The ruling was handed down in response to a petition by the Design-22 furniture company against the Sabbath laws. The law provides that Saturday is the national day of rest, and that Jews may not be employed on that day unless a special permit is issued. Such permits are given to the military, hospitals, police, tourism and other industries, and others.
Design-22 works seven days a week, and employs Jewish workers on the Sabbath. The Ministry of Labor and Welfare fined the company three times in the past, to the tune of 5,000 shekels each time, for doing so. Design-22 ultimately decided to apply for a work permit, but the Labor Ministry turned it down for not fulfilling the conditions needed for such a dispensation. The company took the case to court.
Atty. Rami Krupnick, representing Design-22, claimed that the law forbidding the employment of Jews on the Sabbath negates the Basic Law providing for freedom of occupation.
The three judges, however, led by Chief Justice Aharon Barak, ruled that though there is a contradiction between the two laws, the Sabbath law is still valid, as its legislation met the conditions necessary to negate a Basic Law. Among these conditions are the fact that laws that infringe upon Basic Laws must be legislated with an absolute majority of the Knesset.
Atty. Krupnick further said that every worker and employer should be allowed to choose their own weekly day off. He also claimed that the current law is outdated and not appropriate to Israeli culture, especially given the arrival of a million people from the former Soviet Union since 1990.
Chief Justice Barak said that the ban on Jewish employment on the Sabbath jibes with Israel's values, both from a sociological standpoint and from the national-religious standpoint. He said that there is great importance in providing for a day off that will enable the entire family to be together. Barak ruled that the Sabbath has "become a central component in Judaism," and that therefore the combination of the need to provide a uniform day of rest and the choice of the day based on national-religious considerations is appropriate to the State of Israel's values as a Jewish and democratic state.
Barak also defended the law as something that "protects the worker and the employer, and guarantees equality between the religious and non-religious, and protects the needs of the religious public." He said that the determination of uniform rest hours for the entire economy is a "national-social interest," and that the choice of Saturday as the day of rest for Jews does not comprise religious coercion.