Very doubtful is a country can be called democratic as long as it outlaws people to get married unless they share the same religion. To the best of my knowledge, not a single democratic country except Israel bans civil marriage. It's high time for this bizarre alliance with the likes of Saudi-Arabia to end and for Israel to step into the modern era.

A Christian country follows...Christian ideology, a Muslim country, Muslim laws. So why not Israel going by Torah law, the law of the Jewish people for millenia?

Conversions and civil marriages should be a norm in Israel. In fact, my wife and I got married in US to avoid humiliation, bureaucracy, from becoming becoming silent approvers of this racketeering and monopoly of birth, marriage, death that ultra-Orthodox rabbis have in Israel. This monopolistic pissing contest has to stop that only my interpretation of G-d's laws are right. It was not a minor issue when Ben-Gurion was leading the country but today this issue is number one in its urgency and sensitivity!

Most of the people at this conference have kids who married out and grandchildren who are not Jewish. We do not have to copy America in everything. The Jewish People are disappearing there through assimilation and intermarriage. We do not want this here in Israel.

Israel claims to be a Jewish country, and so it hass to follow Jewish law. Christian countries (such as the UK and US) allow Jeiwhs marriage, but do not accept it as legally married. We have to ALSO do a civil marriage to be legally married.

You basically want to stop Israel from being a Jewish country. Israel follows Jewish law, and we can't have people like Lapid who don't follow halacha in the slightest telling us what to do. If people want to "get married" outside of halacha, go to a non-Jewish country,

Likud 31 Lapid 19 Hatnuya 6 Kadima2 need seven Bitachoni Labor 65 Yachamovitch the State Depends on you for stability and unity.Fourteen would be better .Yachamovitch for President keep the Mks relatively Honest.

point being ...keep it civil. People who love eachother deserve to be respected in their choice of life partner. The nation has no business in the bedrooms of concenting adults. Remember most hassidim dont marry outside of their sect. They marry their cousins with the resulting problems of inbreeding.

Nonsense, Suzy from Australian. Majority Christian countries and majority Muslim countries do NOT need to follow religious laws. That's complete nonsene. Since the 18th century - the Age of Enlightenment - mankind has freed itself of the shackles of religious imposition in the public space. Yair Lapid is spot on. "The complete dominance of the Orthodox rabbis in Israel over divorces and marriages is an insult," Worse: It is a mistake. Let's fix it.

anti jewish anti Torah.

LIMITING THE SUPER JEW'S "TERRITORIES" IS THE BEST BET FOR all/any of JEWISH SURVIVAL! Give it all back to the people who are also just as Jewish as you too, but not so much more Jewish than thou! Marriage is also a sociological state besides being a universally ritualistic favorite glommed onto by those who wish to keep CONTROL of your access to THE EAR OF G-D! From the Wall to the Torah to the office of the marriage bureau, Judaism is the religion and property of a people, not just a few of the "better" people

Very relevant Suzy, very relevant. The Torah Law do not belong to the orthodox or the liberal, it belongs to all of us of the Jewish faith, so it should serve the needs of its people, not only the self appointed guardians of the Torah. Shai

Very relevant . I can think of few 'Christian' countries beyond the Vatican. Most Christian majority countries such as US, EuroZone(much of) Australia, NZ adhere to civil law and hence laws emerge in some quarters allowing for striking changes over time. At one time Blacks could not marry Whites in some US states, same sex marriage now legal in UK etc. We must find a middle ground that is Jewish yet works for all in a civil society. Laws have changed and are subject to re-interpretation eg as we shifted from Temple based to Rabbinical-based practice.

A halachic state like a sharia state like a state under church law is a recipe for corruption, bigotry and cynicism toward religion. It is sensible policy to allow believers to practice their faith freely and allow non believers to be free from any and all religious coercion. Israel by virtue of language, history and majority culture is the state of the Jews not the state of Judaism

Most Hareidi question the validity of the government's religious courts, and question whether any non-Orthodox Jew can validly marry since they are lacking intent to be married according to "Daat Mosheh v'Yisrael", and therefore the marriage is void ab initio. That leaves them in a relationship similar to the Roman law concubine (the word doesn't translate into English), and therefore the "get" isn't required at divorce, meaning there is no chance to create mamzerim. The Religious Zionists believe that without a government enforced standard of marriage and divorce (and conversion), the non-Palestinian population of Israel will evolve into two separate ethnic groups, leading to the problems of a bi-national state (which judging from the hatred of the hareidim by the hilonim, has probably happened).

He talks about loss of Jewish identity on the one hand but initiating civil marriage on the other. Mr. Lapid is inconsistent.

he was elected by israelis, not by american jews. he should remember that israel eats up populists and demogogues. lapid should also remember that the country is facing its most intense existential threats since its declaration of independence. lapid should put his priorities in order. personally, i do not like lapid, olmert's lapdog. he is an american trojan horse, even if he does not know it.

remarriage is necessary because fornication and adultery and adulterous marriages and other sins cost a nation HaShem's protection. Most marriages are adulterous except among the faithful who marry as virgins and remain married unless the grounds of fornication, adultery or desertion are present so that a get can be obtained. In case Lair Lapid is unaware of it, Israel has won wars with HaShem's supernatural help that were impossible to win because Israel is the only nation on Earth with a seventh day Sabbath by national law with strict rules on marriage and divorce and remarriage. Rabbi Yehoshua said from the beginnning there was no divorce but Moses, for the hardness of people's hearts, allowed divorce. Israel's national defense is on the line. People who want to have civil marriages and divorces can to to Cypress.

Hey Suzy, Maybe you don't know this, but there are different kinds of muslims and different kinds of christians. And the reason why these different kinds of christians and muslims exist is because at some point the older traditions went out of fashion. Rules and laws change due to circumstances. At the end of the day a Jew is still a Jew (even Hassidic Jews will admit that). So your argument, just like you, is full of hot air.

Civil marriage would be nice, but without it one can still live together with a contract. Without buses on Shabbat transportation is only for the rich

This is not what Israel was built for, by the secular zionist movement. Haredim didn't lift a single hammer to build it since 1885 and they certainly wont dictate our laws. In the ancient past anyone who didn't observe the Sabbath was killed. Should we do that too to 5 million secular Israelis?

So the cat slowly emerges from the sack, if anyone had any doubts)...

Israel a country that claims to be a democracy is far from it. Civil marriage as suggested by Mr lapic is a step in the right direction. People should have a choice in matters of birth, marriage and death and not be dictated to by the ultra orhtadox. Freedom from other peoples religion is a basic human right.

and that is the whole point. The ultra-Orthodox can continue their lives without a blip (other than to stop living off my shekel) and the rest of us will be free to return to a more pure Judaism, one less tarnished by rabbinic inventions

" In the ancient past anyone who didn't observe the Sabbath was killed. Should we do that too to 5 million secular Israelis? " YES!

The argument over civil marriage is an Israeli matter, and I live in the fleshpots. But I have a legitimate concern over the extraordinarily stringent -- even crazy and self-defeating -- requirements set by the rabinnic establishment to "prove" one's Jewishness. Not many of us descended from European Jews can provide copies of grandparents' or great-grandparents' kettubot 75 or 100 years after emigration from a continent of persecution and, later, execution. I am familiar with the struggle of a son of a friend to be married to a Jew in Israel. As his mother told me: My grandparents didn't flee persecution in Russia so that my son would have to provide piles of documents to prove that they were Jews. Were my sons were so lucky as to seek to marry Israeli girls, there is no way I could "prove" my maternal grandparents' Jewishness; any such documents my mother's parents may have had were destroyed in a flood. The best I could do is show the rabbonim their wedding invitation and my bar mitzvah photos, synagogue dues statements and circumcision, but I doubt even those would suffice. It's like the conversion hurdles; you'd think there were so many hundreds of millions of us that we should make as difficult as possible to become one of us. It's as though the rabbonim want to keep people out.

As an American Jew, I can tell you this: my parents had 4 children - only one married a Jew. Is this what Lapid aspires to - the American ideal? He's an idiot - American Jews are dying out. The Reform movement is run by goyim. That was the point - they wanted to be goyim. Wake up. Being secular is one thing, but instituting civil marriage is quite another. It has never been the custom or the law of the land of Israel. And we Jews don't change because the times change. If that was the case, we wouldn't be here.