Coalition Chairman MK Ofir Katz (Likud) on Tuesday announced, “After speaking with the heads of the coalition factions, as well as with Shas Chairman Rabbi Aryeh Deri, it was decided that at this time it would not be right to promote this controversial legislation. Therefore, the Rabbis Bill will be removed from the agenda.”
The bill aimed to solve the severe shortages of city rabbis in Israel, because dozens of municipalities exist without a rabbi. According to the bill, city rabbis will be elected by committees that would be governed by the minister of religious services and not the mayor.
Also: city rabbis’ terms will be extended to ten years, as is the case with the country’s chief rabbis. Like supreme court judges, city rabbis must retire when they reach age 70, however, the proposed bill permits the minister to extend their term by five years after their 70th birthday.
Currently, some 35 municipalities function without a city rabbi. This means that the local religious committees take care of services such as kashrut, weddings, mikvahs, and burials. But it appears from the new bill that it aims not only to fill the existing gap in 35 municipalities but to appoint as many as 600 city rabbis in municipalities that don’t have them – not by the mayor but by the minister.
The current law gives the local municipalities 75% of the vote to appoint a city rabbi, including the local council members, while the Ministry of Religious Services has only one representative in the appointment process. The new bill keeps the municipality’s share of the vote at between 30% and less than 50%, while the ministry presumably controls 51% of the vote.
The cost of appointing 600 new city rabbis is expected to reach about NIS 100 million ($27 million), to be paid by the local taxpayers. It appears from the bill’s draft that it does not consider the possibility that a municipality does not have a city rabbi because it does not want or need one.
The bill was taken off the agenda on Tuesday morning not so much because coalition members Benny Gantz and Ze’ev Elkin publicly attacked it – which they did – but because Likud Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli and Likud MKs Moshe Saada and Dan Illouz sent a letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu calling on him to freeze the bill, arguing it would promote strife in the country at a time of war.
“The slogan, ‘Together we will win,’ is not intended for decorative stickers and street billboards, but as a compass for making decisions,” they told the PM.
They continued: “The attempt to transfer the center of power in the appointment of local rabbis from the public to the Minister of Religious Services in our view expresses a centralizing trend, which weakens the public’s ability to choose a candidate for a position that matches the characteristics of the local community. In times of war, it is appropriate to give up controversial bills. But instead, several politicians are pouncing on this issue as if it were a matter of life and death.”
