Asif Ynov Gidolim, LTD v. The Chief Rabbinical Council of Israel

Under Jewish law, it was prohibited to cultivate Jewish-owned land every seventh year, known as the sabbatical year. Jewish law also prohibited Jews from consuming produce cultivated from Jewish-owned land during the sabbatical year. Some Jewish law authorities permitted the land to be sold temporarily to a non-Jew with a special sales permit. Under this sales permit, the Jews could still cultivate the land and eat the produce during the sabbatical year while the land was temporarily owned by non-Jews. The Chief Rabbinical Council of Israel (defendant), a national administrative body, empowered local rabbis to issue kashrut certificates to indicate that the produce from a given farm was kosher because the farm was following the sabbatical-year rules. The kashrut certificates were essential to the farmers’ business because many Jews would not consume the produce from a farm that had not been certified as kosher. Some local rabbis did not agree with the issuance of temporary sales permits, viewing the loophole as a violation of the sabbatical-year rules, and refused to issue kashrut certificates in their local jurisdictions. The Chief Rabbinical Council traditionally worked around this problem by allowing the farmers to seek and obtain a kashrut certificate from an alternative rabbi in the event the local rabbi refused to issue the certificate. The Jewish farmers had relied on this procedure for several years. However, only weeks before the beginning of the sabbatical year in 2007, the Chief Rabbinical Council conducted a telephone survey of its members and decided that farmers could no longer seek kashrut certificates from alternative rabbis and that the local rabbis had the final word on whether kashrut certificates could be issued in their jurisdictions. This decision posed a significant impact on Jewish farmers who had presumed they could continue operations under the temporary sales permit, and it threatened the Jewish farmers’ market share and financial stability. One such farmer, Asif Ynov Gidolim, LTD (plaintiff), filed a petition with the Israel Supreme Court to review the Chief Rabbinical Council’s last-minute policy change. The Chief Rabbinical Council’s submission to the court lacked documentation of how the policy-change determination was made.