As a member of the Indian Jewish community, I wish to invite the attention of your Ministry to an impending intrusion of the Govt, of Israel in the internal religious affairs of the community. As you may be aware, the Bene Israel section of the community has been very much exercised over certain discriminatory directives issued by the Chief Rabbinate in Israel which subject members of the community who have migrated to Israel to humiliating questioning if they wish to marry. Instead of following the straightforward course of withdrawing these obnoxious directives, which have been condemned by progressive elements of Jewry the world over, efforts have been made to bring Jewish religious institutions in India under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. As resistance was shown to the reception of a Rabbi deputed by the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Israel in consultation with the Chief Rabbinate and presumably paid out of Israeli State funds, it has now been arranged to have the Rabbi sponsored by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, with headquarters in New York, since this Union has been helping with guidance and money a local organisation called UOJCI (Address C/o Magen Hassidim Synagogue, 8 Morland Rd. Jacob Circle, Bombay 11-rBC). Apparently the local organisation has accepted the arrangement without realising its dangerous implications.To the reception of a foreign Rabbi and the acceptance of his guidance in deciding complicated questions of Jewish religious law there can be no possible objection, as the community has no trained Rabbis of its own. Nor can there by any objection to such a Rabbi being of Israeli nationality. But the participation of the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel (which, it may be explained, is almost a limb of the State machinery in Israel in so far as its rulings in matters of marriage and divorce are enforced by the State) in the deputation of a Rabbi …