>On Tuesday, Judy Maltz reported in Haaretz that the Israeli Rabbinate, which controls conversion, marriage and divorce in Israel, is using DNA testing to verify a person’s Jewishness. Since a person who isn’t Jewish can’t marry a Jew in Israel, which has no civil marriage, the rabbinate is using the DNA test to deny people they consider non-Jews the civil right of marriage.
>It’s a horrifying state of affairs. An immigrant advocacy center called ITIM has filed six complaints about the tests, mostly for former Soviet Jews. As Elad Caplan, the center’s director, told Maltz, “Judaism is about belonging and community – it’s not about race and blood, as our worst enemies have claimed.”
>And yet, this shouldn’t surprise us. For starters, this isn’t the only civil rights abuse that the Rabbinate, which is led by ultra-Orthodox clerics, perpetrates. In addition to refusing non-Jews the right to legally marry Jews in Israel, the rabbinate continues to bar women from getting a divorce without their husbands’ consent, creating the disaster of “chained women” who languish for years, sometimes decades, neither married nor divorced. (Men, too need the consent of their wives, but the rabbis have found loopholes to free men.)
