Most of the immigrants to Israel don't want to convert By Ha'aretz Daily

Most of the immigrants to Israel don't want to convert By Ha'aretz Daily

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Posted on February 21, 2002

By Yair Sheleg, Ha'aretz Correspondent

The entire population of non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, on paper at least, are the ones who potentially stand to gain from the High Court's ruling Wednesday that people who undergo non-Orthodox conversions in Israel must be registered as Jewish on their Israeli identity cards.

An underlying assumption is that it it will be easier for those interested in conversion to undergo the process of through the Reform and Conservative movements.

According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, there are some 207,000 non-Jewish immigrants living in Israel, and another 77,000 immigrants whose Jewish identity is questionable. The majority of these immigrants hail from the former Soviet Union, but recently it has emerged that non-Jewish immigrants are also arriving from Argentina.

Most of the immigrants do not want to convert at all. Last year, only some 4,500 immigrants underwent conversion, and half of them were Ethiopian immigrants, mainly Falashmura. Only 2,100 of the immigrants from the Commonwealth of Independent States converted last year.

Those dealing with the subject say that immigrants from the former Soviet Union assume that Israeli society will accept them as Jews without them having to convert, and that they only feel the need to go through the conversion process for specific purposes, such as marriage or so that their children having their children recognized as Jews.

This is borne out by the fact that over 70 percent of the people who do bother to convert, according to information provided by the rabbinical courts, are women who are concerned about how their status might impact on their childrens' prospects of marriage. The elderly and married men and women who are not interested in having children, generally do not convert.

A much smaller population that is affected by the ruling are minors adopted overseas. Rabbi Yosef Avior, who deals with their conversion, estimates that there are 400 cases of these conversions every year. He said that over 95 percent of them are converted in his court and the rest prefer their children not be converted.

The real significance of the High Court ruling, therefore, is mainly symbolic. Neither the Orthodox, nor the Conservative and Reform movements are expecting a sharp rise in the number of conversion requests

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