The Chief Rabbinate Council has approved a new range for the financial sum written into a ketubah, setting a minimum of NIS 36,000 and a maximum of NIS 360,000 and ordering Israel’s marriage-registration procedure to be amended accordingly.
The decision was adopted at a council meeting last week, and was recorded in a formal resolution dated Thursday. It is intended to curb unusually high commitments that senior rabbis say bear little relationship to a groom’s actual ability to pay, and can later create disputes over whether he ever genuinely intended to undertake them.
The practical change is at the marriage-registration stage: once the procedure is amended, the sum entered in the ketubah is to fall within the NIS 36,000-NIS 360,000 range.
It does not, however, mean that a woman will automatically receive the sum written in her ketubah if the marriage ends. The new decision governs what is written into the document; whether a ketubah payment is ultimately owed remains a separate question for the rabbinical courts, depending on the circumstances of the case.
What is a Ketubah?
A ketubah is the Jewish marriage contract setting out a husband’s obligations toward his wife, including a financial commitment that can become relevant in divorce proceedings.
The new limits follow years of debate in the rabbinical courts over excessively high ketubah sums, sometimes running far beyond what the husband could realistically pay.
One of the central questions in those cases is known in Jewish law as gemirut da’at – whether the person making the commitment genuinely intended to be bound by it. When a groom writes an enormous sum largely as a ceremonial gesture, judges can later be left to determine whether that figure represented a real financial undertaking.
The committee that recommended the new limits was initiated by Sephardi Chief Rabbi David Yosef, and included on its panel Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Kalman Meir Ber, as well as senior rabbinical judges and officials involved in marriage registration.
Range intends to reflect genuine financial realities
The committee concluded that NIS 360,000 was an appropriate upper limit and NIS 36,000 an appropriate minimum, and the council adopted its recommendation.
Ber said the upper limit was intended to address cases in which grooms commit to “imaginary sums” that they neither intend nor have the ability to pay.
At the same time, he said, the rabbinate did not want to leave the ketubah without a meaningful minimum, because the document is intended to provide the wife with genuine financial protection.
Setting both boundaries, he said, was intended to restore the ketubah to its proper role as “a halachic document with meaning, and not an empty declaration of intent.”