Lady in the Dark

Pretty Rina Eitani, 35, seems as Jewish as Rebecca. She was one of those who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, landed in Palestine as a refugee in 1947. She joined a kibbutz, served in the Israeli army, raised her son and daughter as Jews, and though nonobservant, celebrates Judaism's major feasts in her house. Now she is a town councilor of Israel's Mapai (Labor) Party in Upper Nazareth.

But she is not Jewish enough for Israel's Ministry of the Interior. Although Mrs. Eitani's father was a Polish Jew, explains the ministry, her mother was a German Protestant--and according to the Halacha (religious law), a Jew is someone whose mother was Jewish, or a convert to the faith. The ministry demands that she turn in her passport pending the investigation of her citizenship. She has the choice of converting formally to Judaism or becoming a naturalized citizen of Israel as a non-Jew.

Whether or not Mrs. Eitani is Jewish has blossomed into a nationwide debate. What makes the problem so touchy is that it cuts to the root of Israel's schizophrenia as a modern, secular state whose laws are strongly influenced by a minority of observant Orthodox Jews as their price for remaining in the coalition with the governing Mapai. In 1960 the Interior Ministry, dominated by Orthodox Jews, ru'ed that the Halacha would determine whether an immigrant could enter Israel under the 1950 Law of Return, which makes any Jew automatically eligible for citizenship.

The ministry's ruling is clearly at variance with the views of Israel's Supreme Court. Three years ago, in ruling against Carmelite Father Daniel, a Catholic convert who applied for citizenship under the Law of Return on grounds of his Jewish birth, the court declared that a Jew is basically anyone the man in the street would consider Jewish. Although Rina qualifies under this rule of thumb, the ministry refuses to back down.

Until the government rules in her case, Mrs. Eitani remains a lady in the dark about whether she is Israeli, German, Polish or stateless. Her children have been jeered at, and Orthodox Nazarenes have passed out handbills warning against "the Gentile in our midst." On principle, however, she refuses to make a public act of conversion while the controversy continues. "I have no other religion but Judaism," she says. "How can I say that I'm not a Jew now? I would be denying my past."

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