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:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)