About two weeks ago, seven heads of important Jewish institutions in the United States sent an urgent letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning against changes to the status quo on sensitive issues such as conversion and the Law of Return. The focus of their ire: a possible change to the grandchild clause in the Law of Return.
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Today, only around 28% of immigrants to Israel are Jewish; in other words, over 70%are not Jewish. Over the past year, around 40,000 non-Jews have immigrated to Israel, most of them from Russia. Over the past decade, thanks to the grandchild clause, some half a million non-Jewish immigrants have come to Israel. How many of them arrived from the United States? All told, 67 out of half a million! Should we continue to import assimilation into Israel for the sake of 67 people?
There is a mendacious myth that has emerged in the wake of the debate over the grandchild clause. This myth is that the clause is somehow connected to the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. The journalist Zion Nanos tweeted, "It's a shame no one retroactively updated Hitler that the Nazis also sent to the camps grandchildren of Jews; that was one of the justifications for the grandchild clause in the Law of Return." Nanos isn't alone; many people believe in this myth.
In reality, under the infamous Nazi race laws enacted at Nuremberg, grandchildren of Jews weren't considered Jewish, unless that is, three of their grandparents were Jewish. This explains the inconceivable number of Jews in the Nazi army, the Wehrmacht.
The grandchild clause was adopted after the Reform movement in America sought to allow mixed families to make aliyah. The historian Bryan Mark Rigg was the one to smash one of the greatest taboos of the Holocaust. In his book, "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers", based on his doctorate at Cambridge University, Rigg estimated that some 60,000 soldiers with one Jewish parent served in the Wehrmacht and around 90,000 more who had a Jewish grandparent.
In January 1944, the Wehrmacht issued a secret document that listed 77 generals and senior army officers "mixed with the Jewish race or married to Jewish women." All of them had certification from Hitler – 23 colonels, five major generals, eight lieutenant generals, and two generals. According to Rigg, "a further 60 names of generals and senior offices in the Wehrmacht can be added to that list, along with two field marshals."
As incomprehensible as it may sound, according to Rigg's introduction to his book, such soldiers served the Reich with distinction, while their relatives burned in Auschwitz."
Rigg, who served in the US Marine Corps, and even volunteered with the IDF, began researching the topic after discovering his own Jewish roots when looking into his family history. He interviewed some 400 former Nazi soldiers in the course of his research.
An image of Werner Goldberg appeared in Wehrmacht recruitment posts as an advertisement for the "ideal soldier". He was blond, blue-eyed, and had an upturned nose, the Aryan fantasy of the Thousand Year Reich. The posters forgot to mention one minor detail. Werner Goldberg was half Jewish.
Colonel Walter Hollander, who was awarded the German Iron Cross and the Gold Cross, was born to a Jewish mother yet received personal certification from Hitler in which the Fuhrer certified the Aryanism of this Halachic Jew.
Wehrmacht Major Robert Borchardt, the son of a Jewish father, and the commander of the armored reconnaissance battalion 341 received the Knight's Cross for breaking through a tank formation on the Russian front. Shortly before his death in 1983, Borchardt told German schoolchildren, "Many half-Jews who fought for Germany in World War II believed that they should defend their fatherland while serving in the army."
There were also senior officers. For example, General Field Marshal Erhard Milch, a Nazi war criminal who was the deputy of Herman Goring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, was the son of a Jewish father.
Just to make it clear, were Goldberg, Borchardt, Hollander, and Milch to request Israeli citizenship today, the Law of Return in its current form would have accepted them. Fact, not myth.
The grandchild clause of the Law of Return enables even a person who has just one Jewish grandfather to make aliyah. The status allows him to bring to Israel his children, grandchildren and their partners. One Jew enables the immigration of five non-Jews.
So now that we have disproved the lie upon which Clause 4A is based and according to which the clause in the Law of Return is a mirror image of the Nuremberg Laws, the question is: Why did the State of Israel introduce the clause?
A perusal of the protocols of the debate over the grandchild clause held in 1970 reveals a completely different reason. "There is currently no physical threat to the existence of the People of Israel," said then prime minister Golda Meir. "But there is another danger, and it is real and imminent... the rate of assimilation has reached threatening dimensions."
Golda, from the Alignment left-wing bloc, not United Torah Judaism, was afraid of intermarriage, just like her fellow secular colleagues.
In other words, the reason the grandchild clause was added to the Law of Return was not as a response to the Nuremberg Laws, but to enable Jews married to non-Jews to make aliyah with their families. One should note that this was done following pressure from the Reform movement in the United States that wanted mixed families to be able to make aliyah in view of the soaring assimilation figures.
One could suspect that the real reason for American opposition to an amendment to the Law of Return is that it is quite possible that some American Jewish leaders have grandchildren who are not Jewish.
I am convinced that as Zionists and supporters of Israel with a warm Jewish heart, they feel the pain of having grandchildren who are no longer Jewish.
They are not alone. Over 50 percent of new couples among the Jewish community in the US are no longer Jewish, this despite the ridiculous attempts to redefine who is a Jew in America. Unfortunately, they ignore the implications: If we don't amend the grandchild clause, you won't be able to make aliyah in the future.
If most new immigrants to Israel aren't Jewish then there is no moral justification for the existence of the Law of Return. Left-wingers, liberals, how, from your perspective, will you justify immigration of grandchildren, their partners, and their children (great grandchildren) who are not Jewish? Why should they be allowed to make aliyah, when Israeli Arabs are denied family reunification and the return of refugees?
If most immigrants continue to be non-Jews, we won't be able to defend the Law of Return in the world, and we won't be able to defend it at the High Court of Justice. Israeli democracy will not be able to live with such a distortion.
And neither will you, the Jews of the United States, be able to defend the Law of Return. You will lead to the end of the Jewish state, to the end of the Jewish reserve that is meant to be able to take you in if the hour of need arises.
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