Masorti movement challenges hegemony on weddings in Israel

by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

ynet reports on the new Masorti campaign to get Israelis to marry according to halakha.. but not according to the Orthodox.
Israeli couples are increasingly uninterested in getting married according to the established Israeli system, with Orthodoxy monopolizing all legal lifecycle events, and going through a demeaning and complicated process in order to get married. Twenty percent -or more- of Israelis each year choose to live together as couples outside the framework of the Office of the Chief Rabbinate, either by not participating in any wedding ceremony or by going through a civil ceremony in Cyprus or elsewhere.

The Masorti campaign aims to bring Jewish couples in Israel back to tradition by showing them that it is possible to have a halakhic wedding which is not only according to Jewish law, but also includes personal touches, and can be more egalitarian… and doesn’t need to include demeaning lectures to the couple about their personal lives.

The campaign includes print ads and commercials on radio and Internet sites that direct readers and listeners to a well-put-together website, and has generated significant interest. In the first three days there were more than 25,000 unique hits on the website.

Of course, this has po’d the Establishment:
According to the Masorti press release

The Chairman of Shas in the Knesset, Yaakov Margi, petitioned the Israel Broadcasting Authority to ban the Masorti campaign from the airwaves. In a letter to Mordechai Sklar, IBA’s general director, MK Yaakov Margi charged that the Masorti movement “knowingly misleads and perpetrates a campaign of fraud.” He further claimed to be writing on behalf of “those who are spiritually lost and would not want to find themselves ending up in unseemly places.”

MK Ophir Pines-Paz (Labor) responded in his own letter to the IBA that Masorti “faithfully combines tradition and progress” and suggested the Shas letter should be buried as “a foolish attempt at censorship.”