Chief Rabbi: Israel’s Nuremberg Law-based Citizenship Definition Not Strict Enough

New Observer
December 8, 2014

David-Lau
Chief Rabbi of Israel, David Lau: ‘Stop non-Jews entering Israel.’

Israel’s Nazi Nuremberg Laws-based citizenship rules are not strict enough to preserve Jewish racial purity and more needs to be done to prevent non-Jews from marrying Jews, that country’s chief rabbi has declared.

Interviewed by the Israeli newspaper Ynetnews, Israel’s Chief Rabbi David Lau—the single most powerful and influential Jewish religious leader in the world—said that his nation’s “Law of Return” was letting too many non-Jews into the country.

The “Law of Return”—which allows persons with Jewish heritage three generations back to immigrate to Israel—is, according to the Ynetnews, specifically based on the Nazi Nuremberg Laws which defined who was a Jew—and which are, ironically, paraded by the Jewish Supremacist-dominated media as the ‘apex of evil.’

The article, titled “Chief rabbi: Stop allowing non-Jews to make Aliyah” (Aliyah is the Hebrew word for Jewish immigration to Israel), quoted Chief Rabbi Lau in connection with a discussion of a recent study in Israel which revealed that people who are not defined as Jews in terms of Halacha (Jewish religious law) were getting in to Israel by exploiting the weak definitions of who is a Jew as contained in the Law of Return.

According to the article, some “nine million people from around the world are eligible for Israeli citizenship despite the fact they are not Jewish according to religious law.”

Someone who is Jewish by Halacha is defined as a child born to a Jewish mother. According to Reform Judaism, a person is a Jew if they were born to either a Jewish mother or a Jewish father, while according to Orthodox Judaism, the father’s religion is irrelevant as long as the mother was Jewish. Both strands therefore demand racial-genetic-descent in order to qualify as Jews.

The debate currently underway in Israel is therefore how far back this racial descent must stretch.

This situation—where Jews who are not Jews “according to religious law” has prompted Israel’s chief rabbi to demand that the Law of Return be tightened to exclude these “non-Jews.”

Chief Rabbi Lau told Ynetnews that “we must change the Law of Return immediately so it will include only those who are Jewish according to the halacha.

“Israel can decide to be the third world’s welfare state, but as long as that decision has not been taken—it needs to stop allowing non-Jews to make Aliyah,” Rabbi Lau said.

Lau went on to give what he called a practical example of how whet he views as “non-Jews” are immigrating to Israel under the current Law of Return definition:

Rabbi Lau gives as an example which he says he is personally acquainted with: “Because of one Jewish grandfather who is buried in Moscow, over 73 people (his children and grandchildren) moved to Israel through the Law of Return.”

The Chief Rabbi then went on to say that the “the biggest threat this poses [the weak Law of Return definitions] is inter-faith marriages”—in other words, letting non-Jews into Israel is creating the situation where they can marry with Jews, and dilute the pure Jewish blood in that country.

The article then goes on to explain exactly how the Israeli citizenship laws are based on the Nazi Nuremberg Laws:

There are roughly 14 million Jews around the world, but over 23 million people eligible for citizenship, a new study claimed as the government authorized a massive overhaul for the conversion process.

According to the study by Prof. Sergio DellaPergola from the Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, as of the beginning of 2014, the number of Jews (people born to Jewish mothers) stands at 14,212,800 (a 0.66 percent increase in comparison to 2013).

If you take into account those born to Jewish fathers, but non-Jewish mothers, the number rises to 17,236,850.

The number jumps to 22,921,500 when you take into account people who can trace Jewish ancestry three generations back—the maximum allowed by the Law of Return.

The definition is similar to the one laid out by the Nazi’s Nuremberg Laws, and is thus understood to be Israel’s response to the threat posed to Jews by anti-Semitism based on racial—as opposed to religious—criteria.