Last week, ITIM, the Jewish life advocacy organization I direct, filed a lawsuit in an Israeli regional labor court on behalf of an Ethiopian-Israeli mikveh (ritual bath) attendant discriminated against by a municipal rabbi. The rabbi, who is responsible for supervision of Jewish law in the municipality and is a state employee, directly challenged the mikveh attendant’s Jewish identity, and urged women not to use her services because of her Ethiopian ethnicity.
The case follows other recent examples of racism within Israel’s State religious establishment. In 2019, ITIM successfully represented a group of Ethiopian-Israeli Barkan Winery employees who had been demoted and prevented from coming into contact with kosher wine, because the winery’s ultra-Orthodox kosher supervisor did not consider them Jewish.
The rejection of Ethiopian-Israelis’ Jewish identities is antithetical to Israeli thinking of the past 40 years, including that of Israel’s leading rabbis. In the early 1970s, both the chief Sephardi and Ashkenazi rabbis ruled that members of the Ethiopian Beta Israel communities were full-fledged Jews. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ruled unequivocally that Ethiopians’ Jewish identities were not in question. Yet, here we are, in 2021, filing a lawsuit against a state rabbi as a last resort, following a four-year struggle to get the state religious establishment to take responsibility for the institutionalized racism that exists in some of its corridors.
The facts of the case are clear. In November 2016, the municipal rabbi called the plaintiff and asked if she had assisted women in the mikveh that evening. Yes, she said, she had. Next, he asked if she was Ethiopian. Yes, she said, she was. And had she converted to Judaism? No, she said, she had not converted to Judaism.
She had no reason to convert, because she was Jewish when she immigrated to Israel. A letter from Rabbi Yosef Hadane, the chief rabbi of Israel’s Ethiopian Jewish community, testifies to her Jewish identity. The Israeli Chief Rabbinate certified that she was Jewish when it sanctioned her marriage in 1993.
Nonetheless, following their conversation, the municipal rabbi sent a text message to a WhatsApp group saying that “anyone who immersed in the mikveh with the Ethiopian attendant” must ask a rabbi if her immersion was valid. He also took out advertisements in a local newspaper stating that the mikveh in which the attendant worked was no longer under his auspices.
Jewish tradition teaches that character defamation or the ruining of an individual’s reputation is tantamount to murder. Yet this is exactly what resulted from the rabbi’s words and actions. For the next three years, the rabbi’s supporters ridiculed and publicly humiliated the mikveh attendant and her children. Last week, when news of the lawsuit became public, members of the religious establishment accused her of desecrating God’s name. They blamed the victim, because they were blind to their own racism.
I am hopeful ITIM will win this case. But the time for Israel to treat immigrants from Ethiopia as equal members of society is long overdue. And the necessity of Israel’s religious establishment to embrace the diversity of the Jewish people in all its variety is urgent.
Rabbi Seth Farber, PhD, is founder and director of ITIM, an organization committed to increasing participation in Jewish life by making Israel’s religious establishment respectful of and responsive to the diverse Jewish needs of the Jewish people.