Israeli Tourism Minister Yariv Levin attacked Reform Judaism in the United States on Sunday, invoking Chelsea Clinton's wedding ceremony.
It happened during a government meeting on setting aside a space at the Western Wall for Reform Jews. The Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City is the only remaining piece of the Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 A.D., and is a place venerated as holy by Jews. It is near the Dome of the Rock, a mosque considered sacred by Muslims.
"The Reform Jews in the U.S. are a waning world,"
Haaretz quoted Levin as saying.
"The assimilation there is of enormous extent," Levin said. "They don't even properly track it [the assimilation] inside their communities. The evidence is that a man who calls himself a reform rabbi is standing there with a priest and weds Hillary Clinton's daughter, and no one condemns it, thereby legitimizing it."
Chelsea Clinton, who is Methodist, married Marc Mezvinsky, who is Jewish, in an interfaith ceremony in 2010. They are expecting their second child. Clinton did not convert, making her children not Jewish by conservative standards.
Levin said that such marriages will mean those who follow Reform Judaism will be completely assimilated into the non-Jewish population within two or three generations, so there is really no need to reserve them a specific space at the Western Wall to pray.
That said, Levin ended up supporting the move anyway because he feared the courts may actually pass a less favorable alternative.
The Reform movement was founded in the mid-1800s and now is the largest branch of Judaism in the United States with more than 1.5 million adherents. It is less focused on ritual and personal observance and allows for more outside influence than more conservative forms of Judaism.
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