said Ofer Zalzberg, director of the Middle East program at the Herbert C. Kelman Institute, a Jerusalem-based research group. “And it comes just a month before an election, so it becomes dramatically more politicized, and it touches people in visceral places: Who are we? What is our identity? And what are our freedoms?”

Mr. Zalzberg said, “This has already triggered a backlash among a large constituency who reject the court’s right to take decisions about what Jewish collective identity is all about.”

Within Israel, the overwhelming majority of Jews are either Orthodox or secular, but liberal rabbis said that there had already been an uptick in the number of non-Jews seeking to convert to more liberal streams of Judaism. Rabbi Gregory Kotler, a Reform rabbi in Ram...

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