JERUSALEM – To be married in Israel, immigrants must prove their Jewish ancestry to the country’s Chief Rabbinate.
Couples can solicit a letter from their hometown rabbis or present their parents’ Jewish marriage contracts. Sometimes they even bring a Yiddish-speaking grandmother before a rabbinical court. In the end, every claim has to pass through one man: a midlevel bureaucrat named Itamar Tubul.
Tubul, 35, is the soft-spoken rabbi who heads the Chief Rabbinate’s personal status division – a job that places him at the center of a brewing crisis between the Chief Rabbinate and the American Modern Orthodox community.
In October, Tubul rejected a proof-of-Judaism letter from a prominent liberal Orthodox rabbi, Avi Weiss. The move sparked widespread outrage that Rabbi Weiss, a longtime synagogue leader in New York who had vouched for the Jewishness of many Israeli immigrants in the past, was suddenly having his reliability called into question.
Tubul rejected the letter from Rabbi Weiss after two members of the Rabbinical Council of America, the Modern Orthodox rabbinic organization of which Weiss is a longstanding member, questioned Weiss’s commitment to Orthodox Jewish law.
“They said there were problems with his worldview,” Tubul told JTA. “His system raised doubts regarding his non-deviation from what is accepted in matters of proof of Judaism and personal status.”
The Chief Rabbinate says it is considering whether it can trust Rabbi Weiss, who has pioneered a number of controversial innovations in the Orthodox world, most recently with his decision to ordain women as clergy through a new religious seminary called Yeshivat Maharat.
Critics say the process for evaluating American rabbis lacks transparency and objective standards.
To make his recommendations, Tubul relies on a network of personal contacts. His first step is to confer with judges on nine U.S. rabbinical courts approved by the Chief Rabbinate. If the judges don’t know the rabbi in question or doubt his credentials, they refer Tubul to local colleagues.
After soliciting their recommendations, Tubul accepts or rejects the letter.
“There aren’t enough checks and balances in the system,” said Rabbi Seth Farber, the founder of Itim, an Israeli organization that guides couples through the Chief Rabbinate’s bureaucracy. “This is all capricious. It’s all who they happen to know. That’s not a way to run a state.”
Tubul told JTA that he corresponds with at least three rabbis regarding every American letter he investigates and never rejects a letter based solely on an initial negative recommendation.
“We check every possibility to complete the puzzle,” he said. “If someone says you can’t trust [a letter], we don’t reject it. Sometimes there are interested parties that we don’t want to deal with, so we investigate further.”
In the wake of the Weiss decision, the Chief Rabbinate has entered negotiations to give the RCA more say in the evaluation process. According to a draft agreement obtained by JTA, the Chief Rabbinate will consult with the RCA on every questionable letter before making a decision.
In addition, the RCA would provide the Chief Rabbinate with a list of rabbis accredited to give proofs of Judaism, marriage and divorce.
“For the Chief Rabbinate to rely more formally on the RCA for approval of these letters is a question of helping the process along,” Rabbi Mark Dratch, the council’s executive vice president, told JTA.
“Cooperation will help both sides be able to serve more appropriately and prevent the kind of embarrassment that exists from time to time.”
The RCA does not have the power to override Tubul’s decisions. Rabbinate spokesman Ziv Maor told JTA that the RCA will be a partner in the process, but final authority will still rest with Tubul. Nothing in the draft precludes individuals within the RCA from conveying their concerns about particular rabbis directly to the Chief Rabbinate. And while Rabbi Dratch told JTA that the organization stands by Rabbi Weiss’s authority to vouch for Jewishness, he acknowledged that most of the group’s members do not support Rabbi Weiss’s various innovations.