Tel Aviv City Hall is planning to become the first Israeli local authority to independently register residents as couples, which allow the city to recognise same-sex relationships officially.
By Israeli law, the only marriages performed in the country that are officially recognised by the state are those carried out by religious authorities.
For Jews, this means only those performed by Orthodox rabbis. Same-sex couples have managed to win limited rights in the courts, if they were married abroad or are living in a common-law marriage.
This means those in same-sex relationships cannot usually access municipal services as couples, since local authorities rely on the Interior Ministry’s population register, which does not recognise their partnerships. The new initiative in Tel Aviv seeks to bypass this, by registering couples at a municipal bureaucratic level for the first time.
