August 2017 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

The government of Israel, rightfully, wouldn’t have ignored the torching of synagogues, the destruction of tombstones in Jewish cemeteries or assaults against Jews in other countries if governments were lax in investigating such crimes. Now, it must show determination to uproot such hate crimes from areas under its jurisdiction, defining perpetrators as terrorists who endanger Israel’s security, no less than those who send car bombs into city centers.
Ethnic tensions erupt frequently over some small incident, and then spiral out of control. After an Arab citizen drove through a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood in Acre during Yom Kippur, on October 8, 2008, five days of violence between Jews and Arabs ensued.
The troubles started on Wednesday as Jewish residents, who make up two-thirds of this mainly low-income city of 46,000, began the fast of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when all traffic in Israel’s Jewish population centers comes to a standstill.

Late that night an Arab resident, Tawfiq Jamal, drove with his son into a predominately Jewish neighborhood, known as the eastern district, to pick up his daughter from her fiancé’s apartment.

After leaving the car, the Jamals, perceived by Jewish residents as deliberately breaking the sanctity of the fast, were chased by a stone-throwing mob.

They escaped, though the son received light wounds to his face. But a rumor spread through Acre’s Old City, where many of the town’s Arab residents live, that Tawfiq Jamal had been killed. According to witnesses from both sides, hundreds of masked Arab youths set out to take revenge. …

Scores of cars were vandalized, and the windows of Jewish-owned stores were smashed.

Over the next few nights, Jewish residents set fire to at least three Arab-owned houses in the neighborhood and damaged several more, despite a heavy police presence. Most Arab residents had left to stay with relatives.

“At the end of the fast the whole neighborhood came out,” Tawfiq Taisir, 27, said outside his home, the yard filled with glass from the upper-floor windows that had been shattered by stones. Mr. Taisir, an Arab, said his family had lived as part of a tiny minority among Jews in the eastern district for 30 years.

The home of an Arab family three doors down from him was gutted on Saturday night.⁵⁰⁷

The rape of a young woman in May 2012 by three Sudanese or Eritrean men sparked widespread riots against black African immigrants.
Some 1,000 protesters rallied in Tel Aviv’s Hatikva neighborhood on Wednesday and called for the ousting of African asylum seekers from Israel.

Demonstrators attacked African passersby while others lit garbage cans on fire and smashed car windows.

Another group of demonstrators stopped a shuttle taxi and searched for migrant workers among the passengers, while banging on the windows.

The crowd cried “The people want the Sudanese deported” and “Infiltrators get out of our home.”

Following the protest, hundreds of people assembled in the main street of the Hatikvah neighborhood. Several protesters smashed the windows of a grocery store that served the migrant workers community, broke the windows of a barber shop and looted it.

Police arrested 17 people during the protest, with some of them detained while beating Sudanese migrants.⁵⁰⁸

The primary targets of Israeli Jews, however, especially the fanatical settlers in the West Bank, are Palestinian civilians. United Nations figures show that the annual rate of Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians almost quadrupled between 2006 and 2013, rising to 399 in 2013. Israeli security forces have largely failed to stem the so-called “price tag” campaign in which thugs cut down trees, deface mosques and beat Palestinian farmers.⁵⁰⁹ (According to another report, since 2008, there have been 15 cases of intentional arson attacks on homes and mosques in the West Bank and the police and Shin Bet security service have not solved even one of them.) Emboldened by the tolerance of the Israeli government and society for their acts of extremism, before the Friday services on December 11, 2009, Israeli settlers vandalized a mosque in the West Bank village of Yasuf, torching furniture and spraying Nazi slogans in Hebrew on the premises.⁵¹⁰ On October 3, 2011, Jews torched a mosque in the Israeli Bedouin village of Tuba-Zangariya and desecrated its interior by spray-painting in Hebrew, “Mohammed is a pig.” (It should be noted that Israeli’s Bedouin male population serve in Israel’s military.) Villagers blamed rabbis from the nearby Jewish town of Safed for inciting the violence. Safed’s chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, lauched an anti-Arab campaign prohibiting Jews in the area from selling or renting apartments or rooms to Arabs. Several hundred Arab Israeli students attending college in Safed were his primary targets. Rabbi Eliyahu’s scandalous response was to be expected:
Asked Monday on Israel Radio if he would condemn the attack on the Tuba-Zangariya mosque, Rabbi Eliyahu said there was no evidence that Jews had carried out the attack.

“It makes more sense, based on the facts, that this was a feud and not done by Jews,” he said. “I’ve never seen a Jew vandalize a mosque.”

Although such apparent acts of vengeance have recently occurred in the West Bank, a similar attack targeted another mosque in the northern Israeli village of Ibtin last year. Jewish extremists are suspected in all of the incidents.⁵¹¹
There has also been a proliferation of attacks on Christian and Muslim cemeteries in Jaffa and other localities. The Assembly of Catholic Bishops in the Holy Land issued a condemnation in a press release on October 9, 2011: “We witnessed in the last days frequent violations, burning and desecration of holy places, and things are not limited anymore to a certain area, but were extended to Galilee and Jaffa.” Afterwards, conditions only escalated. Many mosques have also been set on fire in recent years and racist graffiti sprayed on the walls. In early December, 2011 there was an attempt to burn the mosque in the Palestnian village of Burkina. An 80-year-old, now disused, mosque in central Jerusalem was defaced and set afire on December 13, 2011. Graffiti spray painted on the historical site included inscriptions such as “Muhammad is Dead,” “Muhammad is a Pig,” and “Price Tag,” the latter referring to violent acts by settlers and their supporters against Palestinians.⁵¹² This was followed by the assault on a new mosque in the West Bank town Burqua on December 15, 2011. Unkown persons painted slogans on the wall of the women’s section, doused the carpet with gasoline, set fire to the building and fled just before the imam arrived to call people to morning prayers. The handiwork was signed “Mitzpe Yitzhar,” the name of an “illegal” Jewish outpost built on privately owned Palestnian land a few kilometres to the north.⁵¹³ In June 2012, racist graffiti was found in Jewish-Arab town of Neve Shalom. The tires of 14 cars parked along the town’s main road were slashed, and slogans such as “death to Arabs,” “revenge,” and “Ulpana outpost,” were found sprayed on the vehicles. On September 5, 2012, a young Arab man was attacked by Jewish youths in Jerusalem and his leg was broken.⁵¹⁴ Some 40 cars had their tires slashed and anti-Arab graffiti was sprayed on walls in the Arab town of Jish (Gush Halav in Hebrew) in northern Israel on April 3, 2014. (The town has a population of 3,000 Christians and Muslims.) Among the graffiti was “Only goys [non-Jews] will be driven out of our land.”⁵¹⁵

As the following article from December 12, 2012 shows, desecration of Christian churches and cemeteries occur with alarming frequency and are met with exemplary restraint by Christians, amid widespread Israeli tolerance for such profanations.

A monastery and an Armenian cemetery in Jerusalem were vandalized overnight Tuesday, as Israeli police said Jewish extremists were most likely responsible for the hate crimes.

Reports of settlers storming into the al-Aqsa mosque the same night could not be confirmed independently by Al-Akhbar.

Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld told Ma’an that hateful graffiti was sprayed on the walls of the Monastery of the Cross and three neighboring vehicles were also damaged.

Police are investigating the incident, he added.

Anti-Christian graffiti such as “Jesus is a son of a bitch,” and Israeli nationalist slogans were found on the church and nearby vehicles, Israeli media reported. Graffiti reading “price tag” were also sprayed on the monastery.

One car had “Happy Hanukkah, triumph for the Maccabees” written on it, Ynet said, referring to the ongoing Jewish holiday which coincides with the Christmas period.

The “price tag” slogan is used by some Israeli extremists who vandalize or destroy Palestinian land or property. The attacks have included multiple arson attacks on cars, mosques and olive trees.

Perpetrators are rarely caught.

A priest from the monastery said he forgives whoever committed the attack, which is the seventh of its kind.

“It saddens me deeply,” Father Claudio said. “I believe in Jesus and some don’t, it’s their problem. We believe in peace and I forgive whoever did this the first time and this time.”

Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said graffiti insulting to Jesus Christ was also “sprayed on the gates of the entrance of the Armenian cemetery.”

The Midle East Monitor reported that dozens of Jewish extremists stormed into the al-Aqsa mosque courtyard on Tuesday night to perform “Talmudic rituals” and write on the walls.

Such takeovers of mosques occur frequently, often with the approval and tacit protection of the Israeli military.

Price-tag attacks by Jewish extremists against religious sites are commonplace in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

In October [2012], “price-tag” and anti-Christian slogans were sprayed on the gate of the Monastery of Saint Francis, just outside of the Old City.

In early September [2012], suspected Jewish extremists torched the wooden door of a Jerusalem monastery and in February [2012] extremists wrote “Death to Christianity” on two Jerusalem churches.

Last December [2011], an ancient mosque in Jerusalem was torched and sprayed with the Star of David, “price tag,” “Muhammad is a pig” and “A good Arab is a dead Arab” in Hebrew.⁵¹⁶
The activities of yeshiva students (the equivalent of seminarians), who have a long history of harassing the Catholic clergy in Israel, came to the attention of the media in October 2004, when a yeshiva student spat at a 17^th century cross being carried by the Armenian archbishop during a procession near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City. The student from an elite Orthodox yeshiva explained that he was raised to see Christianity as idol worship, which is forbidden by the Torah. At subsequent government-sponsored meetings it came to light that the problem was widespread and such incidents were generally not reported to the police. According to reports from 2010, Christians who are easily recognizable, like Father Goosan Aljanian, Chief Dragoman of the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, encounter outright hate on a daily basis. “Almost every time he walks through the narrow alleys of the Old City of Jerusalem in his cowl, ultra-orthodox youths spit and curse him.”⁵¹⁷ Vandalization of Christian churches (spray-painting, dumping garbage on church property) and desecration of Christian cemeteries are frequent occurrences in Israel, yet reports of such incidents rarely find their way into the mainstream Western media. Significantly, there were an increased number of incidents such as this during the Purim holiday, when some Christians lock themselves indoors to avoid assaults. Most of the instigators were reportedly yeshiva students who view the Christian religion with disdain. A former adviser to the mayor of Jerusalem on Christian affairs, Shmuel Evyatar, commented that “in practice, rabbis of yeshivas ignore or even encourage” such activities.⁵¹⁸ When Israeli politicians considered returning some of the Occupied Territories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip hundreds of rabbis denounced this move. “We speak on behalf of the Jewish people—past, present and future. It is forbidden to give the land away,” Shalom Gold told a conference called by the Rabbis’ Union for the People and Land of Israel.⁵¹⁹ Devout Jewish settlers in outposts like Sa’Nur in the northern reaches of the West Bank posted a Hebrew sign at the front gate that reads: “No Arabs, no dogs.”⁵²⁰ A Palestinian Christian who moved into a predominantly Jewish suburb of Jerusalem built on land unilaterally annexed by Israel (in contravention of international law) described his reception by a local rabbi who knocked on his door offering to teach Torah: “I pointed to the picture over my door and explained I was Christian. He reacted with horror, telling me to get away from him, like I was dirty.”⁵²¹ Polish Catholics rescuers of Jews who settled in Israel also experience harassment. Shoshana Raczynski, who married her Polish rescuer, recalled: “One day a few religious Jews were throwing stones at our house, screaming ‘Go away, goy.’” When their son went to the army and wanted to be a pilot, he was told, “Your father is a Polish Catholic; you won’t be a pilot.”⁵²²

Public burnings of New Testaments are also fairly frequent, but generally go unreported by the media. On December 25, 2001, The Jerusalem Times reported that a New Testament was publicly burned at a school in Beit Shemesh (30 km from Jerusalem) with the approval of the principal, a rabbi.⁵²³ In May 2008, hundreds of Yeshiva students in Or Yehuda collected and burned hundreds of New Testaments near a synagogue, spurred by the city’s deputy mayor. (The New Testaments had been distributed to Ethiopian Jews by Messianic Jews.) Two months earlier, the son of a Messianic Jew was seriously wounded by a parcel bomb left outside his home in Ariel. Earlier in the year, Haredim demonstrated outside Messianic Jewish gatherings in Beersheba and Arad, and there were instances of violence. The previous year, in 2007, arsonists burst into a Jerusalem church used by Messianic Jews and set the building on fire, raising suspicions that Jewish extremists were behind the attack. No one claimed responsibility, but the same church was burned down 25 years ago by ultra-Orthodox Jewish extremists.⁵²⁴ Messianic Jews have experienced a long history of discrimination and harassment in Israel.⁵²⁵ Sometimes the objects of intolerance and derision are fellow Jews who are not Messianic. Jerusalem introduced special buses for the Haredi, an ultra-conservative branch of Judaism that requires strict separation between men and women. Women who refuse to travel in the back of the bus face harrassment and even violence. The Haredi have also taken to patrolling parts of the city and engage in activities such as spraying people with bleach because their clothes are not considered modest enough and threatening and even setting fire to stores whose clothing displays are considered too racy.⁵²⁶ Israeli Jews have been responsible for anti-Semitic incidents in Israel,⁵²⁷ and Jews have been caught engaging in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, France, Poland, and elsewhere.⁵²⁸ In July 2012, Michael Ben Ari, a member of the Israeli Parliament, tore up a copy of the New Testament and threw it in the trash, saying: “This abominable book … and all it represents belongs in the garbage can of history.”⁵²⁹ In April 2017, Shnuer Odze, an Orthodox rabbi in Manchester, England, removed a New Testament in Hebrew that someone had placed in his synagogue, set fire to it on the street and then posted the pictures on social media.⁵³⁰

Virtually every robed member of the Christian clergy in Jerusalem has been spat at, often multiple times, by Jews. This practice, which is steeped in age-old tradition and is considered a sign of piety, has gone on openly for decades and has been tolerated by the authorities and the Jewish population at large. As Israel Shahak explains,
Dishonoring Christian religious symbols is an old religious duty in Judaism. Spitting on the cross, an especially on the Crucifix, and spitting when a Jew passes a church, have been obligatory from around AD 200 for pious Jews. In the past, when the danger of anti-Semitic hostility was a real one, the pious Jews were commanded by their rabbis either to spit so that the reason for doing so would be unknown, or to spit onto their chests, not actually on the cross or openly before the church. The increasing strength of the Jewish state has caused these customs to become more open again but there should be no mistake: The spitting on the cross for converts from Christianity to Judaism, organized in Kibbutz Sa’ad and financed by the Israeli government is a an act of traditional Jewish piety. It does not seize to be barbaric, horrifying and wicked because of this! On the contrary, it is worse I because it is so traditional, and much more dangerous as well, just as the renewed anti-Semitism of the Nazis was dangerous, because in part, it played on the traditional anti-Semitic past.
These deeds are carried out primarily by yeshiva students and fundamentalists, with the approval or even encouragement of rabbis, but young children and elderly Jews have also been implicated. (Dishonest publicists have attempted to portray the culprits as “ultra-Orthodox thugs,” but in fact it is rather ordinary yeshiva students and other Jews who take part in them, and claim—contrary to all evidence—that these activities have received widespread condemnation among Jews.⁵³¹) The February 16, 2009 issue of Haaretz reported on this disturbing phenomenon:
A few weeks ago, a senior Greek Orthodox clergyman in Israel attended a meeting at a government office in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul quarter. When he returned to his car, an elderly man wearing a skullcap came and knocked on the window. When the clergyman let the window down, the passerby spat in his face.

The clergyman prefered not to lodge a complaint with the police and told an acquaintance that he was used to being spat at by Jews. Many Jerusalem clergy have been subjected to abuse of this kind. For the most part, they ignore it but sometimes they cannot.

On Sunday, a fracas developed when a yeshiva student spat at the cross being carried by the Armenian Archbishop during a procession near the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City. The archbishop’s 17th-century cross was broken during the brawl and he slapped the yeshiva student.

Both were questioned by police and the yeshiva student will be brought to trial. …

But the Armenians are far from satisfied by the police action and say this sort of thing has been going on for years. Archbishop Nourhan Manougian says he expects the education minister to say something.

“When there is an attack against Jews anywhere in the world, the Israeli government is incensed, so why when our religion and pride are hurt, don’t they take harsher measures?” he asks.

According to Daniel Rossing, former adviser to the Religious Affairs Ministry on Christian affairs and director of a Jerusalem center for Christian-Jewish dialogue, there has been an increase in the number of such incidents recently, “as part of a general atmosphere of lack of tolerance in the country.”

Rossing says there are certain common characeristics from the point of view of time and location to the incidents. He points to the fact that there are more incidents in areas where Jews and Christians mingle, such as the Jewish and Armenian quarters of the Old City and the Jaffa Gate.

There are an increased number at certain times of year, such as during the Purim holiday.”I know Christians who lock themselves indoors during the entire Purim holiday,” he says.

Former adviser to the mayor on Christian affairs, Shmuel Evyatar, describes the situation as “a huge disgrace.” He says most of the instigators are yeshiva students studying in the Old City who view the Christian religion with disdain.

“I’m sure the phenomenon would end as soon as rabbis and well-known educators denounce it. In practice, rabbis of yeshivas ignore or even encourage it,” he says.

Evyatar says he himself was spat at while walking with a Serbian bishop in the Jewish quarter, near his home. “A group of yeshiva students spat at us and their teacher just stood by and watched.”

Jerusalem municipal officials said they are aware of the problem but it has to be dealt with by the police.⁵³²
The reported harassment includes curses directed at clergy and nuns, anti-Christian graffiti painted on the walls of churches and holy places, and throwing of stones. As the following reports shows, despite the presence of surveillance cameras, not much had changed the following year:
Father Samuel Aghoyan, a senior Armenian Orthodox cleric in Jerusalem’s Old City, says he’s been spat at by young haredi and national Orthodox Jews “about 15 to 20 times” in the past decade. The last time it happened, he said, was earlier this month. “I was walking back from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and I saw this boy in a yarmulke and ritual fringes coming back from the Western Wall, and he spat at me two or three times.”

Wearing a dark-blue robe, sitting in St. James’s Church, the main Armenian church in the Old City, Aghoyan said, “Every single priest in this church has been spat on. It happens day and night.”

Father Athanasius, a Texas-born Franciscan monk who heads the Christian Information Center inside the Jaffa Gate, said he’s been spat at by haredi and national Orthodox Jews “about 15 times in the last six months” – not only in the Old City, but also on Rehov Agron near the Franciscan friary. “One time a bunch of kids spat at me, another time a little girl spat at me,” said the brown-robed monk near the Jaffa Gate.

“All 15 monks at our friary have been spat at,” he said. “Every [Christian cleric in the Old City] who’s been here for awhile, who dresses in robes in public, has a story to tell about being spat at. The more you get around, the more it happens.”

A nun in her 60s who’s lived in an east Jerusalem convent for decades says she was spat at for the first time by a haredi man on Rehov Agron about 25 years ago. “As I was walking past, he spat on the ground right next to my shoes and he gave me a look of contempt,” said the black-robed nun, sitting inside the convent. “It took me a moment, but then I understood.”

Since then, the nun, who didn’t want to be identified, recalls being spat at three different times by young national Orthodox Jews on Jaffa Road, three different times by haredi youth near Mea She’arim and once by a young Jewish woman from her second-story window in the Old City’s Jewish Quarter.

But the spitting incidents weren’t the worst, she said – the worst was the time she was walking down Jaffa Road and a group of middle-aged haredi men coming her way pointed wordlessly to the curb, motioning her to move off the sidewalk to let them pass, which she did.

“That made me terribly sad,” said the nun, speaking in ulpan-trained Hebrew. …

News stories about young Jewish bigots in the Old City spitting on Christian clergy – who make conspicuous targets in their long dark robes and crucifix symbols around their necks – surface in the media every few years or so. It’s natural, then, to conclude that such incidents are rare, but in fact they are habitual. Anti-Christian Orthodox Jews, overwhelmingly boys and young men, have been spitting with regularity on priests and nuns in the Old City for about 20 years, and the problem is only getting worse.