Chief Rabbis and Knesset Members join forces to promote legislation that will allow the Rabbinate to withhold kosher status from missionary operated eateries.
Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that the Chief Rabbinate must issue a kashrut (kosher) certificate to a restaurant run by missionaries. Ever since, Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar and others have been searching for ways to restore the Rabbinate’s exclusive authority in determining the criteria used to render a restaurant fit for a religious Jew to patronize.
The five Shas Party government ministers, plus MKs Yaakov (Ketzaleh) Katz, Uri Orbach, Uri Maklev, and Menachem Moses, took part in a Thursday morning meeting in Rabbi Amar’s office. Rabbi Yona Metzger, Israel’s Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi, revealed at the meeting that the woman who runs the eatery in question “prays to Jesus while ritually separating the challah (braided Sabbath bread).”
[Editor's note: A stringent kashrut level mandates bread baked by Jews and the ritual separation includes a special blessing made while separating a prescribed portion of bread dough from the rest. In Temple times, it was given to the priests; today it is burned in memory of that offering.]
The No-Fraud Kashrut Law currently states that the Chief Rabbinate must determine whether a restaurant is to receive kosher authorization based “solely” on the Jewish laws of kashrut. Four MKs, three of whom are religious, have proposed the following amendment: Instead of the world “solely,” the law will state that the decision will be based on “criteria determined by the Chief Rabbinate Council in accordance with Jewish Law.”
The amendment is being sponsored by MKs Katz and Orbach, as well as MKs David Azulai (Shas) and Aryeh Bibi (Likud). It will be presented to the ministerial committee on legislation this coming Sunday, where the government's position on the change will be determined.
“We must stand guard and make sure that the Supreme Court does not intervene in matters that it does not understand,” Rabbi Amar has said. “In the end, the ones who will suffer will be the public.”
The change in legislation, the sponsors say, is designed to solve three problems caused by the current situation in which the final kashrut-determining authority is not defined:
1. The kashrut market is not sufficiently organized, and is given to intervention by private elements, often misleading the consumer as to the level of kashrut of a given product.
2. Many sectors do not trust the Chief Rabbinate’s kashrut framework, locally or nationally, and therefore seek more expensive products authorized by privately run kashrut bodies.
3. Many eatery-owners pay significant sums of money to receive kashrut authorization from private bodies.