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He called Israel unwelcoming to Christian organizations and then met with the Palestinian authority yesterday.
Letter from him qua ambassador: https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/www/uploads/2025/07/IMG_0737-merged.pdf
To be fair to Israel, there is a truly massive amount of resources flowing from United States evangelical organizations to Christian missionaries in Israel. It’s not much of a secret that the purpose of these missionaries is to convert Jews into Christians. I’m surprised it took them this long to remember they have borders.
Whats wrong with converting Jews to Christians anyway? Plenty of secular Jews are welcome in Israel, whats wrong with ethnic Jews that are Christian?
Jews are widely treated as a kind of endangered species.
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It's the only thing that will cause a halachic jew to lose their halachically jewish status, IIRC.
They are still considered Jewish according to Halacha in that they can revert to Judaism without having to undergo the conversion that a gentile would undergo.
The practicing another religion thing is more specifically about Aliyah / migration to Israel. That is governed by different rules and so some groups that are not halachicly Jewish (patrilineal descendants of the first and second generation) are allowed and groups that are (converts to other religions born of Jewish mothers) are disallowed.
In practice the rules are very rarely enforced. A substantial minority of Soviet / Russian immigrants were (and are) low key practicing Christians, true even if the recent post-2022 Ukrainian wave. Unless someone is an open missionary on social media they are rarely rejected.
I legitimately did not know that converting to another religion means you don't qualify for the Law of Return. What I can't figure out (with five minutes of Googling) is whether that applies to atheist or agnostic Jews. Like, atheism isn't a religion you convert to, right? But it would be weird if Christian Jews were disqualified but atheist Jews weren't.
It doesn’t apply to them. It only applies to those who convert to (and in practice openly proselytize) another, in reality another Abrahamic, religion.
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Do decorating a conifer around the New Year and boiling eggs for Easter count as Christian practices?
Certainly there are Christian trads who don’t see it that way, but in Israel it’s part of the secular vs conservative culture war where religious conservatives complain about Christmas trees and tinsel at shopping malls and in other public spaces.
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