Criticism of Confessional System
The status quo agreement creates difficulties for people who, for whatever reason, cannot marry or divorce within the system, or who do not want to marry in a religious ceremony. The issue became acute when large numbers of immigrants (olim) from the former Soviet Union arrived in Israel in the 1990s. Although they became Israeli citizens under the Law of Return, some of the olim were not considered Jewish by the rabbinate, which requires proof of maternal Jewish descent.
Read more about this topic: Marriage In Israel
Famous quotes containing the words criticism and/or system:
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)