The Knesset advanced in a preliminary reading on Wednesday a bill that would grant the Chief Rabbinate the authority to determine prayer arrangements at Judaism’s holiest accessible site, the Western Wall, by anchoring its rulings into primary legislation. It passed 56-47.
Formally, the proposed amendment to the 1967 Protection of Holy Places Law does something narrow: it seeks to move the definition of what constitutes “desecration” at Jewish holy sites out of regulatory practice and into statute – and to stipulate that such determinations must conform to the directives of the Chief Rabbinate.
Substantively, it does something far broader.
As noted by the Israel Democracy Institute, the bill does not explicitly abolish egalitarian prayer at the southern Ezrat Yisrael plaza, nor does it mandate changes to the existing physical layout of prayer spaces at the Wall. What it does do is entrench and reinforce the exclusive status of the Chief Rabbinate as a decision-making authority – effectively subordinating the regulation of conduct at the Western Wall to one of the most substantive Orthodox authorities.
This is not a small legal tweak. It is an attempt to resolve, by legislation, a decades-long national dispute over whether the Kotel is first and foremost an Orthodox synagogue or a Jewish-national site that must accommodate the religious practices of a global people.
The context around the bill
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly withdrew the bill from the Ministerial Committee for Legislation earlier this week, likely to avoid triggering a crisis with Diaspora Jewry. It returned as a private member’s bill, sponsored by Noam MK Avi Maoz, with coalition lawmakers granted a free vote, many of whom supported it.
The legislative push comes in the wake of a High Court decision last week that, despite political rhetoric to the contrary, did not alter the prayer arrangements in the main Western Wall plaza. Instead, it ordered the state to move forward with long-delayed accessibility and development measures at Ezrat Yisrael, an area designated for mixed-gender and non-Orthodox worship under the now-frozen 2016 Western Wall compromise.
In other words, the court demanded implementation of existing government commitments. It did not impose a new status quo. That distinction matters.
For more than 30 years, Israeli society has struggled, politically and legally, with the question of how to balance freedom of worship with religious sensibilities at the Wall. The 2016 compromise, adopted by a Netanyahu-led government and supported at the time by ultra-Orthodox coalition partners, sought to distinguish between the main plaza, which would remain under Orthodox administration, and the southern section at Robinson’s Arch, which would be expanded, regulated, and made accessible for egalitarian prayer.
That compromise was frozen in 2017, even as the government reaffirmed its commitment to develop the southern plaza.
The current bill threatens to collapse that distinction over time, not by banning non-Orthodox prayer outright, but by vesting final authority over what constitutes prohibited conduct in a religious body that does not represent the majority of world Jewry.
World Zionist Organization vice chairman Yizhar Hess put it bluntly: “Today’s approval of moving forward with legislation to imprison Jews who pray at the Egalitarian Kotel will always be remembered as a dark day in the history of Zionism and the nation-state of the Jewish people.
“Were legislation like this moved forward in any other country, limiting the rights of Jews to pray according to their custom at their holy sites, many of the members of Knesset who supported this legislation may even call it antisemitic.”
More than half of Israel’s Jewish public visits the Western Wall at least once a year; millions more do so from abroad. It is the closest thing the Jewish world has to a shared civic-religious commons, a space where soldiers, bar mitzvah boys, secular tourists, and worshipers stand shoulder to shoulder before stones that have absorbed centuries of exile and return.
At a moment when Jewish unity is already strained, it is difficult to see how narrowing the terms of belonging at the Kotel serves any national interest. Even if the bill stalls in committee or is ultimately struck down in court, the preliminary vote sends a message that Israel is prepared to legislate one stream of Judaism’s authority over a site that carries meaning for all.
Leaders would do well to ask themselves: Who, exactly, does that benefit?