Israel’s Chief Rabbi: No Plans to Remove Riskin
JERUSALEM (JTA) — The Chief Rabbinate has no intention of removing Efrat Chief Rabbi Shlomo Riskin from his position, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau said.
“There has never been any intention to push out Rabbi Riskin,” Lau said Wednesday in remarks at the Meir Harel Yeshiva in Modi’in, where he led a class for retirees. “At the time the subject came up, there were statements that do not reflect the opinion of the Chief Rabbinate.”
Late last month, the Chief Rabbinate declined to automatically renew Riskin’s appointment as Efrat’s chief rabbi as is usually done and summoned him for a hearing on the matter on June 29. Riskin has been the chief rabbi of Efrat since 1983, when he helped found the settlement located in the Gush Etzion bloc of the West Bank.
“It saddens me that the issue of Rabbi Riskin’s continued service has been blown out of proportion,” Lau said in his remarks which also were disseminated by Lau’s office.
Riskin recently appointed a woman, Jennie Rosenfeld, to serve as a religious leader in Efrat, giving her the title “manhiga ruchanit,” or spiritual adviser. He has also come under fire from the Chief Rabbinate for his views on reforming the conversion process in Israel, supporting a government directive that would allow municipal chief rabbis to form conversion courts rather than requiring potential converts to appear before four Chief Rabbinate-led courts. These issues reportedly were discussed in connection with summoning Riskin for the hearing.
Riskin turned 75 last month, the age at which municipal rabbis are required to retire, unless their tenure is extended five more years, as is usually done automatically.
Last week, Israel’s chief Sephardi rabbi, Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef slammed Riskin during his weekly sermon, saying he made “all kinds of innovations” regarding women, and is “making a new war.”
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
