JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Sunday that he would oppose a conversion bill that has rekindled the age-old debate over who is a Jew — and provoked an angry response among liberal Jewish groups abroad whose support is critical to the Jewish state.

Last week, an Israeli parliamentary committee gave preliminary approval to a draft legislation that would give Orthodox rabbis in Israel more control over conversions. The more religiously liberal Reform and Conservative movements that represent the vast majority of Jews outside Israel contend the new legislation would be a dangerous blow to religious pluralism.

Netanyahu told his Cabinet on Sunday that he feared the bill would create a rift in the Jewish world and that if he couldn't find a compromise solution, he would ask his coalition partners to vote against it.

Under the current practice, Israel recognizes only conversions performed by Orthodox rabbis inside Israel, but people converted by non-Orthodox rabbis outside the country are automatically eligible for Israeli citizenship like other Jews. The proposed legislation would give Israel's chief rabbinate the legal power to decide whether any conversion is legitimate.

The group most likely to suffer would be immigrants who converted to Judaism abroad and could now be denied Israeli citizenship.

The bill touches a raw nerve in the Reform and Conservative movements, whose presence is marginal in Israel, where Orthodox rabbis have a near monopoly over religious practices such as marriage and burial.

While staunch backers of Israel, these groups look worriedly at the prospect of the country's Orthodox religious establishment further entrenching its control, and in effect being the arbiter of Jewish identity. Passage of the bill would also be a blow to the legitimacy of non-Orthodox rabbis the world over.

Rabbi David Saperstein, head of the Washington-based Religious Action Center of the Union of Reform Judaism, said the bill, if passed, would mark a "crisis of the first order."

"It would be an enormous blow to the unity of the Jewish people and the principle of religious freedom in Israel," said Saperstein, who is visiting the country to lobby lawmakers to drop the bill.

"The American Jewish community will remain strongly engaged in Israel, but the message will be sent that the government of Israel does not accept our rabbis and our movement as legitimate, and it would make all our work much more difficult."

Of the world's roughly 13 million Jews, half live in Israel and most of the rest are concentrated in North America.

Israeli religious authorities' skepticism about the legitimacy of overseas conversions has been cited as one of the main causes of a growing rift between Israel and world Jewry.

Rotem's bill has even provoked a group of Jewish U.S. senators to draft a rare letter of complaint to Israel's ambassador to Washington, the Jerusalem Post newspaper reported.

Caley Gray, communications director for signatory Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-New Jersey), told the Jerusalem Post that "Senator Lautenberg hopes the Knesset does not pass this legislation, which he views as divisive."

The bill's sponsor, David Rotem, an Orthodox lawmaker from the largely secular Yisrael Beitenu party, has rejected the criticism, saying his goal was to make conversion easier for immigrants from the former Soviet Union who make up the majority of his party's voters. The bill empowers selected municipal chief rabbis to conduct conversions. Currently, all such power is vested in the chief rabbinate in Jerusalem.
Roughly 1 million people immigrated to Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many with questionable ties to Judaism. Rotem has said his bill would allow would-be converts the freedom to shop around and look for an amenable local rabbi.