Above the heads of hundreds of thousands of young Israelis hovers a large question mark called doubt of their belonging to the people of Israel and hence to the State of Israel as well.
"Every year, about 4,000 Jewish inquiries are conducted in Israel and about 95% go out with a Jewish certificate," Rabbi Eliyahu Maimon, who is in charge of Jewish inquiries in the rabbinical courts, said last month in Yair Ettinger's series of "Good Jew" articles in the news here.
With such findings, why does not the question mark become an exclamation point that cries to heaven for the injustice done to hundreds of thousands of Israelis?
The word "clarification" is very subtle. This is an investigation for all intents and purposes. The inquiry procedure is conducted roughly as follows: First, we are asked to bring Grandma and Mom to court. The problem is that for some of us, not for us, they are no longer alive. Second, seek to bring original documents from the Soviet period that testify to the Judaism of their owners. The problem is that in many cases the original documents were handed over to the Ministry of the Interior during the aliyah, God knows what happened to them, and the rabbinate does not accept copies and claims that it is a forgery. In other cases, documents did not survive the hardships of the Jews during the Soviet era. The third stage is the requirement to travel to the countries of the former USSR, and to photograph the grave of great-grandmother with a Star of David. No aliyah in the history of the State of Israel has conducted such tests.
On Tuesday, in an article by Lee Naim in News 12, we got another glimpse into the cruelty and opacity of the processes of clarifying Judaism in three different stories: a religious young woman, with a head covering, whose parents came up in Operation Solomon A young couple, about to get married and the bride went through a humiliation in the rabbinical court: during the inquiry, the judges doubt her credibility, claim she is adopted, and take care to split her parents into two separate rooms so that they do not match versions; And finally, a woman who married in the rabbinate and received the permits, is required to prove her Judaism again after 15 years (!) In the divorce status in that rabbinate.
I watched the article and remembered how my partner, who immigrated to Israel with his family in 1996, went with his mother Hannah to prove his Jewishness in the rabbinical court in Ashkelon before our wedding.
His mother, whose family secretly ran a synagogue at their home in Volgograd, baked matzah for all the Jews in the area, and her older sister was baptized in the frozen Volga River before her wedding, stood before judges in Israel to prove her son's Judaism.
Do not you think it is absurd?
And these are a few stories out of 95% that are clearly Jews.
The continued existence of the inquiries is ignorance regarding the heritage of these Jewish communities.
What does the rabbinate do with all the findings that emerge from the inquiries?
I would expect the state to draw conclusions from the data collected over the years and stop spending state money on an army of Jewish arbitrators in the rabbinical courts.
It's time to dump her and move on.
Not only do the inquiries not contribute to us as a society but they cause us to drown.
Why is this the case?
The Babylonian Talmud tells of a man who sees a woman drowning in a river but does not reach out to save her, Sages call him a derogatory term "foolish follower." Thousands of young Israelis are drowning in the river of bureaucracy and opacity and are forcibly torn from a stable position on Israeli soil.
And with all the information gathered over the years during the inquiries, I would suggest using an archive that would allow the documentation of the story of 1.2 million Israelis from the USSR and Ethiopians.