Just when the Jewish Agency (why does that organisation still exist?) thought it had done a deal over conversions that would have taken Israel's ultra-Orthodox rabbinate out of the equation, along comes Eli Yishai, Shas's Interior Minister, who wants to turn the clock back to the bad old days.
Yishai, who should resign over his failings during the devastating Carmel fire, coicidentally - or not - is working to change Israeli ID cards so that they once again state the holder’s religion and thus prevent non-Orthodox converts from being defined as Jews.
When he was last Interior Minister 10 years ago, Yishai was ordered by the High Court of Justice to recognise Reform and Conservative converts as Jews. All IDs issued since then have had eight small stars on the nationality line instead of a religion.
He and other clowns from his and the United Torah Judaism Party caused so much hatred towards the Orthodox because of their fundamentalist ways, that an openly secular party, Shinui, stood for the Knesset and won 15 seats. It disappeared largely because the excesses of the Orthodox parties were curtailed. It seems, however, that Yishai and his mates have a short memory.
As Masorti (Conservative) Movement CEO Yizhar Hess said, Yishai's decision is “cynical and malicious. Instead of embracing the converts, Yishai is humiliating them. Most of the Jewish people are Reform and Conservative, but a fundamentalist haredi minority is making Israel look bad, just when it needs the Jewish people more than ever. Yishai is a strategic threat to Israel as the nation of the Jewish people and a democratic state.”
Israel is rapidly becoming not the state of the Jewish people, but the state of the Orthodox Jews.