Yona Metzger, whose term as Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel ended in 2013, accepted a plea bargain earlier this week on charges of corruption and is now headed to prison. He stood accused of accepting bribes in exchange for conversions and the pocketing of money meant for charitable purposes; his other alleged crimes include breach of public trust, theft, money-laundering, tax violations, and conspiracy to commit a felony. Marc Angel reflects on the implications:

While Yona Metzger is the first chief rabbi of Israel to be convicted as a criminal, others have had reputations tarnished by unsavory words and deeds. One former Sephardi chief rabbi was accused of granting rabbinic ordination to unqualified individuals in order for them to receive higher pay for their government jobs. Another chief rabbi was engaged in ugly battles for political power. While many of the previous chief rabbis were models of scholarship and piety, others have been petty, vindictive, power-hungry—and now one of them is a convicted criminal.

Is it any surprise that the chief rabbinate of Israel is held in low esteem by the Israeli public and by Jews of the Diaspora? Instead of demonstrating the beauty and wisdom of Torah, [chief rabbis] too often have disappointed the public with their negative qualities. . . .

[D]oes Israel really benefit by maintaining the offices of the chief rabbis? Or does the chief rabbinate represent an outdated, inefficient, and disrespected system? The chief rabbinate has little real natural constituency. Ḥaredim rely on their own rabbis. . . . The non-Orthodox have no use for the chief rabbinate. The religious Zionists—the original constituents of the [institution]—are almost totally disaffected from the current system, unless they themselves hold jobs supplied by the rabbinate itself.

In spite of the massive unpopularity of the chief rabbinate, it wields power in the areas of marriage, divorce, and conversion. It claims power in the area of kosher supervision. It has the power to accept or deny the Jewishness of people who are applying for aliyah. . . . We need to come up with something better, and we need to do so promptly.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.