Despite her earnest efforts, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked did not succeed in amassing the necessary support to appoint Dayan Rav Oriel Lavie Shlita to the Chief Rabbinate Supreme Beis Din as she hoped. However, the dati leumi community did register partial success as Dayan Rabbi Eliezer Igra Shlita was appointed to the Supreme Beis Din. This was made possible when Chief Rabbi Dovid Lau Shlita and Rishon L’Tzion Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef Shlita backed the appointment too.

It was decided the committee would reconvene in two weeks as they still must address the appointment of regional dayanim as per a High Court of Justice ruling. There are still many vacancies on the Chief Rabbinate Supreme Beis Din but the machlokes between the chareidim and dati leumi communities continues, preventing those appointments.

The head of the Chief Rabbinate Batei Din system, Rabbi Shimon Yaakobi explains that the Chief Rabbinate batei din system addresses some 90,000 cases annually, which easily explains the major backlog as there are 96 dayanim nationwide serving in 11 batei din. Nevertheless, despite the backlog and the near collapse of the system due to the caseload, the in-fighting between the sides prevents appointing the missing dayanim on both the regional and high beis din levels.

Rav Yaakobi adds the Chief Rabbinate explain the system needs dozens of new dayanim and batei din to permit providing timely adjudication of cases as one would expect the system to provide. They explain the current bizarre reality which includes an untenable caseload for the dayanim explains the delays in the batei din system but funds are not allocated to expand the system while its parallel, the civil judicial system, has expanded several fold over the past decades. The batei din on the other hand have not received the same funding to grow over recent decades, resulting in today’s abysmal reality.

Rabbi Yaakobi explains the dayanim are in an untenable situation that does not permit them to provide the adequate time to adjudicate cases. He adds while there are thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of persons in Israel eligible to become judges in the civil courts, there are only about 300 who have successfully completed all of the criteria and registered with the Chief Rabbinate to become dayanim and this is something that demands years of intensive Torah study. He rejects criticism of dayanim, who on the average earn about NIS 25,000 gross monthly salary, with the veterans reaching as high as NIS 70,000 after 30 years. He explains they are to be regarded the same as their civil court counterparts yet this is not so but the dayanim are constantly under fire while the collapse of the system is the result of a lack of batei din and dayanim, not because they are not working as they should.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)