Israel averts crisis over conversion bill

The idea of delay came from Netanyahu,who said this week that the proposed law,which had passed a parliamentary committee,could tear apart the Jewish people. He had received tens of thousands of enraged e-mail messages from American Jews who had been urged to contact him by their rabbis.

Please join me in writing an e-mail to Prime Minister Netanyahu to call a halt to this historic mistake, wrote Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side last week in an appeal. Judaism and the Jewish people do not belong exclusively to the most reactionary among us!

The bill that so enraged American Jewish leaders was actually aimed at making conversion easier for the 300,000 Israelis who moved here from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s and are not,by Orthodox rabbinic law,considered Jewish because they come from mixed parentage.