Following intervention by the High Court of Justice, the Chief Rabbinate and the Rabbinical Courts Administration have agreed to halt mandatory third-party Jewish status-investigations and stop all unauthorized usage of personal Jewish status data.
The agreement between these bodies, the State Attorney’s Office and the Itim religious services organization brings an end to a seven-year legal battle by the latter group against what it described as the severe overreach of the rabbinate and the rabbinical courts, and their unauthorized use of private data regarding the Jewish status of Israeli citizens.
Over the last decade, the Chief Rabbinate has become increasingly suspicious of the Jewish status of any Israeli who was born in the former Soviet Union, or their descendants.
Very often, when such citizens approach the rabbinate to register for marriage or seek other religious services, they will be sent for Jewish status clarification in a state rabbinical court to determine if they are indeed Jewish.
The rabbinical courts themselves have become ever more stringent in their approach to Jewish status clarification, often relying on Soviet documentation rather than tools within Jewish law to determine Jewish-status, Itim director Rabbi Seth Farber says.
Indeed, in some cases citizens whose relatives had previously had their Jewish status affirmed and been married through the Chief Rabbinate subsequently had their Jewish status revoked
In cases where the rabbinical courts determined an individual not to be Jewish, or was unable to be properly clarified, the individual concerned was added to a blacklist of citizens blocked from marriage through the rabbinate.
But at the same time, the Chief Rabbinate would summon the individual’s relatives to rabbinical court and require them to undergo Jewish status clarification, would fine them if they refused to do so, and put them on a blacklist of citizens unable to marry through the Chief Rabbinate.
Such measures could result in numerous citizens who never requested any religious service or rabbinical court process being blacklisted by the Chief Rabbinate.
In one case covered by The Jerusalem Post, four members of one extended family were placed on the rabbinate’s blacklist after one member of the family sought to register for marriage but whose proof of Jewish identity was rejected by the rabbinical courts investigator.
Three of these family members had however previously married in Israel through the Chief Rabbinate, meaning their Jewish status had been approved by marriage registrars and rabbinate officials in the past.
As well as blacklisting third parties, the Chief Rabbinate also created a database of such people and would use it to check up on the Jewish status of other people when they came to register for marriage or sought other religious services.
Due to Itim legal pressure, the Chief Rabbinate has changed various aspects of its regulations on mandatory Jewish status clarifications for third parties but never revoked them and maintained its database and free use of such data regarding such people.
In November 2020, the High Court issued an interim ruling suspending mandatory third-party investigations and the compilation and use of a database, and demanded the Chief Rabbinate explain its position.
Following discussions between the Chief Rabbinate, the Rabbinical Courts Administration, and the State Attorney’s Office, with input from Itim, an agreement was reached stating that the Chief Rabbinate and rabbinical courts cannot make Jewish status investigations mandatory for third parties.
In addition, the Chief Rabbinate and the Rabbinical Courts Administration committed to not using the details of third parties in court decisions unless inherently necessary to determine the Jewish status of the primary subject of the process, and agreed not to use the data in order to check on the Jewish status of other citizens.
A decision issued by the High Court on Thursday gave this agreement the force of a formal ruling.
“This decision brings to an end investigations which have no basis in Jewish law or Jewish tradition and brought about a split in the Jewish people,” said Farber following the ruling.
“It puts an end to the crusade of the rabbinical courts to cast aspersions on the Jewishness of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, by grounding in law that these investigations are outside of their jurisdiction.”
Farber accused “clerks” in the Chief Rabbinate and the Rabbinical Courts Administration of “having taken it upon themselves to engage in extra-halachic activity,” and said Itim’s success in overturning in the Supreme Rabbinical Court dozens of rulings by regional rabbinical courts which revoked citizens’ Jewish status proved the need to end the third-party investigations.
Itim attorney Sara Weinberg said the ruling was “an historic day in restoring the basic right to privacy of Israeli citizens in front of the rabbinical courts.”