Twisting the law of return: Messianic 'rabbi' establishes law firm to help Messianics immigrate to Israel
The former 'spiritual leader' of the largest messianic congregation in the United States has immigrated to Israel and opened a law firm (as a 'foreign lawyer,' which means he doesn't have to be admitted to the bar here) in Petach Tikva to help Messianic 'Jews' to immigrate to Israel under the law of return.
Infamous
U.S. Christian leader "rabbi "Jamie Cowen, who managed to make aliyah
in 2011, has changed his name to Cohen and established the messianic law
firm Cohen, Pex and Brosh, with its main branch in Petach Tikvah.
The Messianic Times reports that the law firm is comprised solely of "dedicated followers of Yeshua the Messiah" but as of this writing, none of that appears on the Cohen, Pex and Brosh website.
Before immigrating to Israel, Jamie Cowen was the charismatic leader of the large Christian messianic congregation, Tikvat Israel, in Richmond Virginia. Dedicated to evangelizing the Jewish people, Cowen served for several years as president of The Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations(UMJC) and is currently listed as a member of the Messianic Jewish Rabbinical Council.
As mentioned, as of this writing, none of Cowen's "messianic" background information appears on attorney Jamie Cohen's profile, as seen on his firm's website (although there is mention of his studies at a Catholic University and school of theology).
What is featured prominently in the law firm's section under Areas of Practice is "Immigration to Israel":
"All issues of immigration to Israel: Aliyah according to the Law of Return – 1950. Permanent residency. Temporary Residency. Work Visas. Student visas. Tourist visas. Volunteer visas. Clergy visas. International Refugee Law according to the UN convention (Asylum seekers)."
This is of major concern to Jews worldwide but especially in Israel. A number of evangelical/messianic lawyers in Israel have put interpreting the Law of Return to favor messianic Christian aliyah at the top of their agenda, and they are making inroads. In fact, another Israeli messianic law office, the Jerusalem Institute of Justice (JIJ), has recently issued pro-bono advice, which is being widely disseminated online and in email, geared for the throngs of believing Christians who want to make Aliyah. This will be the subject of JewishIsrael’s next report.
A few comments: First, I have nothing against Christians. I have nothing against Christians supporting Israel. I have written dozens of posts defending Christians from persecution. I have a lot against Christians who try to proselytize Jews.
Second, the law of return is meant to facilitate Jewish immigration to Israel - not anyone else's. After all, this is (supposed to be) the only Jewish state in the world. 40 years ago, in what might have been the last chance to enact a specific definition in the law of return of 'Who is a Jew,' the National Religious Party (forerunner of today's 'Jewish Home') asked Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik zt"l (may the memory of the righteous be a blessing) whether they should insist on adding the word 'k'halacha' to the law of return as a condition to their entering Yitzchak Rabin's first government. He told them that they should not enter the government without that condition. They ignored him (as a teenager growing up in Boston, the story got around quite quickly...). As a result, the law is ambiguous about who is allowed to immigrate to Israel under the law of return, and we are now paying the price (isn't it ironic that even an Orthodox convert to Judaism has to jump through hoops to immigrate here, but Messianic Christians are allowed to immigrate under the law of return?). This is an illustration of why the Haredim argue that you have to listen to your rabbis....
Third, as to my comment about the 'foreign lawyer' designation: For years, lawyers have been pressing the organized bar to allow us to partner with foreign lawyers. Within the last year, the bar, in its infinite wisdom, has allowed foreign lawyers who are not admitted to the bar here to hold themselves out as lawyers. Just like Cowen is doing. Israeli lawyers, on the other hand, are still forbidden to share their fees with 'non-lawyers,' with term lawyer being defined as - you guessed it - anyone who is admitted to the Israeli bar.
Portugal has become the first country in the world other than Israel to adopt a law of return for Jews.
At first, Portugal's powerful Socialist
Party was none too thrilled about inviting descendants of Portuguese
Jews to return. But the Socialists eventually came around, submitting
their own bill to naturalize Sephardic Jews that ultimately was
incorporated into Ribeiro e Castro's amendment to the Law on
Nationality.
The new legislation says "the government will give
nationality ... to Sephardic Jews of Portuguese ancestry who belong to a
tradition of a Portuguese-descended Sephardic community, based on
objective prerequisites proving a connection to Portugal through names,
language and ancestry."
The law names Ladino, the Spanish-based
Jewish dialect spoken by some 100,000 people worldwide, as a viable
"linguistic connection."
Whatever his motivation, focusing
international attention on the Catholic Church's dark history is a bold
choice for Ribeiro e Castro, a Catholic himself and former director of
the Church-affiliated TVI network. He attributes his decision to an old
high school buddy who taught him about Sephardic traditions in Portugal,
and to his father, who served as Portugal's colonial governor in Angola
in the 1970s.
"My father was an admirer of what he called 'small
history,' minor developments with a huge impact," Ribeiro e Castro
said. "Naturalizing the Sephardim could be that."
For the law to
have any impact, bureaucrats in Lisbon first need to address a host of
complications. The Portuguese Bar Association already has warned that
the law could compromise the constitutional principle of equality before
the law.
And then there are practical issues.
"Differentiating
between Jews whose families were exiled [from] Spain and those who fled
Portugal is very difficult," said Jose Oulman Carp, president of
Lisbon's Jewish community.
"Clearly the Jewish communities [of
Portugal] will need to be consulted on the screening process and we can
provide some input, but the distinction is nearly impossible in many
cases."
But whatever the end result, merely the effort to lure back
Portuguese Jews constitutes, in Freund's mind, an ironic twist of
history.
"Five centuries ago, the expulsion happened partly
because the Iberian rulers wanted the Jews' assets," Freund said. "Now
we see efforts to welcome back the Jews partly for the same reason."
As long as this doesn't become an excuse to demand that Jews leave Israel to return to their 'home countries' it's fine. Long before we were exiled from anyplace else in the world, we were exiled from Israel.
Someone reminded me recently of a quip I once made about a fellow Orthodox Jewish Freshman at Columbia in the 1970's, who had written on his dorm application that he wanted an 'Orthodox roommate' and got a Greek Orthodox one, which was not what he had in mind (he wanted an Orthodox Jewish roommate). The person who reminded me of the story thought I was the protagonist (I was not).
But Greece and Israel have a lot more in common than most of you probably think. There was a lot of surprise expressed recently over the extent to which Greece cooperated with Israel in denying the flotilla of fools the opportunity to create a confrontation on their way to Gaza. You should not be surprised. You see, as Diana Muir Appelbaum (who was a class ahead of me across the street at Barnard) points out, Israel and Greece have a lot of things in common.
Only after the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians and the 1,400,000 Greek Christians of Anatolia was largely complete did the great powers meet in the Swiss city of Lausanne, where they worked out partial compensation for the Greek victims. The remaining Christians in Turkey were obliged to move to Greece, and the 300,000 Muslims in Greece (except for those of Thrace) were required to depart for Turkey, with their homes converted to housing for Greek refugees. A Greek Christian community was allowed to remain in Istanbul in 1923, but it was driven out during the Cyprus crises.
One result was that well over a quarter of the population of the Greek state, which numbered a mere four-and-a-half million people, was suddenly made up of refugees. Only in the Jewish state have refugees comprised a larger proportion of the population.
Even after this enormous ethnic cleansing, large Greek communities remained in the Soviet Union, Egypt, French Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere. The Greek law of return was designed to provide citizenship for ethnic Greeks who might need it. They have needed it often—in large events, like the Nasser-era policies that forced a substantial Greek community out of Egypt, and small but dramatic ones, like the 1993 Greek Army operation that rescued ethnic Greeks from war-torn Abkhazia.
The challenges of integrating these recurring waves of refugees have been enormous. As in Israel, they arrived stripped of their property to a country with little demand for their skills, speaking mutually unintelligible variants of Greek or entirely foreign languages.
Read the whole thing. Now, if only all those things we have in common would translate into UN votes....
You won't believe this... Gadhafi's mother was Jewish
During a discussion on Israel Radio they just dropped this little tidbit. There is a Jew left in Libya. His name is Muammar Gadhafi. At first, I found it hard to believe, but when I Googled "Gadhafi's mother was Jewish" (without the quotes), the first three results all confirmed it. Gadhafi's mother was a Jewish woman who converted to Islam at the age of 9 or the daughter of a Jewish woman who left her husband for an Arab Sheikh. Those two narratives are not mutually exclusive. I kid you not.
A year and a half ago, two Israeli women who claimed to be relatives of Gadhafi's were interviewed on Israel's Channel 2 television.
The older of the two interviewees, Guita Brown, claimed that she is Gaddafi’s second cousin: her grandmother was the sister of Gaddafi’s grandmother. The younger of the two women, Rachel Saada, Brown's granddaughter , explained in more detail: “The story goes that Gaddafi’s grandmother, a Jewess, was married to a Jewish man at first. But he treated her badly, so she ran away and married a Muslim sheikh. Their child was the mother of Gaddafi.” While Gaddafi’s grandmother converted to Islam when she married the sheikh, according to Jewish religious law (and common sense), she was ethnically still Jewish. And that makes Gaddafi's mother a Jewess. And if Gaddafi's mother is a Jewess, what does that make Gaddafi?
Let's go to the videotape (sorry - the interview is only in Hebrew).
That means Gadhafi is Jewish - he can even be counted in a minyan (quorum of Jews for prayer).
More to the point, Gadhafi is entitled to 'return' to Israel under the Law of Return. Given that he may soon be looking for political asylum and the usual candidates (the Saudis and the Europeans) are unlikely to take him, could he be looking to come to Israel?
Oy vey.... What could go wrong? (Well, the professor in the video doesn't believe it).
I will admit here that my assumption has usually been that Israelis, when they finally realize the choice before them (many have already, of course, but many more haven't, it seems), will choose democracy, and somehow extract themselves from the management of the lives of West Bank Palestinians. But I've had a couple of conversations this week with people, in Jerusalem and out of Jerusalem, that suggest to me that democracy is something less than a religious value for wide swaths of Israeli Jewish society. I'm speaking here of four groups, each ascendant to varying degrees:The haredim, the ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose community continues to grow at a rapid clip; the working-class religious Sephardim -- Jews from Arab countries, mainly -- whose interests are represented in the Knesset by the obscurantist rabbis of the Shas Party; the settler movement, which still seems to get whatever it needs in order to grow; and the million or so recent immigrants from Russia, who support, in distressing numbers, the Putin-like Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister and leader of the "Israel is Our Home" party.
Let's just say, as a hypothetical, that one day in the near future, Prime Minister Lieberman's government (don't laugh, it's not funny) proposes a bill that echoes the recent call by some rabbis to discourage Jews from selling their homes to Arabs. Or let's say that Lieberman's government annexes swaths of the West Bank in order to take in Jewish settlements, but announces summarily that the Arabs in the annexed territory are in fact citizens of Jordan, and can vote there if they want to, but they won't be voting in Israel. What happens then? Do the courts come to the rescue? I hope so. Do the Israeli people come to the rescue? I'm not entirely sure. There are many Israelis who value democracy, but they might not possess the strength to fight. Does American Jewry come to the rescue? Well, most of American Jewry would be so disgusted by Israel's abandonment of democratic principles that I think the majority would simply write off Israel as a tragic, failed experiment.
Am I being apocalyptic? Yes. Am I exaggerating the depth of the problem? I certainly hope so. Israel is still a remarkably vibrant democracy, with a free press and an independent judiciary. But on the other hand, the Israel that I see today is not the Israel I was introduced to more than twenty years ago. The rise to power of the four groups I mentioned above has changed, in some very serious ways (which I will write about later) the nature and character of the Jewish state.
Rabbi Meir Kahane HY"D (may God avenge his blood) predicted all along that the day would come when Israel would have to choose between being a Jewish state and being a democracy. And indeed it could happen.
But a couple of points need to be kept in mind. First, Israel can be a democracy without being identical to either the United States or Western Europe. We can be a democracy in our own style - indeed, we must be our own style of democracy in order to preserve our Jewish character. Neither the United States nor the Europeans (with the nominal exception of the Church of England) has an established religion. Most other democracies have nothing like the Law of Return, which clearly discriminates in favor of Jews. Does that make us not a democracy? Not at all. It just means that in some less-than-absolute sense, we have already chosen to put the State's Jewish character ahead of Western notions of democracy.
Second, Goldberg assumes that we can push a button and be rid of 'the territories.' We can't even if we wanted to. We can't because it would make us militarily vulnerable. We can't because it wouldn't bring peace and it would encourage war. We can't because it's not what the Arabs are after. What Goldberg and those who 'worry' about Israel's democracy don't or won't understand is that Israel's war isn't a war about territory. It's existential. Once you accept that, you can more easily accept necessary limitations on democracy to cope with that reality.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
