Professor discusses Jewish/Israeli law

Daniel Sinclair, an appointed lecturer of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, led an informal discussion on Jewish Law and Israeli Law last Wednesday evening at the Hillel Foundation. Sinclair said that after Israel gained its independence, it maintained much of the legal system imposed on Palestine by the British. "Eastern Europeans wanted Israel based on Jewish law but the enforcement of religion did not fit the modern spirit," said Sinclair to a group of 20 undergraduates and Law School students. However, Sinclair stressed that traditional Jewish law has been a determining factor in several modern cases. Sinclair cited instances in which traditional Jewish law was used in modern Israel to decide cases of rape between a husband and wife, the rights of prisoners to conjugal visits, and the obligation of witnesses to take an oath of truth during a trial. "Traditional Jewish laws offer a lot of wisdom and guidance in line with the issues of modern western thought," he said. Traditional religious law is still strictly used today in Israel in the personal matters of marriage, divorce, and custody cases, while issues such as education are resolved by secular courts. Israel does not have a written constitution, and so secular cases are decided on the basis of peace, freedom, justice, and truth of Israel, according to Sinclair. In recent years, the Orthodox and Reform branches of Judaism have disagreed about the validity of Reform, civil, and mixed-religion marriages in Israel, as well as about the types of divorce appropriate to these marriages. "Jewish marriage is a unifying factor," Sinclair said. "Civil marriage would destroy a civilized vestige of Jewish unity." Third year Law student Oded Salomy had mixed emotions about Sinclair's treatment of the marriage issue. "On one hand, I'm glad that he didn't sort of rehash all the controversial religious debates going on in Israel of marriage and divorce," Salomy said. "But on the other hand, he ducked all the real painful issues with which secular Israel is dealing." The discussion ended with a brief question and answer session concerning the issues of the absence of an Israeli written constitution and child custody laws in Israel. Sinclair, a recipient of the Jacob Herzog memorial prize for Jewish Law, arrived in Philadelphia last week for the first stop on a national lecture tour. Bonnie Bailis, advisor to the Drexel University Hillel and Sinclair's former student, brought the lecturer to Hillel as a follow up to a conference on Biomedical Ethics held at Hillel last November.

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