Israel is becoming less Jewish, not just less democratic, WZO's Yizhar Hess argues

Dr. Yizhar Hess is a 10th-generation Jerusalemite. He was in his early thirties when he and his wife Yael, both secular Israelis whose grandparents had been religious, answered a Jewish Agency advertisement and moved to Tucson, Arizona, for three years as emissaries.

He came back with a question he has been asking ever since.

"I had to go to North America to feel Jewish," Hess said in an interview at the Jerusalem Post studio this week with Editor-in-chief Zvika Klein. "What didn't we do good here?"

Hess, who served 13 years as CEO of the Masorti Movement in Israel and is now in his second term as vice chairman of the World Zionist Organization, has built his career on one answer. The state's hold on Jewish life, he says, is what's wrong.

"In Israel we had a historical mishap," he said. "Due to the unholy connection between state and religion. And it created something that makes Israel not only less democratic, but less Jewish, because so many people are blocked from what they feel as coercion."

Most critiques of Israel's religion-state arrangement come from the democracy side. Pluralism, equality, the rights of minority streams. Hess wants the conversation moved. The damage, he argues, is to Judaism.

The marriage numbers are the clearest evidence he points to. The Chief Rabbinate's annual marriage figures have been roughly flat for years while Israel's Jewish population has grown. The gap goes abroad, into private ceremonies, or to alternative bodies.

"Most of them today who do not marry via the Chief Rabbinate are doing a very Jewish wedding, but not under the auspices of the Chief Rabbinate," Hess said. "It's a good sign. It's an encouraging phenomenon."

Klein pushed back on whether the dynamic was inevitable. If Israel ever legally mandated circumcision, fewer Israelis would do it. The vast majority do it now, in or out of the hospital, because nobody is forcing them. Hess agreed. "In some aspects of this unholy connection between state and religion in Israel, we are going to bad places."

The funding picture follows the same pattern. Orthodox institutions receive state funding measured in billions of shekels a year. The Reform and Masorti movements together represent roughly 7% of Israeli Jews by self-identification, by Hess's count, on a fraction of the budget.

"Just imagine how would Israel look like from a Jewish point of view and from a democratic point of view, if there was equal funding to the different streams," he said. "We would have had a different Israel, more Jewish and more democratic."

The Western Wall is the visible version. The 2016 government agreement to build a proper pluralistic prayer space was frozen, then formally cancelled. What remains, Hess said, "looks like the back side of the bus. It's not dignified."

A bill from MK Avi Maoz, reportedly backed by Justice Minister Yariv Levin, would push further. It would define forms of Jewish prayer at the Kotel that the Chief Rabbinate doesn't approve of as desecration, and allow arrest for those who pray that way. Hess has called it "a declaration of war on world Jewry."

He doesn't apologize for the language.

"Polite people seldom change the world," he told Klein. "Social activism, when you are a minority group that really wants to change the spectrum, sometimes it has to be not as polite as we all want it to be. It's the history of feminism. It's the history of Zionism. This is how it works."

Klein, who has covered the Israel-Diaspora seam for years from a religious-Zionist vantage point, noted that the rabbinate problem isn't only a Masorti and Reform grievance. Religious Zionists have their own running fight with a Chief Rabbinate they argue has been captured by non-Zionist Haredi politics. Conversions rejected, marriages interrogated, grandparents' Jewishness litigated. Israeli problems, not just Diaspora ones.

Hess's contribution is to connect the two complaints. The same apparatus that loses credibility with religious Zionists for being too Haredi loses credibility with secular Israelis for being coercive at all. Israelis push their Jewish identity into private channels, or pick it up in synagogues outside the country.

The latter, Hess said, is happening at scale. He cited 576 Israelis going to Camp Ramah this summer alone. The total number heading to Jewish summer camps abroad, he said, is closer to 2,000. The annual Tikkun Leil Shavuot celebration his movement runs at JCC Manhattan drew about 3,000 Jews last year.

"Israelis are coming back with the feeling that going to shul is not necessarily this thing that is not relevant to their lives," he said.

The WZO is the political instrument Hess wants to use. He has just walked out of two and a half months of negotiations there with the strongest hand his bloc has held in years. Mercaz, the Masorti slate he leads, nearly doubled its mandates in the spring 2025 elections. The coalition agreement signed in late November split senior positions evenly between the right-religious bloc and the liberal bloc, a 50-50 division Hess called unprecedented. Yair Netanyahu was kept out of a senior role. Otzma Yehudit was kept out of the coalition entirely.

"It wasn't the consensus" to keep Itamar Ben-Gvir's party out, Hess said. "But it was enough for everyone to sign by them."

The deal has a critics' side too. The number of WZO departments expanded from around 14 to as many as 24, each headed by a paid appointee. Hess defended the expansion as the cost of the consensus that kept the extremists out, acknowledged the criticism is partly due, and said work is underway to limit such expansions in future congresses. The next five years at the WZO will include a lot of explaining that math.

He has a cultural project too. He produced a Hebrew monodrama about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the 20th-century thinker who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and built a Jewish theology of human rights. The play has run more than 100 times in Israel and toured Argentina, London, and New York. The WZO is also taking over the renovation of Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, closed for seven years. Hess wants the original Declaration of Independence scroll on display when it reopens.

Every year between Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha'atzmaut, the WZO gathers at the egalitarian section of the Kotel to read the Declaration with cantillation, in the trope of a megillah, a sacred scroll. Twelve readers, drawn from every stream, Reform and Conservative, Orthodox and Haredi, secular and traditional, Israeli and Diaspora. Hess calls the Declaration "the sixth megillah." The political statement is also a Jewish one. The text of the modern state, he is arguing, can be sanctified without the Chief Rabbinate signing off.

Whether the next Israeli government takes any of this seriously is the open question.

Hess is not pessimistic, at least not on the wider canvas.

"We are living in the golden age of the Jewish people," he told Klein near the end of the interview, citing 17 million Jews worldwide, seven and a half million in Israel, eight million in North America.

"I just hope this is the way it stays."