High Court rejects bias claim against Beth Din
V THE HIGH Court has rejected a claim that a Federation Beth Din ruling was invalid because the rabbinical court was biased.
The claim was brought by Rabbi Moshe Avram Dadoun regarding the adjudication of a business dispute by the Beth Din six years ago.
In 1999, Rabbi Dadoun paid £130,000 to Yitzchok Biton, who was a fellow investor in a pair of property companies in the UK.
But while Rabbi Dadoun argued he had used the money to buy Mr Biton’s stake in one of them, Mr Biton considered it part-repayment for money he invested.
In 2008, the two men took their difference to the Federation Beth Din, which six years later found largely in favour of Mr Biton, ruling that he retained his shareholding and was owed over £213,000.
In 2017, Rabbi Dadoun discovered that some nine months before the Beth
Din had issued its decision in spring 2014, Mr Biton’s brother, Rabbi Daniel Biton from Israel, had met the head of the Federation Beth Din, Dayan Yisroel Lichtenstein, in London.
Mr Biton’s brother had turned up to the Federation’s headquarters for its daily afternoon service. According to the High Court judgment, Steven Woolf, representing Rabbi Dadoun, argued that it was “implausible and inconceivable that there would not have been a discussion as to the merits of the case”. But Dayan Lichtenstein, in his witness statement, said their conversation after minchah “could not have lasted more than a matter of minutes” and “focused very simply on when the [rabbinical] court were going to issue the award”.
In his decision, deputy judge Michael Green QC accepted that Mr Biton’s brother and Dayan Lichtenstein had discussed just the timing of the Beth Din decision.
A month after the meeting, when the Beth Din had still not released its findings, Yitzchok Biton himself had written “a somewhat aggressive diatribe” to the Federation to complain.
But while Mr Green said it was regrettable the Federation had not disclosed that letter to Rabbi Dadoun at the time, “that was because of a failure of administration at the Beth Din rather than anything sinister”.
He said he did “not consider that the failure to disclose the letter provides any evidence that could support a case for apparent bias against the Beth Din”.
The court heard that the Federation Beth Din handled 60 commercial cases a year. Besides that, it was busy with other issues including marriage, divorce and kashrut — which partly accounted for the delay in resolving the dispute between the two men.
The case concerned adjudication of a business dispute