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PM'S OFFICE TO CONTROL CONVERSION COURTS
by Abigail Radoszkowicz
Jerusalem Post, July 12, 2004
The cabinet decided on Sunday that authority over conversion courts will be transferred from the regular rabbinical court system to the Prime Minister's Office.
The rabbinical court system has been part of the Justice Department since the Ministry of Religious Affairs was dismantled in December. Justice Minister Yosef Lapid had been opposed to moving the conversion courts, and observers said that while the move had been in the works for some time, Lapid's current weakness provided an opportunity for the little-publicized announcement.
Rabbi Haim Druckman, a national Zionist leader who has long been involved in conversion issues and serves as head of one of the conversion courts, has been appointed to supervise the new conversion court system.
"The prime minister decided to bring the courts under his authority because he sees conversion as a national priority," Druckman told The Jerusalem Post.
Asked how he plans to increase the number of converts among the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not considered halachicly Jewish, Druckman replied, "We will try to explain to all those immigrants from the former Soviet Union who want to join the Jewish people that we will help in converting them." Last year, a few hundred converted.
The chief rabbinate has been under the administrative authority of the Prime Minister's Office as of 2003, also as a result of the dissolution of the Religious Affairs Ministry. A spokesman for the Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo Amar said that so long as it was understood that the conversion courts would be under the ultimate authority of the chief rabbinate, he had no objections to the move. He said he would check every file before signing the final conversion certificates.
Amar was in favor of making the conversion procedure more user-friendly, said the spokesman, and had recently proposed setting up centers in Russia and Germany to prepare candidates for conversion.
According to surveys, immigrants from the former Soviet Union show considerably more interest in converting to Judaism before their arrival here.
A spokesman for the haredi International Rabbinical Committee for Conversion Matters said that "conversions have to be under the auspices of serious rabbis, and it is the responsibility of the chief rabbis of Israel to maintain a conversion court system which meets the proper standards of Halacha."
The spokesman expressed the haredi establishment's displeasure with Druckman for cooperating with the Joint Conversion Institute, a learning center supported by the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform streams of Judaism.
"The government decision is the orthodox establishment's last chance to adapt a more reasonable and friendly policy towards candidates for conversion," said Gilad Kariv of the Reform movement's Religious Action Center. "The renewed inclusion of the conversion bodies within the state's religious authority makes its responsibility to recognize conversions by all three streams, and to support them equally, even more acute," Kariv added.
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