What does the militant, ultra-orthodox Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City) have in common with Shulamit Aloni's anti-religious Citizen's Rights Party? Both advocate complete separation of Rabbinate and State. To Neturei Karta, questions of Torah and Talmud have no business in the political market place of a secular State; to the Citizen's Rights Party, questions falling within the provinces of citizenship and government must be freed from the dictates of divine commandments and archaic rabbinical interpretations. The status quo, compromise heaped upon compromise between the socialist and religious parties, has led to a political imbroglio which has crippled the Knesset (Israel's parliament) and has intensified the rift between halachic (those following the divine commandments) and non-halachic Jews throughout the world.
The political confrontation between religious authority and secular nationalism dates to the rise of modern nationalism in Europe. In the last decade of the 19th century, Herzl's doctrine of secular nationalism-Zionism-induced a sharp and varied reaction among orthodox Jews. Mizrachi, the first modern religious political party, was formed in 1902 as a religious faction in the World Zionist Organization. Its aim, "the land of Israel for the people of Israel according to the Torah of Israel", has not been significantly revised in the last 72 years.
Viewing resettlement of Palestine as part of God's design for His people, Mizrachi adherents were assailed by Agudat Israel (a movement of orthodox backlash to modern Jewish trends), as Satan's dupes who were being seduced by a new false Messiah, Zionism. It took the Nazi holocaust to change Agudat Israel's position with regard to the role of Israel in God's plan for His people. When the first Knesset was elected in 1949, Agudat Israel was among the parties holding seats.
Neturei Karta broke away from Agudat Israel in 1935 when the latter refused to support the former's demand for an ultra-orthodox community in Jerusalem completely separate from the Zionist community. Women's education was another issue of conflict. The Beit Ya'acov Movement, founded by Sarah Schenirer in Poland to provide vocational training for women and supported by Agudat Israel, was bitterly denounced by Neturei Karta Relations between these two extremist religious groups further deteriorated when Agudat Israel began to cooperate with the Jewish Agency during World War II, and reached an all time low when Agudat Israel became part of Israel's first government. Neturei Karta has always opposed the creation of the Zionist Sate, preferring Arab domination.
The Satmar Rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum, of Brooklyn, New York, and reb Amram Blau of Me'ah She'arim, Jerusalem, are the respective spiritual and political leaders of Neturei Karta, a fluid "organization" with no fixed membership or headquarters. Neturei Karta has organized public demonstration in opposition to "sinful, atheist" practices such as mixed (male-female) public swimming pools, public transportation on Sabbath, drafting women for national service, performing autopsies by pathologists and the sale of pornography. Often dati'im (religious Jews) identified with Agudat Israel join Neturei Karta activists on an ad hoc basis in fighting against the secularization of Israeli society. It has been said of religious politics in Israel that the Satmar Rebbe puts pressure on Neturei Karta, Neturei Karta puts pressure on the Rabbinate, the Rabbinate puts pressure on the religious parties, and the religious parties put pressure on the Cabinet.
An institutionalized system of religious jurisdiction over personal status had been in effect in Palestine long before Israel's independence. Under Ottoman and British colonial rule, the various religious communities, headed by caliphs, rabbis, priests, etc., maintained legal control in religious matters of their respective communities. This system was continued in the new Jewish State. Two chief rabbis, one Ashkenazi and the other Sephardi, both members of Mizrachi, which became the National Religious Party (NRP) in 1956, were given the mandate to hold central religious authority over Jews in Israel. Religious courts were then entrenched as part of the State's judicial apparatus, and their decisions were legally binding on all Jewish citizens regardless of individual religious views.
The secular leadership justified this arrangement as one which would minimize the tension between the secular and religious extremists at a time when the infant State was faced with more pressing defense and economic problems. Ben Gurion stated his position candidly: "I know that we required the widest possible political backing to carry out the gigantic tasks that I envisaged. . . the wider the coalition the narrower would be the list of policy items which I would get general agreement. I was prepared to limit my program to the basic urgencies and offer concessions on what I regarded as subsidiary issues." (Ben Gurion Looks Back, p. 33, Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London, 1969). Ben Gurion felt that concessions to the religious-Zionists in areas such as control of marriage and divorce, making Sabbath the legal rest day, giving full autonomy to every trend in education and safeguarding kashrut in State kitchens were a small price to pay for national unity.
What was a "subsidiary issue" to Ben Gurion and the majority of the socialist-Zionist leadership was the core concern of the NRP and Agudat Israel. The religious parties view the Jewishness of the State as prescribed by Torah their first and foremost political objective. The non-religious parties, on the other hand, rise and fall in response to issues related to military and foreign policy or the extent of free enterprise in the nation's economic composition. None of the major non-religious parties, whether it be Labor on the left or Likud on the right, openly advocates a separation of Rabbinate and State. In short, the non-religious parties are not actively anti-religious whereas the religious parties are actively anti-secular.
The outcome of the December, 1973 elections clearly demonstrated how religious power is manifested in Israeli politics. The Labor Alignment (Mapam and Mapai) won 51 Knesset seats; Likud (Herut, Liberals, State List, Free Center and Land of Israel) won 39 seats; the NRP holds 10. The Alignment needed 61 seats for a bare majority. With the Independent Liberal Party (ILP), which carried 4 seats, and the two Arab parties supporting the Alignment with 3, Golda Meir's party still fell short of a majority by 3 seats. Only the renewed coalition government with the NRP, which has been a partner in every past Labor government, have given the Alignment the majority it required to comfortably rule the country without fear of a non-confidence vote in the Knesset. Although the NRP lost one seat in the last election, its bargaining position has improved as a result of the Alignment's losses to Likud.
The NRP's price for a continued partnership is the Alignment's accepting a strictly halachic definition of "Who is a Jew?" Specifically, the NRP is calling for a reformulation of the Law of Return to include as a Jew anyone born of a Jewish mother or converted in accordance with halachic requirements. At present there is a one year moratorium on the decision.
At the height of the conflict, the Chief Rabbinate Council, convened by Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Goren had forbidden the NRP from joining the Alignment unless the demand for stricter interpretation of "Who is a Jew?" was met. The Council's ban overruled attempts by moderate elements within the NRP to work out a compromise with the Alignment on this issue. Since the 1970 death of NRP leader, Haim Moshe Shapiro, factional infighting has led to a hard line position in which compromise is condemned by the "young guard" of the party.
If, rather than forming the present government, the Alignment had conceded to the demand of the NRP, then all marriages, divorces and conversions performed by non-orthodox rabbis would be regarded as invalid by Israeli law. A reduction in aliyah and strained Israel-Diaspora relations would probably have followed since the majority of Diaspora Jews are not orthodox. An NRP victory in the future could unleash a militant anti-religious backlash in Israel, as was the case during the year of the Yossele Schumacher abduction in the early sixties.
Although the present crisis has been resolved, in the future the failure of any single party to gain a parliamentary majority will result in a situation where a religious minority has disproportionate power and the possibility of imposing the precepts of orthodoxy on all Jewish Israelis. This is an ironic predicament for a secular democratic State priding itself on tolerance toward the religious minority. In a democratic state, when the minority has the power to define the personal status of those in the majority, then the political system is in dire need of reform. However, as long as the present system remains, the Labor parties, which have been in power for the duration of the State's existence and have profited from coalitions with the religious-Zionists, will always be in danger of having to bear the bitter consequences of their failure to constitutionally settle the "Who is a Jew?" question earlier in the game.
Aron Hirt-Manheimer is the editor of Reform Judaism and a former writer for the Jewish Student Press Service.