The (Jewish) marriage trap

“Hello. You’ve reached the Tzohar rabbinical organization. If you are calling about a wedding, unfortunately Jewish couples can no longer register for marriage with the volunteer rabbis of Tzohar because of a decision by the Religious Affairs Minister, Yaakov Margi. Your call to Minister Margi will help change his decision so that Tzohar will be able to continue to perform weddings. You can reach his office at 02-560-8866 or by e-mail.” This is the message that couples wishing to register for marriage through Tzohar heard this week. Its words marked the peak of the five-year struggle between Tzohar, the Religious Affairs Ministry and the rabbis for control, honor and money.

Over the years, the wedding initiative has become Tzohar’s flagship project. Every year, Tzohar performs more than 2,000 weddings, becoming a popular alternative for non-Orthodox couples. This week, Tzohar announced that the project would be stopped. According to its rabbis, the decision stemmed from the ongoing attempt by the Religious Affairs Ministry to limit the organization's actions.

On Wednesday, it looked as though the crisis might be solved. Though the mediation of MK Fania Kirshenbaum and other Knesset officials, intensive talks took place between Tzohar’s rabbis and the Religious Affairs Ministry. The temporary solution that appears likely is a change in the law regarding the locations where a couple may register for marriage, which would allow the rabbis of Tzohar to continue to perform weddings throughout the country. Until this marriage registry law is passed, Rabbi David Stav, the chairman of Tzohar, will be given hundreds of marriage licenses that will allow the project to go on.

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“They want to shut down the competitors”

“Sometimes, the first time that a non-observant couple meets a religious person is at the rabbinate when they register for marriage. There, they are treated with contempt, unprofessionally and not always nicely. Many times, rabbis have asked for money even though it is not allowed, and that has always made the religious world look bad,” a high-ranking Tzohar official said, explaining the idea behind the wedding project. “So we started the project. What was special about it was that it enabled the non-observant couple to meet a religious person who welcomed them and explained the process. In addition, we enabled the couple to add a personal statement. The rabbis who are members of Tzohar commit to not asking for payment for performing the wedding and not holding more than one wedding per evening in order to make this significant event a good and positive experience.”

Tzohar officials claim that for several years, an unending struggle has been going on against the project, which provided a true alternative for non-observant and non-Orthodox couples who were fed up with the behavior of the religious councils and the chief rabbinate. “The Religious Affairs Ministry and the rabbinate, which placed obstacles before non-observant/non-Orthodox couples and treated them dismissively and with suspicion, have decided to shut down their main competitor,” said Moshe Beeri, the director -general of Tzohar. “The rabbis of the ultra-Orthodox population, who performed weddings through the religious councils, saw how their livelihood was being taken away. Even though it was explicitly against the law, they were accustomed to taking payment from the couple, and many couples chose to be married by rabbis from Tzohar because they did not want to be married by a rabbi from the religious council.”

Tzohar officials claim that the first action taken against them several years ago was an amendment to the chief rabbinate’s criteria, whose purpose was to determine which rabbis had the authority to perform weddings. The officials say that it looked as though the amendments were directed specifically against them. “The new criteria were impossible. It was stated, for example, that only a rabbi who had performed 20 weddings could perform weddings. How do you get to twenty weddings if you are not allowed to perform any at all-” Beeri asked.

Another amendment was that the dean of a hesder yeshiva or a pre-army academy could perform weddings only for his own students. “If the dean of a yeshiva or a pre-army academy is talented enough, and his knowledge of religious law is sufficient enough to allow him to officiate at his students’ weddings, why can he not perform a wedding for his non-observant neighbor-”

After the criteria were established, Tzohar’s leaders learned that of the 600 rabbis who were recognized as rabbis of Tzohar and who performed weddings regularly, only few met the criteria. Couples who had registered with the religious councils and asked to be married by a rabbi from Tzohar who did not meet the criteria were turned down. The number of calls to Tzohar dwindled.

But Tzohar officials found a solution. They decided to emulate the acts of the ultra-Orthodox religious courts, which do not register weddings through the religious councils, enabling the members of the extremist ultra-Orthodox to bypass the councils’ bureaucracy. The ultra-Orthodox who wished to register for marriage went to the religious courts. The courts paid some of the registration fee to the religious councils, which made money even as their workload decreased. In this way, the only ones who had to register with the religious councils were national-religious and non-observant or non-Orthodox couples.

“We were on our way to Cyprus”

Tzohar officials began to register couples for marriage through the rabbinate of Shoham, of which Rabbi David Stav, Tzohar’s chairman, is the city rabbi, and the rabbinate of Kfar Etzion. But recently, the religious affairs minister decided to enforce, selectively, another old bylaw of the Religious Affairs Ministry that stipulates a couple may register for marriage only in their place of residence. This took place even as the ultra-Orthodox religious courts continued their decades-long custom of registering marriages outside the couples’ place of residence. Minister Margi told Rabbi Stav that he would give him only 200 marriage licenses that were intended only for residents of Shoham. Minister Margi conveyed a similar message to the rabbinate of Kfar Etzion. One of Tzohar’s main assertions is that if not for the organization, many non-observant and non-Orthodox couples would have avoided having an Orthodox wedding, choosing instead to have a civil ceremony in Cyprus or a Reform wedding in Israel, and Orthodox Judaism would lose out.

According to Liat, a new bride, Tzohar officials have good cause to fear. “I have many friends who got married through Tzohar, and we need to understand that today, non-observant/non-Orthodox people choose to get married in Cyprus without hesitation. A non-observant person who had no connection to religion at home doesn’t get married at all or marries abroad. Many of my friends felt frustrated by the regular process at the rabbinate because it seemed that the institution was corrupt and unfair. Each religious council has a different process and each rabbinate has different rules – for example, meeting with a counselor for brides or a counselor for grooms. There’s a feeling that it is something primitive and hush-hush.

“That’s why I chose Tzohar,” says Liat. “A friend of mine recommended them to me. With them, I felt that we were in dialogue throughout the whole process. They are careful about feedback and dialogue. They want to hear you. Besides, they are a very modern organization. They work with email, for example, and their interpersonal skills are great. There is also the feminist thing. If you go through the rabbinate, you cannot express it at all, but Tzohar tries to provide expression for it, and that was very important to me. They let the couple plan the ceremony, which is the most important one in a person’s life. I did not even try to go to the rabbinate. It was not even an option. If Tzohar did not exist, we would have gotten married in Cyprus, period. Every travel agency has deals for trips to Cyprus.”

Amid and Dvorit Oscar, who got married last September, never even thought of going through the religious councils. “My parents divorced when I was young,” says Amid, 31. “My biological father has not been in contact with us since I was five. My mother remarried, and the man who raised me is my real father. It was important to me to honor him by making sure that his name was written in the ketubah [marriage contract]. My older brother wanted to do the same thing, but when he went to the rabbinate, they refused. I did not want to get into a debate with them. I have nothing to do with the rabbinate, I do not know anyone there and I was afraid that they would make things difficult for me. I went right to Tzohar.”

It was important to him to have an Orthodox ceremony. “My family is traditional. My wife’s family is less so,” he said. “It did not matter to her how we got married, but it was important to us to have a Jewish wedding without going through hell to do it.”

Dvorit, 28, describes the process at Tzohar as “extremely positive and pleasant.” “They registered us, everything was done by email, even my bridal counseling – after all the awful stories I heard about it – was actually terrific and interesting. We had some fascinating philosophical conversations.”

The couple says that they were also troubled by the money part. “We heard that the rabbis wanted money, but the rabbi who performed our wedding did not take a single shekel. He said he was not allowed. He only agreed to accept money for the taxi, and even then he offered to go by bus. We felt that he did it with pleasure.”

Tzohar officials are very much aware of the matter of payment. “We know that the rabbis who ask for money take approximately 800 shekels, while a rabbi from Tzohar does not take even one. The couple pays only the ordinary fee that the religious council collects,” an organization official said. “That is one of the battles against us – that we’re stealing away their livelihood.”

In addition, Tzohar officials believe that this is another battle in the war of Haredi versus religious. “We are competition, an alternative, and we show them in a less flattering light. So what could be more convenient than neutralizing the competition? This is a war of control. This struggle cannot be seen in any other way.”

“Wholesale marriage registration”

Rabbi Margi told Israel Hayom's weekend supplement that Tzohar “began a campaign based on false assertions. The subject of marriage registrations came up in the state comptroller’s report. When we examined the subject, we discovered that there was wholesale marriage registration going on in Shoham by Rabbi Stav, who registered the couples who wished to marry through Tzohar there. We announced that we had to prepare to make the work there official, not change anything, but provide licenses. Today, they are breaking the law, and I am breaking the law when I give them marriage licenses. We gave them time to come and talk with us and solve the problem.

“I agreed with Rabbi Amar that we would recognize the rabbis of Tzohar as authorized to perform wedding ceremonies and as marriage registrars in rabbinates countrywide,” Margi continued. “A rabbi from Tzohar will be allowed to register marriages using the tools provided by the local council. Rabbi Stav agreed to the procedure, asked to do a pilot program, and two hours later the organization’s director-general came back and said in almost criminal language, ‘I will give you two hours. If you do not produce 500 marriage licenses for me, we are going to start a campaign against you.’ That’s what they did, and it worked.” To the claims that the ultra-Orthodox religious courts are still allowed to follow the procedure that was disallowed for Tzohar, Margi said that the agreement dates back to the British Mandate era, before the state of Israel was established.

“I do not want to appear in the state comptroller’s report. Just as the Interior Ministry will not give out identity cards or passports in a disorganized manner, I will not give out marriage licenses in a disorganized manner either. I am not going to go and smear anyone. I just feel disappointed that it is precisely the people who are considered enlightened who want me to break the law.”

In response, Rabbi Stav said, “The solution is a deception. Will some rabbi from the local rabbinate agree to have a rabbi from Tzohar sit in his place? It is a joke and the minister knows it.”

Officials of the Chief Rabbinate said that they had nothing to do with the uproar. “Recently, a meeting took place in the rabbinical council that discussed the criteria for being allowed to officiate at weddings, and it was decided that those rabbis of Tzohar who agree to perform weddings according to the rabbinate’s customs would be permitted to do so,” the officials said.

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