In the course of a trip to the States which the chairman of Bayit Hayehudi party, MK Naftali Bennett, made two weeks ago, he visited a Conservative school in New York. Bennett was the first religious official to recognize such a body and meet with it, and after the visit, he distributed a video showing his meeting with the students and praising them. He described it in these words, "My encounter with the students of this Conservative school showed me how much love for Judaism they have."
After breaching a barrier of many years separating traditional religious Jewry from the groups outside it, the goal of legitimization of those movements which threaten the body of Torah-true Jewry continued last week, this time in the Knesset. MK Motty Yogev met with dozens of students from Reform and Conservative communities. During this meeting, the students expressed their desire to become `rabbis' and commiserated about the great difficulties which the Chief Rabbinate sets before them.
In an interview with "Yated Ne'eman", Chief Rabbi Dovid Lau spoke out, after having been verbally attacked by Bennett for his refusal to recognize the Conservatives, an approach which was exemplified by the Minister of Education and Diaspora towards that affiliation. Bennett castigated him for not conferring legitimization for Reform so as to draw them closer but rather serving to cast them off.
HaRav Lau said, "At the end of WW II, there were six million Jews living in the U.S.; today there are only five million. Throughout the years of the Holocaust, there was no strong wave of aliya to Israel nor was there a Holocaust, b"H, in America. Those destructive movements are to blame for the effacement of Jewish identity to the point of serious assimilation.
"To say that these visits strengthen the Jewish connection?" he cried out, "is a total distortion. The truth is exactly the opposite! Today, b"H, the Reform organizations in the US are in decline. Even their own representative went as far as to admit it to the American media. When not even one of the founders of Religious Zionism dreamed of meeting with them, now that they are in decline, the former decide to grant them recognition enabling them to make their mark here?!"
It is well-known that Bennett sees himself as a possible prime minister of Israel sometime in the future. He apparently believes that he furthers this goal by showing that he is concerned about a broader range of Jewish lifestyles. However it is likely that he is mistaken since he will be weakening his base of support and will not likely acquire any important gains from trying to accommodate those who are fundamentally at odds with much that the religious movement has traditionally stood for.
