Update: As we were going to press, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Chief Rabbinate must allow women to take the Rabbanut’s halakhah exams.
On October 7th and throughout the year and a half since then, we have heard one story after another about brilliant women in the cockpit, outstanding women fighters in tanks, courageous women doctors fighting to save lives on the front lines, and talented women who took it upon themselves to lead important initiatives on the home front. The visibility of women fighting for our country stands in stark contrast to the situation in the religious sphere. Women hold no rabbinic positions in the State of Israel—at least not public positions funded by the state. There are no municipal rabbaniyot or even neighborhood rabbaniyot; no rabbaniyot in hospitals or sitting on the Council of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.
It is impossible to ignore the contradiction between the reality of exclusive male occupancy of the Chief Rabbinate, ongoing now for over 75 years, and the current state of women’s Torah scholarship. Starting some 30 years ago, a revolution in Torah study for women began, constituting one of the major advances for women of the past decades, and catapulting women Torah scholars forward. Yet, incomprehensibly, this transformation has not translated into public rabbinic roles for women in Israel.
In order to understand what has happened in Israel over this past year in relation to the Chief Rabbinate, it is important to be familiar with the structure of the institution, the forces that operate it, and, unfortunately, the low level of public interest it generates.
The Law of the Chief Rabbinate in Israel (1980) grants authority to the Council of the Chief Rabbinate and to Chief Rabbis to oversee the ordination of rabbis, kashrut, marriages, and other religious matters. The Ministry of Religious Affairs is responsible for operating these systems. The Chief Rabbinate is elected by an Electoral Assembly made up of 150 members, 80 of whom are municipal, neighborhood, or local rabbis appointed by the Council of the Chief Rabbinate (who are themselves elected by the Electoral Assembly), along with dayanim, who are appointed by a government committee, and ten rabbis personally appointed to the Assembly by the Chief Rabbis. All of these 80 members are men. The other 70 members of the Electoral Assembly are public representatives, including mayors and heads of local authorities, all of whom have extensive and important working relationships with the Ministry of the Interior, along with a number of members of Knesset. (In recent years the Ministry of the Interior has been headed by Shas, a powerful ultra-Orthodox Sefardi political party.) The Electoral Assembly is thus deeply embedded and entrenched in politics. For this reason, arguments over its conduct have been ongoing for tens of years.
The Chief Rabbinate Law established a ten-year term for the Chief Rabbis, which was supposed to end on October 31, 2023, but the election of their successors was deferred to June 2024 for political reasons. In June 2024, the government again ignored the law by failing to call the Electoral Assembly. This resulted in an unprecedented situation—the tenure of the Chief Rabbis ended in July 2024 and no replacements were elected. This continued until September 2024, when two new Chief Rabbis were chosen and began their tenure. Why did the government not vote on the date determined for this election by law? Here is where the involvement of women comes in.
Petition to Include Rabbaniyot in the Electoral Assembly
In November 2022, members of the Rackman Center for the Advancement of Women’s Status, part of Bar-Ilan University’s Law Faculty, petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to demand that rabbaniyot be included in the Electoral Assembly—specifically, that women who are “engaged in religion and Jewish law” be appointed among the ten rabbis personally appointed by the Chief Rabbis. This petition was denied, at least in part because the Chief Rabbinate refused to recognize women Torah scholars as legitimate rabbis, and even claimed that there were no women in Israel with sufficient halakhic knowledge.
In December 2023, Kolech (the Religious Women’s Forum, of which I am CEO) entered the picture. We asked 12 rabbaniyot to send a statement to the Supreme Court detailing their years of learning in rigorous beit midrash programs, their fields of halakhic specialization, and their rabbinic employment experience.
The Supreme Court was impressed with the statements and in January 2024 determined that there are rabbaniyot in Israel! They further determined that in the law determining the makeup of the Electoral Assembly the word “rabbis” now includes women as well, and stated that there are women with sufficient halakhic background to qualify them to take part in the Electoral Assembly. This was a ground-breaking declaration and a significant turning point in the status of women with regard to policy in Israel, constituting an acknowledgement of the rabbaniyots’ advanced level of halakhic knowledge and the fields of activity in which they are engaged. However, the court sought to avoid a direct confrontation with the Chief Rabbinate and, instead of requiring it to appoint women among the ten representatives designated by the Chief Rabbis, they wrote only that it must “weigh the possibility” of doing so. Not surprisingly, the Council of the Chief Rabbinate objected to the decision of the Supreme Court and declared that it would not consider appointing women to the Assembly.
In July 2024 the Rackman Center once again petitioned the Supreme Court seeking to compel the Chief Rabbinate to carry out the ruling. It was during this period that the tenure of the Chief Rabbis expired and, for the first time since the establishment of the state, none were elected in their place. In the face of pressure from the Supreme Court and the Ministry of Justice to include women, the Ministry of Religious Affairs opted to freeze the election process and did not call the Electoral Assembly.
In subsequent deliberations, the Ministry of Religious Affairs suggested removing the ten representatives of the Chief Rabbis from the roster, thus preempting the possible “danger” of appointing women to the Electoral Assembly. Amid concerns of political fallout, they clung to the excuse put forth by the Chief Rabbinate that opening the door for rabbaniyot would enable even more radical “Reform” (women) rabbis to demand a seat on the Assembly.
Months passed and the debate continued. In an effort to pressure the Chief Rabbinate to hold elections, Professor Aviad Hacohen, a senior legal expert, filed a petition to the Supreme Court demanding that the electoral process be expedited. The Supreme Court accepted the petition and compelled the government to hold elections by September 2024. This set another precedent. Instead of 150 members of the Electoral Assembly, the government held elections for the two Chief Rabbi positions with only 140 members, which included only a few individual women who serve in public positions. The women halakhic scholars were left behind. The Chief Rabbinate got what it wanted and in practice also received support for its halakhic position that it does not recognize women’s halakhic authority and the possibility that women could hold rabbinic offices.
In February 2025, the Electoral Assembly elected the Council of the Chief Rabbinate, which will serve for a five-year term. Desiring to hold this vote with a full complement of 150 members without interference from the Supreme Court, the Constitution Committee of the Knesset began deliberations on amending the Chief Rabbinate Law so that only rabbis ordained by the Chief Rabbinate (i.e., men) can be included in the 80 “rabbinical” members of the Electoral Assembly. At the same time they suggested setting aside a few more places for women within the 70 public representatives.
As part of these deliberations, the director of the Ministry of Religious Affairs met with representatives of organizations working to promote inclusion of rabbaniyot. The organizations presented the need and importance of including women halakhic scholars in the Electoral Assembly. We described the rigorous advanced halakhah programs, the women’s wide breadth of knowledge, and their halakhic activities.1 In the deliberations, the need for a suitable title for these women was raised. We demanded that they be called “women of halakhah” (because the title rabbanit generates implacable resistance, not only among the ultra-Orthodox but also among members of the religious nationalist sector), while more conservative organizations preferred “yirot shamayim” (God-fearing women) or similar terms that do not reflect the halakhic knowledge and status of these women. In the Knesset Constitution Committee’s discussions there was a real conversation about the status of women and an opportunity to reduce the inequality faced by women. However, as a result of the objections of the ultra-Orthodox parties (and others who chose to give in to the demands of the ultra-Orthodox), the conclusion reached by the committee made no mention of women of halakhah in the amended law, and they continued to be excluded from the “rabbinical” component of the Electoral Assembly. We, sitting in the auditorium, were outraged at this insult to and erasure of these women. The issue was promptly dropped from the public agenda. The Chief Rabbis began their tenure, the Electoral Assembly of 150 members was conditioned on the inclusion of 30 women (a mere 20 percent, all within the public representative category), and the elections for the Council of the Chief Rabbinate were delayed for a few more weeks.
A New Petition
Our friends at the Rackman Center immediately prepared a new petition against this amendment to the Chief Rabbinate Law. Claiming that it deliberately discriminates against women, they sought to return the issue of women of halakhah to center stage. They demanded that this discriminatory amendment be either withdrawn or expanded to include women of halakhah. They further stated that this lack of acknowledgment of rabbaniyot, and the use of the term “rabbi” as referring solely to men, constitutes discrimination and an infraction of women’s right to equality before the law—that it constitutes humiliation and limits the representation of halakhah in the Electoral Assembly solely to men.
It was not easy to recruit rabbaniyot for this petition. The frustration that arose from the fight over the amendment to the law that led to the official exclusion of women of halakhah from the Electoral Assembly left little room for optimism and little energy to motivate a further round of struggle in the Knesset or the courts. We countered this by pointing out that ignoring or abandoning the struggle for recognition means accepting discrimination as fixed within the law and conceding that what was is what will be. Women of halakhah did indeed suffer a humiliating blow. The State of Israel once again gave in to chauvinism and accepted the exclusion of women from the source of decision-making in the religious sphere. This further weakened the status of halakhic programs as a relevant path of knowledge, training, and professional development for women, and reinforced the depiction of women’s Torah learning as of lesser value than that of men.
Within a few days, we were able to convince a number of women of halakhah to get on board, and a petition was submitted to the Supreme Court on behalf of six rabbaniyot, the Rackman Center, and Na’amat (the largest women’s organization in Israel, whose work includes advocating for gender equity). We at Kolech chose not to sign the petition, in order to enable the women themselves to be at the forefront and to focus attention on their knowledge and experience as being worthy of recognition and appointment to public roles in the religious sphere. The understanding that simply accepting the situation was in effect the slamming of a door compelled the women to continue the fight via the courts of law and of public opinion, to demonstrate the value of women’s Torah learning, and to show that it was as much an inseparable part of themselves as it was for men. We are currently waiting for the court’s ruling on this petition.
Petition for Exams Testing Halakhic Knowledge
In addition, we are currently waiting for the response of the Supreme Court to a different petition, which demands that women be allowed to take the same exams as those administered to men for rabbinic ordination. This petition was filed in 2019 by Itim (an organization that aims to make Israel’s religious establishment responsive to the needs of the broader Jewish public), six women of halakhah, the Rackman Center, and Kolech. The petition argued that because these exams qualify people for certain government jobs and for higher pay, denying women the right to take the exams was a form of financial discrimination.
Under rules of the Supreme Court, the government was required to respond to questions from the court. However, they repeatedly requested postponements, so the case still has not been resolved. From the very beginning, the Chief Rabbinate strongly opposed any form of recognition of female rabbinic authority.
The petition stated that the use of the term “rabbi” as referring solely to men constitutes discrimination and an infraction of women’s right to equality before the law.
In 2022, the Ministry of Religious Services administered halakhah exams for women. Several women took these exams and most passed. However, although these exams were similar to those for rabbinic ordination, there were significant differences and the exams covered only some of the topics required for official recognition and rabbinic certification. As a result, they cannot be used as a basis for government jobs or higher salaries.
In the most recent response from the government, in January 2025, the state agreed to establish a series of alternative state exams, essentially identical to those given by the Chief Rabbinate. These exams would be open to both women and men, and those who succeed would receive a government certificate. While this would not be a certificate of ordination, it would constitute official acknowledgment of the halakhic knowledge of the women and would be treated as equivalent to the “Yoreh Yoreh” level of rabbinic ordination conferred by the Chief Rabbinate for purposes of employment and financial benefits. However, these exams have not yet been instituted.
The government’s response does not entirely accommodate the demands of the petition to have a system of ordination for women that is equivalent to that available to men. However, it does constitute official government acknowledgement of the level of knowledge of women of halakhah, and as such is a dramatic watershed moment, and a success that we should celebrate!
Prognosis for the Future
In practice, the appointment of a woman as Chief Rabbi, or even as a municipal rabbi, is still not on the horizon. But when religion and state are enmeshed together, as in Israel, we cannot, as religious feminists, do anything but move forward with heads raised high and backs straight. We must be alert to social and legal processes, and committed to continuing to develop the field of women’s Torah learning for the alumni of the programs and the young students whose future is still to come, in the hopes that it will be they who will one day finally gain recognition by the rabbinical establishment in Israel of their status as halakhic scholars worthy to serve as public rabbis.