Dr. Aliza Lavie, Chairman of the People’s Lobby, Religion and State in the Knesset: “The government is exploiting the existing political chaos and is hastening the government’s bill to regulate the supervision services on kashrut. The memorandum of the law presents no real solution to the substantive problem of the Chief Rabbinate’s monopoly on the kashrut system. On the contrary, the government will establish a cumbersome and complex system with countless officials. These officials will only empower the rabbinate through a lubricated mechanism. They are those who exploit the political chaos by blackmailing the system and promoting a grab. Who did they promise and why did they promise at the expense of all of us
Kashrut in Israel has long since become a corrupt and inflated system that suffers from clear conflicts of interest in the relations between an inspector and a supervisor. The absence of a uniform standard of supervision, and in extreme cases suspicions of criminal activity. As a result, the public’s trust in the system has steadily eroded, and accordingly, the status of the rabbinate and the quality of kashrut have been eroded.
The government proposal, which will be brought up next Sunday to the Ministerial Committee on Legislation, must be stopped. The law will create costs of billions of shekels for the economy, which will directly affect the cost of living, and leave the public without a kosher product.
In the current reality, a fundamentally profound reform is required. A private bill that I am promoting is the first comprehensive attempt to deal with the complex issues in the faltering Kashrut system. The proposal will lead to the transfer of power from the government to citizens, the establishment of an authority to supervise the provision of kashrut services, the expansion of the authorities and the granting of a kosher certificate to anyone who has received a license for that purpose. The role of the state will be to oversee the Kashrut bodies in aspects of transparency and control. The aim of the proposal is to fundamentally change the kashrut system in Israel and to regulate the conditions for the entry of new entities into the field, thereby enabling competition and streamlining in the sector. “