Haim Amsalem

Haim Amsalem was born in 1959 in Oran, Algeria, to a family of Moroccan origin.[1][2] His family relocated to Lyon, France, when he was an infant, and he immigrated to Israel at age eleven, growing up in the Pardes Katz neighborhood of Bnei Brak.[2] There he studied at local yeshivas and received rabbinic ordination.[2] He married his wife Hana at age twenty-one and is the father of eight children.[2]

His early rabbinic career took him to Moshav Sharsheret in the northwestern Negev, where he served as community rabbi, and later to Netivot, where his work brought him into contact with immigrants from the former Soviet Union.[2] In 1993 he moved to Jerusalem's Har Nof neighborhood and established a kollel.[2] In 2002 he accepted an invitation to serve as rabbi of Geneva's Sephardic community; he later returned to Israel in 2006.[2][3] His experience in Geneva is credited in contemporary accounts with deepening his engagement with conversion issues.[2]

Amsalem entered the Knesset in 2006 after Rabbi Ovadia Yosef placed him on the Shas party list.[2] He served during both the 17th and 18th Knessets, and his name appears in a 2009 Jewish Virtual Library table of Shas's sitting Knesset members and candidate list, where he was ranked tenth.[4]

During the 18th Knesset, Amsalem began publicly challenging central tenets of Shas and the broader Haredi political position. He argued that only the small number of yeshiva students who genuinely excelled in Torah study should be exempt from military service, while physically capable eighteen-year-olds should serve, and those unable to serve in the military should perform alternative national service.[5] He linked this position to a reading of Maimonides holding that a person should devote one-third of the day to Torah study and one-third to work, and criticized what he called aggressive ultra-Orthodox politics.[5] He described his entry into Shas as an effort to reform the party from within, and accused its leadership of abandoning its Mizrahi constituency by aligning with Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox institutions and ideology.[2]

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef repudiated Amsalem, and he was expelled from Shas in November 2010, becoming a one-member parliamentary faction.[6][2] Shas's public condemnation reportedly included a comparison of Amsalem to Amalek.[3] He called for leadership that would return "sanity and moderation" to the Haredi community.[6]

Following his expulsion from Shas, Amsalem founded Am Shalem — translated as "The Whole People" — and led it into the January 2013 election for the 19th Knesset.[6][7] The Institute for National Security Studies described Am Shalem in its 2013 election primer as Amsalem's "relatively moderate Ultra-Orthodox party" and considered it among those unlikely to pass the electoral threshold.[7]

The party did not win any seats. The Central Elections Committee's official results recorded 45,690 valid votes for Am Shalem, representing 1.20 percent of the total, below the 2 percent threshold.[8] A later Ynet retrospective reported 42,095 votes rather than 45,690, demonstrating an inconsistency in secondary coverage.[9][8] Amsalem noted that Am Shalem's 2013 candidate list included three women, which he described as unprecedented in the Haredi sector.[2]

For the 2019 election, Amsalem appeared at number two on the candidate list of the Identity party led by Moshe Feiglin, in a position reserved for him by the party.[10] He described his political outlook as advocating "moderate, bringing-people-closer Judaism" and "live and let live."[10]

In 2011 Amsalem published two substantial halakhic works on the question of conversion. Zera Yisrael ("Seed of Israel") is a 456-page halakhic discussion, and Mekor Yisrael ("Source of Israel") is a 388-page companion volume reproducing writings and responsa by more than 120 rabbinic authorities cited in the first work.[6] A shortened Hebrew compilation of these works was published in 2014 under the editorship of Efrat Shukron.[11]

Zera Yisrael focuses specifically on immigrants and descendants of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who have Jewish fathers but are not recognized as Jewish under halakha because their mothers were not Jewish.[6] Amsalem limited this proposed approach to people in Israel of Jewish paternal ancestry; he did not present it as a general conversion policy for the diaspora or for people with two non-Jewish parents.[6] A 2012 review reported that more than one million people had immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union during the preceding two decades, including hundreds of thousands in this halakhic limbo. It noted that their status could prevent them from marrying Jews in state-sanctioned ceremonies or being buried in a Jewish cemetery, while Amsalem warned that a growing separation between Israeli nationality and Jewish status threatened to divide the Jewish people.[6]

The book's central halakhic innovation, as characterized by a National Library of Israel record, concerns the definition of accepting the commandments and the manner in which converts must be informed of them.[1] Amsalem argued that rabbinic courts possess latitude in assessing whether an applicant has sincerely accepted the commandments, and that this assessment should take into account each person's circumstances and motivations.[6] He maintained that converts must reject idolatry, affirm God's unity, and receive instruction in the commandments, but need not make an explicit commitment to observe every commandment.[6] He further distinguished between the court's decision to accept an applicant and the ongoing validity of a conversion already performed, arguing that a conversion involving circumcision and immersion could remain valid even if the convert later failed to observe all the commandments.[6]

To support this position, Amsalem cited rabbinic precedents including Maimonides, the Radbaz, and Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer, characterizing the demographic situation of Soviet-origin immigrants as a halakhic "state of emergency" that obligated courts to act inclusively for the sake of Jewish unity.[6] He described these immigrants as seeking "to return to the rock from which they were cleft."[6]

Zera Yisrael received approbations from a notable range of rabbis, including his own teacher Rabbi Meir Mazuz, as well as Shear Yashuv Cohen, Dov Lior, Nachum Rabinovitch, and Yaakov Ariel.[6]

Beyond his writings, Amsalem has pursued conversion work through institutional channels outside the Chief Rabbinate. He leads Ahavat HaGer, an independent international Jewish conversion court.[12] Amsalem has argued that independent conversion courts operating according to halakha should receive government recognition and that their converts should be recognized for civil purposes, operating separately from the Chief Rabbinate.[13]

From 2016 onward, Amsalem traveled to northern Brazil five times to participate in conversions of people with Sephardic ancestry.[14] These trips, supervised jointly with Brazilian Orthodox rabbi Gilberto Venturas, resulted in approximately 100 conversions per visit and are described as the first large-scale series of conversions performed in Brazil.[14] Israel's Chief Rabbinate did not recognize those converts as Jews, as Amsalem was not on its list of approved conversion judges.[14]

In public statements on the issue of independent conversion courts, Amsalem argued that ninety-seven percent of those seeking conversion through such courts had Jewish roots and had bound their fates with the Jewish people, and that rejecting them served only to promote assimilation.[13]

In a 2019 interview announcing a new "Moderate Judaism" initiative, Amsalem outlined an agenda addressing conversion, the plight of agunot (women refused a religious divorce), and reform of religious services.[2] He stated that the Chief Rabbinate had "lost its legitimacy" and framed his project as finding solutions within halakha rather than departing from it.[2]

In a 2021 interview, Amsalem disclosed that his five sons had studied in yeshivas and subsequently completed full military service, after the family concluded that full-time Torah study was not their vocation.[15] He described his own position as supporting Torah study while advocating core secular studies, vocational education, and employment for those not suited to full-time religious learning.[15]

In April 2026, Amsalem stood as a candidate in the election for chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, running against Shas-backed Rabbi Zevadia Cohen and Rabbi Aryeh Levin.[16] He had the declared support of twenty-one Tel Aviv City Council members and had previously run in the Jerusalem rabbinate election.[16] Cohen won with thirty-seven of sixty-one votes cast; Amsalem received twenty-one votes and Levin received three.[16]

Amsalem's halakhic positions on conversion generated sustained opposition from Haredi religious authorities. A May 20, 2010 circular signed by the heads of the Edah HaChareidis denied that his positions had halakhic justification, and an editorial in the Haredi newspaper Yated Ne'eman criticized his claim that Jewish law permits partial acceptance of the commandments.[6] At a 2011 Hebrew University conference on conversion, Amsalem used the phrase "halakhic terror" to describe stringencies associated with the invalidation of conversions conducted under Rabbi Haim Druckman.[17] He also publicly challenged Rabbi Avraham Sherman, whose approach to conversion he had criticized as grandstanding at the expense of converts of Jewish paternal ancestry, particularly IDF soldiers.[17][6]

Amsalem's accusations that Shas leaders abandoned the party's Mizrahi base and aligned with Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox institutions are political claims reported from his own statements rather than independently established findings.[2]