Having taught the story of Israel for years, I’ve watched students grapple with a question that cuts to the heart of Zionism’s founding purpose: why does Israel’s Law of Return ground the right of immigration not in religious observance, but in Nazi Germany’s definition of Jewish identity?
The answer is as simple as it is sobering. The Nazis didn’t ask questions. They didn’t care whether you kept Shabbat or hadn’t set foot in a synagogue in decades. To them, it was a matter of blood – and they murdered six million Jews for it.
That lesson is now under threat. And it is not only a historical one.
Across major American cities and European capitals, a violent epidemic of antisemitism is making the same brutal calculation. The thugs attacking Jews on the streets of Paris, London, New York, and Los Angeles are not stopping to inquire about levels of observance. They are not checking whether their victim davens three times a day or belongs to an Orthodox shul.
To them, a Jew is a Jew – and that is reason enough to attack. The barbaric hatred hunting Jews around the world today is indifferent to denomination, just as it was in 1933. Jewish blood is Jewish blood.
A bill now advancing through the Knesset has apparently not absorbed this lesson.
Championed by Religious Zionism MK Simcha Rothman, the proposed amendment to the Law of Return would recognize only conversions performed “in accordance with Halacha” – effectively slamming the door on Jews who converted through Reform or Conservative movements.
It is a bill that mistakes theological gatekeeping for national policy. Worse, it betrays a foundational principle that Israel was built to embody: Never Again.
To understand why, we must return to the law itself. When David Ben-Gurion and Israel’s founders drafted the Law of Return in 1950, just five years after the liberation of the death camps, they made a deliberate and profound choice.
They did not define eligibility by religious practice, by denominational affiliation, or by the approval of any rabbinical authority. They defined it by the same criterion the Nazis had used – ancestry – and then inverted its logic entirely.
Where Nazi law marked Jews for death, Israel’s founding law marked them for refuge. Where Nazi ideology said Jewish blood was a curse, Zionism said it was a claim – a claim on a homeland, on safety, on belonging.
The message was clear: if you were Jewish enough to be killed by the Nazis, you are Jewish enough to be a citizen of the world’s only Jewish state.
The 1970 amendment extended this further, granting the right of return to any grandchild of a Jew, regardless of whether they themselves were halachically Jewish. The message was unambiguous: if the world’s murderers would come for you because of your Jewish lineage, Israel would take you in because of it.
Rothman’s bill guts that logic entirely. By restricting citizenship eligibility to those who converted through Orthodox channels, it introduces precisely the kind of hierarchy of Jewish legitimacy that Israel’s founders refused to construct.
It says, in effect, that some Jews are more Jewish than others – that a Reform Jew who risked her life to convert, who raised Jewish children, who stands with Israel in its darkest hours, is less entitled to refuge than the rabbinate’s stamp of approval would suggest.
Majority of Jews in Diaspora are Reform, Conservative
Reform and Conservative Jews constitute the majority of organized Jewish life in the Diaspora – the communities most actively fighting antisemitism, most engaged in Zionist education, and most likely to send their children to Israel on gap years and programs.
To invalidate their conversions for the purpose of citizenship is not a statement of religious principle. It is a political capitulation to a narrow ultra-Orthodox constituency at the expense of the Jewish world. It fractures the very covenant Israel made with the Jewish people when it declared itself a state.
The stakes could not be higher. At a moment when Diaspora Jews are under physical assault – when synagogues need armed guards, when Jewish students are being driven off campuses, when wearing a Star of David in certain neighborhoods of London or Marseille is an act of courage – Israel is considering whether to tell some of those Jews that they are not welcome enough to come home. That is not a theological position.
It is a national betrayal.
Israel was not founded to adjudicate who is Jewish enough. It was founded because the world had just spent twelve years demonstrating that the question of who is Jewish would always be answered – violently – by someone else. The Law of Return was Israel’s answer: we will decide, and our answer will be as broad as our enemies’ hatred.
That answer must not be narrowed now. Not by coalition politics. Not by rabbinical gatekeeping. Not while Jewish blood is still being spilled in the streets of cities that were supposed to be safe.
Israel must be a home for all Jews. That is not a liberal position or a conservative one. It is the founding promise of the Jewish state – and it is not negotiable.
The author holds a PhD in International Relations from Northeastern University.