Honour, haredi-style

Religious Affairs: Honour, haredi-style

Which restaurants and food products are kosher and which are not? Who is allowed to get married and who is not? Who can be a rabbi and who cannot?

Last week, elections took place to choose the state-empowered body – the Chief Rabbinate Council – that is supposed to answer these questions. The elections were an upset. The non-hassidic, Lithuanian-haredi rabbinic leadership, which gradually has been gaining more power within the Chief Rabbinate, suffered a major setback. Two of its veteran members, Rabbi of Rehovot Simcha Hakohen Kook and chairman of the Neighbourhood Rabbis Council Moshe Rauchverger, who is also a neighbourhood rabbi in the Haifa area, were voted out of the council.

Ashkenazi haredim lose majority

Ashkenazi haredim lose majority in Chief Rabbinate membership vote

The leaders of Ashkenazi haredim suffered a blow to their hegemony in the Chief Rabbinate on Tuesday night while Shas and the national religious camp scored significant victories.

In a vote for 10 new members of the Chief Rabbinate’s Rabbinical Council, a large number of religious Zionist and Shas-backed rabbis were voted in. Rabbis Ya’acov Shapira, head of Jerusalem’s Zionist flagship Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, was chosen along with Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safed. Both Eliyahu and Shapira are sons of former chief rabbis and both are considered national religious.