Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that the Interior Ministry must recognize the marriage of Israeli couples who wed via online civil ceremonies through the US state of Utah.
The ruling is a glaring violation of the religious status quo as it enables Israelis who are halachically forbidden to each other to marry within Israel for the first time.
The phenomenon of online civil marriages via Utah began during the COVID pandemic in 2020, when couples were unable to travel abroad and decided to take advantage of Utah’s new policy of allowing wedding ceremonies to be performed via Zoom.
Then-Interior Minister Aryeh Deri ordered the Population and Immigration Authority to freeze the registration of the online marriages. Ayelet Shaked, who served as the Interior Minister in the Bennett-Lapid government, continued Deri’s policy during her term but meanwhile, a number of couples submitted an appeal to the court against the decision.
Over 1,000 couples have wed through Utah’s online services since 2020.
“In another political move, the Supreme Court today proved once again the necessity of the judicial reform,” Shas MK Moshe Arbel responded to the decision. “The Supreme Court’s recognition, on Purim, of civil marriages performed on Zoom is a sad joke at the expense of all of Israel’s citizens, religious and traditional, and more than anything, expresses its aspiration to promote the values of a state of all its citizens and the elimination of the state’s Jewish identity.”
Yisrael Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman welcomed the ruling, saying it was “good that the Supreme Court stood up to the religious coercion of Deri and his friends who are trying to lead us into a halachic state.”
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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8 Responses
Zionism is diametrically opposed to Judaism.
no one has to recognize an illegal marriage….keep your gentile thoughts to yourselves….
Any work performed on the very Holy day of פורים shall never experience מזל, hence this evil marriage by Zoom, shall never see any success into becoming the new procedure in 🇮🇱, and likewise for the entire future power & existence of this wicked Supreme Court
People are finally realizing that this fight against the reforms are not about Democracy or anything else BUT a fight against controlling the country’s ability to enact laws against Hashem and his Torah
yad al keis Kah
1. If a foreign jurisdictions regards the “place” (meaning the governing law) of a wedding to be where the person officiating (which in Christian tradition, it the most important person for the wedding) is, then it would be understandable that a zoom wedding would be seen as being performed where the cleric or state official conducting the wedding is located, even if the bride and groom are elsewhere (connected by zoom, just as in the past they could post be represented by proxies).
2. If the bride and groom are in one place, halacha would probably focus on that place since in Jewish wedding the “officiant” is merely a legal advisor or at best a “master of ceremonies”, though perhaps the witnesses have to physically be in the same place as the bride and groom. If the wedding were in Israel (bride and groom, and witnesses), and it was a valid halachic wedding where the people getting married were both frum Jews who were for some reason avoiding the government’s rabbanut and the Misrad ha-Panim, but have a foreign marriage license and a foreign Orthodox rabbi via zoom to sign the foreign marriage documents, would it not be a clearly valid wedding that Israel would recognize – as the medinah recognizes valid foreign marriages and halacha recognizes kosher marriages not entered into in Eretz Yisrael.
3. The real objection is that the married couple are not allowed to marry according to halacha (e.g. same gender, one is a non-Jew, the woman is already married to someone else, etc.) but were getting married “abroad” since Israel law would prohibit such a marriage. Using Zoom rather than making them take a foreign vacation to get married is not the real problem with the treff marriage.
The Zionist “State” has no zechus kiyum to begin with, as it is a gross merida baHashem. So, maybe this will finally cause Hashem to have mercy and free us of the Zionist cataclysmic disaster and idol, and perhaps then culminate in the true and final geulah bb”a.
Just change the headlines. ISRAELS BATTLE AGAINST TORAH.
These r just the unfortunate predictable repercussions.
Fact.