Three women arrived on Monday to take the Chief Rabbinate’s official certification exams for the first time since the founding of the state. However, more than four hours after the exams were scheduled to begin, they had still not been allowed to sit them, according to ITIM, the organization that led the High Court petition that forced the Rabbinate to open the exams to women.
The Jerusalem Post has queried the Rabbinate for a response.
The moment was meant to mark a historic breakthrough in a years-long legal fight over women’s access to state-backed religious credentials. Instead, by midday, it had turned into another confrontation over whether the Rabbinate was complying with the High Court of Justice ruling at all.
Rabbi Seth Farber, the founder and head of ITIM, said that the women had been left waiting for hours and that the organization was trying to get them food for lunch.
“They’ve been just sitting there, disgraced for two-and-a-half hours,” Farber said.
According to ITIM, the women were not receiving the equal exam conditions required under the court’s ruling. The organization said it was preparing to file both a new High Court petition and a contempt of court motion. The exams were eventually delivered to the women at around 3 p.m., in accordance with a court-issued deadline, after which they promptly attended the four-hour exam.
The exams were scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. Like the men sitting the Rabbinate’s exams, the women were legally entitled to identical testing conditions. Instead, they were sent to a separate location, away from the main exam site at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center.
The Chief Rabbinate said that the women were being tested at a separate address in order “to prevent disturbances and disruption to the proper order of the exams.”
For the petitioners, however, the separate location and the delay sharpened the concern that the Rabbinate was formally allowing women into the testing system while still denying them the equal and ordinary access the court required.
One of the women, Yaara Samuel, said, “We knew there would be challenges, but we expected to be challenged on our knowledge. We are deeply disappointed in what happened today, that everything we studied for and invested in was for naught.”
“But,” she added, “the Torah knowledge remains with us; we came here to use that for the betterment of our communities.”
Prolonged battle over women’s access to Rabbinate exams
The confrontation comes after a prolonged legal battle over whether the Chief Rabbinate, as a state religious body, can bar women from its official exams even when those exams carry practical civil and professional consequences.
The High Court ruled last year that women could not be excluded from the Rabbinate’s certification exams, rejecting its argument that because it does not ordain women as rabbis, it was also entitled to prevent them from sitting the exams.
The justices drew a distinction between rabbinic ordination itself and the state-administered exam system. While the court did not order the Rabbinate to ordain women, it found that the exams operate as a form of state-backed professional certification, with consequences beyond the internal world of rabbinic title.
The Rabbinate’s exams, including the first-tier Yoreh Yoreh track, can affect eligibility for religious-service posts, salary scales, and recognition in public frameworks. In some contexts, rabbinic certification is treated as equivalent to an academic degree for pay and employment purposes.
That practical significance stood at the heart of the petition, which argued that once the state attaches public benefits and professional consequences to a certification system, it cannot exclude women from that system simply because they are women.
The court also rejected proposals to create a separate alternative examination track for women, accepting the petitioners’ argument that a parallel route would not provide the same recognition and would risk preserving the very inequality the petition sought to end.
After the ruling, the Rabbinate sought a further hearing, but Supreme Court President Isaac Amit rejected that request, leaving the original decision in place. Registration for women was later opened, setting up Monday as the first real-world test of whether the Rabbinate would implement the ruling in practice.
Farber, earlier, called the day “historic and moving in the history of the Jewish people, for the sake of the Torah of Israel,” but that it was also about the state’s obligation to recognize female Torah scholars on the same terms as men.
However, on Monday, it took hours for that promise to be fulfilled. One of the women, Ruth Agiv, said, “This was one step in a much broader process, and I’m happy to be a part of it, when it means that more women have access to this knowledge.”
Farber said, “What happened today is an embarrassing moral failure, a desecration of God’s name in the first degree. I don’t know who is responsible, but they must pay.”
UTJ faction head MK Moshe Gafni said that the proper legal framework to be followed is that of Torah rule, and that “it is forbidden to adhere to court rulings that are against the Halacha.”
Democrats faction head Yair Golan said in response, “Those who call to violate court orders are criminals.”
Keshet Neev and Shir Perets contributed to this report.