Bayit Yehudi MK Betzalel Smotrich has proposed legislation to establish a unified standard for kashrut licensing across the country. His bill is scheduled for debate in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation on Sunday.

The bill is supported by Chief Rabbis Yitzhak Yosef and David Lau. Opponents, however, argue that the draft legislation would increase the power of the Chief Rabbinate and perpetuate the current system’s conflicts of interest. […]

The Ne’emanei Torah Va’avodah lobbying group said, however, that standardized regulations could be achieved simply by the Religious Services Ministry issuing such regulations without enacting legislation. […]

“Standardization is theoretically a positive idea… but unfortunately, the proposed law does not deal with bad aspects of the current system; dealing with corruption, conflict of interests between the supervised [business] and the supervisor; the business connections between municipal rabbis and private [haredi] kashrut authorities; unsupervised activities of those authorities and the creation of many different costs for the consumer and the economy,” the organization said.