Rabbi Kalman Meyerbr Elected as Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi

“Rabbi Kalman Meyerbr” was elected as the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi for a ten-year term.

According to reports from Israeli media on Thursday, October 31st last week, final elections were held between two Chief Rabbis “Barr, who is Haredi” and “Rabbi Mikahallovi”. The two aforementioned candidates had obtained equal results in the first round of elections held on September 29th, the same date on which “Rabbi David Yosef” was elected as the Chief Rabbi of Sephardic Jews (Oriental Jews), whose religious rulings related to Jews and religious matters in countries such as Iran and Iraq are connected to this Sephardic branch of Judaism.

The Chief Rabbi is elected by a legal electoral committee that has 150 members. The final result of this election was 77 votes in favor of “Rabbi Kalman Meyerbr,” who is ultra-Orthodox and the Chief Rabbi of Netanyahu, against 58 votes. Analysts considered this election as a sign of the political victory of the “Degel Hatora” faction over “Shas” and the religious-Zionist party (RZP).

According to published reports, RZP and Shas had an agreement whereby RZP supported Shas’s candidate for the position of Sephardic Chief Rabbi (Yosef), and in return, Shas also supported the religious-Zionist candidate for the position of Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi.

It should be noted that more than half of today’s Jews are Ashkenazi. Jews have two Chief Rabbis, one being the religious leader of Ashkenazi Jews (European) and the other being the religious leader of Sephardic Jews (Asian or Oriental). In the past, the term “Ashkenaz” was used to refer to a specific cultural group of Jews, with no social consensus regarding their original roots and population developments.