ABSTRACT
In early 1949, shortly after the creation of the state of Israel, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion received an urgent telegram from Ehud Avriel, his country's representative in Prague. Mr. Avriel complained bitterly about the hostile attitude of the Orthodox rabbinate in Czechoslovakia toward young couples in which one of the partners was not Jewish according to halachah. In light of the efforts of European Jewry to rehabilitate itself after the Holocaust, Mr. Avriel was incensed that young people wishing to identify as Jews should confront additional obstacles imposed by an unrelenting rabbinate. The rabbis, he wrote, were engaged in “clerical blackmail.” This telegram gave rise to a heated debate in the Israeli cabinet, during which Mr. Ben-Gurion summarized his own views as follows: “I do not believe in a doctrine of race. If the children of these couples will grow up in a Jewish home, they will be Jews.”
