Mixed Marriages in Israel

A lovesick young artist was on a hunger strike in Tel Aviv last week, and all Israel debated the consequences. The artist: Moshe Barak, 27, an Israeli of Rumanian parentage who was wounded four times in the Arab-Israeli war. His objective: to force the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, to repeal its rabbinical ban on civil marriages.

Matter of Form? Artist Barak met his fiancee, Oriah, soon after she arrived from Yugoslavia in 1951. The Orthodox Christian daughter of a Belgrade accountant, Oriah had been expelled by Tito's government for anti-Communist activities, had found Israel the only country ready to give her an immigration visa. But when Oriah and Moshe decided to marry, the local rabbi told them that Israeli law forbids Jews to marry Christians. The only way out was for Oriah to become a Jew, or for Barak to become a Christian--purely "as a matter of form." The young couple refused to start their marriage with "an act of deceit." "If men are not free to marry the women they choose," said Barak, "they lack an elementary freedom." He served notice that if the Knesset would not consider changing the law, he would "fast until the end." A fortnight ago, after a final meal of shish kebab and beer, he stretched out in a Tel Aviv hotel with the announcement: "I was willing to die for Israel's freedom during the war, but I believe a free family life is an even nobler cause." Life for Law? Israelis at first shrugged their shoulders at what seemed a publicity stunt, but as Barak's fast went on and his husky frame shrank, letters and telegrams began piling up at his bedside. A committee for "Freedom of Conscience" plastered towns and villages with posters. The newspapers joined in, and most agreed with Zmanim, which editorialized: "The legal situation is absurd." Ranged against repeal of the religious marriage law was the force of Israel's religious parties and of those Jews who fear that mixed marriages may dilute or destroy the separate racial identity of the Jewish people. "One out of every three Jewish men in the U.S. wed Christian women," said the Deputy Minister of Religious Affairs in the Knesset. "This must not be permitted to happen in Israel."

At week's end, Barak collapsed and was taken to a hospital. Doctors feared he would die, but on the tenth day he made no protest when a nurse held his head and began to feed him tea.

Barak's fast was a success in the sense that it stirred public opinion and seemed certain to draw the Knesset's attention to the whole issue of religious marriages. But in threatening to kill himself in defense of his position, Hunger Striker Barak had offended many Israelis who believe in less dramatic forms of debate. "The straightforward and democratic way of revising laws is by tabling a proposal before the Knesset," wrote Attorney General Haim j Cohen. "Except in times of emergency j . . . there can be no other way, and I pray there never will be another way in Israel."

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