The Chief Rabbinate הרבנות הראשית

A community rabbi is an old office: he is elected, he is paid, people come to him with questions. A chief rabbi of a country is a new office, and it came not out of the yeshiva but out of government: the Ottomans kept a hakham bashi, and in 5681 (1921) the British established in Mandatory Palestine a rabbinate with two chief rabbis, Ashkenazi and Sephardi. The first were Rabbi Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook and Rabbi Yaakov Meir. The Sephardi chief rabbi bears the title Rishon LeZion—"first in Zion"; it is older than the rabbinate itself and goes back to the Sephardi heads of Jerusalem in the seventeenth century.

What it was given. Marriage and divorce, conversion, kashrut, the Sabbath questions of a state, the army rabbinate, oversight of the courts. In the State of Israel this is not advice but law: a Jewish marriage is contracted only through the rabbinate.

Who did not accept it. Agudat Yisrael and the Edah HaCharedit kept their own courts and their own rabbis and did not join: an office appointed by the authorities cannot, in their view, stand above the Torah. From the other side the non-religious resented the rabbinate, because marriage and divorce were placed outside their choice. The argument has run from the first day and is not settled; this reference shows where it runs, it does not settle it.

The Ashkenazi line. Rabbi Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook (1921–1935), Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog (1936–1959), then five years with the post vacant; Rabbi Isser Yehuda Unterman (1964–1973), Rabbi Shlomo Goren (1973–1983), Rabbi Avraham Shapira (1983–1993), Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau (1993–2003), Rabbi Yona Metzger (2003–2013), Rabbi David Lau (2013–2024), Rabbi Kalman Ber (from 2024).

The Sephardi line, the Rishon LeZion. Rabbi Yaakov Meir (1921–1939), Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel (1939–1953), Rabbi Yitzhak Nissim (1955–1973), Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (1973–1983), Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu (1983–1993), Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron (1993–2003), Rabbi Shlomo Amar (2003–2013), Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef (2013–2024), Rabbi David Yosef (from 2024).

The years are given in the common reckoning: the appointments were dated by it, and since the Hebrew year begins in autumn the boundaries would shift by one to no reader's benefit. The two lines are worth reading side by side: they almost always ran as a pair, and in 5733 (1973) both changed at once—Rabbi Goren and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef came in together, and the argument between them shaped the decade that followed.

What it did. Through the rabbinate passed questions nobody had faced before: what to do about agunot after the Catastrophe and the wars; how newcomers from places where no community remained are to prove they are Jews; how to keep the sabbatical year in a country where farming is Jewish again; what to do about the Sabbath in a power station and a hospital. The answers were written largely by the people in this article and the ones beside it.