Friday, June 04, 2004

Have rabbis faked 30% of Israel's weddings???????

As usual, the most interesting -- and scandalous -- part of this Ha’aretz article is buried at the bottom.
According to the article, one of the reasons Rabbi Bakshi-Doron is calling for the end to the Orthodox monopoly on marriages in Israel is his concern that too many rabbis are deliberately sabotaging the halachic validity of the ceremonies are performing.
Why would they do such a thing? In recent years, apparently, the Israeli rabbinic courts have taken an increasingly hard-line on children who according to Jewish law are mamzerim, or bastards. And rabbis are increasingly concerned that the issue of marriages they are performing, for various reasons, could fall under that category.
Sometimes, if necessary, they will ‘annul’ the marriage in retrospect:
“The rabbinic courts use every possible trick to prove that the marriage of the children's mother is invalid in the halakhic sense, even if it was an ostensibly kosher, Orthodox marriage. The antecedents of the witnesses were not valid, the rabbi did not mean it seriously, the ceremony was held at an non-kosher venue...”
And – here’s the scandal – sometimes in advance, without the knowledge of the people they are marrying:
“Among the ultra-Orthodox rabbis, confirmed horror stories are current about rabbis who admitted after the fact that they performed a wedding ceremony but beforehand intentionally did something so that the marriage would not be valid according to halakha. ‘And this isn't about the margins,’ said Bakshi-Doron at the conference of dayanim a year ago, ‘but about 20 to 30 percent of the state.’”
What a disgusting mockery this makes of halacha, of the institution of marriage, of our rabbis. If the rabbis really think the children could be mamzerim, they have no right to marry the parents. And if they have no reasonable basis to think so -- how dare they perform a fake ceremony?
It makes no difference if Rav Bakshi-Doron was vastly exaggerating and it applies to 'only' 5% and not 20% of marriages. If it turns out that Rabbis, who by Israeli law are the only qualified people to perform marriages in Israel, are deceiving the people they are marrying and not giving them a halachic ceremony, the Orthodox establishment immediately forfeits the right to insist on one. More than that: a full investigation is warranted into the conduct of what must be hundreds, if not thousands of rabbis, and the conduct of the religious councils / leaders / rabbis who knew and stayed silent whilst Israeli and Jewish law was being made into a laughingstock.

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