Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Israeli Rabbi Wants ID Cards for Non-Jews To Work on Shabbat

A prominent Israeli rabbi said that non-Jews in Israel should carry identification cards issued by the state’s Jewish religious authority marking them as not Jewish as part of a plan to make commerce in Israel adhere to Jewish law.

Yisroel Rosen, the head of the Zomet Institute which creates technology in accordance with Jewish law, said that Jewish businesses should be allowed to remain open on the Sabbath but only if they are staffed and managed by non-Jewish workers. These non-Jewish workers would carry identification cards issued by the Israeli rabbinate.

Rosen’s proposal, which he made in a blog post seeks to solve the longstanding impasse in Israel over whether private businesses should be allowed to stay open on the Sabbath, when Jewish law prohibits Jews from doing work. Public offices and public transportation in Israel shut down from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.

Israeli law allows municipalities to make their own regulations about what businesses may remain open on the Jewish day of rest. In the so-called “Shabbat wars,” Jerusalem and Tel Aviv businesses have been levied with fines for staying open on Saturdays.

Contact Naomi Zeveloff at [email protected]

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.