Law of Return

Law of Return, Israeli law, passed by the Knesset (parliament) in July 1950, that grants Jews the right to immigrate (or make aliyah) to the country and receive Israeli citizenship. The law was meant to ensure a safe haven for a long-persecuted people in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, which saw the killing of six million Jews, and to ensure a Jewish majority in the newly established state of Israel. Ahead of the 1950 passage, about 700,000 self-defined Jews had moved to the nascent state, many of them Holocaust survivors and refugees from Arab countries.

For years after the passage of the law, the Israeli government debated who qualifies as a Jew under the law. Under traditional interpretations of Halakhah (Jewish law), a person is Jewish if born to a Jewish mother. But this definition left many problems in addressing the heart of the law. Individuals with Jewish heritage through their father or a grandparent sometimes identified as Jewish or were persecuted for their Jewish heritage, as was the case under the Nazi regime. Some Jews also formally converted to another religion under duress. In a landmark case, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that Brother Daniel (born Oswald Rufeisen), a Jewish man who converted to Roman Catholicism during the Holocaust and later became a monk, was not eligible to immigrate because he was actively practicing a religion other than Judaism. In 1970 the law was amended to extend immigration and citizenship rights to the children and grandchildren of Jews, as well as to their spouses, but the amendment excluded people who had been Jewish and voluntarily adopted another religion. Another Supreme Court case in 1989 ruled that the law allowed immigration to converts to Reform Judaism, the predominant form of Judaism in the United States, and other movements outside Orthodox Judaism—whose Ashkenazi and Sephardic chief rabbinates held exclusive authority over Judaism in Israeli law—as long as the conversion took place outside Israel. The large-scale immigration after 1980 of tens of thousands of the Beta Israel, Ethiopian Jews whose Jewishness has sometimes been challenged by Orthodox rabbis, has generated considerable controversy and ethnic tension in Israel. Palestinian Arabs born in territory that became Israel in 1948 and their descendants, including those who are stateless refugees, do not have a legal path to immigrate, which is one of the central unresolved issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.