Many Jews eligible to marry via Rabbinate elect to do so abroad instead

As an Israeli couple with a straightforwardly Jewish pedigree, Yoni Zierler and Yochi Rappeport could have easily gotten married through the Chief Rabbinate.

But instead, Zierler, whose father Lawrence is an Orthodox rabbi, and his wife officially tied the knot abroad in a US civil ceremony, conducted by a justice of the peace in 2015, which — unlike civil weddings conducted in Israel — enabled the couple to officially be registered by the Jewish state as married.

The couple wrote about their decision, including in The Times of Israel, describing it as a response to what they perceive as the ultra-Orthodox-dominated Rabbinate’s attempts to establish a monopoly on Judaism and exclusion of same-sex couples.

Their vocal approach and reach may have been unusual — Rappeport is the executive director of Women of the Wall — but the sentiment they expressed is commonplace, according to a new report on religion and state, which says that about a third of all Israelis who choose to get married abroad in a civil ceremony are Jews who likely would have been allowed to tie the knot at home through the Rabbinate had they wanted to.

This figure from the Israel Democracy Institute’s Biennial Statistical Report on Religion and State in Israel is among multiple findings in the document underlining both a widening disconnect between many Israeli Jews and the state’s religious authorities on the one hand, and a relatively high level of adherence to religious customs and norms among the public on the other hand.

Thousands of couples have encountered religious matrimonial restrictions in Israel, where the only marriages performed locally that the state recognizes are religious unions between partners of the same faith conducted by an authorized cleric.

The government does, however, recognize civil marriages by Israelis conducted abroad, making such unions a popular workaround: More than 66,000 couples who were residents of Israel have gotten married abroad since 2001. More than half of them could not have gotten married in the country for various reasons, most commonly because at least one of them wasn’t recognized as Jewish by the Rabbinate.

But 35 percent of those who got married abroad are Jews who, in most cases, could have gotten hitched in Israel through the Rabbinate, according to the report published Sunday.

Between 2003 and 2019, about 9,000 people each year registered as married in Israel based on overseas marriages, accounting for 15% of the total marriages in those years, the report said.

More and more people are opting to leave the state’s religious bodies out of their marriages. Among Israeli Jews, ”there is a gradual downward trend” in the number of couples getting married in religious institutions, according to the report. The number of Jewish couples who got married through the Rabbinate in 2015 was 39,111. By 2019, this figure dropped by 14% to 33,354.

Among Muslims, the report’s editors — Ariel Finkelstein, Ayala Goldberg and Shlomit Ravitsky Tur-Paz — observed no significant decrease in the number of married couples.

Cohabitation without marriage is rising in Israel, from 0.4% in 1987 to 5.2% in 2020. But it remains relatively low even among seculars, where unmarried cohabiters comprise 10% of couples. In France, the United Kingdom and many other Western countries, unmarried cohabiters account for 20% of couples.

In Israel, about a third of the couples living together without marriage are parents of children living at home, the report said.

The report also found that assimilation by Jews is low in Israel, which has about 1.7 million married couples. Of all married Jews, only 3.3% are married to a non-Jew. Most mixed marriages that include a Jewish partner are with non-Arab Christians or people without a religious affiliation. Only 0.1% of mixed marriages are between an Arab and a Jew.

Since 2016, about 3,000 people have converted to Judaism annually in Israel, the report said. Most of them do so through the Rabbinate. But between 2015 and 2021, some 1,500 people converted through Giyur K’Halacha — a Rabbinate-circumventing conversion authority that the state recognizes for the purposes of naturalization, but which the Rabbinate does not accept for the purposes of authorizing a Jewish marriage.

Non-orthodox Jewish movements can also perform a state-recognized independent conversion. The Reform movement converted 1,342 citizens and another 183 temporary residents in 2015-2021. The Conservative Movement has converted another 484 citizens and 50 temporary residents in those years.

Divorce — which, unlike marriage, must be done through a state-recognized cleric even if the wedding was a civil one conducted abroad — is also on the rise: During the past decade, the number of divorces among Jewish couples rose by 14% and among Muslim couples by 44%. In 2019, the government registered a record year in divorces — nearly 16,000.

The Rabbinate’s average time for finalizing a consensual divorce is about two months. In conflict cases, 73% of divorces are finalized within a year. Recalcitrant spouses, who refuse to grant a divorce and expose themselves to sanctions by the Rabbinate’s courts, on average grant a “get” — a Jewish divorce certificate — within three years of being punished.

The report, which is the second biennial on the subject of religion and state, also features a trust index based on a survey of more than 1,000 Israeli adults, conducted in August. As in the first report on the subject, the highest trust is in the Kadisha burial societies (45%) and the lowest trust is in the Ministry of Religious Services (24%).

Those two institutions and the country’s many Jewish religious councils, which provide relevant services in the various municipalities, receive 77% of the total budget allocated to religious institutions, which in 2020 was about NIS 1.855 billion ($500 million). Only 7% is allocated to non-Jewish religious institutions, according to the report, whose survey results have a 2.85% margin of error.

The report includes surveys on religious observance levels in Israel.

About 19% of adults surveyed said they had worked on Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest.

Nearly 70% of the Jews surveyed said they are strict to some degree about eating kosher food: 46% say that they are always strict and another 23% are partially strict. Only 35% of the Jews answered that they only eat at businesses that have a kosher certificate that they trust. Another 43% of Jews do not check at all the extent to which the business keeps kosher.

Among the Muslim respondents, 66% said that they are always strict about eating halal and another 23% are strict sometimes. Of those who said they’re always careful to eat halal, 68% also said that kosher-certified meat is halal to them.

The survey reflected a relatively high level of observance when it comes to ritual baths by Jewish women at a mikveh. Among married Jewish women, 35% bathe regularly at a mikveh whereas 11% do so occasionally. Some 43% did so only immediately before their wedding. Among Jewish men, 12% bathe once a week or once a month, 12% once a year, and 9% every few years.

Another finding was the growing phenomenon of local burials of Israelis and foreign Jews who had lived abroad. A record 2,646 such burials were recorded in 2021, of which 61% were Israeli citizens. Deaths in France, the United States and the United Kingdom accounted for 40%, 35% and 5% of those burials in 2021, respectively.

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