Summary
Benjamin Shalit, in Lahav’s account: the secular Israeli army officer whose petition in the Shalit Case asked that his children by his non-Jewish wife Anne be registered as Jewish by nationality, asserting that Israeli nationalism was civic, not religious, and that self-determination, not Jewish law, should decide (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2272-2551).
Details
- To the Shalits religion played no role in identity; the Interior Ministry would register the children’s religion as blank but their nationality only as “father Jewish, mother non-Jewish”. Shalit claimed “My children are Jewish,” “because the enemies of Israel are their enemies, and they will grow up to defend the State against them”, and he was prepared to register them as “Hebrew” or “Israeli” instead if the government allowed (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2272-2440).
- A five-justice majority granted relief on a subjective test; the Knesset then amended the law to incorporate the halakhic definition, non-retroactively, leaving Oren and Galia Shalit the only halakhically non-Jewish persons ever registered as Jews in Israel (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2353-2551).
- Within eight years of the case Shalit was caught in an embarrassing personal dispute with the army and emigrated to Sweden; his children grew up with a binational Israeli-Swedish identity (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2500-2551).
- Shalit was born in the same week and the same Haifa hospital as Simon Agranat’s oldest son Israel, a fact Lahav uses in reading Agranat’s dissent as a fathers-and-sons conflict (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2441-2499).
Related pages
Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Shalit Case, Simon Agranat, Haim Cohn