“Right now [Israel's haredi-controlled chief] rabbinate is exporting its isolationist postures to the Jewish world at large, and that has to be curtailed, because it’s not just bad for the rabbinate, it’s bad for the Jewish people and Israel."
Israel's haredi Chief Rabbis David Lau and Yitzhak Yosef
The Times of Israel reports that Rabbi Avi Weiss is not the only Orthodox rabbi from the Diaspora being mistreated by Israel's haredi-controlled chief rabbinate. There are, it reports, at least six more:
…This isn’t the first (nor is it likely to be the last) time ITIM has contended with the Israeli rabbinate’s refusal to accept testimony from American Orthodox rabbis. According to the group’s director, Rabbi Seth Farber, who has helped 750 immigrant couples wed in the past six years, there have been six additional cases of rejected testimony from Orthodox rabbis since October. In all instances solutions were found and the weddings held without delay.
“This story is not just about Rabbi Avi Weiss,” says Farber, though Weiss and his congregation are certainly victims.…
Farber says ITIM identified this trend a year ago, when he began noticing the threshold of religious observance demanded of overseas rabbis going up considerably, he says. He cites two reasons for the change: “the objective factor:” there is no central body of Orthodoxy in America; and the “subjective” one: growing distrust of the American Jewish community within the ranks of the Israeli rabbinate.…“We’ve reached a point of critical mass, like in the case of conversion in 2006, where the rabbinate is saying, ‘We’re going to assume everybody is not ok,’” says Farber.
Since the Weiss scandal broke there have been whispers of a “blacklist” of US rabbis in the Israeli rabbinate.
And, according to Farber, there is now a list of “kosher” rabbis, started about two and a half years ago by mid-level rabbinate bureaucrats with little understanding of American Jewry. The officials had gone through the rabbinate’s files for the past 20 years and compiled a list of all the American rabbis the rabbinate had worked with.
Farber stresses this list is “as capricious as it comes,” and not binding, but is nevertheless used as a basis of acceptability in the rabbinate today. Weiss should have appeared on such a list, and probably was, says Farber, until factional politics intervened.
“The rabbinate is a public institution and can’t continue operating like a shtetl, on the basis of who you know.”…
Though the Shulhan Aruch states any Jew who affirms he is Jewish should be believed unless there is reason to doubt him, the practice in Israel has been to get additional confirmation to remove all doubt, says Farber. “According to halacha, we can trust” people beyond the narrow circles of “Orthodox rabbis of a certain ideological posture.”
Even 25 years ago, he says, no one would have questioned a rabbi’s testimony.
“Right now the rabbinate is exporting its isolationist postures to the Jewish world at large, and that has to be curtailed, because it’s not just bad for the rabbinate, it’s bad for the Jewish people and Israel,” he warns.
I'm told by an informed source that the actual number of Diaspora Modern Orthodox rabbis excluded by the chief rabbinate without a hearing or any due process at all is 11, not 7.
And, despite the fact that there are haredi rabbis who literally sell conversions (there are non-haredi rabbis who do this, as well), no haredi rabbis are on that list.
I'm also told that Rabbi Avi Weiss asked the chief rabbinate two months ago for the names of the rabbis who were attacking him and their specific complaints.
The chief rabbinate responded by claiming that the Rabbincal Council of America (RCA) was the soure of those complaints against Weiss.
But the RCA, I'm told, denied this, contacting Weiss even before Weiss contacted them to deny any involvement in denigrating him.
The chief rabbinate then claimed that it was leading RCA members, not the RCA itself, that attacked Weiss. But it refused to provide the names of those rabbis or the specifics of their attacks.
And as you can see from yesterday's report on this issue, if true, all this would make the chief rabbinate liars – a position it has been in many times previously.
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