A Jewish religious revolution is brewing in Israel, and Yizhar Hess provided evidence of it in a presentation in Milwaukee on Jan. 12.
Hess is executive director and chief executive officer of the Masorti Movement, Israel’s branch of Conservative Judaism. To a group of about 40 people meeting at The Porticos condo complex, he described a startling finding by several Israeli polls.
In 2009, 2012 and 2013, Israeli surveys by newspapers and by the Israel Democracy Institute found that some 500,000 or more Israelis — between seven to eight percent of the population — identify with the Conservative or Reform Jewish religious movements. That is double the number and proportion found just 10 years ago, Hess said.
Not that they all attend Conservative and Reform synagogues in Israel for the holidays — “And thank God they don’t. Where would we put them?” Hess said.
Only about 70 Masorti and 35 Reform synagogues exist in Israel, he said, many of them small operations that do not have their own buildings.
But the numbers do mean that many more Israelis have been exposed to the alternatives to Orthodox Judaism and like what they have seen, he said.
Whether they were emissaries to U.S. Jewish communities and saw Reform and Conservative Jewish services — as Hess did when he was emissary in Tucson, Ariz., for three years — or by attending a non-Orthodox friend’s lifecycle event, or some other way, more and more Israelis have become “more open” to these movements, Hess said.
No longer can mainstream Israeli culture dismiss Reform and Conservative Judaism as Diaspora imports with no roots in Israel itself, he said. (Hess did not discuss Reconstructionism or any other Jewish religious movements.)
One sign of this was that Israeli President Shimon Peres agreed to be the featured speaker at the celebration of the Masorti Movement’s 35th anniversary, Hess said.
Nevertheless, Israel has a long way to go before it truly embraces Jewish religious pluralism, Hess said.
In the first part of his talk, he described how Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, created the “status quo” agreement with groups in Israel’s Orthodox community. This agreement allowed Orthodox groups to have control over marriage and divorce, kashrut (dietary laws) and Shabbat observance, plus allowed them to establish their own government-funded educational institutions.
Whatever were the motivations for making this agreement then, the result has been the establishment of some “things we now need to fix,” Hess said.
The control of marriage, for example, has made Israel “one of the few if not the only democracy” in which Jews do not have the right “to marry whom you like in the way you would like to do it,” he said.
In education, not only do Orthodox religious schools often receive services, like bus transportation, that non-Orthodox schools often do not receive and often have smaller student-to-teacher ratios, Hess said.
Yeshiva students also often receive subsidies paid for by the Israeli government that are larger than the salaries given to Israel Defense Force soldiers, he said.
“I’m not an Orthodox basher,” Hess said. “The problem is the coercion that comes with being a monopoly. Monopoly is bad.”
One reason this monopoly is bad is that it has alienated many Israelis from participation in elections. “It has caused people to stop believing in their ability to change the system,” Hess said.
As a result, voter participation declined from 86.9 percent in 1948 to 64.8 percent in 2009, Hess said.
But the struggle continues and Israelis have recently formed organizations to monitor the records of Knesset members on religious pluralism issues.
Some victories have been won, such as the plan and agreement reached with the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency for Israel about creating an egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Hess said.
Hess emphasized that this struggle within Israeli society not only needs financial support from the Diaspora, but Diaspora Jews have every right to make their voices heard.
“You guys are stakeholders as much as I am” in these issues, he said. And while there is no Hebrew word for “pluralism” at present, Israeli and Diaspora Jews “need to make sure it will happen… that pluralism will make aliyah [move to Israel],” he said.
Hess’ visit to Milwaukee was co-sponsored by Congregation Beth Israel Ner Tamid, where he also spoke during the Shabbat of Jan. 10-11, and the Israel Center of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, which organized the Jan. 12 event.
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