Jewish woman made Aliyah but denied the right to marry without conversion

alinaandjared

My husband sent me this link and we talked about it for a great while.  This reality is really unfortunate, in my opinion.

http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=195896

2dBride

This is unfortunately common.  The Law of Return is deliberately as all encompassing as possible.  It was set up to ensure that if people like the Nazis ever came into power again, Jews would have somewhere they could go to escape.  Since Hitler's definition of a Jew included people with, for example, a Jewish father and a nonJewish mother, the Law of Return treats such people as Jewish.

However, the (Orthodox) religious party has a great deal of power within Israel, including over marriage laws.  The reason is that the Israeli government is multiparty, with a coalition always necessary for a leader to come into power.  And the major parties would rather form a coalition with a party that has only one issue (meaning the organizer can have its way on all other issues) than with a party that has a spectrum of issues.  Since the religious party really only cares about one issue, it gets invited in to every coalition.

And the effects have been distinctly unfortunate.  Even people who have had an Orthodox conversion in the US are sometimes treated as "not Jewish enough" for a marriage in Israel.  And the very people most in need of the Law of Return--those who have been swept up in conflicts in their homeland--often lack the extensive records necessary to prove their Jewish lineage.