"We dropped the ball for too long, but now we’re galvanized"
A quarter-century ago, senior Agudah figures on an Am Echad mission met with Bibi to discuss the religious status quo, which was under attack by a coalition of secularists and Reform.
In a closing of circles, last week some of the same leaders returned under the same banner to meet a silver-haired Netanyahu. But in the shadow of an unprecedented assault on the state’s Jewish character, the subtext had become: Can the world Orthodox community halt the Bennett government’s changes to giyur laws where the country’s religious politicians have failed?
“There’s no doubt that we made an impression,” says Am Echad cochair and Agudah chairman Shlomo Werdiger. “We met ministers from across the government, and instead of yelling like the opposition do, we spoke to them as businesspeople and leaders who are invested here in Israel’s future. We told Prime Minister Bennett that if you continue to assault the conversion laws, your legacy will be that you’ve destroyed the state’s Jewishness. Bennett heard what we had to say, and we’re going to have a follow-up meeting with him.”
Given the deep freeze in relations between the Bennett-Lapid government and Israel’s right-wing-religious bloc, the sight of chareidi-aligned leaders engaging with coalition figures was itself newsworthy. But differences in tone apart, the Am Echad mission brought something new to the table: boxes containing 150,000 petitions from communities all over the world against the liberalization of giyur laws. “We were able to convey to the government that not only are rabbanim in Israel united against the changes in the law, but that rabbis all over the world will stop accepting conversions from Israel.”
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