Law of Return
The Law of Return ( Hebrew חוק השבות chok ha-schwut ) is an Israeli law from 1950 that allows persons of Jewish origin or faith and their spouses to immigrate to Israel .
History and beneficiaries
The Law of Return was passed by the Knesset on July 5, 1950 as the first law after the founding of the state in 1948, when memories of World War II and the Holocaust were fresh. The law gave every Jew the right to immigration and Israeli citizenship. Jew was thereafter according to the halachic definition of who has a Jewish mother or converted is. It was supplemented by the Nationality Act of 1952.
In 1954 the law was changed to the effect that in justified cases (for example for criminals) the right to immigrate can be denied. The Israeli Supreme Court rejected the application for naturalization of the religious priest Daniel Rufeisen , who was born as a Jew , because he had fallen away from Judaism by converting to Catholicism. However, he was later granted Israeli citizenship for his services to saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust.
The immigration guarantee of the Return Act was extended in 1970 to the children and grandchildren of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew, and the spouse of a grandson of a Jew. According to the Rufeisen judgment, people who were Jews and had voluntarily changed their religion were explicitly excluded. This change in the law was also made in order not to separate interfaith marriages between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person and to simplify immigration to Israel. In the meantime, this regulation for spouses has also been extended to the non-Jewish partners in a registered partnership or same-sex marriage .
purpose
Both laws reflect the dual nature of Judaism as a religious community and people and privileges Jews in order to facilitate their immigration to Eretz Israel as the historical homeland of Judaism in accordance with the Zionist vision .
The positive discrimination against descendants of compatriots in exile, which is also common in other nations with a larger diaspora such as Ireland, Poland , Greece and Germany , also took place against the background of the anti-Semitic persecution and discrimination in numerous countries that continued after the end of the Holocaust . The law not only enables the fulfillment of a religious obligation to immigrate to Israel, but also always offers threatened Jews around the world the option of a life in their own state.
Web links
- Yoav Sapir: The Jewish Law of Return: a German translation.
- The Law of Return - The text of the law and its various amendments.
- Alexander Yakobson, Amnon Rubinstein: Democratic Norms, Diasporas, and Israel's Law of Return (PDF; 130 kB).
- Amnon Rubenstein: The problem is how to become an Israeli . ( Memento of November 27, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) In: Ha'aretz .
- Judt Labels Israel “Anachronistic”, Calls for Binational State .
Individual evidence
- ^ Message from the Embassy of the State of Israel in Berlin on citizenship. December 13, 2011, accessed October 18, 2015.
- ↑ Shlomo Guberman: The Law of Return - 1950. August 20, 2001. At mfa.gov.il (English), accessed January 28, 2019.
- ↑ Hezki Ezra, Tova Dvorin: Right of Return Extended to Gay Couples. On israelnationalnews.com, December 8, 2014.
- ↑ Shlomo Avineri: A lighthouse called the Law of Return. In: Ha'aretz , October 25, 2012, German translation in Hagalil .