Who Makes the Rules?
Traditionally, individual rabbis perform conversions one-by-one. The basic prerequisites are two: verification of the candidate's knowledge and sincerity, and satisfaction of ritual requirements. Since verifying sincerity is hardly possible, scrutiny focuses on the converting rabbi. Orthodoxy generally, and Israeli Orthodoxy vehemently, rules out Conservative conversions on the awareness and sincerity count and considers Reform conversion anathema if not an oxymoron.

In 1996, after the Rabbinate predictably rejected several Conservative conversions, the Israeli branch of this movement, joined later by the local Reform movement, sought redress with the HCJ, which gave the state until April 30, 1997, to respond. The practical deadline for legislative action that would specify who has the right to perform conversions in Israel was Apr. 2, the last day of the Knesset's winter session. Hence the conversion bill passed its first reading on Apr. 1 by a vote of 51 to 32, with 7 abstentions. Three points deserve emphasis: (1) Passage on first reading means no more than that the bill is posted to the appropriate committee, to consider and revise. (2) The vote fell well short of an absolute majority. (3) Even before the vote, then-coalition chairman Michael Eitan (Likud) promised to freeze further legislative action while the interested parties sought a compromise.

On June 26, this task was handed to a seven-member blue-ribbon committee whose members represented all currents. The panel's chairman, Ya'akov Ne'eman, was (1) personally Orthodox but not affiliated with any Orthodox party, (2) not an elected official, and (3) averse to technical fixes. Prime Minister Netanyahu's choice of Ne'eman reflected his own hope for a workable settlement. For the duration of its deliberations, the Orthodox accepted the suspension of parliamentary action on the bill and the heterodox suspended their High Court litigation on this issue.

An Edifying Non-Outcome
Aware that any nontechnical settlement would require the consent of the chief rabbis, in early December 1997 Rabbi Uri Regev, Director of the Religious Action Center of the Movement for Progressive Judaism (Reform), asked to meet with them to explore their views; in re-sponse, Gedalya Schreiber, director-general of the Chief Rabbinate demanded public renun-ciation of five key Reform principles that are anathema to the Orthodox. The Reform rejected this demand. Rabbi Ehud Bandel, head of the Masorti (Israeli Conservative) movement, sought a similar meeting and affirmed his group's adherence to the principles embodied the Rabbinate's stipulations, but was denied the audience when he insisted on parity of clerical status with the Chief Rabbis. Under no terms did the Rabbinate offer to recognize either of the heterodox movements.

Ne'eman handed the report to Prime Minister Netanyahu and the chief rabbis on Jan. 23 unsigned, pending the rabbis' acceptance of its ideas, and incomplete, lacking the clause whereby the Reform would stop performing conversions under its own auspices. The committee's compromise procedure called for a conversion to be established, shared by all three streams, its board to comprise the director of the rabbinical court system and six other members, including one each from the Conservative and Reform movements. The graduates would be converted by an expanded array of rabbinical courts appointed by the chief rabbis. The heterodox would cease to perform conversions outside the framework of the joint institute.

On Feb. 9, the Chief Rabbinical Council turned down the key recommendation-that the rabbinate undertake to convert graduates of the joint institute as an infringement of rabbinical autonomy. The Israeli heterodox leader ship termed this response a "declaration of war on the Jewish people." As if to confirm that matters had returned to square one, in late January the Chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, Avraham Burg, came out in favor of the kind of technical solution that the commission had tried to avoid. By the end of the month, a broad spectrum of public figures and elected officials, including an 80 legislators who signed a "sense of the Knesset" petition, endorsed the Ne'eman prescription. The High Court of Justice, acknowledging that any solution would take considerable time, again postponed adjudication of the heterodox petitions.

The Ne'eman commission did not disband, for two reasons: (1) its mandate included other issues -- heterodox officiants at marriages, municipal religious councils, prayer at the Western Wall, and budget allocations for religious services; and (2) the disputants feared that its formal disintegration would prompt a turbulent denouement in the High Court of Justice, in the legislature, at the ballot box, or, should things get totally out of hand, in the streets.