Melchior said that more than half of the 65,000 people who immigrated from the former Soviet Union last year were not Jewish. Mike Rosenberg, director of the Jewish Agency's immigration and absorption department, said he did not have last year's figures, but confirmed that the number of those who were not halachicly Jewish among the immigrants from the former Soviet Union has been growing every year. In 1989, he said, there were 94 percent Jews and 6 percent non-Jews. By 1997, the last year for which the Agency had statistics, the percentage of Jews to non-Jews was 59 percent to 41 percent. However, he added that having brought the immigrants, the Jewish Agency and the state of Israel have a responsibility to be very active in strengthening the immigrants' Jewish identity.
Jewish identity is very lacking both among the Jewish and the non-Jewish immigrants.
He said he feels very strongly that for those who want to convert, every effort should be made by the Jewish Agency and the government to make this possible. Conversion today, he added, is very difficult. Jewish Agency spokesman Michael Jankelowitz said the issue of the growing number of non-Jewish immigrants was to be discussed at last week's board of governors meeting. The non-Orthodox movements stayed away from the ministerial committee meeting on conversion because their people had been invited not as representatives of the respective movements, but as members of the board of the joint conversion institute, which was opened as part of the implementation of the Neeman Commission recommendations. They also objected to the fact that Melchior's first order of business was to ask the Israel Supreme Court to delay hearing a petition by the Conservative movement against the Interior Ministry decision not to register as Jews adopted children converted by its rabbis in Israel.