After yearlong strife, Knesset passes Shas’s controversial ‘Rabbis Law’

New law on funding salaries of religious officials ‘promotes the politicization of the rabbinate,’ warns Rabbi David Stav of the liberal Tzohar rabbinic group

Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"

Religious Services Minister Michael Malkieli attends a plenum session on the so-called Rabbis Bill in the Knesset, January 15, 2025. (Goldberg/Flash90)
Religious Services Minister Michael Malkieli attends a plenum session on the so-called Rabbis Bill in the Knesset, January 15, 2025. (Goldberg/Flash90)

After more than a year of efforts and coalition infighting, lawmakers on Wednesday evening passed the final reading of the so-called Rabbis Law II in the Knesset plenum, paving the way for what critics warn will be a significant expansion of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party’s influence over religious life in Israel.

The seemingly prosaic amendment to the Religious Services Law, which passed 46-35, grants the religious services minister the power, in consultation with the finance minister, to allocate additional funds to local religious councils around the country at his discretion.

According to the bill’s explanatory notes, the legislation would allow the government to help pay the “salaries of regional rabbis, rabbis of moshavim and ritual bath attendants without burdening the regional authorities and councils” — both within communities featuring religious councils and those without such a body.

The law changes the status quo in which the majority of funds for such office-holders was provided by the local religious council, giving the ministry greater influence over religious services on a municipal level.

Municipal rabbis are meant to serve as the direct religious authority for the Jewish residents of their city or town, signing off on things like marriage licenses and kashrut certificates for local restaurants.

Although it does not explicitly grant the minister, currently Shas’s Michael Malkieli, the power to appoint rabbis, opponents of the bill have criticized it as an effort to expand Shas’s power over the Rabbinate — especially if implemented in conjunction with new regulations diluting the voting power of local government officials in elections for city rabbis, approved by Malkieli late last year.

The regulations do away with rabbinical term limits; allow the government to unilaterally call elections to install rabbis in communities that have chosen to forgo having a local religious council; and give the minister a greater say in the selection of members of the committees that elect municipal rabbis.

Shas Chairman Aryeh Deri speaks during a Sephardic Rabbis Union Conference in Jerusalem, December 6, 2016. (Yaakov Cohen/Flash90)

“The approval of the law at the very moment when we are being informed about the hostage deal [with Hamas in Gaza] represents a new level of cynicism,” argued Rabbi Seth Farber, whose Itim nonprofit lobbied against the bill and is suing the state in an effort to roll back the legislation.

“The law, which gives the religious services minister a blank check to appoint whatever positions he wants in the religious councils, will deepen partisan control over local religious services,” Farber told The Times of Israel.

“Instead of working toward open and welcoming religious institutions that are connected to the local public, Shas is strengthening an extreme monopoly and will further alienate populations from Judaism,” he said.

The bill “strengthens the politicization of the Rabbinate. It gives [the minister] the power to control the budget of the rabbis, the nominations of rabbis,” agreed Rabbi David Stav, chairman of the Tzohar rabbinical organization and a plaintiff in the case against Malkieli’s regulations.

“Basically, it’s strengthening the involvement of Haredi politicians in each municipality. It’s a disaster for the rabbinic world,” he said.

The bill’s passage was also panned by opposition lawmakers, who accused the coalition of using the public’s focus on the emerging ceasefire deal to push it through under the radar.

Rabbi David Stav, cofounder and chairman of the Tzohar rabbinical organization. (Yossi Zeliger/Flash90)

The Democrats’ Efrat Rayten posted on X: “We are all watching and holding our breath” to see if the hostages will be freed, “but at the same time, in the disconnected world of the Knesset, the coalition is passing the Rabbis Law II to arrange cronyism.”

While a spokesman for Shas did not respond to a request for comment, Shas MK Erez Malul, the bill’s sponsor, told The Times of Israel this summer that he believed critics’ concerns were just “cheap populism.”

He argued that there are many municipal rabbis in communities whose salaries are anchored in government decisions rather than legislation. Local religious councils often “don’t want to take part in paying their salaries and so we are simply creating a route that includes… a special budget for these positions.”

The bill’s progress from proposal to law took well over a year, due to opposition by Shas’s coalition partners, which generated significant anger in the party against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Members of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee debate a measure on funding local religious councils, July 2, 2024. (Sam Sokol/The Times of Israel)

An earlier version of the Rabbis Law, which would have cost taxpayers tens of millions of shekels annually in salaries for hundreds of new neighborhood rabbis employed by local municipalities, was blocked in the Knesset last year by members of the prime minister’s Likud party.

The second, softened, version of the bill also faced considerable opposition from National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who torpedoed it on three separate occasions as part of an effort to exert leverage on Netanyahu in an unrelated political feud, before it was finally passed on Wednesday evening.

“We have been trying to pass this law for over a year,” Malkieli told Haredi radio station Kol Berama on Thursday.

“This law allows the Religious Affairs Ministry to expand religious services. Even non-religious people want to have religious services in their area. We have corrected a long-standing injustice.”

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