Modernizing the Chief Rabbinate

Abstract

Abstract This chapter deals with the effects of legal centralization on the institutions and procedures of the Chief Rabbinate of Palestine and, after 1948, Israel. An institution established by the British Mandate, the Chief Rabbinate became far more powerful in the late 1940s and early 1950s, under the tenure of Isaac Herzog and Benzion Ousiel. During that time, a series of reforms were enacted that imported the structure and procedures of modern European law into the Israeli rabbinate. As part of these reforms, regional rabbinical courts were, under protest, made subordinate to a rabbinical court of appeals in Jerusalem and made subject to new procedural rules. Rabbinical enactments were crafted to create a uniformity of practice among Israel’s diverse Jewish communities. At the same time, rabbinical court rulings were published for the first time in the format of secular law reports and rabbinical committees composed halakhic law books, in the model of modern legal codes, which they intended to be the law for all citizens of Israel.