Also absent were representatives from the Reform and Conservative movements. Melchior said that more than half of the 65,000 people who immigrated from the CIS last year were not Jewish. In response, Mike Rosenberg, director of the Jewish Agency's immigration and absorption department, said he did not have last year's figures, but he could confirm that the number of those who were not halachicly Jewish among the immigrants from the former Soviet Union has been growing every year. Rosenberg stressed that the policy of the Jewish Agency is to bring whoever is eligible under the Law of Return and this is determined by the Israeli consular offices. However, he added that having brought the immigrants, the Jewish Agency and the state have a responsibility to be very active in strengthening their Jewish identity.
Jewish identity is very lacking both among the Jewish and the non-Jewish immigrants.
He added that 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. Today, he said, it is very difficult. Jewish Agency spokesman Michael Jankelowitz said that the issue of the growing number of non-Jewish immigrants is one of the items being discussed at this 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 has been 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 High Court of Justice 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, which was set for November 9.