Hiddush outraged by possibility of all-male committee for Rabbinic appointment

Suggested appointments for the Committee for Rabbinical Judges would leave the committee without female members, exacerbating and intensifying the already gender-discriminatory rabbinic court system

23/11/2011 13:10

Tags: Religious Councils · Gender discrimination · Uri Regev · Jerusalem Post · Ha’aretz

A protest against the rabbinic courts at Jerusalem.19.03.2008. Photograph by: Elstar Miriam, Flash 90.

The Israeli Bar Association voted this week to select new appointees to the Committee for Rabbinical Judges. Their suggested appointments of attorneys Asher Axelrod and Mordechai Eisenberg, would therefore contain no female members.

The Committee for Rabbinical Judges appoints judges over Israel’s 12 regional rabbinical courts. These judges oversee court cases on divorce, a matter which, as there is no way to divorce civilly in Israel, is highly prejudicial to the rights of women, leaving many women locked into their marriages and unable to move on with their lives because they are without a ritual divorce. This issue affects all Israeli Jewish women regardless of religious and secular backgrounds because of their lack of freedom of choice.

Rabbi Uri Regev, CEO of Hiddush, told The Jerusalem Post that “To have an all-male committee might have been acceptable several decades ago, but in 2011, this is no longer the case,”

Women’s freedom, dignity and property are all impacted directly by the identity of the dayanim who will be appointed.

“I would have expected the Bar Association to be guided, formally or informally, by the notion of advancing the status of women in Israel, especially in light of the tremendous impact the selection of dayanim [judges] has on the plight of women who fall into hands of the rabbinic courts,” he went on.

“Their freedom, dignity and property are all impacted directly by the identity of the dayanim who will be appointed.”

Hiddush and partner organizations conceive of these appointments as an important way to make strides in increasing the rights of women in these matters; as women are coerced into these religious courts, they must at the very least have their interests represented in the choosing of these judges.

Ha’aretz reported that Regev “wrote a blistering letter on Monday to Barzilay and Zvi Firon, the chairman of the Bar's national council, in which he demanded the cancelation of the deal.

For the Bar not to name a woman to the appointments committee ‘ignores decades of progress by the Israeli legal system in realizing the principle of equal status for women…It implicitly strengthens the growing threat of women being removed from the public sphere due to Haredi political and economic pressure, and betrays the Bar's responsibility and function of strengthening civil rights and gender equality.’”