Israel’s High Court of Justice this week reaffirmed an earlier ruling that local religious councils cannot bar candidates from non-Orthodox denominations solely on the basis of their religious affiliation.
The court ordered Monday that a Reform and a Conservative Jew must be two of the Haifa City Council’s candidates for the city’s religious council.
The court also ruled that the city councils of Jerusalem and of the northern community of Kiryat Tivon must reconsidered their lists of religious council candidates because of their refusal to approve Reform and Conservative candidates.
Rabbi Uri Regev, the director of the Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center, who represented the petitioners before the court, said the decision was “another significant defeat” to the “Orthodox monopoly” over religious life in Israel.
In January 1994, the court ruled that candidates for religious councils may not be barred on the basis of their affiliation with non-Orthodox Jewish movements.
The local religious councils, supervised by the Religious Affairs Ministry, have exclusive jurisdiction over marriage, kashrut, burial and other religious matters for all Jews living in Israel.
The services provided by the councils are rendered to Orthodox practice regardless of the affiliation or religious customs of the individual receiving the service.
Forty-five percent of each religious council is appointed by the local municipal council, with another 45 percent appointed by the religious affairs minister and 10 percent by the local rabbinate.
The religious councils of Haifa, Kiryat Tivon and Jerusalem had rejected the Reform and Conservative candidates proposed by the Meretz Party, prompting the left-wing secularist movement to petition the court.
Meretz charged that its candidates had been disqualified solely because of their religious affiliation.
In the case of Haifa, the justices said that because all the council members had praised the Meretz candidates on a personal level, they had no choice but to conclude that the candidates were disqualified because of their religious affiliation.
The court ordered that the two candidates be appointed to the council.
In the cases involving Jerusalem and Kiryat Tivon, the court ordered the city councils to discuss the qualifications of the Meretz candidates and to vote again on the candidates within two months.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
