The S & P Sephardi Community has appointed a dayan with a modern Orthodox background to its Beth Din.
Rabbi Joseph Dweck, the community’s senior rabbi, welcomed the recruitment of Dayan Ofer Livnat from Israel during the Shabbat service at the Lauderdale Road Synagogue.
Rabbi Dweck told the JC this week he was "delighted to welcome Dayan Livnat to our Bet Din. He is a venerable scholar and expert in his field and is himself, a teacher of dayanim. His presence considerably deepens and broadens the expertise and integrity of the oldest Bet Din in the country."
Dayan Livnat, from the Eretz Hemdah Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, will continue to commute regularly to the UK, where he has been teaching for four years.
Eretz Hemdah is jointly responsible for the semichah (rabbinic ordination) course which is run by the Montefiore Endowment in the UK.
It also teaches the first UK course for rabbis to train as dayanim which the Endowment launched in 2016.
Primarily taught long-distance using online technology, the dayanut course has attracted 25 students from around the world, including from the United Synagogue and from congregations affiliated with the mainstream Rabbinical Council of America.
Dayan Livnat is probably the first dayan in a UK Orthodox Beth Din to sport a kipah serugah - knitted kipah.
At the end of last year, he enrolled as a doctoral student in the Hebrew and Jewish studies department at University College London.
He said he was "very grateful for the appointment and hope I will be able to make a positive contribution to the community".
Israeli-born, he grew up in America, attending a yeshivah high school before studying at Birkat Moshe, a hesder yeshivah combining military service with Jewish studies, in the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim. He has a degree in education from Lifshitz College, a religious educational institute in Jerusalem.
After qualifying as a dayan, he has taught extensively and since 2010 has been a member of the Eretz-Hemdah Beth Din, adjudicating monetary disputes.
