MK (Yahadut Hatorah) Rabbi Uri Maklev is opposed to the state marriage registry reform announced on Sunday, 10 Sivan 5773 by Minister of Religious Services (Bayit Yehudi) Naftali Bennett. In essence, the reform permits one to register with a Rabbinate Religious Council of choice. One will no longer be compelled to report to the religious council in the city one lives.
According to Maklev, “This does not represent a reform in religious services but a reform in Halacha.” Maklev fears that regional registration will open the door for marriage that lacks yichus, for those disqualified to wed (פסולי חיתון), non-Jews and others to pose as Jews. “The traditional community which does not wish to see its children marry goyim will no longer rely on the system.”
Maklev feels the reform simply tries to hide its true identity, “citizen services” which arouse his suspicions. He adds such a reform has not been seen in other ministries or agencies, including the Interior Ministry or Bituach Leumi,” which do not permit anyone from any city to enter any office to address one’s affairs, but one must report to a local office in the city of one’s residence.
“Reforms, competition and privatization are fine for the Economy Ministry, and I wish they would do just that, but not for services upon which Halacha is involved…”
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
7 Responses
Any authentic orthodox individual is in consternation from this marriage reform.
(It has been bandied about for several years )
Essentially,if some religious council(out of many dozen) was corrupt or badly lax ,the situation was limited to that or those locales.
Now The evil ones intend to allow the whole country to register with that locale.
If in fact it was illegal (and the law was enforced) to have a de facto (or what some say “intimate”) relationship except within marriage – the registry would be meaningful. In fact, non-frum Israeli routinely engage in “intimate” behavior with people other than their official spouses. Such behavior is considered quite acceptable in non-frum circles. Such relations, including those involving goyim, even involving people married to others (assuming one accepts as valid Israeli rabbinate supervised marriages involving non-religious Jews), are lawful, tolerated and common-place in secular Israel.
The result is that a marriage registry loses any value in terms of determining yichus or kashrus of people. If anyone, in Israel or elsewhere, wants to be sure that their child is not marrying a goy or a mamzer, they will have to do more than check official records. In practice, frum Jews assume someone who is frum is kosher, and unless they are incredibly naive, they should assume that anyone who is not obviously frum is questionable. In practice, since frum people rarely marry hilonim, this isn’t a problem except for a new Baal Tseuvah.
Indeed it is hardly unknown for a new “Baal tsuvah” to discover that he/she isn’t Jewish, which is very easy to remedy since they are already Shomer Mitsvos (with a complication arising only if the BT is a woman who is about to marry a kohen).
So perhaps instead of fighting over a “marriage registry” that has no real significance, they should be arguing over matters that involve real “life or death” issues for the frum community. Our survival is based on our learnign Torah and doing mitsvos, whereas whom the hilonim are sleeping with really isn’t significant.
Maklev typically is understating the travesty
“This does not represent a reform in religious services but a reform in Halacha.” — This year’s motto will be ‘Any change from the past Rabbanic statues is REFORM”, what total nonsense!!! Investigating an individuals yichus can be done no matter where a person registers for marriage.
To a kuperman:
You write:
Our survival is based on our learnign Torah and doing mitsvos, whereas whom the hilonim are sleeping with really isn’t significant.
What’s up with this us and them. Do you really lack such ahavas Yisrael that you are willing to mafkir our non frum brothers and sisters?
The rabbanut is working to ensure all yidden, not just frum ones, have a halachically acceptable marriage
#5 – However if the person does not wish to be married “kdas Moshe ve-Yisrael” and has no intention of being bound by halacha, by going through the “halachically acceptable marriage” we are putting a michshol lifnei iver and causing them to end up doing very serious averias (particularly the woman and the men she “associates” with) and cause the children to be mamzerim. Better they should have a civil ceremony or no ceremony at all, and produce children that are not mamzerim. Being dan le-kaf zechus, I suspect that many rabbanim have no idea how much gloi arayos take place among the hilonim (though if you really want to research, there have been studies done checking on paternity – the results are pretty).
Akuperma- You forgot to mention bashing “hilonim” on this site, as being part of our survival. You only mentioned Torah and mitzvos…