Who's a Jew?

When is a Jew not a Jew? When he is in Israel, if he belongs to a sect of which the Chief Rabbi disapproves. And being considered a non-Jew in Israel can be awkward, especially if one falls in love. Mixed marriages are illegal--no rabbi may marry a Jew to a non-Jew--and civil marriage (and divorce) does not exist. The result is a storm of resentment between Israel's secular and religious Jews, which is currently whistling around the ears of silver-thatched Acting Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Nissim.

Indian Jews. Last week Indian-born Avshalom Dhatavkar, 24, and pretty Shula Elmalen, 21, went to a lawyer to start suit against Israel's rabbinate for not allowing them to marry. The impediment: Avshalom was born into the Bene Israel sect, which has some 15,000 members in India and 7,000 in Israel. Reputedly in India for 2,000 years, the Bene Israelis were long cut off from communication with the mainstream of Judaism, and purists maintain that they developed rules of marriage and divorce that were not in accordance with religious law--hence many of them must be technically momzerim (bastards), and it is forbidden for an Orthodox Jew to marry anyone who is illegitimate.*

"I was good enough to fight as a parachutist in the army, and to be working now on a high-priority project for the Defense Ministry," says Avshalom furiously. He refused to answer his last call-up for military service, told his commanding officer: "If I am not a Jew, you have no right to call me to serve.'' Said Shula last week: "If we don't succeed in our suit, we'll go to the missionaries and ask to be converted to Christianity, and the church will marry us. We can't afford to go to Cyprus, as so many others do, to get a civil marriage."

Rabbi Nissim's opponents feel that there is more than Orthodox scrupulosity behind his strictness to the Bene Israelis; they point out that Nissim is an Iraqi Jew and is prejudiced in favor of a group of rich, well-educated Iraqis who migrated to India during the 19th century, led by the famed Sassoon family, and fomented the bitter resentment of the Bene Israelis by trying to change their ways.

First Class. By last week, pressure on Chief Rabbi Nissim had mounted to a point where he seemed about to yield on Bene Israel and find an interpretation of the law that would give the sect first-class citizenship. Members of Bene Israel held a rally at which they threatened to resort to passive resistance and to stop all immigration from India. This possibility led Executive Chairman Moshe Sharett of the Jewish Agency to make a private plea to Nissim to change his ruling, and Premier David Ben-Gurion, who faces general elections in three weeks, told a mass meeting: "The Jews of Bene Israel are Jews like all other Jews, and there is no basis for disqualifying them."

Sharett thinks it is nonsense to try to analyze the purity of Jews and determine the extent to which they have intermingled with other peoples. "A Jew is first of all someone who is conscious of being a Jew," he says. "Consciousness determines the sociological and political facts of life."

*Behind the hassle over who is a Jew in good standing and who is not lies the question of the 1,000,000 Reform and 2,000,000 Conservative Jews in the U.S., whose rabbis grant divorces that the Israeli rabbinate considers worthless. According to a rabbinate spokesman: "We can only regard American Jewry as a great, unclassified mass who can be dealt with only on an individual basis as problems arise."

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