JERUSALEM — It’s not quite Moses’ 40 years in the desert, but for nine struggling Venezuelan converts to Judaism, their tortuous journey to a better life in the promised land finally brought them to Israel on Thursday.
They paused inside the arrivals hall of Israel’s international airport for a prayer before being whisked into a minibus and taken to an immigration absorption center — a tidy, low-slung building with simple beds — in an Israeli desert city.
Israel’s Law of Return gives Jews the world over the right to settle in the Jewish state. But the Venezuelan converts were denied entry late last year over concerns they weren’t involved enough with Venezuela’s Jewish community and were looking to take advantage of Israel’s immigration policies to flee the troubled South American nation.
Israeli authorities reversed that decision in January, citing the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. As part of a face-saving deal between Israel’s Interior Ministry, headed by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish minister and the liberal Jewish movement to which the nine belonged, the converts were made to undergo a repeat conversion and join an “established religious community” for several months in Israel before being eligible for citizenship.
The group marked its conversion — for the second time — with a ritual immersion last Sunday at a synagogue in Colombia before setting off for Israel.
The protracted fight over the “Venezuelan Nine” underscores the fierce debate in Israel over who is a Jew and how a religion that doesn’t proselytize grapples with an increasing number of converts, especially from Latin America, who have found their way to Judaism outside traditional paths such as marrying someone of the faith.
It’s also taken its toll on the nine Venezuelans.
For years, Franklin Perez has lived a Jewish life. He wears a skullcap, gave Hebrew names to his children and traveled three hours by road to Caracas to buy kosher meat — when he could find it.
His embrace of Judaism began when he moved to the Venezuelan city of Maracay in 2004 after losing his job as a philosophy professor during a political shake-up at his university. He fell in with a group of messianic Jews who combine Christianity with Jewish traditions. Perez’s curiosity had already been piqued during his childhood by a Jewish great-grandmother in an otherwise Roman Catholic family, and he led the group in study of religious texts.
Over time, a hardcore nucleus was drawn to bedrock Judaism. In 2011 they found Juan Mejia, a Conservative movement rabbi who lives in Oklahoma but returns a few times a year to his native Colombia. He led them in six hours of study online each week, and after a year they traveled to study with him for a week in Santa Marta, Colombia. They returned in 2014, and under the supervision of a religious court of three rabbis took a dip in the warm waters of the Caribbean to complete their conversion.
