Home › Forums › Eretz Yisroel › Zionist Quote › Reply To: Zionist Quote
Chaverim, your use again of the pejorative “Zionist converts” again demonstrates the lack of a Jewish heart and compassion, and ignorance of history. In fact, why did we get into such a mess with Russian converts? Because the Russian govt wiped out all traces of Jewish learning. Therefore many Jews did not know anything of their heritage and married non-Jews. (If anything this proves the need for a Jewish state, since intermarriage is far lower than it was in Russia, so you have disproved yourself.) But getting back to the topic at hand, we have Jews who want to make Aliyah from Russia who have a non-Jewish spouse. What is your solution? Tell them to get divorced, leaving broken families and children? Don’t allow them into the country at all, and leave them lost to yiddishkeit forever? Thankfully the medinah has compassion and is trying in the best way possible in conformance with halacha to allow these families to remain together. The best solution seems to be to motivate the non-Jewish spouse to convert and accept mitzvos. However, there may be individual cases where this fails. I believe Rav Ovadiah Yosef agrees with this approach.
It is very easy for a kannoi to scream asur and blame the medinah for a problem that was actually caused by a lack of a Jewish medinah where Jews were at the whims of cruel anti-semitic rulers in golus. It is much more difficult to solve the problem than to scream about it, because solving it actually takes compassion, careful learning and Torah knowledge to do, whereas screaming can be done by any klutz on the street. Thankfully the klal was blessed with compasionate poskim like Reb Moshe in his time, who tried as hard as he could to help Jews in trouble (he freed 2000 agunos from WW2). Far be the day when insensitive, coldhearted kannoim start to deal with difficult issues of the klal.