At 5:30 Thursday morning, police knocked on the door of Dov Haiyun, an Israeli Conservative rabbi, and summoned him for questioning regarding his officiating at a wedding unregistered with the chief rabbinate—in violation of a 2013 statute enforcing the rabbinate’s monopoly on weddings and divorces. Before the police had a chance to interrogate him, Israel’s attorney general shut down the investigation and Haiyun was released. The incident provoked understandable outrage in the Israeli and American-Jewish press, which immediately presented readers with a simplistic narrative: the chief rabbinate, increasingly dominated by ultra-Orthodox rabbis with totalitarian impulses, detained (or “arrested” as some reports had it) a Conservative rabbi for performing a non-Orthodox wedding. Elli Fischer, who himself has performed a number of illegal weddings, seeks to set the record straight:
Nowhere in the [relevant] ordinances are Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox weddings mentioned. The law applies equally to any marriage that takes place outside of the auspices of Israel’s chief rabbinate, the body tasked by Israeli law with registering the marriages of Jews. In fact, given that the chief rabbinate does not recognize marriages that do not comport with its interpretation of “the Law of Moses and Israel,” it is likely that the law applies only to Orthodox weddings performed outside the chief rabbinate. This is the interpretation of Rabbi Uri Regev, Haiyun’s attorney. . . . It is impossible to know the scope of the law for certain because, in the five years since the passage of this law, no one has been imprisoned, fined, tried, indicted, or even arrested for violating it. . . .
[A rabbinic court] ordered an investigation into Haiyun not because of his affiliation with the Conservative movement but because, as Haiyun himself has said, he officiated at the wedding of someone whose status as a possible mamzer [or illegitimate child who is forbidden to marry under halakhah] was under investigation by the chief rabbinate. The fact is that Reform and Conservative rabbis have been conducting weddings in Israel for decades with impunity. According to a recent report, the number of Orthodox weddings that take place in Israel outside the chief rabbinate has increased dramatically as well in recent years. Together, these constitute only about 4 percent of Jewish weddings in Israel, but the numbers are on the rise. . . .
There are many good reasons to avoid marriage under the auspices of the chief rabbinate. In the present case . . . I perfectly understand why Haiyun, having been convinced that there is no taint [of halakhic illegitimacy], decided to officiate.
It is precisely because I encourage such weddings that I am baffled by the attempt, beginning with Haiyun himself, to turn this molehill into a mountain. I accuse those who [have responded by equating] Israel with Iran and Saudi Arabia, who have begun posting their own pictures as “WANTED” signs on social media, of distorting the reality, [which is] that the Israeli authorities have clearly chosen to look the other way. By making themselves out to be heroes and martyrs, they are . . . discouraging typical Israeli couples from taking this important step [by leading them to think they risk arrest]. By turning the issue into one of Conservative and Reform versus Orthodox, they undermine efforts to win the hearts and minds of traditional, observant, and ḥaredi Israelis—precisely those groups whose support is needed if there will ever be real change.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/iran-is-not-here-on-the-haiyun-episode/