Israeli Rabbinical Conversion Court Slammed May 27, 2007

As YNet reports today:

Head of the rabbinical conversion courts in Israel, Rabbi Haim Druckman, slammed on Sunday a rabbinical judge from Ashdod for his decision to annul the conversion of a woman who converted 15 years ago.Druckman criticized the judge, Rabbi Avraham Atiya, for his harsh statements regarding the conversion courts in Israel, and spoke against “the closed haredi clique.”

The Ashdod rabbinical court recently announced that the convert and her children were no longer Jewish, after the woman admitted to Rabbi Atiya that she never observed the mitzvot. After declaring the woman’s conversion invalid, Atiya also stated that the conversion courts were run by “heretics and criminals who annihilate the Jewish people and push it toward assimilation.”

Rabbi Druckman did correctly claim that there is no law which requires one to check up on a convert afterwards (and indeed, many converts find this sort of surveillance to be offensive).My personal instinct is to side with Rabbi Atiya. And not just because I’m charedi.

Jewish Law contains a principle called giluy da’at — by someone’s actions afterwards, you can judge retroactively what their mindset “must have been” at a point in time. Conversion requires that the convert “accept upon themselves the yoke of the commandments”. If a person were to say, go directly from immersion (the culmination of the conversion process) and order a BLT, we would say that “this eating a BLT shows that this person never intended to keep kosher”.

If this woman for any amount of time would have been observant, this would not be an issue, she would be no more than any other Jew who goes through a rough time with observance. Even 15 years of laxity doesn’t render someone a non-Jew.

But her “never” having kept mitzvot — this shows something. She either must not have accepted them on herself as binding, or she just wanted to get G-d angry (ch”v).

Either way, while her heart-wrenching story may incense some, Rabbi Atiya’s ruling remains — as far as the halacha is concerned, she never performed an integral part of the conversion process: accepting G-d’s rule, through His Law, over her life.

And it’s kind of hard to have a legitimate conversion without that.