New Chief Rabbi of Israel Accused of Cheating on Ordination Exam
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Rabbi David Lau, the recently elected chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel, has been accused of cheating on an ordination exam.
Israel’s Channel 2 reported Sunday that Lau in 1993 brought papers with the questions and answers to previous exams into one of his ordination tests. Reference material is not permitted in ordination exams.
The papers did not have Lau’s name on them.
Lau was disqualified from the exam. He took and passed the test in 1994, the year he received his ordination.
Reporter Amit Siegal said Channel 2 had received information accusing Lau of cheating on the exam on the eve of the election late last month. However, the news channel refrained from reporting on the information as it attempted to verify the accusation, the Times of Israel reported.
Channel 2 received a signed affidavit documenting the incident from Rabbi Uzi Levi, the test’s proctor and a senior official in the Chief Rabbinate’s ordination department.
Last week, Lau came under fire for using a racist slur in describing Israeli and foreign basketball players. He was elected to serve as Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi for the next 10 years.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
