Nearly 100,000 couples in Israel are mixed couples, in which the Jewish spouse is married without a Jew, according to data from the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Ministry of the Interior, which are first published in Israel Today.
This is the first time in years that official data have been published on the number of couples involved, which indicate the extent of assimilation in the State of Israel.
In recent years, senior officials in the field of conversion in Israel have warned that there is a growing phenomenon of mixed marriages in the State of Israel, and that conversion courts are run lazily as far as the conversion of minors is concerned. The ultra-Orthodox claim that if there are mitigating courts, they will have to manage family trees to define who they think is a Jew, but on the other hand the mitigators say that in light of the fact that there is already intermarriage among Israelis, in a decade or two it will no longer be clear who is a Jew.
Data provided by the CBS at the request of Dr. Nathaniel Fischer, Head of the Department of Government at the Shaarei Mada VeMishpat Academic Center, show that in Israel there are a total of 1.3 million couples in which at least one of the spouses is Jewish, of whom one million and 260,000 couples have two sons. The couple are Jews, and 85,000 couples are involved - in which the spouse is not Jewish.
In the segmentation by gender, in most of the couples involved, the woman is not Jewish, which means that according to Halacha, the children will not be Jews.
There are 52,000 Jewish men who are married without Jewishness, compared to 32,000 Jewish women who are married to non-Jewish men, in contrast to the common claim that there is equality between women and men in this field.
In fact, the CBS data are mitigating compared to current data from the Ministry of the Interior, according to which there are 111,000 couples involved in the State of Israel, ie Jews married to non-Jewish Israelis.
CBS data show that the vast majority of Jewish women and men who marry non-Jews, 87 percent, marry non-religious people - most of them probably from the former Soviet Union. Contrary to the Flame campaign and other organizations, the CBS reveals that the phenomenon of Jewish women Marrying Arabs is completely marginal.
At the same time, there are more Jewish women who marry Arabs than men who marry Arabs.
"The phenomenon of mixed marriages is not only a problem of Judaism abroad, but of Judaism in Israel," says Dr. Fischer.
