Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

The Rabbis Said Choose: You Can Be an Olympian or a Jew — But Not Both

Benjamin Ish-Shalom, head of Israel’s Joint Conversion Institute, recently gave an interview to The Jewish Week that should makes one’s blood boil.

Ish-Shalom’s institute is the product of a collaboration between different streams of Judaism that has worked to help facilitate the conversion of the large numbers of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not considered to be Jews under halacha because their mothers aren’t Jewish.

Unfortunately, even though the Joint Conversion Institute has backing from Orthodox rabbis, its students have had a hard time passing muster with the official Orthodox rabbinic courts. The courts’ obstructionism has been so great that Ish-Shalom (who is himself Orthodox) is threatening to set up independent conversion courts. Ish-Shalom says that the existing courts often make demands on converts that have no basis in Jewish law.

Here’s a particularly maddening bit from Ish-Shalom about the behavior of the rabbinic courts:

Many of these obstacles are unrelated to underlying halachic demands. It’s a question of approach, of rabbinic policy. They are not willing to convert a woman who wears trousers. They want her to dress like a religious Orthodox woman. I know of a policewoman, who has to wear a uniform. They recommended that she switch jobs. There was another woman who represented the State of Israel at the Olympics. They demanded that she leave the sport and switch to another occupation. She did it because she wanted to be converted. But this is not a halachic demand.

Read the rest of the interview, in which Ish-Shalom also says that the rabbinic courts will refuse to convert candidates who live on secular kibbutzim.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.