Not Jewish enough to marry a Cohen

(Israel), February 18, 2005

I have been talking about how Jews and non-Jews cannot legally marry in Israel, but here are some fascinating excerpts from an article from one of the leading Isreali newspapers, Haaretz, showing how their laws even go far beyond that.

In the case discussed, a Jewish man named Cohen cannot marry a Jewish woman named Plotnikov. By Jewish law, a Jew is someone with a Jewish mother – which Plotnikov has – but the Jewish elite, the Cohen priest class, must have completely unblemished Jewish ancestry, meaning the prospective Cohen groom cannot marry anyone but an absolutely genetically pure Jew. And the Jewish State backs this up!

It is one more illustration of the extreme racial nature of Israel. State of Israel forbids the marriage of the Jewish elite with anyone of even 1/1000th of Gentile ancestry. This qualification is very similar to the Nazi elite called the SS who were meant to be the guardians of the National Socialist State. SS officers were required to prove their heritage 8 generations back. Even here, Israel and the racial religion of Judaism is even more racially extreme than the Nazis. Their elite must be free of any trace whatsover of the unclean and hated Gentiles. Notice that there is never a word of condemnation of these Jewish and Israeli policies. Compare that to the vehement Jewish opposition to the anti-miscegination laws of the Old South and you might get an fairly good idea who is really running things in America!

Plotnikov cannot marry the man she loves, Shmuel Cohen, even though she is Jewish according to halakha (Jewish religious law). A rabbinic court in Jerusalem ruled recently that even though Plotnikov is Jewish, she is not eligible to marry a Cohen since her father is not Jewish. According to Jewish tradition, people with the surname Cohen are descendants of the priests that served in the Temple in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.The couple were shocked by the court’s verdict. “None of the rabbis had told us there might be a problem,” Plotnikov says.

Plotnikov immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union (FSU) in 1992. Last summer she met Cohen, a retired career army man, and they fell in love. A short while after meeting, they decided to wed. “I was prepared to get married without going through the rabbinate, but it’s very important to my boyfriend, because he is from a traditional family,” Plotnikov says. When the couple registered at the rabbinate, the marriage registrar referred Plotnikov to a rabbinic court for a process for ascertaining Jewishness. This is a procedure which all immigrants from the FSU are required to undergo if they want to marry. After presenting documents and hearing testimony from witnesses on Plotnikov’s behalf, the rabbinic court confirmed that Plotnikov is Jewish and single and ruled that “she can be married in accordance with Jewish tradition, except to a Cohen.” Since civil marriage and non-Orthodox religious marriage in Israel are not legally recognized, the sole option remaining to the couple is to wed overseas. Cohen says that he’s afraid to tell his religious family about the rabbinic court’s ruling. “I’ve never gone abroad, but to marry Irina I will be delighted to go. I respect the religious world, but there’s a limit to how far I am willing for our privacy to be invaded.”

Alex Tantzer, who heads a campaign to promote civil marriage, says that Plotnikov’s case is an extreme example of the treatment that tens of thousands of immigrants from the FSU receive at the hands of the rabbinic establishment. “I suggest that those same rabbis who ruled there are Jews who are not Jewish enough to marry Cohens be examined themselves. Perhaps they too have, heaven forbid, a non-Jewish father in their past.” Rabbi Shaul Farber, of the Itim institute for advice on the Jewish circle of life, says the ban on Plotnikov and Cohen marrying is enshrined in a halakhic rule that is similar to the rule barring the marriage of a Cohen and a divorcee. However, he believes that if the couple marries in a civil ceremony or if Plotnikov becomes pregnant, the rabbinate may agree to recognize the marriage retroactively. Rabbi Farber says that girls from religious families in Israel who were born as a result of in vitro fertilization can expect to face a similar problem. The reason for this is that such families made sure to use sperm from non-Jewish donors, to avoid accidental forbidden marriage.”

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Some laws in Israel are exact replicas of the Nazi racial laws, as this article once again shows. ISrael is one of the final bastions of racism and facism. However, they have some advantage that for instance South Africa didn;t have, they have the Holocaust..............which according to some people is like a "carte blache" to do whatever they desire until the end of times.

I also wonder what the ADL would say, if the state of New York forbids the marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew and even demands that people that want to marry a white Christian, prove that they do not have ANY Jewish or black blood! This is the exact thing Israel is doing.

The ADL would go nuts, Jews would fill the streets to protest, the media would go nuts! But if Israel does this, we quietly accept it.

Some months ago I saw a documentary on the difficulties (impossibilities, in some cases) faced by Jewish women in Israel in getting a divorce from their often errant husbands. It was heartbreaking; these women - often with children - trapped in a marriage where the husband had moved out some years previous, started another family, yet still would not grant a divorce to their spouse. And this supported by the courts in that grant for divorce was in the gift of the husband. Often it came down to money; how much was she willing to pay for her release from bond!

At the time it struck me just how closely these cultural norms, given legislative authority through 'state religion', resemble what we would usually associate with practices in Muslim states. The fact that it happens in Israel means, sadly, that it goes largely unheralded in the 'West'. We are highly selective on who we choose to liberate; Jewish mothers and Palestinians just dont cut it, it would seem.

Thought the comparative with Nazis a tad gratuitous, but thanks for the article.

__________________
"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

"Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."
-- Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.

"One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail."
--Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994

During a sermon preceding the 2001 Passover holiday, the influential Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef exclaimed: "May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them." He added: "It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, (*)(*)(*)(*)able ones." Source: Ha'aretz April 12, 2001

In 1923, radical Zionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky-- spiritual father of not only of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin but of Brooklyn Rabbi Meir Kahane-- wrote that the "sole way" for Jews to deal with Arabs in Palestine was through "total avoidance of all attempts to arrive at a settlement"-which Jabotinsky euphemistically termed the "iron wall" approach. Not coincidentally, a picture of Jabotinsky graces Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's desk. Source: The Village Voice, "Death Wish in the Holy Land," Dec. 12, 2001

"[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs."-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the 'Beasts,"' New Statesman, June 25,1982.


We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population."-Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum."


"We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters."-Uri Lubrani, Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs. Source: "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.


"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them."-Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.

Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, head of the Kever Yossev Yeshiva (school of Talmud) in Nablus stated, "The blood of the Jewish people is loved by the Lord; it is therefore redder and their life is preferable."

Ginsburg declares in Baruch Hagever that what Goldstein did in murdering the unarmed Palestinian civilians at their house of worship, constitutes, "a fulfillment of a number of commands of Jewish religious law...Among his (Goldstein's) good deeds, as enumerated, are...taking revenge on non-Jews, extermination of the non-Jews who are from the seed of Amalek...and the sanctification of the Holy Name.

Excuse me, I have to go throw-up.

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"Tweeter was a Boyscout before she went to Vietnam and found out the hard way... nobody gives a d@mn."

1/1000 gentile disqualifies you for marriage. Wow, thats pretty restrictive, even the Nazis weren't THAT restrictive.

Yeah, not even the KKK is THAT restrictive. But just look at how the game is played. If some white bigot wants race purity, he's called a racist (which he is). But if Israel does this, we respect them. To be honest, I don't think ANY nation still has these kind of Race Laws, that forbid interracial marriage and demand race purity if you want to marry one of them (a Cohan).

And this is not all. If you are not a Jew in Israel, you're really screwed, because even more race laws apply.

And the kind of stuff I hear about the people, are not very good either. Just a few months back, Israeli parents demanded that a non-Jewish child should be removed from their kindergarten, because they didn't wanted their kids to play with something as unpure as a Arab.

The list is very very long.

Basically, let me just say, that it's no coincidence the Palestinans react the way they do.

Does anyone know where I could find a complete English translation of these laws? You see I'm dating an Israeli and while my family is a generic mutt mix of goodness knows what I'm pretty certain he's fairly pure. So what's the policy on a non-religious (I've neither been christened nor picked a creed) foreigner (I'm also Canadian) marrying a Jewish Israeli?

I don't have a translation, but I've read quite a lot about these laws. Basically, Jew-Gentile marriage isn't legal in Israel. What most people do, is marry abroad and then come back, and then through a complex legal procedure, your marriage could become legal.

However, you'd better hope he doesn't belong to the Cohan priest class, they are only allowed to marry 100% Jewish people.

God bless.

There is a difference from a Rabbinic Marriage and a marriage granted in law. Just like the churches in America can deny marriages to couples that are gay, or for what ever reason. While the State can grant marriages without the prejudices or reasons of a marriage of religion.

Also the law of having only Jews marry Jews is a law of survival, at the rate that our people are marrying into other faiths and then raising their children of that faith is slowly eroding our people. We do not have ten's of millions of Jew's, we can not afford to allow us to grow smaller than we already are.

No, there exists no other way of marriage in Israel than the orthodox way, which prohibits interfaith marriage. I'm not making it up, a couple (he Jewish Israeli, she American Christian) I knew had to go to Cyprus to get married.


Well, I'm sorry, I find this extremely racist. Especially when considering the age we are living in. I'm sure there are also a lot of whites who feel their race is threatened by interracial marriage. We call them supremacists.....and the Zionist media really lets hem have it, the same media that tolerates the exact same thing when Israelis practice it.

I find it both racist and hypocritical. And somebody should stand up against it. There's no room for such double standards.