A very ‘Jerusalem’ chief rabbi race

Nine years after promising to put a religious Zionist at the helm of the city’s rabbinate, Mayor Nir Barkat got his wish.

By PEGGY CIDOR
Mayor Nir Barkat shares a toast with chief rabbis Arye Stern and Shlomo Amar. (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Mayor Nir Barkat shares a toast with chief rabbis Arye Stern and Shlomo Amar.
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
The mini-drama ended at 7:40 p.m. with an official announcement by Mayor Nir Barkat to the local politicians, activists, journalists and members of Jerusalem’s Religious Council, who had packed the large city hall in Safra Square since the wee hours of Tuesday.
Rabbi Meir Kahane, president of the elections committee, was then handed the microphone, announcing what had already leaked a few minutes earlier in the corridors leading from the mayor’s chamber to the hall: Namely that the mayor had succeeded, and the winners in Jerusalem’s chief rabbi race were Rabbi Arye Stern, who got 27 out of the 47 votes for the Ashkenazi poll, and Rabbi Shlomo Amar (Sephardi, with 28 votes).
The tension caused by the last-minute candidacy of Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, currently chief rabbi of Safed – submitted just a few days before the list was closed – had brought some action into these elections, in which at least one of the two new chief rabbis would have to be from the religious-Zionist stream. But it was not just Eliyahu who brought some alertness to this campaign; Rabbi Haim Amsalem also added some unexpected turbulence by throwing his hat into the ring.
Barkat’s choices were elected in the end, but as occurs too often in such races, the not-so-pleasant realities behind the scenes and the not-sospiritually- elevated forces behind the rabbinical milieu were revealed.
From the beginning of his entry into the political arena, Barkat wanted to bring some innovation to the venerable institution of Jerusalem’s Chief Rabbinate. Probably still unaware of the mighty powers and interests paving the rabbinical scene, he presented – while still at the head of the opposition at city council, about nine years ago – the idea of condensing the task into one city chief rabbi, arguing that the time was ripe for abolishing the obsolete division into Sephardi and Ashkenazi.
Nine years, and a lot of political battles, have taught Barkat that even a hi-tech success cannot change everything. He hence renounced the idea of a single chief rabbi, and moved on to his next target: endowing Jerusalem with chief rabbis from religious-Zionist society – if not both of them, at least one.
From that point, there was an unprecedented collaboration between him and the religious affairs minister – who is also the Jerusalem affairs minister, and the leader of Bayit Yehudi – Naftali Bennett.
Stern is indeed from the flesh and blood of religious-Zionist society, though this cannot exactly be said about Amar. Formerly chief rabbi of Israel and a Sephardi haredi, Amar is still by no means a representative of the ultra-Orthodox sector.
Eliyahu, on the other hand, has over the years uttered more than a few problematic declarations regarding the status of Arab citizens, homosexuals, secular Jews in general and women’s status in particular – which raised a few red flags in the eyes of the city’s pluralistic groups and associations.
Even Barkat, who owed Eliyahu’s family due to its open support for him in the mayoral race just one year ago, could not ignore this.
Thus Amar – whose wife, present at the short ceremony enthroning the two winners at city hall, didn’t join the public in singing “Hatikva” – nevertheless became the best candidate for all, creating one of those surreal realities so identified with Jerusalem, with the most secular members of the electing corpus lobbying for his election with all their power.
And Amsalem? Well, he ended up with two votes, remaining once again a sort of distant dream: A Sephardi moderate attentive to the needs of all, including women, raising high hopes that never come to fruition.