The Movement for Reform Judaism

Should the latter alternative come to prevail, the Zionist enterprise, with its stress on both Judaism and democracy, will have failed. That’s why the central task of the Zionist movement has been to promote aliyah, immigration of Jews to Israel. Nowadays, when even the immigration from the former Soviet Union has dried up, this means immigration from the Western countries, notably North America and Europe.   

That’s an uphill struggle, because people don’t emigrate when they’re comfortable in the countries in which they live, whatever their ideology. To win that struggle, different agencies have been set up in Israel the task of which is to make Israel as attractive as possible for olim from the West. The traditional ways of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency may have become irrelevant; there’s even talk of dismantling the Agency’s Aliyah Department. It’s difficult to imagine a more devastating blow to Zionism, delivered by its own child – the State of Israel. Internal growth is considered to be problematic, because it’s the ultra-Orthodox and Arab sectors of the population that produce most babies. The former doesn’t care for democracy, the latter is unhappy with the Jewish dimension.   

But, as stated above, Jewish immigration from the free world rarely happens. Israelis get excited when a couple of hundred Jews arrive from the United States or a few dozen from Britain, but they know that this is more symbolic than substantive. For a while there was immigration from France, but we hear that since Sarkozy has become President, aliyah from France has greatly decreased. The irony shouldn’t escape us: because Sarkozy is good to Israel, Jews are happy to stay in France.   

The effect of all this has been that last year more Jews left Israel – for the United States, Europe, Australia and South Africa – than Jews came to Israel from these and other countries. But there are many people, probably millions, who crave to come to Israel. Not only those from the Philippines, Thailand, Romania, etc. who already work here, are married, have children born in Israel and now want to stay for good, but the many refugees from African countries – Eritrea, Sudan and others – who risk their lives to reach Israel. Prime Minister Olmert speaks of a potential tsunami of such refugees.   

Israel is in a real quandary. To let them all in would seriously endanger the Jewishness of the state – even though some of them are only too happy to convert to what they perceive to be Judaism. Not to let them in would be compromise Israeli democracy and trample on fundamental Jewish values. Jews, who have been “strangers in the land of Egypt,” as the Bible has it, should know their sacred duty to receive strangers and provide for them, whether or not they’re Jews.   

This is by no means the only problem that Israel is facing today, but it deserves our serious attention, even though nobody seems to know how to solve it.

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