There are moments in a long campaign for justice when the most important thing is grit. Monday, three women Torah scholars demonstrated courage in fighting through an attempt to undermine their dignity, and they emerged proud.

I want to share how I experienced the events at the Ministry of Religious Affairs because several inaccurate accounts are already circulating. The real story is both more frustrating and more inspiring than what’s been reported.

The rabbinic certification exams were scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. Following an almost decade-long battle in Israel’s Supreme Court, and after a decision in July 2025 by the court, Monday was the first time women were to be allowed to sit for these exams. Three women who have spent years preparing for this moment arrived at the Ministry by 9:30.

They were not alone. ITIM’s legal team, which had fought the case in court, accompanied them, along with representatives from a remarkable coalition of organizations that have stood behind this effort: Matan, Ein HaNatziv, Maharat, Kolenu, and the Rackman Center, among others. That coalition walked these women to the door of the Ministry, a location that had itself been a compromise, since the original exam site was supposed to be Jerusalem’s International Convention Center, Binyanei HaUma. When they went in at 10, I went back to my office.

But the exams did not begin at 10:30.

At 11:09, I received a brief text from the head of ITIM’s legal department, Ofra Sitesmar, who was stationed at the ministry for the day. The exams had not been delivered to the room. I immediately called Rabbi Itamar Tubul, head of the Rabbinate’s examinations department, who was overseeing the men’s exams at Binyanei HaUma. He told me that the director of the Rabbinate had been instructed not to proceed with the women’s exams.

ITIM’s legal team moved immediately. Attorney Yair Mevorach Shaag composed an emergency appeal filed with the court around 12:20. The petition was unambiguous: the Rabbinate was flouting a Supreme Court decision from July. The petition asked the court to either instruct the Rabbinate to deliver the exams at once or, alternatively, to immediately halt the men’s exams as well.

Within roughly 40 minutes, an injunction from Justice Solberg, who had originally issued the decision, entered the court record. The State had until 3:00 p.m. to respond. If the ITIM account of the facts was accurate, the letter said, the State should make every effort to deliver the exams. In parallel, I WhatsApped the Chief Rabbi of Israel notifying him of the problem and asking him to intervene.

Meanwhile, the three women waited upstairs in the Ministry, sequestered and uncertain. We were told that they weren’t allowed to leave the room.

At approximately 2:00 p.m., the two female proctors — employees of an outside firm who had been waiting in the exam room — were informed by the Ministry that the exams would not be taking place. They came out of the room and left. We advised the women that they were free to leave as well.

At approximately 2:40, 20 minutes before Justice Solberg’s deadline, the women received text messages: the exams were on their way.

I called Rabbi Tubul again. He told me he was personally delivering the exams and that the women should come back upstairs. His explanation had now shifted: the problem, he said, had been that no rabbi was willing to proctor the exams (alongside the two other proctors – a format that was in place for the men’s exams), but that now a solution had been found. I pointed out that the women proctors had already left the building. He said he would call them and ask them to return.

They came back. The exams were administered more than four hours after they were supposed to have begun. Rabbi Tubul even sent me a photo of the three women sitting for the exam, an image that is now all over social media.

Deliberate or incompetent?

Many people have asked me whether this was a purposeful attempt to torpedo the exams or simply staggering institutional ineptitude. I don’t have enough evidence to say, but it doesn’t matter. Either answer is a disgrace. Either answer represents a chillul Hashem — a desecration of God’s name — of the first order. A Supreme Court ruling was treated as an inconvenience. Three women who had done everything right were made to wait, in uncertainty, for hours.

What saved the day – what preserved any shred of dignity in what happened – was the conduct of the women themselves. They sat. They waited. They did not leave. And when they were told, at the last possible moment, that they could finally take the exam they had come to take, they went back upstairs and persevered. True grit.

The three women, Ruth, Yaara, and a third who has asked not to be named, demonstrated perseverance that was moving. None of them were members of the original group of women who filed the petition: this is a team effort.

Eight years ago, ITIM, together with Kolenu and the Rackman Center, brought this issue to the Supreme Court to establish that women should have an equal opportunity to be examined and certified in Jewish law. Since then, there have been many ups and downs. Yesterday was a milestone, but it is not the finish line.

The real measure of success will come in five or ten years — and it will look like something quite concrete. Across Israel, there are hundreds of positions within the religious establishment that should be open to women but currently are not, simply because passing the rabbinic certification exams is a threshold requirement for holding them. Positions like overseeing municipal mikvehs. Seats on religious councils in cities and towns around the country. Roles in which women’s knowledge, judgment, and pastoral presence would be not merely acceptable but genuinely valuable to communities, to families, to the women and men who turn to religious institutions at the most vulnerable moments of their lives.

Those doors remain closed today. Opening them will require not just legal victories but sustained pressure, coalition-building, and the quiet, unglamorous work of changing institutional culture from the inside. We are under no illusions about how long that road is.

But here is what gives us reason to continue: the women who walked into that exam room yesterday — four hours late, after a morning of uncertainty and institutional bad faith — did so anyway. That is not a small thing. And they did not walk in alone. Their families, their study halls, the organizations, institutions, and foundations that stood behind this effort should be recognized for the support they provided the women.

We have a long road ahead. But we have walked long roads before.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)