Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question

View from a booth:

The world view of mainstream Orthodox Judaism, represented by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who made the decision to bar "M" from the Jews' Free School is closed, insular and stulted. As is pointed out at the end of this article, the order barring "M" because his mother was not converted according (allegedly) to Orthodox standards (too much of which is purely political) would bar 40% of those who consider themselves Jewish and who practice Judaism. The same people who will shry like banshees over this ruling are the same ones who think Sharia law -- or at least some elements of it -- is awful, when in fact those that follow the mainstream Orthodox line are the same rigid thinkers as are Sunni or Wahabbi Muslims -- no room to wake up to the reality that it's 2010 almost, not circa 1800 Poland. Either Judaism accepts change, either halacha changes organically like any other body of law, or it will devolve, if it already hasn't, into a moribund weltanschaaung that will eventually die. Too many Jews who do their best to practice Judaism with the right intention are being turned off by rules that those within the current Jewish power structure do not want to see change at any cost. This is a recipe for disaster for the future of Judaism, which should be a living, breathing organism, not what those on "the inside" say it should be, to the exclusion of far too many people. Can Orthodox Judaism afford to continue its present path? For me, no. The Court in Britain that decided that "M" was discriminated against was correct: if the JFS is going to accept government money, then it has to live by government rules.

Of course, there will be those who say "we have to maintain standards", a proposition with which I essentially agree, but it should not be up to one body or stream of Judaism to say what those standards are. Anyone or any group which claims a monopoly on what they think Jewish standards are correct and true to Jewish thought are to be viewed at least with skepticism. Judaism is too complex for one view to be right and all others to be wrong. That is a simplistic zeitgeist that only serves the simple minded who do not wish to explore the true essence and meaning of what it is to be Jewish.

Randy Shiner

November 8, 2009

By SARAH LYALL

LONDON — The questions before the judges in Courtroom No. 1 of Britain’s Supreme Court were as ancient and as complex as Judaism itself.

Who is a Jew? And who gets to decide?

On the surface, the court was considering a straightforward challenge to the admissions policy of a Jewish high school in London. But the case, in which arguments concluded Oct. 30, has potential repercussions for thousands of other parochial schools across Britain. And in addressing issues at the heart of Jewish identity, it has exposed bitter divisions in Britain’s community of 300,000 or so Jews, pitting members of various Jewish denominations against one another.

“This is potentially the biggest case in the British Jewish community’s modern history,” said Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle newspaper here. “It speaks directly to the right of the state to intervene in how a religion operates.”

The case began when a 12-year-old boy, an observant Jew whose father is Jewish and whose mother is a Jewish convert, applied to the school, JFS. Founded in 1732 as the Jews’ Free School, it is a centerpiece of North London’s Jewish community. It has around 1,900 students, but it gets far more applicants than it accepts.

Britain has nearly 7,000 publicly financed religious schools, representing Judaism as well as the Church of England, Catholicism and Islam, among others. Under a 2006 law, the schools can in busy years give preference to applicants within their own faiths, using criteria laid down by a designated religious authority.

By many standards, the JFS applicant, identified in court papers as “M,” is Jewish. But not in the eyes of the school, which defines Judaism under the Orthodox definition set out by Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. Because M’s mother converted in a progressive, not an Orthodox, synagogue, the school said, she was not a Jew — nor was her son. It turned down his application.

That would have been the end of it. But M’s family sued, saying that the school had discriminated against him. They lost, but the ruling was overturned by the Court of Appeal this summer.

In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”

The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.

“The requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act,” the court said. It added that while it was fair that Jewish schools should give preference to Jewish children, the admissions criteria must depend not on family ties, but “on faith, however defined.”

The same reasoning would apply to a Christian school that “refused to admit a child on the ground that, albeit practicing Christians, the child’s family were of Jewish origin,” the court said.

The school appealed to the Supreme Court, which is likely to rule sometime before the end of the year.

The case’s importance was driven home by the sheer number of lawyers in the courtroom last week, representing not just M’s family and the school, but also the British government, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, the United Synagogue, the British Humanist Association and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

Meanwhile, the Court of Appeal ruling threw the school into a panicked scramble to put together a new admissions policy. It introduced a “religious practice test,” in which prospective students amass points for things like going to synagogue and doing charitable work.

That has led to all sorts of awkward practical issues, said Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, because Orthodox Judaism forbids writing or using a computer on the Sabbath. That means that children who go to synagogue can’t “sign in,” but have to use methods like dropping prewritten postcards into boxes.

It is unclear what effect the ruling, if it is upheld, will have on other religious schools. Some Catholic schools, accustomed to using baptism as a baseline admissions criterion, are worried that they will have to adopt similar practice tests.

The case has stirred up long-simmering resentments among the leaders of different Jewish denominations, who, for starters, disagree vehemently on the definition of Jewishness. They also disagree on the issue of whether an Orthodox leader is entitled to speak for the entire community.

“Whatever happens in this case, there must be some resolution sorted out between different denominations,” Mr. Benjamin said in an interview. “That the community has failed to grasp this has had the very unfortunate result of having a judgment foisted on it by a civil court.”

Orthodox Jews, of course, sympathize with the school, saying that observance is no test of Jewishness, and that all that matters is whether one’s mother is Jewish. So little does observance matter, in fact, that “having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish,” Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, chairman of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue, said recently.

Lauren Lesin-Davis, chairman of the board of governors at King David, a Jewish school in Liverpool, told the BBC that the ruling violated more than 5,000 years of Jewish tradition.

“You cannot come in and start telling people how their whole lives should change, that the whole essence of their life and their religion is completely wrong,” she said.

But others are in complete sympathy with M.

“How dare they question our beliefs and our Jewishness?” David Lightman, an observant Jewish father whose daughter was also denied a place at the school because it did not recognize her mother’s conversion, told reporters recently. “I find it offensive and very upsetting.”

Rabbi Danny Rich, chief executive of Liberal Judaism here, said the lower court’s ruling, if upheld, would help make Judaism more inclusive.

“JFS is a state-funded school where my grandfather taught, and it’s selecting applicants on the basis of religious politics,” he said in an interview. “The Orthodox definition of Jewish excludes 40 percent of the Jewish community in this country.”

Rabbis Searching For Common Ground

by Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher

Each of the rabbis — Orthodox, Conservative and Reform — on a panel probing the Who is a Jew controversy claimed that his or her movement’s policy on conversion standards was consistent with tradition. Yet they also acknowledged that the divide among them was deep.

Two of the panelists, one Orthodox and one Reform, at last Thursday evening’s community forum, sponsored by The Jewish Week and the JCC in Manhattan, expressed concern that if compromises were not made soon, the strand that holds American Jewish religious life together may be frayed beyond repair. 

Rabbi Robert Levine of the Reform Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan warned the full house of 250 people at the JCC: “We’re coming very close to the level of sinat chinam” 

[hatred among Jews] that brought about the destruction of the Temple. “Many Orthodox rabbis won’t walk into my shul, and that pains me,” he said, noting that the level of trust among rabbis of different denominations has deteriorated in recent years.

“The key issues here are trust and urgency,” agreed Seth Farber, who received his rabbinic ordination at Yeshiva University and is founder and director of an Israeli organization called ITIM: The Jewish Life Information Center, which helps Israelis navigate the bureaucracy of the Chief Rabbinate on matters of personal status, including marriage, divorce, conversion and burial.

Rabbi Farber cited the writings of Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, a prominent Orthodox rosh yeshiva in Israel, as suggesting that Orthodox authorities are paying too high a price by adhering to strict standards in defining Jewish status if their position threatens Jewish unity. 

Staking a claim that Conservative Judaism meets traditional standards on conversion, Rabbi Judith Hauptman, professor of Talmud and rabbinic culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary, cited Talmudic passages regarding how one should treat a potential convert. She said each requirement is met by Conservative religious courts.

Rabbi Basil Herring, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America (Orthodox), trod lightly on specifics in questioning whether non-Orthodox rabbis demand that a convert live a fully observant life.

He said that adherence to the mitzvot of the Torah has sustained Jewish life over the centuries and will continue to do so. Trust is important, he said, but added that it is equally important to be truthful, asserting that the Orthodox community has best weathered the storms of assimilation and intermarriage by maintaining halachic standards.

The most serious dispute among the panelists was between the two Orthodox rabbis, with Rabbi Farber charging that Rabbi Herring’s RCA has made conversion more strict and difficult in the last two years, through an agreement the group reached with the Israeli Chief Rabbinate.

“Admit you’re changing the standards,” he said to Rabbi Herring noting: “The new RCA standards exclude a significant number of Orthodox converts who could have converted five or 10 years ago.” 

Rabbi Herring insisted that it was “a canard, false and untrue to say that RCA standards are more severe” than in the past. He said the group’s guidelines in the early 1990s were more strict, and that what the RCA has done now is take the existing guidelines and standardize them so as to increase conversions. He said there were more conversions in the last year and a half (150) than any previous 18-month period, and that another 200 conversions “are in the pipeline.”

Moderator Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist of American Jewry, wisely prevented the program from becoming a narrow debate, and defused several tense moments during the evening with displays of humor.

But all agreed the topic is critical and has an impact on the very notion of Jewish unity.
Though the RCA has been taken to task by some for complying with the Chief Rabbinate’s demands,

Rabbi Herring had strong words of criticism for the institution, widely blamed for resisting rather than embracing potential converts and raising the bar on religious standards. He said the Chief Rabbinate “has failed” in making observant life welcoming. “They have succeeded in alienating many,” and their actions are “not the North American model we can or should implement.”

After hearing Rabbi Levine speak of how Reform conversions are carried out with an emphasis on Torah learning and a commitment to ethical behavior, within a framework of choice, Rabbi Herring said he was “astounded” to hear that the Reform movement “requires acceptance of the commandments.”

He said he had been led to believe that Reform requirements did not include a commitment to keep the mitzvot.

“We have to be truthful and frank,” he said.

The gray area of the discussion was on the definition of what it means to “accept the yoke of the commandments,” as cited in the Talmud; some Orthodox rabbis insist on a convert’s commitment to keep all of the mitzvot, and the more liberal branches require an assurance to lead an ethical life based on Torah values, but not necessarily each commandment.

Rabbi Levine noted that his Reform movement was responsible for most American conversions, and he offered an impassioned explanation of why basing a child’s Jewishness on patrilineal descent, the Reform standard, is consistent with Jewish history. He said that if Rabbi Herring’s standards were required, “we would be a vestigial people,” adding that when “you tell the vast majority [of potential converts] ‘you’re not up to our standards,’ the next generation won’t give a damn.”

Rabbi Hauptman, who at one point during the program mock-complained that she felt “left out” as the only panelist “not under attack,” offered an analogy between conversion standards and Passover cuisine.

She said her family preferred a specific commercial brand of matzah while others only ate shmurah matzah. 

“Shmurah is fine, but that doesn’t mean my brand isn’t up to standards,” she insisted, noting that “if the Orthodox want to add additional restrictions” to conversion, “let them fight it out, but I am walking the path of Jewish law.”

At the close of the evening, the panelists sounded a call for action, recognizing, as Rabbi Herring said, that the key question was how to solve denominational differences “in a way that does not diminish us — how do we live with our differences and not compromise our beliefs” since “we all need each other desperately.”

Rabbi Hauptman posed the notion of all girls going to the mikveh before bat mitzvah and all couples doing the same before marriage so as to level the standards of Jewish practice in a non-judgmental way. 

She said that if rabbis across the religious spectrum sought to “hammer out common standards, we can do something about it, like we did sitting on this panel tonight.”

She is right, of course, but such efforts have been attempted before, most notably in Denver several decades ago when rabbis of each denomination formed a bet din, or religious court, together and sought uniform standards. It performed 750 conversions between 1978 and 1983, but came to an end when the Reform movement approved patrilineal descent, breaking with longstanding tradition and increasing the divide.

Other similar efforts, including the 1997 Neeman Committee proposal in Israel, have failed as the result of pressure from the right on Orthodox rabbis not to participate.

Will the threat of a permanent fissure within a shrinking Jewish community compel the leaders of the different denominations to try again, putting unity above ideology? Based on past experience, it’s difficult to be optimistic. But the looming alternative to such action is a fractured and increasingly alienated group that can no longer even call itself a community. 

We can only urge our religious leaders to solve this crisis, or in one last act of togetherness, suffer the consequences. 

E-mail: Gary@jewishweek.org

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Leading Jewish state school is cleared in race bias case

July 4, 2008

Leading Jewish state school is cleared in race bias case

David Lightman, with his daughter, who was not allowed to enrol at JFS

Nicola Woolcock and Joanna Sugden
A leading Jewish state school was cleared yesterday of racially discriminating against the son of a convert in a ruling that shores up the whole faith school system.

JFS, formerly the Jewish Free School, refused a place to an 11-year-old boy whose mother had converted to the faith.

His father took legal action on the ground that the school's admissions code breached race laws, by favouring children with Jewish-born mothers over religiously observant families who had converted. A High Court judge decided, however, that the school had not discriminated on racial grounds and said that Jewish status could not be determined by secular courts.

Mr Justice Mumby recognised that, if the case had succeeded, it would probably have rendered unlawful “the admission arrangements in a very large number of faith schools, of many denominations”. He said that members of a religion did not necessarily have to practise that faith.

Judaism is passed on through the maternal line, or through conversion. Religious state schools are allowed to use faith-based criteria to decide which children to admit.

The father of the boy, known as M, was seeking a judicial review because he said that the school in northwest London used ethnic rather than religious reasons for refusing his son a place. Children from two other families who consider themselves Jewish have also been turned away from the school, which achieves high results and is very oversubscribed.

One was the daughter of the school's head of English, Kate Lightman, whose husband David is an Orthodox Jew. She converted more than 20 years ago under Israel's Chief Rabbi, but her daughter was not deemed to be Jewish by the Office of the Chief Rabbi in Britain, which controls JFS's admissions.

Dinah Rose, QC, representing M, said that the school would accept a child of Jewish-born “committed atheists” but exclude others who are “Jewish by belief and practice” because of their mother's descent.

Rejecting the legal challenge, the judge said the admissions policy was “not materially different from that which gives preference in admission to a Muslim school to those who were born Muslim, or preference in admission to a Catholic school to those who have been baptised”. He said such policies were a “proportionate and lawful means of achieving a legitimate end”.

The judge said the school had the right to give preference for those from a certain religion, even if they had fallen away from that faith. Russell Kett, chairman of governors at JFS, said: “The school abhors all forms of discrimination and welcomes the judge's express finding that JFS does not racially discriminate.”

Simon Hochhauser, president of the United Synagogue, said: “We are pleased that JFS's admissions procedures and policies have been so fully endorsed. We acknowledge the judge's ruling that Jewish status can only be defined by Jewish law.”

Philip Hunter, the chief schools adjudicator, ordered JFS last year to scrap admissions criteria designed to be used if it were ever undersubscribed.

Ruling due on school racism claim

What's this? Jews fighting about "Who is a Jew?" I can't believe it.rs


Ruling due on school racism claim
2 days ago

A High Court judge is due to rule whether a Jewish school racially discriminated against an 11-year-old boy.

The boy, identified in court only as "M", applied to attend the Jewish Free School but was declared "not an 'approved' Jew".

His father said he was "appalled" by the decision of the north west London school, which gains some of the best academic results in the country.

In a case with serious implications for other religious schools, his lawyers are asking Mr Justice Munby to declare the school's admissions policy was unlawfully based, in part, on "ethnic origins - rather than faith or religion".

Dinah Rose QC, representing M's family, told a previous hearing the boy's application was rejected by the over-subscribed state-maintained school, which gives preference to children whose "Jewish status" is confirmed by the United Synagogue (US).

A child's Jewish identity is inherited through the mother, but the US did not accept that M's mother was Jewish. She was born a Roman Catholic, but converted to Judaism before her son's birth, although not the Orthodox movement.

M's parents are now divorced and the boy lives with his father, with whom he is an active member of the local synagogue and of the Masorti, a "progressive traditional" Jewish movement. However, other children were given preference by the school as the US did not consider the boy to be Jewish, because his mother was not accepted as Jewish.

Ms Rose claimed that amounted to racial discrimination, as other children were given preference if their mothers were Jewish by birth, even if they were "committed atheists".

Ben Jaffrey, appearing for US, previously said there would be "very serious potential consequences" if M and his father win the case. He said it would affect not only the JFS but over 20 other schools and other Jewish organisations providing services in the community.

The British Humanist Association is supporting M's application for judicial review. The decision is to be handed down by Mr Munby, sitting at the Cardiff Civil Justice Centre.