Rabbi David Stav, chairman of the national-religious rabbinical association
Tzohar, announced Wednesday night, via a YouTube video, that he would be
standing as a candidate for the position of chief rabbi of Israel.
Stav’s
long-awaited announcement has been expected since last August, when Tzohar began
a campaign to prompt the chief rabbinate to adopt a more modern approach to the
Jewish life in the country. The election of the new Ashkenazi and Sephardi Chief
Rabbis will take place in June.
The appointments are made by secret ballot of a
150-member selection panel in which is comprised of representatives from the
government, the Knesset and regional religious councils. The majority of the
current members are considered haredi, but this could change after the
elections. Tzohar has frequently taken issue with the rabbinate’s approach to
the general public and founded its flagship free-of-charge marriage program to
provide an alternative to what it describes as “Israel’s strict rabbinic
bureaucracy.”
The chief rabbi positions have been filled by haredi rabbis
for many years. The last chief rabbis to be considered national-religious were
Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu and Rabbis Avraham Shapira, who left office in
1993.
During the four-and-a-half minute video, Stav said that during the
17 years of Tzohar’s activities, the organisation had come to realise that, “a
great danger is forming in front of our eyes to the very existence of the Jewish
people here in the state.”
Stav was referring to the growing numbers of
young couples who go abroad to get married in civil ceremonies instead of in
religious marriages in Israel. According to CBS data, approximately one third of
secular Jewish citizens who get married, wed in civil marriages abroad. The
phenomenon presents a problem to the future of Orthodox Jewish marriage since
proof is required before marrying that a person is Jewish, which is usually
provided by presenting the halachically mandated wedding certificate of each
spouses’ parents. “So we are creating, by our own hands, two people here within
the next decade or two: one a Jewish nation, religious or traditional, the
second a non-Jewish Israeli nation,” Stav claimed. “There is no greater or
significant destruction than this phenomenon.”
Tzohar largely blames the
rabbinate for the decline in Jewish marriage in Israel due to what it describes
as its unwelcoming and bureaucratic modus operandi. Stav said that every year
more and more Israelis “recoil from the belittling attitude,” of the rabbinate,
and the “fear of the rabbinate’s divorce process,” The rabbi said that for this
reason, as well as increasing divisions between religious and secular
communities in Israel, and and the disconnection of many people from Judaism and
tradition led Tzohar to demand “a deep and substantial change to the chief
rabbinate to return it to the path of embracing people.”