Elvis in Jerusalem by Tom Segev

Author:Tom Segev
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2011-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

In November 1957 a boy named Aharon Steinberg died in the village of Pardes Hanna. His mother was not Jewish, so the boy was buried not in the main part of the local cemetery, but “outside the fence.” A public scandal ensued, in the wake of which the minister of interior, Yisrael Bar-Yehuda, ordered that new immigrants should be registered as Jews upon their own declaration, unless it was possible to prove otherwise. The minister’s order produced an even stormier debate. The religious parties demanded that the official rabbinate be the sole judge of a person’s Jewish status, in accordance with the general rule that “the State of Israel will consider Jewish anyone who is considered Jewish according to the laws of the Torah.” The parties of the left demanded, in turn, that the state cease altogether to register the ethnic affiliation and religion of its inhabitants.

As the controversy grew ever more heated, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wrote to several dozen “wise Jews”—rabbis, thinkers, and writers—and asked their opinion on the question of “who is a Jew.” His very willingness to hear the opinions of non-Zionist rabbis, some of whom did not even live in Israel, was a concession on his part, as if Israel were recognizing that Jews living overseas had a right to intervene in internal affairs. Throughout the years the Supreme Court was petitioned over and over again to rule on who is a Jew. The question has continued to weigh on the Israeli public and has remained without any consensual solution. The present legal situation is that in matters of personal status, such as marriage and divorce, Jewish affiliation is awarded only to people with Jewish mothers, or to those who have been converted to Judaism by an Orthodox rabbinical court. To receive Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, it is sufficient to have one Jewish grandparent: such citizens may bring non-Jewish relatives into the country.

The conflict over religion’s place in the state has been resolved for the most part through practical compromises of one sort or another, by means of political negotiations. All these arrangements indicate that Israeli culture has not succeeded in formulating a relevant alternative to Jewish culture. In the 1930s most kibbutzim did away with observance of the Sabbath and the dietary laws, and in some cases religious marriage and burial as well. Here and there they tried to design secular alternatives to holiday ceremonies and even composed secular texts to recite on these occasions. The kibbutz movement published a secular Hagadah.

These alternatives did not, however, produce a real secular culture. Uriel Simon wrote: “The important and lasting achievements of 200 years of secular Jewish creativity in the spirit of the Enlightenment are not a sufficient foundation for constructing an Israeli national-cultural identity. Furthermore, these achievements themselves stand on the shoulders of 3,000 years of creativity that is principally religious in nature.” The common Jewish foundation that is shared by most of Israel’s citizens, including those who are not religious, has prevented the tension from degenerating into an absolute break.

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