David Yosef was elected on Sunday to succeed his brother Yitzhak as Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi. The election for his Ashkenazi counterpart ended in a tie, requiring a second round between hardliner Rabbi Micha Halevi and moderate Kalman Ber of Netanya.
Yosef, a member of the Council of Torah Sages of the Shas Sephardi Orthodox movement, was favored to win and enjoyed the backing of Shas, which is widely viewed as the predominant political force of Sephardic religious Judaism in Israel.
Yosef, 67, whose late father Ovadia joined Shas and became its spiritual leader after serving as chief Sephardic rabbi for 11 years, won 72 votes out of 140 in the Chief Rabbinate’s electing assembly. Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu of of Safed came in second with 43 votes followed by Michael Amos, a rabbinical judge.
In the election for Ashkenazi chief rabbi, 40 delegates voted for Halevi, the chief rabbi of Petah Tikva, and another 40 voted for Rabbi Kalman Ber of Netanya, a relative moderate with many supporters from Religious-Zionist communities as well as Haredi ones.
The remaining votes were distributed between rabbis Meir Kahana, Eliezer Igra and Moshe Chaim Lau, the eldest son of Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, a previous chief rabbi of Israel and a famous Holocaust survivor and speaker. Moshe’s brother, David, was the previous Ashkenazi chief rabbi.
The electing assembly did not set a date for the second round of voting.
The election, which was expected to take place in spring, was delayed because of a dispute involving the Chief Rabbinate, the religious services ministry and the High Court of Justice.
The impasse was broken following a High Court of Justice ruling on Aug. 8 that effectively lifted the court’s previous requirement that women be considered to serve under the title of “rabbi” on the Chief Rabbinate’s electing assembly.
In the context of a 1980 law regulating the Chief Rabbinate’s work, the designation of “rabbi” may apply also to women versed in Jewish law, the court ruled in January. It said that the Rabbinate must therefore consider appointing women to a category of 10 rabbis whom chief rabbis may by law appoint to the electing assembly.
The Rabbinate declined to do this, saying that in Orthodox Judaism, women may not be considered rabbis. It declined to convene an electing assembly, making it impossible to elect successors to the former chief rabbis, whose 10-year terms ended in July.
On Aug. 8, the High Court of Justice backtracked from its demand and authorized a compromise whereby which the rabbis agreed not to appoint anyone to the category of 10 rabbis, thereby lowering the number of electing assembly delegates from 150 to 140.
Half of the remaining 140 delegates comprise 70 municipal rabbis affiliated with the Chief Rabbinate, all of whom all men. The other half is made up of delegates who are not rabbis, including mayors, lawmakers, cabinet ministers and other public representatives, some of whom are women.
