When it comes to the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, the issue is no longer merely women’s religious leadership. It is whether the rabbinate believes itself bound by the law of the State of Israel at all.
After years of litigation, Israel’s High Court ruled in 2025 that women must be allowed to sit for the standard rabbinical examinations administered by the rabbinate. The court did not require the ordination of female rabbis or compel the rabbinate to rewrite Orthodox theology. It ruled only that women could take the same examinations men take because those exams carry substantial professional, financial and public benefits.
The ruling was narrow, careful and entirely reasonable. The rabbinate’s response has been disgraceful.
First, it canceled the entire fall 2025 testing session. Then it created obstacles for the women who registered for the spring exams. According to reports, exam materials arrived hours late. Only three women ultimately sat for the April test. Now the rabbinate has announced that the relevant exams simply will not be offered during the July session at all — while every other category of religious examination proceeds as scheduled.
This is not administrative inconvenience. It is calculated defiance.
Most revealing is that some senior rabbis are barely hiding it. Reports indicate that members of the Rabbinate Council demanded the exams be frozen until the Knesset could pass legislation barring women from serving in halachic roles altogether. In other words, if the court rules against us, we will obstruct compliance until politics rescues us.
That is intolerable in a democratic society.
Religious institutions are entitled to their theological positions. Orthodox Judaism has long maintained distinctions regarding ordination and formal rabbinic authority. Reasonable people may debate those questions seriously and respectfully. But this case is no longer about theology. It is about monopoly power and contempt for civil authority.
The irony is painful. Jewish tradition contains the principle of dina demalchuta dina — the law of the land is the law. Religious leaders routinely invoke that principle when demanding compliance from others. Yet Israel’s own state rabbinate appears unwilling to comply with a lawful ruling from Israel’s highest court because it dislikes the outcome.
The modern Israeli rabbinate already suffers from a severe crisis of public trust. Many Israelis view it as politicized, coercive and disconnected from the broader population. Incidents like this deepen that alienation. They project weakness masquerading as piety — an establishment so fearful of educated women taking examinations that it would rather damage its own credibility than administer a test fairly.
The solution cannot simply be more outrage and another round of litigation. Israel’s attorney general and courts should insist on immediate compliance with judicial rulings by every state institution, including the rabbinate. The Knesset should also consider conditioning portions of the rabbinate’s public funding on compliance with court orders and nondiscriminatory administration of state-recognized certification systems.
But the larger issue is structural. The rabbinate exercises sweeping monopoly authority over marriage, conversion, kashrut, burial and religious certification while increasingly behaving as though it answers only to its own ideological factions. If it wishes to function as an autonomous sectarian authority, it is free to advocate its religious positions. What it cannot do is wield state power while selectively disregarding state law.
