Critics charge new regulations will hand Shas control over municipal rabbinates

‘They will actually control all the local rabbinates, all the local rabbis in Israel,’ says Rabbi David Stav from 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"

Anti-government protesters and police stand next to the Jerusalem Rabbinate and Religious Council, May 4, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Anti-government protesters and police stand next to the Jerusalem Rabbinate and Religious Council, May 4, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

After more than a year of failed efforts, Shas appears poised to roll back a 2022 reform that had curbed the Religious Services Ministry’s role in the appointment of municipal rabbis, in a move that critics say will likely pave the way for the expansion of the ultra-Orthodox party’s influence across the country.

In a largely unnoticed maneuver last month, Religious Services Minister Michael Malkieli approved a sweeping new set of regulations diluting the voting power of local government officials in elections for city rabbis, doing away with term limits and allowing the state-funded clerics to also pull a paycheck from a second job.

The regulations also allow the government to unilaterally call elections to install rabbis in communities that have chosen to forego having a local religious council, creating more positions for taxpayer-funded rabbis to fill.

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.

However, the appointment process for the positions, traditionally seen as near-lifetime appointments, has long been beset by allegations of corruption and political horse-dealing, prompting a number of appeals to the High Court of Justice over the years along with highly critical state comptroller reports.

In an effort to depoliticize the selection process, and shift power away from the ultra-Orthodox, then-Religious Services Minister Matan Kahana signed off on a major reform of the system in 2022, setting ten-year term limits and increasing the number of representatives of local communities on the selection committees which choose between candidates.

Religious Services Minister Michael Malkieli attends a plenum session on the so-called Rabbis Bill in the Knesset, November 12, 2024. (Goldberg/Flash90)

Shas, an ultra-Orthodox party whose rabbinical leadership has long enjoyed outsized influence in the rabbinate, has sought to reverse the reforms since returning to the government nearly two years ago.

The party initially championed a so-called “Rabbis Bill,” which would have created hundreds of publicly funded jobs for Orthodox rabbis, while giving the Chief Rabbinate of Israel considerable say in the appointment of all new municipal rabbis.

The bill ran into significant opposition and ultimately was withdrawn from the Knesset agenda, prompting Shas to advance a softened version granting the religious services minister the power to allocate additional funds to local religious councils around the country.

At the same time, Malkieli quietly advanced the new regulations to undo many of Kahana’s reforms, which increased the number of local residents on the election committee at the expense of the influence of the religious services minister.

These changes have now been rolled back, with the members of the local council and the head of the local religious council (usually a government appointee) sharing half the seats on the committee.

The other half of the seats will be divided between public representatives. However, under the new regulations, the minister will be empowered to choose two-thirds of these delegates “in consultation with the local authority,” while the rest will be appointed by the municipal government “with the consent of the minister” — essentially giving Malkieli a veto on electors with whom he disagrees.

Rabbi Seth Farber, head of ITIM (Courtesy)

“They’re basically fixing the elections” and “taking all the power for themselves,” alleged Rabbi Seth Farber, the director of the ITIM nonprofit, which together with the relatively liberal Tzohar rabbinic group is suing the government in an effort to block the rollback of Kahana’s reforms.

If approved by the courts, Farber believes that Malkieli’s changes would violate Israelis’ freedom of religion while disenfranchising local governments and acting as a jobs program for Shas-affiliated rabbis.

“There’s no centralized authority that has the right to impose a rabbi on me,” he argued, adding that by doing away with term limits, Malkieli would essentially have created a new status quo for generations to come.

“We talk about the fact that the president has so much power because he can determine what’s going to happen in the American judicial system for the next 50 years if he gets to appoint one or two judges right? Here, one minister is going to get to appoint, you know, probably almost half the rabbis in this country for lifetime appointments. It’s an absurdity,” he said.

Rabbi David Stav, co-founder and chairman of the Tzohar rabbinical organization, agreed, telling The Times of Israel that just like mayors, municipal rabbis “should be elected by the people.”

“By doing this, they will actually control all the local rabbinates, all the local rabbis in Israel,” creating a situation in which “no Modern Orthodox rabbis will be able to get elected based on these regulations,” Stav said.

Rabbi David Stav, co-founder and chairman of the Tzohar rabbinical organization, speaks at the 5th annual Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem on June 20, 2013. (Flash 90)

But while the issue, on its face, looks like a religious one, it also has a strong political component, argues Dr. Ariel Finkelstein, a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute who focuses on issues of religion and state.

Rabbis in the field form “a big part of building the power” of the party and “are actually part of the party’s apparatus,” he said.

That process of building out the party’s power base has been on hold for the past week, however, following an interim order by the High Court preventing the ministry from moving forward on the appointment of rabbis until it responds to Itim and Tzohar’s petition — something it had failed to do by Thursday afternoon’s deadline.

“We are hopeful that the court will prevent the ministry from simply bulldozing through tens of rabbis who will then have lifetime positions while the court is hearing the case,” said Farber.

Both Malkieli and Kahana declined to comment.

Judah Ari Gross contributed to this report.

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