The buck stops where?

The good news is that Israel's Sephardic chief rabbi reportedly has been cleared of complicity in the assault on a yeshiva student who had courted his daughter.

The bad news is that Israel's Sephardic chief rabbi reportedly has been cleared of complicity in the assault on a yeshiva student who had courted his daughter.

The story is worthy of an episode of "The Sopranos": Some months ago, according to news reports, Rabbi Shlomo Amar's 18-year-old daughter Ayala began a relationship with a 17-year-old Orthodox boy. Her mother, who objected to the relationship, asked her son to intervene. According to police, the son had Ayala lead the boy to a car where he and two Israeli Arabs were waiting. At knifepoint, they took him to the home of the Arabs, where they beat him up, tied him up and told him to stay away from Ayala - who was watching. Then they sheared off the boy's peyot and cut his kippah in two, adding insult to injury.

All this took place during Passover, by the way.

The next morning, the miscreants drove the boy to the chief rabbi's house, where he was further beaten. Police later arrested Amar's wife, daughter and son. Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz recommended May 18 that no charges be brought against Amar in connection with the incident.

"When Israel was born," writes Joseph Aaron of the Chicago Jewish News, "such a fact would have seemed impossible, such was the integrity of the men who served as Israel's chief rabbis. But what seemed impossible when Israel was born, seems all too routine only 57 years later."

It's not just the Sephardic chief rabbi, either. Multiple charges have been made against the Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel in the last couple of years - including allegations that he accepted a free hotel room over Passover, in violation of the civil service code, and then appointed the hotel's in-house rabbi to a senior position in the Chief Rabbinate - all of which the attorney general has also decided not to prosecute.

By coincidence - lucky or unlucky, depending on your point of view - Israel's state comptroller issued its annual report recently. Eliezer Goldberg, who heads the watchdog agency, summed the report's findings up thus: "Corruption is more dangerous to Israel than any other threat."

Goldberg went on to say that he expects his report to be ignored, because Israel, unlike many countries in Europe, does not have an authoritative body to act on the report's conclusions.

The bottom line is this: Our leaders - most especially our religious leaders - have a responsibility to the people they serve for conducting themselves in a manner that is above reproach. When it appears they may be failing to do so, it falls to other authorities and the public to hold them accountable.

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