Jerusalem — In a victory for the ultra-Orthodox political parties that were shut out of Israel’s governing coalition this year, two candidates they backed were elected as Israel’s chief rabbis on Wednesday, defeating a rabbi who had promised, in an unusually aggressive campaign, to transform the troubled rabbinate.
Rabbi David Lau, 47, the chief rabbi of Modi’in, a large bedroom community between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, was elected for the Ashkenazim (Jews of European descent), and Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, 61, the head of a yeshiva and an author of 40 books on Jewish law, for the Sephardim (Jews of Middle Eastern origin). Both are sons of renowned former occupants of the post: Rabbi Lau’s father, Yisrael Meir Lau, served as Ashkenazi chief from 1993 to 2003 and now is the head rabbi of Tel Aviv; Rabbi Yosef’s father, Ovadia Yosef, was Sephardi chief from 1973 to 1983 and, at 92, remains a powerful force as the spiritual leader of the Shas Party.
The younger Rabbis Lau and Yosef were elected to 10-year terms in the $100,000-a-year job. They will rotate leadership of Israel’s rabbinical courts, which control marriage, divorce and adoption for the nation’s six million Jews. The rabbinate also oversees the supervision of kosher food, conversion and other aspects of daily life here, and it is condemned by many critics as a corrupt patronage farm. (Rabbi Lau will replace Yona Metzger, who is under house arrest on suspicion of fraud, bribery and embezzlement.)
The rabbis were chosen not by a popular vote of the citizenry but by 150 mayors, rabbis, ministers, judges, lawmakers and electors handpicked by politicians who met for three hours on Wednesday afternoon at a Jerusalem hotel. Each won 68 votes in three-way contests.
Their election capped an ugly and intense campaign that galvanized public attention largely because of Rabbi David Stav, a member of the so-called religious Zionist camp who promised to revolutionize the rabbinate by, for starters, helping brides and grooms prove their Jewish roots and thus ease their path to marriage. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef had denounced Rabbi Stav as wicked and dangerous and said his election would be like “bringing idolatry into the temple.”
Rabbi Lau, too, promised during the campaign to make the rabbinate “more welcoming” and said he would represent not just the ultra-Orthodox but also the religious Zionist — modern Orthodox — and secular Jews. Upon his election Wednesday night, he told an Israeli television station that the rabbinate would “continue tradition.”
“I see myself as a person who can bring parts of the public closer together,” Rabbi Lau said on Channel 10 news. “With God’s help, the rabbinate will belong to us all.”