I laugh that the article calls Rabbi Haskel Lookstein “esteemed.” Esteemed by who? Like all major rabbis, he has people who esteem him and people who loathe him. Everything is a matter of perspective.
JERUSALEM — Critics of Israel’s chief rabbinate have long complained that scores of American converts to Judaism have trouble getting approval to marry in Israel. Now, one such case with a celebrity connection could break open the rabbinate’s longstanding secrecy over which foreign rabbis are approved to conduct conversions.
The case involves an American who, shortly after her Orthodox conversion in New York, became engaged to an Israeli, only to have the local rabbinical court in his hometown reject her status as a Jew when they tried to register for marriage.
As it turns out, the rabbi who signed the woman’s conversion certificate also converted Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and officiated at Ms. Trump’s 2009 wedding to Jared Kushner, the newspaper publisher now planning the presumptive Republican nominee’s potential transition to the White House.
The rabbi, Haskel Lookstein, is one of the most respected Orthodox rabbis in New York, where he has led Manhattan’s Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun for decades, after taking over the pulpit from his father. He recently received an honorary doctorate from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University in recognition for what it called “the influential role he has played in deepening Jewish values and heritage among American Jewry.”
The case raises the question of whether Ms. Trump — who said in a Vogue magazine interview last year that she and her husband were “pretty observant,” keeping kosher and the Jewish Sabbath — would be accepted as Jewish herself in all quarters in Israel.
More broadly, it illustrates a growing divide between Israel’s increasingly strict ultra-Orthodox religious establishment and many Jews abroad over the age-old question of “who is a Jew” that has complicated Israel’s relationship with the diaspora for decades.
The Israeli rabbinate, which controls Jewish marriage and most Jewish burial sites in the country, does not recognize non-Orthodox streams of Judaism like Reform and Conservative, with which the majority of affiliated American Jews identify. In rejecting Rabbi Lookstein’s conversion and those of others in similar positions, the rabbinical authorities now risk alienating Jews abroad who practice modern Orthodoxy according to Halakha, or Jewish law.
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“Ten years ago, if an Orthodox rabbi in good standing performed a conversion, it would have been a given that it would be accepted here,” said Rabbi Seth Farber, the founder of Itim, an Israeli organization that has been critical of the rabbinate and is pressing the case of Rabbi Lookstein’s American convert.He added, “I’d say this is unprecedented in Jewish history, that one group of rabbis rejects another.”
