{"id":186135,"date":"2026-05-04T13:12:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T21:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=186135"},"modified":"2026-05-04T13:49:31","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T21:49:31","slug":"marc-shapiro-abraham-rosenberg-r-chaim-heller-r-shlomo-zalman-auerbach-on-conversion-abortion-mercy-killings-and-new-pictures-and-videos-of-r-jehiel-jacob-weinberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=186135","title":{"rendered":"Marc Shapiro: ‘Abraham Rosenberg, R. Chaim Heller, R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach on Conversion, Abortion, Mercy Killings, and new pictures and videos of R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg’"},"content":{"rendered":"

March Shapiro writes May 8, 2024<\/a>: <\/p>\n

I discussed<\/a> the enigmatic plagiarizer Abraham Rosenberg. As we saw, in 1923 and 1924 Rosenberg published articles on the Jerusalem Talmud in the Orthodox journal Jeschurun, and he later published Al Devar Tikunei Nushaot bi-Yerushalmi. In this last work, Rosenberg refers to R. Chaim Heller as his friend. I and so many others assumed that \u201cRosenberg\u201d was a pseudonym, but Moshe Dembitzer, the expert on everything related to R. Heller, has pointed out to me that this appears not to be the case. Here is a letter Dembitzer found in the JDC archives from R. Heller to Cyrus Adler. As you can see, R. Heller mentions A. Rosenberg\u2014the letter that is unclear must be an \u201cA\u201d\u2014and one of his essays on the Jerusalem Talmud. He also mentions that Rosenberg \u201cis considered only one of the ordinary students.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The R. Auerbach<\/a> material is the substantive part of the post. Three versions of the same letter, each softer than the last. The original says without qualification that bedavar these conversions are valid. The second adds “they err in thinking.” The third in Minhat Shlomo hedges further. R. Goldberg, R. Auerbach’s grandson, suggests R. Auerbach<\/a> approved the changes. Shapiro doubts this. He is right to doubt it. Editors rarely revise a living posek’s letter, and the changes track too neatly with the public consensus position R. Auerbach<\/a> was being asked to support.
\nThe split between public and private psak is the more important issue. R. Auerbach<\/a> signs a public letter with the Steipler, R. Shach, and R. Elyashiv saying conversions without observance are invalid. He privately writes that they are valid bedavar and that converting such people violates lifnei iver. R. Amital tries to harmonize the two letters. He claims the public letter only addresses converts who never accepted mitzvot at the beit din. Shapiro is correct that this reading is impossible. No beit din skips kabbalat mitzvot. The public letter addresses verbal acceptance not followed by practice, the same case as R. Auerbach’s private letter.
\nR. Halpern’s reading is more honest. R. Auerbach<\/a> kept the lenient view but did not want it publicized. That admission has consequences for how to read the signed letters of major poskim. If R. Auerbach<\/a> signs a strict letter while privately holding the opposite, the signature is a political signal, not a ruling. The public letter functions as institutional alignment. The private letter functions as halakhah.
\nThe R. Moshe Feinstein treatment of the Tosafot in Niddah is the clearest case in the post of a posek overriding a text rather than accept an inconvenient reading. Every halakhist before R. Moshe wrestled with the Tosafot as written. R. Moshe declares the word should be different. R. Waldenberg’s response is the right one. You do not get to fix manuscripts by fiat when no manuscript evidence supports the change, and when every prior posek read the text as transmitted.
\nR. David Feldman’s claim that R. Moshe did not write the responsum at all is a further escalation. When an inconvenient text by a major posek cannot be edited away, deny he wrote it. Shapiro rejects this. He suspects R. Moshe Tendler had a hand in the drafting, which is plausible. R. Tendler did medical halakhah for R. Moshe. A hand in the drafting is not authorship. The teshuvah appears under R. Moshe’s name.
\nThe mercy killing material is the most surprising part of the post for anyone who only knows the public Orthodox line. Active euthanasia is supposed to be straightforwardly forbidden. The range of opinion among major poskim is wider. R. Sternbuch sees no Noahide prohibition. R. Zilberstein leans the same way. R. Moshe Feinstein writes that for a non-Jew the prohibition might not apply when the killing benefits the victim. R. Yisraeli permits active euthanasia by a Jew for a suffering patient near death. R. Schachter holds that killing with consent is not murder. R. Chaim Kanievsky tells the questioner that a Jew in a non-Jewish hospital might allow the doctor to end his life. None of this is the public line. The public line is that Judaism forbids it.
\nThe 97% figure is the most arresting empirical detail in the post. From 1996 to 2008, 97% of converts who divorced in Israel were non-observant. The question of whether such conversions are valid is not a marginal academic question. The answer determines the personal status of a large population.
\nThe Maharsha on Pharaoh is the kind of anachronistic reading Shapiro spends much of his career documenting. The midwives kill Hebrew babies because for Hebrews abortion is permitted. R. Shimon Shkop’s mockery of this style is well placed. R. Edels assumes the avot kept the Torah. He has Pharaoh doing legal research on the Noahide code. The result is bad pshat and worse history. It does preserve the assumption that the halakhic frame is universal and timeless, which is the point of the exercise.
\nOne question Shapiro raises but does not answer. Why are these lenient views not better known? The answer is implicit in the rest of the post. The texts get edited. The public letters get signed. The teshuvot get attributed to scribal error or to other authors. The institution does the work of keeping the public line clean. Shapiro’s project is the documentation of that work.<\/p>\n

Alliance Theory<\/a> makes the question close to trivially answerable. The lenient views are not better known because no coalition profits from making them better known.
\nPinsof’s frame<\/a>: beliefs function less as descriptions of reality than as alliance markers. The haredi position on conversion holds that bedavar invalidity follows from absence of sincere kabbalat mitzvot. This does little halakhic work the older mainstream position does not also do. What it does is mark a coalition. Holding it identifies you as haredi. Holding the lenient position identifies you as religious Zionist, modern Orthodox, or as someone who has absorbed the older Maimonidean line the Schmelkes innovation displaced.
\nRun the four diagnostic questions<\/a> through it.
\nWhose status and income depend on the strict line winning? The Chief Rabbinate, the haredi political parties (Shas, UTJ), the haredi yeshiva leadership, the rabbinical bureaucracy that processes Jewish status decisions in Israel, the conversion court system, the marriage registrars, the haredi sefer publishers who curate which texts get reprinted and how. These institutions do not exist in their current form if Jewish status gets settled through the older lenient line. The Druckman court was the state’s version of Jewish status without them. They had to break it.
\nWho do they risk angering by saying the lenient view in public? Each other. The haredi rabbinate is not internally homogeneous on this question. Shapiro shows R. Auerbach holding the lenient view in private while signing the strict letter in public. R. Halpern’s reading is honest. Auerbach kept the view but did not want it publicized. The cost of publicizing it falls on Auerbach inside the haredi coalition. He gets marked as a defector. So he keeps the lenient view in private and signs the strict letter in public. Pinsof’s prediction holds. The signed letter is the alliance marker. The private letter is the halakhah.
\nWho benefits if the strict framing wins? Same list as above, plus haredi donors who expect the strict line, plus the haredi political coalition that uses Jewish status as leverage in coalition negotiations. The strict line is the basis for the haredi monopoly on personal status in Israel. The lenient line dissolves the monopoly. Tens of thousands of Russian olim get full halakhic status without going through haredi courts. The haredi political bargaining position weakens. The state stops needing the rabbinate to settle who is Jewish.
\nWhat truth costs them their position? Several. That Maimonides and the Shulhan Arukh treat bedavar conversions as valid without sincere kabbalat mitzvot. That R. Schmelkes’s 1876 innovation has no precedent in two thousand years of prior halakha. That R. Auerbach held the lenient view in private. That R. Moshe Feinstein’s scribal error reading of Tosafot Niddah is a tendentious move with no manuscript support. That R. Feldman’s claim that R. Moshe did not write his own abortion responsum is a desperate move to evade an inconvenient text. That the Sherman ruling used procedural and political weapons against Druckman because the halakhic argument against him is weak.
\nEach of these truths, said in public, costs the speaker his standing in the haredi coalition. So the truths do not get said in public. The texts that contain them get edited, attributed to scribal error, or reattributed to other authors. The pattern Shapiro documents is the alliance maintenance work.
\nTurner’s convenient beliefs angle adds the second layer. The strict position is convenient for the people who hold it. It gives them gatekeeping power. It imposes no costs on them, because the costs fall on the people declared non-Jewish. They fall on the converts, on Druckman’s religious Zionist rabbis, on the Russian olim who learn after twenty years in Israel that the rabbinate does not consider their conversion valid. Insiders pay nothing for holding the position. Outsiders pay everything. Convenient beliefs hold stable when the cost falls on outsiders. This is why the strict line has held for forty years through repeated civil court rebukes.
\nTurner’s tacit knowledge<\/a> angle adds the third layer. A haredi posek’s formation requires absorbing the strict line as a given before any explicit halakhic argumentation. By the time the young scholar engages the Maimonidean material on his own, his reading is already shaped by what his rebbeim taught him to see. The lenient texts get read through the strict frame. R. Moshe’s scribal error claim about Tosafot Niddah looks plausible only inside a formation that has already accepted the conclusion that no rishon could permit abortion without restrictions. From outside that formation, the claim looks absurd, which is why R. Waldenberg responded with such force.
\nMearsheimer’s social-tribal account<\/a> makes the geometry visible. The Sherman ruling reads as tribal boundary enforcement. Druckman’s converts were Russian, secular in cultural orientation, marrying religious Zionists. They were never going to look haredi. The strict halakhic framing supplied a reason to keep them out. The reason was tribal first, halakhic second. The court found halakhic language to express a tribal judgment that had already been made.
\nThe gap Shapiro asks about follows from this geometry. The strict line has institutional voice because the institutions that benefit from it amplify it, and the costs of holding it fall on outsiders. The lenient line has no institutional voice because the institutions that might amplify it have been weakened or absorbed into the haredi coalition, and the costs of holding it fall on insiders. Shapiro pays a cost for documenting this. He gets called a heretic by parts of the haredi press. He gets blacklisted from some sefer collections. The cost is real but bearable because Shapiro does not need standing in the haredi coalition. He has tenure at Scranton. He has Torah in Motion. He has a base outside the coalition that protects him. Most modern Orthodox rabbis do not have such a base. They keep quiet.
\nThat last point is the operational answer. The lenient views are not better known because the people best positioned to make them known have something to lose. Shapiro is the exception that defines the rule.<\/p>\n

The 97% figure of converts who divorced in Israel were non-observant comes from Shimon Yakobi’s 2009 publication for the Israeli rabbinical courts. Shapiro cites it in footnote 6 of the post. Yakobi worked from official records, so the number tracks. It covers divorces from 1996 to 2008. The non-divorced convert population looks similar.
\nThe figure tells you what was at stake in the 2008 Sherman ruling<\/a>. A panel of three dayyanim of the High Rabbinical Court led by R. Avraham Sherman<\/a> ruled that all conversions performed by R. Chaim Druckman’s<\/a> National Conversion Authority<\/a> since 1999 were retroactively annulled, declared Druckman a disqualified judge, and ordered marriage registrars to refuse any convert who does not look observant. The case began in Ashdod in February 2007. A Danish-born woman who had converted in 1992 came to R. Avraham Attia for an uncontested divorce. Attia asked her one or two questions about her observance, then wrote a nine-page ruling, eight pages of which attacked Druckman’s conversion court and declared the woman not Jewish.
\nThis was not an abstract dispute. Roughly 300,000 of the 1.2 million Russian immigrants who came to Israel under the Law of Return since 1990 were not halakhically Jewish. The Joint Institute of Jewish Studies set up after the Ne’eman Commission and the National Conversion Authority converted thousands of these immigrants through serious one-to-three-year courses. Druckman’s court was the state’s answer to the Russian aliyah’s halakhic status problem. The Sherman ruling tried to undo that answer with one stroke. The Schechter Institutes
\nThe halakhic basis Sherman cited goes back to a 1876 responsum. R. Yitzhak Schmelkes wrote that someone who accepts the yoke of mitzvot verbally but does not intend in his heart to observe them is not a convert. R. David Golinkin argues this position has no precedent in two thousand years of prior halakhic discussion of conversion. Whether that judgment is fair is itself a halakhic question. What is not in dispute is that Schmelkes is the proximate source of the modern haredi position. Sherman built his ruling on Feinstein, Grodzinsky, Sternbuch, Auerbach, Kook, Schmelkes, Yosef, Kanievsky, Shach, and Elyashiv. The R. Auerbach citation is to the public letter Shapiro analyzes, not the private letter to R. Cohen. Sherman builds on the public face of the consensus<\/a>. Shapiro shows that public face does not match the private psak of at least one of the figures cited.
\nThe Supreme Court of Israel pushed back in April 2012. Justice Dorit Beinisch wrote that the rabbinic court ruling included every defect and wrongdoing possible. Justice Amnon Rubinstein expressed distress at the conduct of the rabbinic courts and said it caused mental anguish to the plaintiffs and brought no honor to the rabbinic courts. The petition had been filed in 2008 by the Center for Women’s Justice on behalf of two women whose conversions had been retroactively annulled. The Supreme Court affirmed the validity of the Druckman conversions<\/a> but declined to rule on whether rabbinic courts have the general power to annul conversions.
\nThe civil court returned twice more. In 2016 the High Court ordered the state to recognize private Orthodox conversions performed in Israel outside the Chief Rabbinate. In March 2021 an 8-1 ruling extended recognition under the Law of Return to Reform and Conservative conversions performed in Israel. Each ruling provoked legislative attempts to overturn it<\/a>.
\nMatan Kahana made the most serious modern Orthodox attempt at reform. He served as Religious Services Minister under Bennett. In February 2022 the cabinet approved his plan to let some thirty municipal rabbis perform state-recognized conversions, increasing the number of conversion courts beyond the four controlled by the Chief Rabbinate. Chief Rabbis Lau and Yosef wrote a joint letter attacking the plan, calling it mistreatment of the convert. The bill never cleared the Knesset. The Bennett coalition fell.<\/a>
\nNetanyahu returned at the end of 2022 with Shas and UTJ. The coalition agreement included a State Conversion Law that would give recognition only to conversions performed through the government’s Conversion Authority, effectively overturning the 2016 and 2021 court rulings. The reform Kahana had won was reversed. The Times of Israel
\nThe most recent move is the Religious Courts Arbitration Bill. The Knesset passed it 65-41 in the early hours of March 24, 2026. The bill expands rabbinic court power to arbitrate civil matters. Yair Lapid called March 23, 2026 the day the status quo died and said giving rabbis the powers of courts is a halachic state. The bill is not about conversion. It is part of the broader consolidation of rabbinic court power of which conversion is one front.<\/a>
\nThe current setting comes to this. About 450,000 people living in Israel have Jewish ancestry but are not considered Jewish by the rabbinate, mostly immigrants from former Soviet Union countries. Israel does not allow non-religious or civil marriage, so people who are not legally considered Jewish but do not practice another religion live in a state of limbo, unable to marry or divorce through the state. The Chief Rabbinate refuses to register most converts produced by anyone but its own four courts. Private Orthodox courts run by Tzohar and Seth Farber’s Giyur K’Halacha keep converting people. The state accepts those conversions for citizenship. The rabbinate refuses them for marriage. The two-track outcome holds<\/a>.
\nThis is the institutional setting that gives Shapiro’s textual point its force. Sherman’s ruling stands on a public-face haredi consensus. The private psak runs the other way for some of the named signatories. The lenient line runs from Maimonides through R. Auerbach’s private letter to R. Cohen and the Eretz Hemdah responsa. Both positions exist inside Orthodox halakhah. The institutional question is which gets official voice. The answer in Israel for the past two decades has been the strict line, with periodic civil court rebukes and short reform windows that have not held.
\nWhether this can hold is a separate question. The numbers do not support it. If 97% of converts who divorce are non-observant, the strict position is not describing reality. It is describing a standard almost no one meets. That gap between the rule and the practice produces the periodic crises. Sherman tried to enforce the rule in 2008 and got the rebuke from Beinisch. The 2026 coalition is trying again through legislation. The cycle repeats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

March Shapiro writes May 8, 2024: I discussed the enigmatic plagiarizer Abraham Rosenberg. As we saw, in 1923 and 1924 Rosenberg published articles on the Jerusalem Talmud in the Orthodox journal Jeschurun, and he later published Al Devar Tikunei Nushaot … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[228,37,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversion","category-israel","category-marc-b-shapiro"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t