Three women arrived on Monday to take the Chief Rabbinate’s official certification exams for the first time since the founding of the state, but more than two-and-a-half 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 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 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 exam, which takes between three to four hours to complete, was 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 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.
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 the Rabbinate’s 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. ITIM and the women petitioners 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 called the day “historic and moving in the history of the Jewish people, for the sake of the Torah of Israel,” but said the moment was also about the state’s obligation to recognize women Torah scholars on the same terms as men.
“Today, the path to the Rabbinate exams and to Torah study is open to female Torah scholars who love Torah exactly as men do, and who will be able to receive state recognition for their craft,” Farber said.
But as of midday Monday, the petitioners said that promise had not yet been fulfilled.
The Jerusalem Post reached out to the Rabbinate for comment.