Army Sgt. Michael Oxman was Jewish enough to immigrate to Israel, to enlist in the army and to die for the country. He was not Jewish enough, however, to be buried next to his Jewish comrades.
The 21-year-old Ukrainian immigrant, killed with five other soldiers last month when Palestinian gunmen attacked their army outpost, was laid to rest in a special section of a military cemetery set aside for non-Jews. His father is Jewish, but his mother is not, so according to Jewish law and tradition, Oxman was not a Jew and could not be buried among them.
That kind of distinction is an old source of friction in Israel’s “who is a Jew” debate, which has long set Orthodox rabbis against their more liberal counterparts over the question of what kind of conversion a person must undergo to be accepted as Jewish.
But the sweeping deployments of Israeli soldiers against the Palestinian uprising in recent weeks, and the increased frequency of Palestinian attacks against Israelis, have added new urgency, and poignancy, to the debate.
More than 90 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the past 18 months of the resurgent Mideast conflict. And because many soldiers are recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and their official status as Jews has not been settled, the symbolically awkward scenes of segregated burials are increasing too.
“I can’t understand how a person can be regarded as a normal person while he is a soldier fighting for us, but the moment he sacrifices his life, he’s considered someone who is suspicious who has to be buried apart from everyone else,” said Zvi Paltiel, director of Menuha Nehona, a group advocating the right to alternative burials.
About 6,500 soldiers are classified as “non-Jewish others” by the Israel Defense Forces. Eli Yishai, Israel’s interior minister, from the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, has referred to them as Israel’s “foreign legion” and openly worried whether some of them are volunteering for the army to gain Israeli citizenship for themselves and their non-Jewish families.
German Rozhkov, 25, from Ukraine was one of those immigrant soldiers. Rozhkov was killed March 12 in an exchange of fire with Palestinian gunmen shooting at passing cars near Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Rozhkov, like Oxman, was buried in a special non-Jewish section of a military cemetery, generating sharp criticism from Israeli liberals.
Rozhkov was not Jewish; he immigrated to Israel seven years ago with his Jewish wife, whom he later divorced. But friends and relatives said he was proud of his Israeli citizenship and had talked of converting to Judaism.
Liberal vs. conservative
Rozhkov and about 250,000 other immigrants classified as “non-Jews” represent a fundamental conflict between the liberal immigration laws and the conservative religious laws of the Jewish state.
Under the Law of Return, adopted at Israel’s founding and later broadened to encourage immigration to the country, any person with at least one Jewish parent or grandparent, as well as the spouse of that person, is immediately eligible to become a citizen of Israel.
But according to the halachic, or religious, laws of the country, administered by Orthodox religious leaders, the only people properly regarded as Jews are those born of Jewish mothers and those who undergo conversion to Judaism according to rigid and rigorous Orthodox rules. Religious conversions conducted by Reform or Conservative rabbis–the predominant strains of Judaism in the United States–are not recognized as valid by Israel’s religious authorities.
The distinction is important because those Orthodox religious officials, rather than civil authorities, administer marriages, divorces and burials in Israel.
“We have a large number of people in Israel that can’t be married and can’t be buried” in Jewish cemeteries, said Mike Rosenberg, director general of immigration and absorption at the Jewish Agency for Israel. “It’s certainly something that Israel is suffering with and trying to deal with, because there are so many people that have come here that are not Jewish according to halachic law.”
Exemptions controversial
There is another bitter conflict in Israeli society that is aggravated by each separate burial of a non-Jewish soldier. The same Orthodox religious and political leaders who insist on maintaining rigorous conversion standards–and oppose granting Israeli citizenship to the families of non-Jewish soldiers–also routinely seek exemptions from mandatory military service for their own youths on religious grounds.
“It takes some amount of gall for the Shas Party, which fights for the right of yeshiva [Orthodox religious] students to be exempt from military service, to make life more difficult for those who choose to defend Israel in their stead,” the Jerusalem Post said in an editorial this month.
The Shas Party is unapologetic.
“We are a party which aspires to have Israel a Jewish state and we fight anything which means this county will no longer be a homeland for the Jews,” said spokesman Itzik Sudri. “This is the matter which stands behind the problem with every one of these soldiers who are not Jewish. We don’t feel that the Jewish people are so desperate that we need to look for new Jews. We are not looking for volunteers for the Jewish people.”
Nevertheless, Sudri added, his party is trying to resolve the problem of soldier burials by establishing physically separate areas in Jewish cemeteries that would conform with Jewish religious requirements but not appear visibly separate.
“We realize there is a need to solve this problem with sensitivity and in a way that will not clash with religious law,” Sudri said. “The idea is that anyone coming to the cemetery would not be able to identify that those buried there are any different than anyone else.”
