This story was published by the Associated Press and is all.over.the.web. Like here... and here... and here.
I look pretty! Except now my hair is short (this was taken just after our wedding). No double chin... YAY!
Anyway, looks aside, the article is fairly powerful. At the end of the article, an Israeli law maker states "We are not saying that someone who is Reform or Conservative is not Jewish. But they can't change the order of things here in Israel," he said. "The average Israeli wants the country to abide by the Jewish tradition ... You can't take the things most sacred to us and tear them to shreds."
The article is actually about the conversion bill that is making its way through the Knesset (government) now. The above quote hit me hard. Possibly because I was told I'm Jew-ish during a time when I should have been welcomed in as a Jew. When Craig and I were going through our wedding planning, we had to get the seal of approval from the Rabbanut. We didn't. I was told I wasn't quite a Jew. I was discriminated against because I grew up as a Conservative Jew. That's why the first article was written.
The reason the above quote has me a bit miffed is because they DON'T consider someone, like me, to be a Jew. Because I am a Conservative Jew. I'm not asking them to change the order in which they do things but I am demanding that people like me be counted as part of the Jewish population. No one is tearing our traditions to shreds. At our wedding, my Orthodox cousins told me my "Conservative" wedding was more religious than most weddings in Israel.
The quote hurt. It's a blatant lie. Anyone who has tried to get married in Israel and was brought up outside of Israel as something other than an Orthodox Jew has probably faced the same discrimination. My Conservative wedding was not legal in Israel - so we had to go to Cyprus to make it "official".
Even after reading the article and reading some idiot lie and say he counts me as a Jew - what strikes me as the most odd (and worrying) is the comments people left on the Yahoo publication. There are 851 comments. Most of them are against Jews. My face is on that article. My name is now something to be associated with the problems in Israel. I am the poster-child for what is wrong with Israel! Yet, I am also the poster child for what is right with Israel. This country is my home. This country gave refuge to my family when they needed it the most. This country absorbs more immigrants than most "Western" countries - including refugees from Darfur. Don't get me started on the refugees from the former Soviet Union - we absorbed them, too.
I wanted to be the poster child for people who search for equality. Instead, I did it again and put a face to a problem that most people in this world don't understand. 851 comments. Most of them negative. I read them all. And I'd do it again. In a heart beat.
2 comments:
Oh honey, most of those comments were made by people that are barely literate, from the looks of things. My favorite is this one "Conservative regligious people are always causing problems; doesn’t matter if it’s evangelicals in America, ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel, radical Muslims, Hindu nationalists etc. They always stand in the way of progress."
Uh, I don't think conservative Jew means what you think it does.
I know - most of them are complete morons. When I agreed to the article, I was told there would be other people in the article - people like me, who were told they aren't quite Jewish in the Jewish land. Somehow, I'm the only one...
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