State-employed rabbis barred from taking money for weddings

State-employed rabbis will no longer be allowed to accept money for conducting weddings, and will barred from officiating at more than two such ceremonies in one night, new regulations say.

The instructions, which will be sent to all rabbis in the coming weeks, were drawn up by a joint task force of the Justice Ministry, the Chief Rabbinate and the Religious Services Ministry and approved by Attorney General Menachem Mazuz. The task force was led by deputy state prosecutor Shai Nitzan.

Municipal rabbis, local council rabbis and neighborhood rabbis are all generally state-employed.

The new regulations, which are the first regulations of their kind, will prohibit such rabbis from accepting money for conducting a wedding if one or both members of the couple live in the rabbi's jurisdiction. If the wedding takes places 15 kilometers or more from the rabbi's jurisdiction, he is allowed to accept reimbursement for travel expenses, and in some specifically defined cases, remuneration for his time as well.

However, a state-employed rabbi may from now on be paid for officiating at the ceremony itself only if both members of the couple reside outside his jurisdiction, and if he has been specifically licensed to perform private work.

Moreover, a rabbi will be allowed to conduct two weddings in a night only if they are scheduled far enough apart that he can be certain he will not be late for the later ceremony because of the earlier one.

Rabbis who wish to work privately will need to secure a special permit, and to report every six months on the nature and scope of the private work they performed. But even rabbis who secure such a permit will only be allowed to dedicate a set number of hours every month to private work.