by Rabbi Alan Silverstein, PhD | President of Mercaz Olami (Representing the global Masorti/Conservative movement)
From 1517 until 1917, the entire Middle East was governed by the Ottoman Empire as a “caliphate,” an Islamic sacred polity. Within the vast terrain of Arab lands and North Africa, religious governance and a measure of minority group autonomy were assured through the “millet system.” The creation of “millet courts” enabled Istanbul to appoint a global chief cleric for each faith group. For Jews, a chief rabbi (“chacham bashi,” later renamed “rishon letzion”) operated out of Istanbul. This official was charged with administering his faith’s empire-wide bureaucracy of regional “chief” rabbis assigned to area after area.
The Ottoman Empire weakened and collapsed under the weight of being on the losing side in World War I. The victorious Western powers assumed control and assigned a “mandate” to the British and the French for the administration of designated areas. Palestine was placed under the control of the United Kingdom, which sought to not tamper with the Ottoman law status quo. Under Britain’s Mandatory Palestine government, during World War I, London-based Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook was appointed as the first mandatory Ashkenazi chief rabbi, serving alongside the Sephardi/Mizrachi rishon letzion.
Rav Kook “was a visionary, a leader who sought to bridge the gaps between secular and religious Jewish communities,” said journalist Zvika Klein. “He wasn’t just another political figure in a rabbi’s cloak” — presumably like Israel’s chief rabbis today. “He saw the secular Zionist movement as part of a divine plan…. He believed that even the non-religious efforts to build the state would eventually align with Jewish spiritual life.”
Rav Kook sought to use the Chief Rabbinate to bring all types of Jews closer to Judaism and to elevate the status of his faith in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike.
Led by Torah luminaries, the Zionist infrastructure accepted “The Rabbinate” as Judaism’s official authority. The Rabbinate certified conversions, marriages, divorces, and kashrut, and spread Torah messages relating ancient texts that applied to current concerns. Rav Kook also affirmed the necessity of Palestine Jewry’s right and ability to conduct their own self-defense. Klein acknowledged that Rav Kook “understood the necessity of a military to safeguard the [emerging] Jewish state and balance defense with higher moral principles. His legacy was one of proactive, positive engagement with…challenges.”
Acclaimed mainstream religious leaders remained acceptable even after Rav Kook’s death in 1935. These revered Zionist Torah scholars included rabbis Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, Yitzhak Nissim, and Isser Unterman, as well as Shlomo Goren and Ovadia Yosef (whose terms ended in 1983). Rabbi David Golinkin assessed that these towering leaders “were widely respected for their Torah knowledge and courageous halachic decisions.” For example, Chief Rabbi Herzog (grandfather of Israel’s current president), who served from 1936 until 1959, had earned popularity for having openly opposed the restrictive British White Paper on Jewish immigration. He also made efforts to save Jews in Europe during World War II, and he contributed significantly to the corpus of Torah scholarship.
Sadly, the lofty platform from which these estimable leaders promoted Judaism eroded amid a scourge of politicization, corruption, and nepotism. As assessed by Rabbi Golinkin, under pressure from Haredi parties in the Knesset, as of 1983 the chief rabbis have been “chosen not [necessarily] for their merits but rather for political reasons.” The nadir of the Chief Rabbinate was the term of Rabbi Yona Metzger (2003-13). As Tzvika Klein reported, the Metzger era “ended in a flurry of legal troubles, namely bribery, fraud, money laundering, theft, and breach of trust.” The institution understandably lost the public’s trust.
Accordingly, in 2013, as recorded by Rabbi Golinkin, the process of selecting the chief rabbi by the Ministry for Religious Services degenerated into “a lengthy political campaign which included curses, newspaper ads, and…deals between candidates and political parties…. The only thing missing from most of the campaigning was a religious message…. The election was not about bringing Israelis closer to Judaism but about political power.” Additionally, nepotism became evident. In 2013 the two candidates selected for service were Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, son of Ovadia Yosef, and Rabbi David Lau, son of former Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, both controlled by Israel’s Haredi parties.
With the status of the Chief Rabbinate in decline, in early July 2024 the 10-year terms of Rabbi Lau and Rabbi Yosef came to an end. The succession process experienced procedural delays. As Tzvika Klein pondered, “Chief rabbis retire, but did anybody notice?” Problems had proliferated in conversions, marriages, divorces, kashrut supervision, and so forth. Previously, the Rabbinate would not accept conversions, marriages, or divorces conducted by non-Orthodox rabbis. This nonrecognition now extended to most Orthodox rabbis in the Diaspora as well. Securing kosher supervision became more and more expensive and unreliable. Battles ensued regarding access to local mikva’ot. Some 450,000 Russian olim of questionable Jewish “status” were left without recourse. “Agunot” — women abandoned by their husbands or whose husbands had disappeared and who were therefore “chained” and unable to remarry — remained in limbo. Increasing numbers of engaged couples avoided marriage ceremonies conducted under the authority of the Rabbinate.
Rabbi Golinkin concluded that “the sad fact of the matter is that the Chief Rabbinate of Israel is [today] a coercive bureaucracy without a constituency. It is disliked by Haredim, religious Zionists, Conservative and Reform Jews, and secular Israelis alike…. It only exists at this point so that political parties can use it as a tool of influence and patronage.” A survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute revealed that 72 percent of Israelis would prefer either the end of a state rabbinate or one emerging in a different format. Opinions have proliferated regarding a remedy to these mounting societal concerns. How can Israel’s Judaism be subject to a coercive and ineffective national rabbinic system, a remnant of the Ottomans?
Rabbi Kenneth Brander of Efrat, president of the Ohr Torah Stone network, wrote: “Israel needs a rabbinate that uses Halacha to serve the wide spectrum of the state’s Jewish public while also playing a leadership role in the changing needs of the Diaspora. The status quo will only continue to fuel public cynicism about religion, promote divisions in society, and put the state’s role in the Jewish world at risk.” Rav Brander urges modest changes, putting a more friendly face upon the Rabbanut. “When it comes to weddings, for instance, simply being more friendly to couples, including those who do not identify as religious, would go a long way to make sure they get married under a halachic chupah.”
Rabbi David Stav, a leader of the more user-friendly non-Haredi Tzohar rabbinical organization, offered himself as an alternative candidate for chief rabbi in the 2013 election. However, he failed to outmaneuver the Haredi-sanctioned candidates. Yet even critics of the status quo often were lukewarm in offering support. On the surface, Rav Stav did seek to democratize the Rabbinate both in its matters of selection and in its accountability to the public. Yet the objection to him was that he wanted to sustain the unacceptable status quo; he simply sought to replace the Haredi chief rabbis with members of his Tzohar group.
A more extensive reform of the Rabbinate has been advocated by Rabbi Seth Farber and his organization, Itim. Rav Farber looked not to America’s separation of church and state but to the British Chief Rabbinate (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z”l),with inklings of Rav Kook’s inspiring vision for the position. The chief rabbi should serve as a personal role model for all Israeli Jews, to whom his Torah messages would be addressed. As in the UK, the official Rabbinate would retain authority over kashrut supervision and still embody all facets of the state-sanctioned dimension of Judaism. However, akin to British Jewry, the chief rabbi and his entourage would relinquish control on matters of personal status. Each “stream” would operate marriages, conversions, divorces, etc. on its own terms.
Conservative/Masorti leaders Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary; Reuven Hammer (z”l), former president of the international Rabbinical Assembly; and Rabbi David Golinkin, president of the Schechter Institutes, called for the abolition of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate. In their view, Judaism would remain the official state religion of Medinat Yisrael, but the link between Israel’s polity and a specific stream of Judaism must be severed. Severed too would be the application of coercive power by any specific political party in matters of Judaism. Given the urgent needs of vast numbers of Russian olim, civil marriage and divorce should be legalized, along with leniency in criteria for burial in Jewish cemeteries.
For now, interim personnel are functioning in place of chief rabbis — Rabbi Eliezer Igra as interim president of the Supreme Rabbinical Court, and Rabbi Yaakov Roja as interim president of the Council of the Chief Rabbinate. Leading candidates for these roles once again face charges of nepotism from within Haredi rabbinic dynasties — Be’er Sheva Chief Rabbi Yehudah Deri, brother of Shas leader Aryeh Deri, and Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau, brother of the current Ashkenazi chief rabbi. The prominence once again of dynastic figures intensifies Rav Stav’s call for unifying the two chief rabbi positions into one. Having both an Ashkenazi and a Mizrachi chief rabbi was a post-World War I creation of the British Mandate, not a move in accordance with Torah law. “Instead of being a source of unity,” Rav Stav said, having two chief rabbis “is a source of divisions….” There used to be “a few arguments for why we have two rabbis: The rabbis would be able to balance one another — so if one is too liberal, the other could be more conservative. Or if one was an expert in one field of Halacha, the other could specialize in another.” Rav Stav noted, however, that the two-headed Chief Rabbinate instead “invites conflicts on a constant basis.”
Given all of this controversy, Rabbis Schorsch, Hammer, and Golinkin all aspire to have the Chief Rabbinate revert to the days of Rav Abraham Kook. The goal should be to unify the Jewish people rather than fragment them further. They advocate a Diaspora-style “free marketplace” of Jewish faith. Every Israeli Jew should be permitted to select his or her preferred rabbi. This would apply to matters of marriage, divorce, conversion, and burial; of kashrut supervision; of access to mikva’ot; of state funding for community rabbis; and so forth. Masorti leaders are confident that free and open competition will not alienate Israelis from Yiddishkeit. Instead, more and more Israeli and Diaspora Jews will come to love Judaism and to respect Israel’s rabbis.
Rabbi Alan Silverstein, PhD, was religious leader of Congregation Agudath Israel in Caldwell, NJ, for more than four decades, retiring in 2021. He served as president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis (1993-95); as president of the World Council of Conservative/Masorti Synagogues (2000-05); and as chair of the Foundation for Masorti Judaism in Israel (2010-14). He currently serves as president of Mercaz Olami, representing the world Masorti/Conservative movement. He is the author of “It All Begins with a Date: Jewish Concerns about Interdating,” “Preserving Jewishness in Your Family: After Intermarriage Has Occurred,” and “Alternatives to Assimilation: The Response of Reform Judaism to American Culture, 1840-1930.”