Times of Israel Nativ [Jewish Identity Education] is the army’s gateway to conversion.
It’s Judaism and Zionism 101, taught by civilian and army instructors on
a grassy campus, providing participants with reasonable food in a coed
setting on the army’s dime. The seven-week course, even if one does not
continue toward the conversion seminars that follow, counts toward time
served. In short, most soldiers know that if they are entitled to the
course, they might as well go.
It is – housed under the roof of the IDF, an
organization that is by definition kosher and Sabbath observant – the
only path in Israeli society that manages to skirt most of the
minefields surrounding the question of who is a Jew. [...]
Nativ was founded in 2001, the brainchild of reserves general Elazar
Stern, who, as chief education officer and head of IDF manpower, from
1999 to 2008, left an indelible mark on the military – pioneering the
army’s organized trips to the Nazi death camps, introducing a blood
marrow donor station at the IDF’s induction center, and, among many
other initiatives, launching a rewrite of the army’s code of ethics. [...]
The process is not perfect. From the
ultra-Orthodox perspective it is far too lenient. It does not even span
an entire calendar year – in fact it could be completed in the period
between the end of the Sukkot and the start of Passover – and the
devotion of each and every convert to full compliance with the
commandments has been questioned.
Secular Israelis have been outraged as well. In 2014, Noam Cohen, a newly discharged soldier, told Channel 10
that she was disqualified from the conversion track in the army because
she lives on a kibbutz. It did not matter that her hometown of Kibbutz
Yifat has a synagogue, or that there is a religious family living on the
kibbutz, or that her father was a veteran of Sayeret Matkal,
or that there is a plaque drilled into the synagogue wall with the
names of 22 fallen Israeli soldiers from the kibbutz: the fact of her
living on a secular kibbutz was grounds for disqualification, she said.[...]
Roughly 3,000 soldiers opt to start the Nativ
courses every year. The first seven weeks are a bit like college. The
classes are taught by religious, secular, Reform and Conservative
teachers. The dorms and classrooms are sprinkled with students from all
over the world – participants referred to it as “the Mondial” or World
Cup of soccer – but the clear majority are from Russian-speaking homes.
In a history class I sat in on, addressing the Roman rule over Judea,
there were 20 students from former Soviet Union states and two from the
US, both of whom were Jewish but eligible for the course as new
immigrants. One, a college graduate from New Rochelle, New York, was the
most active participant in class. The other doodled impressively. The
army allowed access to three of the Russian-speaking students.[....]
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