Israel's Shirat Hayam registry: Making it easier to decide who is Jewish and who is not

Isreali Chief Rabbinate issues certificates to hotels. restaurants and other food outlets confirming that kosher food is being sold there. The Rabbinate does not issue a kashrut certificate to a place where a non-Jew has unmediated access to food preparation. This policy restricts non-Jews' employment in the large service industry.  Recently, the policy was made more strict as now non-Jews cannot even serve food in establishments having the Rabbinate certificate. This, of course, means problems for thousands of people who have emigrated to Israel as Jews but are not recognized as Jews by the Israeli Rabbinate.

The bigger problem, according to Seth Farber, is, however, the two-year old Shirat Hayam registry of the Rabbinate which will check employees data and ensure that only Jews are employed in food establishments with their certificate. Following is an excerpt from the article (read the whole article Big Brother and the Rabbinate): 

In the context of the Knesset hearing, the question of “how do you know someone is Jewish” was put to the Religious Affairs Ministry. Unabashedly, the representative of the Carmiel (where some 40% of the population are immigrants from the FSU [former Sovet Union]) religious council said that the prospective worker is asked to present his or her identity number and then it is run against the “Shirat Hayam” national marriage registry. “The worker isn’t spoken to,” said the representative.

“The regulations say that the person with authority to look at this information” is charged with checking if the worker is Jewish. If someone isn’t certified by the rabbinate as Jewish, the establishment may be denied a kashrut certificate.

The Shirat Hayam registry is a relatively new phenomenon. It has only been in use for about two years, and was meant to ease the registration process for couples whose parents were married in Israel by making their parents’ ketubot, or Jewish marriage contracts, accessible. This in turn would allow the rabbinate to register couples for marriage without them having to produce additional paperwork (letters of Jewishness, etc).

But what is abundantly clear is that the Shirat Hayam registry – which by plan will be adopted by all of the local religious councils within the coming year or two – is essentially a tool meant to track everyone’s status. 

What’s even worse is that the information in the Shirat Hayam system extends well beyond whether you are registered as a Jew. It also identifies whether there was ever a conversion, divorce or adoption in your family, whether questions related to your personal status have ever been raised by a rabbinical court, or whether you have ever been married before. And all of this information is available to a clerk, who – going unchecked – is using it for purposes that you never agreed to or that were never intended. Indeed, Big Brother is here and he is sitting at the desk of your local religious council.
The evidence provided by the testimony in the Knesset highlights the fact that the rabbinate has launched a campaign to weed out anyone who has struggled to prove his or her Jewishness (and perhaps those who haven’t yet bothered). The information in the system is already – after two years – being abused, and it’s clear that this is only the beginning.

Databases which contain personal information about all of us are dangerous in the hands of criminals, but they might even be more dangerous in the hands of ideologues who believe that it is acceptable to use the information to advance their agenda. I’m worried about people stealing our personal information from the rabbinate’s database, but I’m even more worried about those who have access to it already.

The most intriguing part of 1984 and the fact that “Big Brother is watching” is that everyone goes about their business as if this is a good thing for society.

A Kashrut Certificate

Source: High Court strikes a blow to Chief Rabbinate's Kashrut-licensing monopoly

One would tend to agree with Seth Farber (that registry is a bigger problem) also because the Israeli  Supreme Court decided in September 2017 to allow other organizations to issue its own certificates about food preparation according to Jewish laws(though not Kashrut certificates which can still only be issued by the Chief Rabbinate). So, the authority of the Rabbinate on food establishments has decreased a bit (See  High Court strikes a blow to Chief Rabbinate's Kashrut-licensing monopoly).