Activists Demand Chief Rabbi Position Be Opened To Muslims

Exclusive occupancy to date of that office by Jews provides a strong suggestion of discriminatory behavior on the part of those who elect that authority.

Heikhal Shlomo, former seat of the Chief Rabbis; credit Martin Vines via Wikipedia.

Jerusalem, November 10 – Civil rights and equality NGOs petitioned the High Court today to order the State of Israel’s flagship religious institution to permit non-Jews to serve in the role of the authority on matters of Jewish law, charging that the exclusive occupancy to date of that office by Jews provides a strong suggestion of discriminatory behavior on the part of those who elect that authority.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), Adalah, and seven other human rights and social change organizations demanded Wednesday that the Court rule the Jewish monopoly on the Chief Rabbinate a form of illegal religious discrimination, and that the Rabbinate must therefore make room for Muslims, Christians, or other religious denominations at the helm of the institution.

“Israel and its supporters constantly insist that Arabs face no discrimination, and can participate fully in civic life here, but the exclusion of non-Jews from serving as Chief Rabbi – either Ashkenazic or Sephardic – gives the lie to that bit of apologetics,” argued Ronit Hed of Shatil, a capacity-building and consulting division of the New Israel Fund that helped the participating organizations draft the petition. “The whole time, Muslims have faced exclusion from one of the most prominent offices in the state, while Jews have stood for election to it more than a dozen times.” A council of Rabbis within the institution elects the two Chief Rabbis, who at present represent the seventh pair of such figures to occupy the position since the founding of modern State of Israel in 1948; never has the council given even a ingle vote to a non-Jewish candidate.

Critics of the Rabbinate as an institution accuse it of racism and other forms of prejudice even beyond the question of whether a Muslim can serve as Chief Rabbi. “Some of those rabbis also want to implement genetic testing to determine who has Jewish ancestry for purposes of marriage and other personal status questions,” observed ACRI activist Hugh Jennicks. “We shouldn’t be surprised that their bigotry isn’t restricted to people claiming to be Jews.”

Jennicks made the additional point that any attempt by Jewish activists to insist that Jews also serve on the analogous official state institutions for Muslims, Druze, and other confessional communities in Israel – which similarly operate a monopoly on many personal status and life cycle events within their communities – will constitute not activism toward equality, but yet another example of Jewish settler-colonialism.

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