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Wednesday 30 March 2016

Palestinians among those requesting conversion to Judaism

Credit: JNS.org

A Palestinian boy looks behind a wall separating Jewish part and Palestinian part after the funeral of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a leading figure in Israel's settler movement, in the Jewish settlement in Hebron, West Bank, Sunday, May 17, 2015. Thousands attended the funeral of Levinger outside Hebron's holiest site, known to Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque. Relatives said he died Saturday after an illness. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

A Palestinian boy looks behind a wall separating a Jewish and Palestinian part of Jerusalem (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)










About half of the annual requests in Israel for conversion to Judaism were received from Palestinians, foreign workers, illegal infiltrators, and illegal immigrants, the Israeli Knesset State Control Committee revealed.

There were a total of 200 such conversion cases that were rejected over the past year by the Knesset Exceptions Committee, which must give its approval in order for anyone’s Jewish conversion process to begin in Israel.

Israeli law states that a non-Israeli citizen who is ineligible for “right of return” can begin the conversion process only after receiving permission from the Exceptions Committee, which often involves a drawn-out bureaucratic process.

“The mixture of halachic (Jewish legal) and government immigration policy concerns is not healthy. The Exceptions Committee must transfer its authority to the Interior Ministry, and instead just provide an estimate of the [conversion] candidate’s honesty,” said the head of the State Control Committee, Member of Knesset Karin Elharar (Yesh Atid).

(JNS.org

1 comment:

  1. Not surprising about the palestinians considering fact that large percentage of them are descended from Jews who had been forcibly converted to Islam.

    ReplyDelete