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February 12, 2013

Who Needs a Chief Rabbi?

Keith Kahn-Harris, Jewish Daily Forward

Finally, after more than a year of deliberation, the United Kingdom has chosen Ephraim Mirvis to be its new chief rabbi, replacing Lord Jonathan Sacks.

Actually, much of that sentence isn’t correct. It isn’t “the United Kingdom” that chooses the chief rabbi. For all its pretensions to established status, the chief rabbinate has only a very limited state-sanctioned function — the licensing of marriages in some synagogues — and the state has no role in his selection.

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TAGGED: Rabbi, Jews, Britain, Jonathan Sacks

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