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18
FRIDAY, AUG. 14, 1987
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Battle For Souls
Continued from Page 1
Last month's moves were
deliberately timed to exploit
the relative political weakness
of the two major blocs in
Israel's national unity
government.
While Likud Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir was trying
desperately to hold on to power,
Labour Foreign Minister
Shimon Peres was making
equally desperate attempts to
bring down the government
and take his campaign for an
international peace conference
to the people.
With support for the two par-
ties exquisitely balanced, the
religious parties — which com-
mand a total of 12 votes in the
Knesset and which effectively
hold the balance of power —
threw down their challenge.
In case the message was lost
on the leaders of the major
blocs, the Sephardi ultra-
religious Shas Party, guided by
its Council of Torah Sages,
spelled out the message: unless
the Likud Knesset Members
supported the religious bills, it
would swing its votes behind
Labour's attempts to bring
down the government.
Early last month, two bills
were introduced, both of which
would have denied official
recognition to Reform and Con-
servative converts. Both were
narrowly defeated after a hand-
ful of Likud Knesset Members
defied party discipline. "For the
- moment," noted the Hebrew-
language daily Ma'ariv, "a
tragedy for generations was
prevented by the split of a hair."
The next challenge was not
long in coming. At the end of
the month, as Labour Party
leaders were making a final,
frenzied attempt to raise a ma-
jority that would bring down
the government before the
Knesset adjourned for its sum-
mer recess at the end of last
week (August 6), Shas an-
nounced that it was intro-
ducing yet another version of
the bill.
The new bill — the Rab-
binical Courts Adjudication
Law — would have compelled
converts to submit their con-
version certificates to Israel's
Rabbinical- Courts, which
would then have ruled on their
legitimacy.
In addition, the Rabbinical
Courts would have been em-
powered to exercise their judg-
ment on the legitimacy of mar-
riage and divorce certificates of
immigrants.
Jewish leaders from the
United States and Canada, who
had warned of dire conse-
quences if any of the bills were
passed, took the measures
seriously enough to dispatch a
high-level delegation to Israel.
(See JT July 31, page 5; JT
August 7, page 3)
Their message was une-
quivocal: the Knesset could re-
ject non-Orthodox converts —
and, by association, the
movements which underwrote
their conversions — and still
expect to emerge unscathed
from the battle.
The backlash from millions
of furious non-Orthodox Jews
around the world, they warned,
might mean a sharp drop in
emotional, political and finan-
cial support for Israel. More-
over, the measures would have
an incalculable impact on
Jewish unity.
Shoshana Cardin, president
of the Council of Jewish Federa-
tions and leader of the delega-
tion, told a press conference in
Jerusalem that any amend-
The fact is that
the battle is
between the
modern Orthodox
and the ultra-
Orthodox. The
Conservative and
Reform movements
are barely
footnotes.
ment to the "Who-is-a-Jew" law
would have serious implica-
tions for Israel-Diaspora unity.
It would cause, she said, "a,
significant portion of our peo-
ple to feel disenfranchised, to
feel that the essential unity
which has characterized our
relationship over these past 40
years has been shattered."
While Labour Party leaders
huddled with a host of small
parties in the hope of muster-
ing a majority to dissolve the
Knesset before the recess, the
Likud disregarded warnings
sounded by the Diaspora
leaders and promised Shas it
would again throw its support
behind the bill.
But the few Likud rebels who
stood out in the earlier votes
had opened the dyke of dissent.
Shas saw it had no chance of
success and the bill was
withdrawn.
At the same time, Shas ex-
posed the inherent weakness of
its own position: while
threatening to support Labour,
it stepped back from the brink
because, ultimately, it could
never hope to extract the sort
of political concessions from
Shimon Peres that it could
from Yitzhak Shamir.
Indeed, Labour leaders effec-
tively conceded that they had
failed to win Shas support —
despite the defeat of the bills —
when they announced last Sun-
day that they would not, after
all, be pressing their demands
for a dissolution of the
government.
The opening shots in the
latest campaign to apply a
strictly Orthodox definition to
converts were in fact fired late
last year when Rabbi Yitzhak
Peretz, the Shas Party leader,
resigned as Interior Minister
Continued on Page 20