Vox: Israel's chief rabbis say some Jews are more Jewish than others

That debate has now moved to the Israeli parliament, where lawmakers used a special session last week to grill Israel’s chief rabbinate about why the country’s religious authorities created a blacklist of more than 160 rabbis around the world they considered untrustworthy. The disclosure of that list immediately sparked a new divide between Israel and Jewish communities around the world. [...]

Israel is a democracy whose population is overwhelmingly secular, but the chief rabbinate, which has long been dominated by Orthodox rabbis, controls all matters concerning marriage, conversion, birth, and death for Jewish citizens. They are elected by a selection of politicians and religious leaders, but the process has been widely criticized as undemocratic (there are few women involved in the process, for one). [...]

Over the past two weeks, Jews around the world have been up in arms about the discovery that the Israeli rabbinate maintains what’s been called a blacklist of Jewish religious leaders from 24 countries including Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Australia. The rabbis on the list hail from all over the world, and from different sides of the spectrum of Jewish religious identity: They are Orthodox and conservative, reform and progressive. What unites them is not their level of observance, nor their outlook, but instead it’s that each of these rabbis had their religious authority to affirm Jewish identity effectively undermined by their inclusion on the list. (Notably women rabbis were left off the list, an omission that some took to mean all women were on the list.) [...]

Then came the discovery of the blacklist of the 161 Diaspora rabbis, and with it a wave of anger from Jerusalem to Montreal to New York. The fight over the Wall has nothing concretely to do with the blacklist. But both connect to the reality that many Jews want to practice their religion, and live their lives, in ways that conflict with the ultra-Orthodox’s dictates. [...]

srael’s two chief rabbis have a large amount of control. There is no civil marriage in Israel. Individuals can only marry within their own faith. That routinely forces Israelis to leave their own country to get married, a source of growing public anger at home and, increasingly, abroad.

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