The laws governing marriage in Israel fly in the face of politicians' assertion that the state is on a par with other Western countries in terms of enlightenment, tolerance and democracy.

Despite 70% of Israelis defining themselves as secular, Israel's rabbinate has a stranglehold on the institution of marriage, refusing to recognise weddings not conducted in a religious ceremony, and proscribing couples from tying the knot where one partner is not deemed sufficiently Jewish by the authorities.

Whilst Christian, Muslim and Druze couples are free to marry outside the remit of the rabbinic authorities, thousands of pairs of potential newlyweds where one half is Jewish and the other not are ensnared each year by the prohibition. Hundreds of thousands of migrants from the FSU, Ethiopia and elsewhere fall into the gap between being Israeli and being Jewish, and as such are prohibited from marrying a 'proper' Jew on Israeli soil. At the same time, secular Israeli Jews who object to being married in a religious ritual are unable to wed in a civil ceremony.

Israel recognises civil marriages conducted overseas, hence each year thousands of Israelis wed in nearby countries such as Cyprus in order to beat the system and become a recognised married couple. Others become common-law spouses, although such status does not grant them all the rights bestowed on formally married couples.

Israel is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and as such has a duty to adhere to its charter, which asserts that men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. However, in a country which so often acquiesces to the anachronistic demands of religious rulers, modern-day declarations of human rights come a distant second to the shackling legislature of a bygone age.

Advertisements sponsored by the Israeli government that suggest Jewish people who marry out of their faith are lost or dead have been pulled from TV schedules, amid uproar.

The Hebrew language adverts start with a wide pan of railway tracks accompanied by mournful music – evoking for many viewers the tracks leading to death camps where Jews were exterminated by the Nazis in the Second World War.

They then show posters in English, French and Russian of young people with Jewish-sounding names. The posters are dominated by one word: Lost. More than 50 per cent of Jewish youths abroad assimilate and become lost, says a voiceover. It urges viewers to call a number and report the names and contact information of Jewish youths abroad who can be saved by being brought to Israel to strengthen their Jewish identity.

The ads were co-sponsored by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office with the aim of bringing to Israeli Jews aged 18-30 for a year of study and volunteering on a programme known as masa – Hebrew for journey.

But they have struck a raw nerve among liberal Jews, who say they show a lack of understanding of conditions for Jews in the West, where intermarriage does not always mean the end of Jewish affiliation.

It's telling Israelis that Jews in the diaspora are second-class Jews, said rabbi Gilad Kariv, director of the Israeli Movement for Progressive Judaism: This is an entirely negative campaign.

Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg added: I don't think who a Jewish student in Boston is dating is the business of the prime minister of Israel.

Despite the row, organisers say the ad campaign is a big success and they have been inundated with thousands of calls from Israelis asking that their relatives abroad be contacted.

A local authority in Israel has announced that it is establishing a special team of youth 'counsellors' and 'psychologists' whose job it will be to identify young Jewish women who are dating Arab men and rescue them.

Mr Hakak, a spokesman for Petah Tikva municipality, said Russian girls, young Jewish women whose parents arrived in Israel over the past two decades, since the former Soviet Union collapsed, were particularly vulnerable to the attention of Arab men.

Hakak said the municipality had created a hotline that parents and friends of the Jewish women could use to inform on them: We can't tell the girls what to do but we can send a psychologist to their home to offer them and their parents advice.

The move by the municipality of Petah Tikva, a city close to Tel Aviv, is the latest in a series of separate initiatives from official bodies, rabbis, private organisations and groups of Israeli residents to try to prevent interracial dating and marriage.

In a related development, the Israeli media reported this month that residents of Pisgat Zeev, a large Jewish settlement in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, had formed a vigilante-style patrol to stop Arab men from mixing with local Jewish girls. Some 35 Jewish men are reported to belong to a patrol known as Fire for Judaism that tries to stop interracial dating.

Last year, the municipality of Kiryat Gat, a town of 50,000 Jews in southern Israel, launched a programme in schools to warn Jewish girls of the dangers of dating local Bedouin men. The girls were shown a video titled Sleeping with the Enemy, which describes mixed couples as an unnatural phenomenon .

Hostility to intimate relationships developing across Israel's ethnic divide is shared by many Israeli Jews, who regard such behaviour as a threat to the state's Jewishness. One of the few polls on the subject, in 2007, found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage should be equated with national treason .

Dr Yuval Yonay, a sociologist at Haifa University, said the number of interracial marriages was too small to be studied . Separation between Jews and Arabs is so ingrained in Israeli society, it is surprising that anyone manages to escape these central controls.

Whilst the proliferation of ultra-orthodox vigilante police is a stain on Israeli society, their Taliban-esque actions can at least be contextualised as the inevitable consequence of religious fundamentalism gone wild. Such communities are dominated by leaders who refuse to accommodate any form of modernisation or freedom of thought into their archaic systems of governance, and the emergence of modesty squads is simply a manifestation of such primitive and patriarchal thinking.

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Israel is warning expatriates not to marry Jewish Americans amid claims its government thinks U.S. Jews are not religious enough.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sponsoring adverts that warn his people that they can lose their national identities if they tie the knot with foreigners with the same faith.

The campaign is ostensibly aimed at attracting Israelis back to their homeland by making them feel guilty about staying in the U.S.

But it has also been claimed that the right-wing Likud party want to prevent liberal Americans moving to Israel and making the country's electorate more left-wing. On the blog Mideastposts.com, one writer says Prime Minister Netanyahu is anti-Liberal and anti-Western, and has been going to great lengths - including trying to weaken settlers' voting power - to keep his party in power.