The Ministerial Committee for Legislation is slated to vote Sunday on a proposal that if passed into law would invalidate the legitimacy of non-Orthodox conversions in the context of potential immigration and citizenship.

The Law of Return offers citizenship to Jewish immigrants, including converts. An amendment proposed by Religious Zionism MK Simcha Rothman would define conversion to Judaism, in this context, as only that carried out “in accordance with halacha,” or Jewish religious law.

For decades, Israel has accepted conversions performed by the Reform and Conservative movements abroad as sufficient for Israeli citizenship, as the Law of Return left the issue of conversions deliberately vague, not specifying if they had to be performed by an Orthodox rabbi.

However, conversions inside Israel had to be performed under Orthodox religious law to be recognized for the purposes of citizenship.

That held until 2021, when the High Court of Justice ruled that people who convert to Judaism in Israel through the Reform and Conservative movements must be recognized as Jews for the purpose of the Law of Return, and are thus entitled to Israeli citizenship.

In its explanatory notes, Rothman, the chairman of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, stated that his bill comes in response to that ruling. The justices, Rothman noted, specified that they had previously withheld issuing a ruling to allow the state to handle the matter, but the state had failed to do so.

Rothman asserted that changing the language of the law “expresses a return to the principles established by the founders........

© The Times of Israel