Rabbinate forces Arab farmers to sell land to non-Jews for sabbatical year

Haaretz Last update - 08:25 29/08/2007
By Yair Ettinger, Haaretz Correspondent

The beginning of the Jewish sabbatical year is just two weeks away, but the kashrut certification bureaucrats are breaking new records for the absurd: Kashrut supervisors from the Chief Rabbinate are forcing Israeli Arabs to sign a document that gives the Israel Lands Administration and the Chief Rabbinate the right to sell the land to a non-Jew as a condition for continued kosher certification for their produce. If they refuse to sign, they were told that the wholesalers to whom they sell their goods will also lose their kashrut certification. The loss of the certificate would mean that the farmers and wholesalers would be unable to sell their produce in Jewish towns and stores. MK Ahmed Tibi (Ra'am-Ta'al) called on Arab farmers not to sign the forms, saying that it was an illegal demand.

Distributors in the wholesale fruit and vegetable market at Tzrifin have recently received the documents they were requested to distribute to every farmer they buy from. The form gives the ILA and the Chief Rabbinate, or their agents, power of attorney to sell the land on which they grow produce to non-Jews during the sabbatical year, which occurs every seven years according to Jewish law and during which the land is required to lie fallow, and which begins on Rosh Hashanah in two weeks. The document is the legal basis for symbolicly selling the land to a non-Jew for the year-long period, known as "Heiter Mechira."

This sale is a legal fiction that allows the land to be farmed and the produce sold to Jews during the sabbatical year. The Chief Rabbinate and the ILA will serve as the go-betweens who will "sell" the land to a non-Jew on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. According to halakha, Jewish religious law, during the sabbatical year Jews may eat produce grown in the Land of Israel only if it was grown on land owned by non-Jews.

However, kashrut supervisors in the center of the country, acting on the orders of Rabbi Avraham Yosef, the Chief Rabbi of Holon, are also demanding that Arab farmers sign the document. One Arab farmer who was given the document said that he was terrified to find out that he was required to sell his land as a condition to continue selling his produce with rabbinical supervision. "For 30 years, I have been in agriculture, and I have seen five or six sabbatical years," he said. "Suddenly, they are telling us that they will remove the kashrut [certification] from our wholesalers if we do not agree to sell the land.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/898515.htmlPeople are scared, since our produce is sold to Jews all over the country." A kashrut supervisor from the rabbinate explained that they wanted "to be sure that all of the land is sold to a non-Jew. The problem is that some of the Arab farmers are [leasing] ILA land, and are farming what is in fact Jewish land. [Any non-Jew who] presents us with a land registry deed that proves that the land is his will be exempted from signing the forms," said the supervisor. The head of the Chief Rabbinate's committee on the sabbatical year, Rabbi Zeev Witman, promised that "All the agricultural produce grown by Arabs will be accepted. They can ignore this document." On the other hand, Rabbi Yosef insisted that "Arab farmers must sign, since there are many go-betweens among Arab farmers and we want to discourage them."