RELIGION : Rabbi Elections Get Down and Dirty in Israel : Charges of womanizing and bribery taint campaign. Some even advocate abolishing the institution of chief rabbinate.

The election next week of Israel’s two chief rabbis has turned into such a mudslinging campaign--including charges of womanizing, bribery and dirty politicking--that even the country’s secular majority is now more scandalized than amused by the way its religious leaders are chosen.

“We are shocked and disgusted at the depths to which the so-called election campaign for the chief rabbinate has sunk,” a group of 29 leading rabbis declared this week.

Tel Aviv Mayor Shlomo Lahat called it “another example of the decline of the moral climate in Israel.”

And Rabbi Shear Yoshuv Cohen, chief rabbi of the northern port city of Haifa and a candidate for one of the posts, said, “This campaigning has been terrible. It is unfortunate that this process has borrowed some of the worst aspects of national politics.”

At stake are two posts of chief rabbi for Israel--one for Ashkenazic Jews who have a European background, the other for Sephardic Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. Both will be chosen by an electoral college of 80 rabbis and 70 public figures, including two women for the first time.

Although most Israelis do not follow strict Jewish law--fewer than 40% of Jews here describe themselves as religious and fewer than 20% as fully observant--Israeli law gives the country’s chief rabbinate tremendous legal powers, particularly in marriage and divorce.

Traditionally, prominent rabbis respected as religious scholars and spiritual leaders have been elected, and in serving 10-year terms they have brought to the post great moral authority, not only among Israelis but among Jews around the world.

In recent years, however, the chief rabbis have been eclipsed by the heads of Hasidic groups, such as Habad. In turn, these revered leaders have also encountered problems that have raised questions about the future of Judaism even in Israel.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a former chief Sephardic rabbi, was heard last week in taped sermons cursing his rivals; most leaders of an ultra-Orthodox religious party here are under investigation for corruption, and the New York-based Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, contrary to the predictions of many of his followers in Habad, did not reveal himself as the Messiah this month.

“In the modern world, we need a person (as chief rabbi) who looks the part, acts the part and speaks the part,” said Rabbi Mendel Lewitus, a prominent Israeli religious scholar. “He must be a leading personality.”

Controversy over this election began when Rabbi Shlomo Goren, chief Ashkenazic rabbi from 1972 to 1983, said no candidate--including Cohen, his brother-in-law--was worthy of the post. “They are all in the minor leagues,” Goren said, complaining that they lacked sufficient learning.

Cohen had already been accused of favoring an end to Israel’s legal requirement that all Jews here be married according to strict religious laws. While that won him support from secularists, it cost him crucial votes among rabbis in the electoral college.

Then Rabbi Yisrael Lau, chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and Cohen’s rival for the post of Ashkenazic chief rabbi, was accused of sexual liaisons with a number of women, including some who had come to him for counseling, over more than two decades. Israeli tabloid newspapers were filled with lurid allegations against Lau.

Although several accusers later withdrew their charges as false and Israel’s attorney general said there was no evidence against Lau, his backers felt that “irreparable damage” had been done.

Lau’s supporters, meanwhile, accused Cohen’s camp of planting illegal eavesdropping devices in the Tel Aviv chief rabbinate to gather evidence against Lau. Cohen’s backers in turn said Lau’s were responsible for articles in the press misrepresenting his position on religious issues.

Old charges against two other candidates also resurfaced; one was said to have “bought” his election as head of a local rabbinate and the other to have bribed his way out of military service.

The scandal has been so great that Avraham Poraz, a member of Parliament from the leftist Meretz party, is winning unexpected support for a bill that would abolish the institution in a step toward the separation of state and religion.

But most religious Israelis say that reform of the chief rabbinate, not its abolition, is what is needed and that reform should come from this election.

“It is very important that chief rabbis . . . should speak not only about things that concern religious Jews,” said Gavriel Sivan, a religious scholar here, “but about things that should bother all Jews and all people--moral questions, ethical problems, the major issues of our day.”