Some might posit that Yisrael Beitenu leader Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is competing with Yesh Atid leader Finance Minister Yair Lapid in introducing anti-religious legislation. Lieberman’s party is introducing a bill seeking to dissolve the nation’s local religious councils, a system that was established decades ago.
The bill was introduced on Monday 27 Teves 5774 by Yisrael Beitenu MKs Dudu Rotem and Robert Ilatov. The legislators feel the responsibility for religious services in a municipality should be that of the local government, thereby eliminating the religious councils, a move that will result in enormous savings. The MKs insist they are in no way seeking to compromise religious services, but the separate entity known as religious councils carries a large measure of redundancy with it and that can be eliminated by placing the religious services under local government.
Opponents warn such a bill would spell total devastation for state religious services around the country.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
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The whole concept of government religious councils was to establish the Dati Leumi version of Yiddishkeit as the “state” religion. Abolishing them would strengthen the hareidim, and undermine the religious zionists, noting that in the last year it is the religious zionists who played a pivotal war in launching the war against the hareidim.
There are a lot of “state” services that really should be run by local municipal government. Municipalities should really run their own police departments. In Israel however, there is one centralized police department for the whole country. Perhaps that might be maintained as a “FBI”-style service but the regular policing should be done by Municipal police.
It is for this reason that this latest move by Yisrael Beiteinu is suspect, as there are other, more “across-the-board” services that ought to be moved from the state to municipalities.