A long-delayed amendment to Israel’s kosher supervision law is now being brought to the Knesset as a government bill, with the stated goal of regulating inspectors, tightening oversight, and restoring the state-run kashrut system. The writer says the current effort is not a Shas political project, but a practical correction of a broken framework that has been neglected for years.
The article traces the issue back 12 years, when then deputy religious services minister Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan and ministry director general Elhanan Glat first brought the author in to help organize the state kashrut system. It argues that the system’s main failures came from disconnecting inspectors from the local religious councils they serve, and from a conflict of interest in which inspectors were paid by the businesses they supervised.
According to the piece, that model allowed inspectors to oversee several businesses at once, led to harassment of business owners, unofficial or in-kind wages such as pizza for children or prepared Shabbat meals, and arbitrary, unequal pricing for kosher certification. It also created uncertainty for businesses and uneven enforcement, while the author says his own four years in the ministry, including a year running the Israel Rabbinate’s meat import department, showed the depth of the problem.
The article says former minister Matan Kahana’s reform was well-intentioned but flawed, because it tried to remove local rabbis and religious councils from the system instead of fixing field operations. It says the law was never implemented, and that current minister Michael Malkieli stopped its rollout after taking office. The new amendment, advanced in the Knesset by Likud member Ohad Tal, is presented as a necessary step to professionalize inspectors, standardize council structures, reduce abuse, and preserve a reliable national kosher system in line with religious Zionist ideals.
