When Dr. Noah Nesin arrived in Israel last month, like most tourists, he visited the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. The only remains of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, the Western or Wailing Wall is a place of prayer and pilgrimage sacred to the Jewish people.

Each year, thousands of Jews stand before the Wall to lament its destruction by the Romans in A.D. 79 and to pray for its restoration.

At the Wall itself, however, the Mattawamkeag physician and the others in his group were not allowed to pray as they do in their Reform synagogues. Because men and women in the Reform tradition pray together rather than separately as Orthodox Jews do, the group was relegated to a parking lot far from the sacred site on their first visit, to the plaza in front of the Wall on their second. Both times, Nesin and the delegation were surrounded by police and media. Despite those restrictions, he called his visits to the Wall the highlight of the trip, which spanned June 7-15.

“At the Wall, as I heard the voices of our delegation rising in prayer, I understood why all Jews, regardless of their gender or particular form of Judaism, must be able to pray in peace at our holiest site,” said Nesin, who served as president of Bangor’s Congregation Beth El last year.

Nesin originally planned to make the trip to celebrate Israel’s 50th anniversary. His pilgrimage, which included 175 other lay leaders and rabbis from the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, took on added urgency when just before the group’s departure, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he would reintroduce a version of the Conversion Bill into the Knesset which would give the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate exclusive control over conversions performed in Israel. A similar bill was introduced last year but set aside after angry protests from North American Jews.

While belief in Jesus as the son of God is a generally accepted requirement for a person to profess Christianity, under strict Jewish religious law, only a person born of a Jewish mother or converted to the faith by Orthodox standards can be considered a Jew. The conversion controversy began over Israel’s “Law of Return,” Beth El’s Rabbi Laurence Milder explained in an interview last year.

The law allowed any immigrant who was Jewish, by birth or conversion, to become a citizen of Israel automatically without going through a naturalization process. This included converts to the Conservative and Reform denominations. However, residents of Israel could become citizens only if they had been born of a Jewish mother or converted into Orthodoxy. In 1997, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that to have two different standards, one for those outside the country and another for those inside, was unconstitutional.

People who are residents, but not citizens, of Israel cannot vote or serve in the military and do not have access to national health care among other things. This includes spouses of Jewish immigrants who have not converted and the adoptive children of citizens who were adopted outside of Israel. The conversion controversy is part a larger immigration dilemma familiar to the United States.

“Over the past 10 years there has been a dramatic rise in the number of immigrants in Israel, particularly from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia,” said Milder. “The conversion bill is symptomatic of the political control the Orthodox [religious political] parties exert over the Israeli government.”

Nesin and his group met with Netanyahu while in Israel last month. The prime minister, who, according the Jerusalem Post, promised to visit a Reform congregation on a future visit to the United States, asked them to be patient and not take extremist positions. Members of the group applauded him when he rejected the idea that non-Orthodox Jews are treated as second-class Jews in Israel. Netanyahu surprised and angered delegation members when he implied that by recognizing Reform converts as Jews, Israel would be opening the door to mass conversion of foreign workers or quickie conversions.

“How do we prevent 4,000 Romanians and millions from other countries from declaring themselves Jews? Where is the barrier? The question we have here is how do we prevent fax conversion,” Netanyahu said.

“This issue doesn’t mean anything to him on a visceral level,” said Nesin. “It only means something to him in the sense that it keeps his coalition [government] going. It is an issue he did not understand and turned it over to others [Finance minister Yak Ne’eman] to handle. Now, I think the prime minister is beginning to grasp the implications.”

Nesin’s Jewish heritage means a great deal to him but he was not raised in a religious household. He did not have a bar mitzvah, traditionally performed when a boy turns 13, until he was 35 years old. His wife chose to convert to Judaism.

“My great-grandfather, who shares my name, was supposedly a very pious man,” he said. “He spent a great deal of time praying in the synagogue, neglecting his family some said. My grandfather fled the Ukraine and had seen the persecution of the pogroms. He rejected the religious life. My own father [a Howland physician] never entered a synagogue until he was a young man in his 20s, I think.

“In my early 30s I decided to examine my ethnic and religious heritage. I really connected with the egalitarianism of the Reform movement, where men and women share roles, rights and responsibilities equally. It is a progressive movement, and personally, I feel it is the real future of Judaism.”

According to Nesin, 80 percent of Israelis are secular or nonobservant Jews, who were at a loss as to how to mourn former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin when he was assassinated in 1992. When his group was forced to hold traditional Friday night services in front of a rabbinical school (they were inadvertently locked out) a crowd gathered and spontaneously joined in singing shabbat songs with the Americans.

Milder said that members of Beth El “care deeply about the rights of converts in Israel because there are a lot of converts in the congregation. We feel compassion for those who are unable to get their spiritual needs met. Many of our members know what that is like. … We are not trying to exert political pressure on the Israeli government, but we want to articulate support for a vision of democracy that includes a pluralistic state. We want to support our colleagues trying to achieve that kind of Zionist dream.

“Noah Nesin’s trip is an expression of a sense of unity we Americans feel with those living within Israel,” Milder added. “His efforts express our commitment to the fate and destiny of Israel, as well as our love for that country. Noah’s trip exemplifies our willingness to share in the task of making Israel the great country we know it can be.”

While in Israel, the board of the UAHC voted to dedicate the organization’s energies and resources to strengthening the bond between the Israeli and North American Jewish communities and called upon the Israeli government to allocate a section of the Wall for egalitarian worship.

“Clearly, Reform Judaism is beginning to be seen as an appealing religious alternative for many Israelis,” said Nesin. “Wherever we have established a congregation, there has been overwhelming participation. Our challenge is to build facilities to meet the growing demand for Reform schools, synagogues and community centers.”