The last, last act in a drama that was never meant to last so long finally seems about to end. In early June, the Israeli government has announced, the curtain will come down on the saga of Ethiopian Jewish immigration to Israel when a final group of several hundred Falashmura, Christian descendants of Ethiopian Jews baptized generations ago, will fly to the Jewish state.

An estimated 10,000 or more Ethiopian Christians claiming to descend from Jewish families will be left behind in Ethiopia, where they have been waiting for Israeli visas, many after selling their homes and relocating to "temporary" transit camps in which they have been living for years.

Although they do not differ in background from the 26,000 other Falashmura who have been admitted to Israel, along with twice that number of un-Christianized Ethiopian Jews, Israel's gates now stand to be shut to them forever.

Already a battle is looming over this decision, with various organizations, lobbies, political parties, and government ministries lining up on opposite sides of the question.

The Jews of Ethiopia are a unique, amazing, and mysterious story, but they are part of a larger problem having to do with Israel's immigration policy, which is in a state of chaotic confusion today. Things that once seemed clear when this policy was first set by the so-called "Law of Return" in 1950, soon after the State of Israel's establishment, are no longer so. Things that once seemed unimaginable have come to pass.

The Law of Return was itself perfectly clear. It gave every Jew in the world the automatic right to immigrate to Israel while denying it to non-Jews, and an amendment added in 1970 extended this right to the wives, husbands, children, and grandchildren of any Jew, defined as whoever "is born to a Jewish mother or who has converted, and is not a member of another religion," even if they were not Jewish themselves by the standards of traditional Jewish religious law.

At the time, such cases were uncommon — and indeed, for a long while the law functioned smoothly. More than 1 million Jewish immigrants entered Israel without challenge between its adoption and the 1970s, while disputes over its application were rare.

What has happened since then to complicate matters? Many things. Here are some of them:

• A rising rate of Jewish intermarriage has greatly increased in today's world the number of "wives, husbands, children, and grandchildren" of Jews who are not Jewish themselves by Jewish criteria.

• These criteria themselves are no longer monolithic. The Reform movement's adoption of the principle of "patrilineal descent," whereby a Jew is anyone born to a Jewish father and not just to a Jewish mother, has left world Jewry without a consensus on who a Jew is.

• The huge immigration to Israel from the ex-Soviet Union in the 1990s brought with it large numbers of non-Jews who met the requirements of the 1970 amendment and became Israeli citizens without becoming Jewish.

• Globalization and religious syncretism have produced Judaizing communities in various parts of the world in which populations with no known Jewish pasts are seeking to live as Jews and to be recognized as such.

• Israel's growing affluence and its technologically developed economy, which has elevated it to the status of a "first world" country, has also made it an attractive destination for would-be emigrants from poorer places who have no relationship to the Jewish people at all. It is no longer Jews alone or those related to them who wish to settle in Israel.

• Concomitantly, Israel, like all other developed countries, is now the home of hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, none of them Jewish. Many have been living in the country for a long time, have raised children in it, and would like to acquire Israeli citizenship and remain.

None of these developments were or could have been seen by the framers of the Law of Return. They make it a clumsy tool with which to deal with current-day realities — and worse yet, a tool that, wielded by bureaucrats in Israel's ministries of the interior and religion, often has been applied inconsistently, sometimes discriminatorily, and frequently under political pressure.

Absurdities have come to abound. The Los Angeles-born son of a non-Jewish father and Jewish mother who considers himself a Buddhist and has never evinced the slightest interest in Jewish life is entitled to live in Israel; a geriatric worker from the Philippines, who has lived in Israel for 10 years and has Hebrew-speaking children who feel Israeli and want to serve in the Israeli army, is subject to deportation.

Thousands of non-Jews from Darfur who have crossed illegally into Israel from Egypt are given residence permits because they are refugees from a war zone; members of the B'nei Menashe, a community of 7,000 ex-Christians practicing Orthodox Judaism in northeast India but not officially converted — an impossibility in India, where there are no rabbis to convert them — are denied entry to Israel and cannot join their 1,500 converted brethren there because they are not considered Jews.

The story of the Falashmura is one more such case. If they are not Jews, why were 26,000 of them admitted to Israel? If they are Jews, why are the remaining 10,000 being turned away? It makes little sense. The Law of Return, despite all the criticisms of it, cannot be abrogated without also abrogating Israel's status as a Jewish state. Which, of course, is precisely what many of the law's critics would like to do. But it needs to be rethought and reformulated. The times have changed while it has not, and it is time to bring it in line with them.

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