Rabbis Avraham Shapiro and Mordechai Eliahu won substantial victories in the Chief Rabbinate elections today to become Israel’s Ashkenazic and Sephardic Chief Rabbis, respectively. Both were strongly backed by the National Religious Party and were supported by Laborite electors as well.
Shapiro, 65, is a sixth-generation Jerusalemite, a judge of the Supreme Rabbinical Court and Dean of the Markus Harav Kook yeshiva. Eliahu, who was born in Iraq, is also a Supreme Religious Court judge.
Shapiro received 80 votes to 39 for his closes rival, Rabbi Yitzhak Kolitz who had the backing of the Agudat Israel. A third Ashkenazic candidate, Haifa Chief Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen, polled 17 votes in the 150-man electoral college.
On the Sephardic side, Eliahu won 87 votes to 49 for Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi-Doron who was also supported by the Agudat Israel. The two new Chief Rabbis succeed Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren and Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef who both served 10-year terms and were barred by law from standing for re-election.
Efforts to have the law amended so the incumbents could run again were defeated, largely by the efforts of Religious Affairs Minister Yosef Burg, a leader of the NRP, and Justice Minister Moshe Nissim. Burg hailed today’s election results as a “victory for democracy.” According to Nissim it was “a victory for the rule of law.”
Yosef implied in a post-election interview that Nissim was seeking “personal revenge.” The Justice Minister is the son of the late former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Nissim who Yosef defeated in the 1972 Chief Rabbinate elections.
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