BREAKING NEWS

Jerusalem comptroller probes religious council members for alleged wrongdoing

In the latest of a series of concerns regarding the Jerusalem Religious Council, the city comptroller is examining claims of breach of trust and conflict of interest violations by council personnel.
In 2013, then-religious services minister and Bayit Yehudi chairman Naftali Bennett announced a series of reforms to the provision of religious services, including the marriage registration process.
The plan was to modernize the marriage registration system and enable the process to be conducted almost entirely via the Internet.
This required local religious councils responsible for religious services in cities and municipal jurisdictions to upload the details of every marriage registration certificate in their records to an online database. This would benefit marriage registrars with quick and easy access to these records to approve marriage registration requests.
The Religious Services Ministry issued a public tender to find a provider to carry out the work required to computerize the marriage records information, but did not insist that all local religious councils use the provider that won the tender.