'Whither Thou Goest . . .'

This week the Jewish holiday of Shavu'ot (or Pentecost, as it is known in English) is being celebrated and it is an ironically fitting time for the renewed debate that has broken out in Israel, with perhaps more passion and rancor than ever, over the subject of Jewish conversion. It is on Shavu'ot that Jews in their synagogues traditionally read the Book of Ruth, which tells the story of the most renowned conversion in the history of Judaism, that of the widowed Moabite woman Ruth, who tells her Israelite mother-in-law Naomi:

"Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God."

Since Rabbinic Judaism did not exist in Ruth's day, she did not have to appear before a rabbinic conversion court. She simply followed Naomi back from Moab to Judea, married a Judean man there, and had children, one of whose descendants was King David, who were automatically accepted as part of the Jewish people.

That is what hundreds of thousands of non-Jews living in Israel, most of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union, would do today, too, if between Ruth's time and our own a rabbinic establishment hadn't come along to block their way.

But this week's crisis wasn't over the principle of formal conversion. Most citizens of Israel, no matter how secular, recognize that a Jewish state that is obliged by its Law of Return to grant citizenship and its benefits to any Jew who applies for them has to have official criteria for who is a Jew and who isn't.

Most, however reluctantly, have accepted the political logic of letting these criteria be those of traditional Jewish law as administered by Israel's rabbinical courts, which have been notorious for making the conversion process difficult.

But this logic can be pushed only so far — and it was pushed further than it can go by last week's ruling of Israel's High Rabbinical Court upholding the decision of a local rabbi to annul the conversion of a Danish woman living in Israel with her Israeli husband for not observing the laws of Judaism as she had promised to do.

More than that, the court recommended considering the annulment of hundreds or thousands of other conversions in recent years on the same grounds.

Although my knowledge may be faulty, I have never heard or read of any other case in Jewish history in which a conversion has been annulled. Even the most stringent rabbis, who insist that prospective converts prove before the conversion ceremony that they are living Orthodox lives, have not in the past peeked into the kitchens or bedrooms of the converted to make sure that they have gone on living that way.

The principle of the full equality of the converted Jew with the born Jew is sacred in Jewish law; the idea that a convert, for whatever reason, can be ignominiously stripped of his or her Jewishness by rabbinical fiat is outrageous even in traditional terms.

Moreover, Jewish tradition, in the past, has been far from unanimous in insisting on strict religious observance as a precondition for conversion. There have been in the annals of Orthodoxy more lenient periods and rabbis who recognized that the desire to join the Jewish people was a sufficiently worthy motive for being becoming Jewish, regardless of one's degree of religious observance.

Although many rabbis traditionally have warned converts that, once Jews, they would be living in sin if they did not keep the precepts of Judaism, none ever threatened them with being turned back into gentiles as now has been done by the High Rabbinical Court.

Until two decades or so ago, the issue of conversion in Israel was largely a question of religious principles versus individual rights. The number of would-be converts was small and the problem of those rejected or stymied by the Orthodox rabbinate was not one of national proportions. But with the huge immigration to Israel from the ex-Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which included many non-Jews married to Jewish partners or descendants of mixed marriages, this has long ceased to be the case.

Hundreds of thousands of citizens of Israel today are not recognized as Jews even though they have chosen to cast in their lot with the Jewish people, which many of them would gladly join in a formal manner if this could be done in a relatively simple and non-demeaning way.

One would like to see Israeli Orthodoxy make this possible. If it is not prepared to do so, secular Israel will have to risk a deep secular-religious rift by fully recognizing Reform and Conservative conversions performed in Israel and treating them as no less valid than Orthodox ones.

A non-observant Jew myself, until now I have favored preserving the Orthodox monopoly on conversion, not only to avoid driving a wedge between the secular and religious publics, but also to set a reasonably high standard for non-Jews applying for citizenship to Israel. It would be undesirable to have a situation, for example, in which any foreign worker in Israel could, by undergoing a quick and painless Reform conversion, become a citizen of Israel overnight.

Yet even this would be preferable to a situation in which converts are treated humiliatingly and in which many more who would like to convert are dissuaded by the prospect of humiliation. Sooner or later, secular Israel will say: Enough. The decision of the High Rabbinical Court has brought that day closer.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.