Michael Malchieli

Malchieli was born on October 7, 1982.[1] He studied education and Jewish thought as an undergraduate and public administration for his master’s degree.[5] Before entering national politics, he taught at the Tiferet Tzvi yeshiva and managed a community center.[5]

He founded Netivot Noam, an organization promoting yeshiva-style Talmudic learning.[1] A 2019 profile listed him as a Jerusalem resident, married with six children; a 2023 profile listed him as married with seven children.[1][5]

Malchieli served on the Jerusalem City Council before entering the Knesset and worked as an adviser to Religious Services Minister David Azoulay.[1] In a 2018 tribute, he recalled serving as Azoulay’s chief of staff at the ministry and called him his “teacher for public service.”[8] He said Azoulay continued to guide him after he became a Knesset member, adding: “I had the privilege to be his chief of staff at the Religious Services Ministry, and that’s where I learned what is public devotion.”[8]

In the 2015 election to the 20th Knesset, Malchieli occupied eleventh place on the Shas slate; the party received 241,613 votes, or 5.74 percent, and won seven seats.[9] He entered the Knesset on November 2, 2016, after Aryeh Deri resigned his parliamentary seat while serving as interior minister.[4] In his first Knesset speech, Malchieli pledged to work for disadvantaged groups and strengthen Jewish tradition.[4]

By 2019, Malchieli was a deputy Knesset speaker and sixth on the Shas election list.[1] He held sixth place in both the April and September 2019 elections, when Shas won eight and nine seats respectively.[10] He was again sixth for the March 2020 election, in which Shas received 352,443 votes, representing 7.70 percent of the vote, and retained nine seats.[11] That election left the right-religious bloc three seats short of the 61 required to form a government.[11]

For the 2021 election, Malchieli was listed fourth on the Shas slate, following Aryeh Deri, Yakov Margi, and Yoav Ben Zur, and preceding Chaim Bitton.[12] He again occupied fourth place in the November 2022 election to the 25th Knesset, when Shas won 11 seats with 392,644 votes, or 8.24 percent of the total.[13] He also served as chairman of the Shas Knesset faction.[5]

Malchieli was appointed minister of religious services in December 2022, after years in municipal and parliamentary roles.[5][14] He was 40 at his January 2023 inauguration, and the ministry had been vacant since the previous August.[1][14] Its responsibilities included jurisdiction over Jewish religious councils, which oversee religious services for Jewish communities.[3]

In January 2023, Malchieli was selected to serve temporarily as interior minister while retaining the religious-services portfolio.[15] The arrangement followed the Supreme Court’s disqualification of Aryeh Deri’s ministerial appointment and Deri’s dismissal from the interior and health ministries.[15] Deri selected Malchieli for the temporary role as part of Shas’s effort to retain the portfolios pending his possible return; the acting appointment was limited in duration by law.[15]

In July 2025, Shas announced that it would leave government positions amid a dispute over legislation concerning yeshiva students’ military-service status.[16] Malchieli said it was impossible to remain in government under the circumstances, but emphasized that Shas would not oppose the coalition.[16] His ministerial tenure ended that summer, and he remained a Shas Knesset member in 2026.[2]

Because Malchieli remained an active Knesset member in 2026, his political legacy was still developing.[2] His ministerial record centered on strengthening the Chief Rabbinate, rabbinical courts, and state religious-services institutions.[6][14] At his inauguration, he pledged to act in accordance with the Chief Rabbinate’s instructions and strengthen the Rabbinate and rabbinical courts.[14] He also proposed expanding rabbinical courts’ powers, including implementing a coalition commitment to let them adjudicate civil property disputes, and said he wanted to improve the standing of religious-services workers and local rabbis.[6] The inauguration included an announcement that the ministry’s religious-buildings development budget would rise from NIS 40 million to NIS 250 million, supporting projects including synagogue construction and renovation.[14]

In December 2022, Malchieli halted a policy scheduled to take effect in January 2023 that would have allowed private Orthodox organizations to issue kashrut certificates, ending the Chief Rabbinate’s monopoly over that function.[3] In 2023, he postponed elections for Israel’s two chief rabbis from their original August date until after the municipal elections scheduled for October 31.[17] He explained that the timing could create an appearance that municipal voting had tainted the rabbinical election, while saying there was no concrete fear of foul play.[17]

In 2024, Malchieli approved new regulations governing the selection of municipal rabbis, reversing elements of a 2022 reform introduced by his predecessor, Matan Kahana.[7] The regulations reduced local influence over selection, gave the minister greater control over the selecting body, allowed rabbis to hold a second paid job, and reversed a ten-year term limit, permitting city rabbis to serve until age 70 with the possibility of an extension.[7] Following litigation and discussions with government legal officials, the ministry amended the rules to restore a role for local authorities and residents.[7] Malchieli instructed that residents’ influence be restored through their representatives on local councils.[18]

Before the October 7, 2023 attacks, Malchieli warned Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs in a late-May letter that the ministry was not prepared for emergency burials.[5] He said responsibility for emergency burial had passed from the Interior Ministry to his ministry in 2017, but the NIS 50 million identified as necessary for preparations had not been transferred. The allocations were NIS 500,000 for 2023 and NIS 1 million for 2024.[5] In his account of the response to the attacks, Malchieli said that after the disaster’s scale became clear on Saturday night, he called the ministry’s director-general and asked local authorities in Ofakim and Netivot to prepare graves discreetly.[5]

Malchieli publicly condemned the spitting on Christian pilgrims carrying a cross from Jerusalem’s Church of the Flagellation, an incident reported on October 3, 2023.[3] He said: “this is not the way of the Torah, and there is no rabbi that supports or gives legitimacy to this reprehensible behavior.”[3] On November 12, 2023, men in Bnei Brak spray-painted over women’s faces on posters displaying the names and faces of Hamas hostages; police arrested one suspect.[3] Malchieli condemned the defacement as “profoundly serious” and said it did not reflect the ultra-Orthodox public’s values.[3]

In 2026, Malchieli supported legislation regulating the status of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students.[19] He said full-time students should be able to defer military service while Torah study remained their occupation, but stated that he would “not ask for a collective exemption” for the ultra-Orthodox.[19]

Tzohar challenged Malchieli’s authority to halt the kashrut-certification reform in a Supreme Court petition filed on September 19, 2023; it remained pending at the end of that year.[3] His postponement of the chief-rabbi elections also drew scrutiny because the contest included brothers of Shas chairman Aryeh Deri and incumbent Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, and the delay could benefit Deri’s brother Yehuda.[17]

The municipal-rabbi regulations prompted a High Court petition by Itim and Tzohar, which argued that the changes increased political control and diminished local influence.[7] In January 2025, the court ordered the state to respond by March 20, and the ministry subsequently amended the regulations to restore local representation.[7][18]

The timing of Malchieli’s emergency response on October 7 also drew scrutiny: his ministry’s operational response began after the holiday ended, although he attended a Cabinet meeting before the end of Shabbat.[20] His schedule showed calls to ministry officials and local religious-council heads between 7 p.m. and midnight, and his spokesperson did not answer a question about why he had not acted earlier.[20]

In 2024, the State Comptroller’s permits committee authorized Malchieli to establish a company with a partner to purchase and rent a property, subject to restrictive conditions.[21] His application also sought approval to retain about NIS 400,000 in his bank account; he had previously engaged in real estate while an MK.[21] He undertook not to participate in ongoing company decisions and to use an independent representative, while stating that he devoted his time to his ministry.[21] Separately, his position on military-service legislation prompted protests by some ultra-Orthodox demonstrators in 2026.[19]