Ivanka Trump and other Orthodox Jewish converts to fall under new guidelines

Source: RNS

JERUSALEM (RNS) Ivanka Trump and thousands of other Orthodox converts to Judaism should be automatically recognized as Jewish under a landmark set of guidelines Israel’s Chief Rabbinate has promised to create.

Israel’s two chief rabbis announced on Wednesday (Dec. 7) that for the first time, they will establish a transparent set of criteria laying out which Orthodox rabbis in the Jewish diaspora have the authority – in their eyes – to perform conversions.

The announcement follows a 2015 Jerusalem court petition by the advocacy group ITIM, which has long demanded that the rabbinate — the authority on all Jewish matters in Israel — release its list of approved rabbis and publicly share its vetting process.

For more than a decade the rabbinate has challenged the validity of many conversions performed by American Orthodox rabbis, including some carried out by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the rabbi who converted Trump

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