The Chief Rabbinate Council this week found a way to neutralize the new law, at least for the time being. The Chief Rabbinate announced candidates registering to get married must do so in their own community for as long as the new nationwide computerized database system is not in place.
The rabbonim point out that for as long as there is no nationwide system in place they are not able of checking the status of applicants and permitting people to register at any local rabbinate may chas v’sholom lead to polygamy or intermarriage. Therefore, the Rabbinate is not permitting applicants to register in any city in line with the new law, but one will be compelled to register in one’s city of residence.
The Chief Rabbinate has been in touch with Deputy Minister of Religious Services Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan, who has agreed the new law cannot be implemented until the nationwide computer system is up and running.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
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2 Responses
There is no effective prohibition of intermarriage or polygamy in Israel – or in any legal system that is unwilling to criminalize non-maritial initmate relations. Frum people don’t have the problem since they marry other frum people – and the rest of Israel couldn’t care less.
All this sort of law does is enrich those who benefit from the patronage (i.e. the zionist rabbinate), and annoy everyone else who sees people claiming to be rabbi harassing them (and since this adding a requirement to halacha that doesn’t exist it probably is prohibited as Bal Tosef).
akuperma you conveniently forget that there are plenty of people who “return to the fold”, the current system makes it easy to marry those people (and there are also of course ‘mixed’ couples of religious and not yet religious people, some special people can make that work), were the system to not work that way then indeed only religious people keeping track of their lineage would be able to marry each other.
The above would constitute a terrible and unneeded split in Am Yisrael the likes of which we haven’t seen yet (yes it happens outside Israel to some extent, but there the non-religious people generally assimilate and don’t care (enough/at all) about their Jewishness, this is not the case in Israel).