Six young people ere converted to Judaism by a rebel religious court on Monday. The small group of Orthodox rabbis who sat on the beit din and supported the act, led by rabbis David Stav and Nahum Rabinowitz, are all veteran pulpit rabbis and the heads of respected yeshivas. Their defiance of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate and the entire Orthodox rabbinical hierarchy could signal the most significant split in Orthodox Jewry in centuries.
The rebel rabbis acted in strict adherence to rabbinical law, or halakha. All they did was to defy the strictures added on by ultra-Orthodox rabbis in recent decades, which require a far more stringent degree of religious observance from prospective converts. In doing so, however, the rebels challenged the entire structure of Jewish orthodoxy in Israel, whereby the ultra-Orthodox leaders set the standards, which are then enforced by the state’s Chief Rabbinate.
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