May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles
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The oldsters of the former generation had a long account with the Church and always tried to bypass it when in the neighbourhood, turning their heads away so as not to see it. … so, too, in the matter of the Church, we saw just how right they had been. The very name of the Church aroused not only the fears buried in the sub-conscious and associations … it also stood for all the evils of the present … It was not love of man that emanated from it but hatred. Ignorant priests, hoodlums in vestments, used its ‘sacred pulpits’ to preach sermons that incited brutish masses. Possessed by a fathomless hatred of the Jews they could not rest until their dream of a Juden-rein Poland was so monstrously realized before their very eyes. … The Church—that was the source of this evil, the fountain-head that nourished it all. However, in that same volume we learn that, when there were plans to invite “the notorious anti-Semite and German collaborator, Father Chechak [Trzeciak], whose name alone struck fear into the hearts of the Jews, to come and lecture in the town,” a Jewish delegation approached Rev. Bielawski, the local pastor, to intervene. “Though this priest was no great lover of Israel, belonging to the anti-semitic [nationalist] party, he was basically a decent man and promised the emissaries that he would not let Chechak appear. Bielawsky kept his word and when the hooligans brought their ‘star’, he refused to let them use the ‘Sokol’ hall—the only hall in the town.”456 A Jew from Volhynia recalled, “Although the Jews of Rokitno had dealings with non-Jews, they did not follow their customs. There was a division between them when it came to matters of faith and opinion. The locals fed calves for alien work and bowed to emptiness while we [Jews] thanked and blessed our G-d for his creation.”457 In a similar vein, a Jew from Chełm recalled what it was like growing up among Christians and what he was taught about them in his yeshiva: Our relations with the non-Jewish population were never very good … There were the Polish-speaking Gentiles who were Roman Catholics, some more pious than others. We were most afraid of them. We considered them idol worshipers. My parents were proud to point out to me that they taught their children to consider the images on their walls as gods. There was not a home without at least three images: one of Jesus, with His heart showing; one of the matka boska, the “mother of God”; and one of Joseph, the husband of Mary. The priest would come to the village at times and bring the “transubstantiated” wafer, which they believed became the flesh and blood of the Messiah. But at that time the priest’s coming only hardened our hearts. We knew we worshiped the only true God, and not priests and images. … In these early years I had few contacts of any sort with Christianity. At about this time I learned the stories of Jesus from the Jewish point of view. They are given in the infamous book of legends composed in the Middle Ages and entitled Toledot Yeshu (The History of Jesus). Some of the material is already embodied in the Talmud: that Jesus was born an illegitimate child and He forced Mary His mother to admit it; how He learned sorcery in Egypt; how He made Himself fly up into the sky by sewing the ineffable name of Jehovah into the skin of his leg, but a famous rabbi did the same and brought Jesus down! …458 Thus in the yeshiva, the Talmud reigned supreme. The Old Testament Bible could be used only for reference and there were no secular studies whatsoever. I had no contacts with Christianity at all. On the way to school we passed a Roman Catholic church and a Russian Orthodox church, and we spat, pronouncing the words found in Deuteronomy 7:26, “… thou shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing.” I said it halfheartedly because of my previous favorable contact with Christianity and because some questions were beginning to creep into my mind. Why should we say such horrible words? The people looked pious. They came from surrounding villages to worship, and they never bothered us. As I continued studying the Talmud, I came to a passage that told of a cruel punishment for that Sinner of Israel, meaning Jesus. For one sin of deriding the rabbis, He was punished forever and ever with cruelty as to be “judged in boiling excrement.” I did not like this story at all. Did it really mean what it said? Could I possibly be in full agreement with this? Did not I also have doubts about the rabbis’ claims that their teachings were given to Moses on Mount Sinai? What then would my punishment be? It was many years before I dared to proclaim these doubts openly.459
Jews also displayed a myriad of superstitions and peculiarities in their day-to-day lives that undoubtedly struck their Christian neighbours as strange and bewildering. As Jewish scholar Raphael Mahler points out, In contrast to the religious and rationalistic Christian sects which opposed superstitions as adamantly as they did secular science, the Hasidic movement was permeated by superstitions of all kinds. The Hasidim believed as much in magical remedies, amulets, exorcisms, demonic possession (dybbuks), ghosts, devils, and teasing, mischievous genies as they did in the almost unlimited heavenly power of the zaddik.463 A Jew from Działoszyce described some of these superstitions as follows: Dzialoszyce [Działoszyce] was a shtetl and, as such, its inhabitants often had a folk view of the universe. Many people wore red bintl (ribbons or strings) to ward off the evil eye. My own mother was superstitious. I remember an occasion when Chawzie Lazniaz visited our store. … When Chawzie left, my mother started feeling nauseous and opined, “It could only be the evil eye.” The folk culture of the shtetl sometimes extended to medicine as well. Leibish Seniawski, nicknamed the felsher (folk healer), worked as a family practitioner. … Another folk remedy was a little harder for us children to take. If any of us had croup or got a really bad cough, we were taken to Uncle Aron Yasny’s stable. Urine was collected from his mare and my parents made us drink it. This was supposed to cure us. … The logic of the shtetl sometimes approached the logic of Chelm, a topsy-turvy shtetl where twisted reasoning was a purported commonplace and, as such, the subject of humorous folktales. I recall one incident involving the same Lazniaz family. … Itchele was pleased to find a pair of rubber galoshes that fit his diminutive foot. On the way out of the store after having made the purchase, [his wife] Chawzie noticed in the window display a large pair of size 11 galoshes marked for sale at two zloty [złoty]. Chawzie commented, “Look, Itchele, the price for the larger galoshes is the same as for the ones you bought. For the same money, take the larger ones!” … Itchele, as usual, was defenseless in the face of his wife’s overbearing “logic.” … When I was about six years old, Chane Delesete died. … I followed the funeral procession on its way to the cemetery. On the corner of Dziekanowice Street, between the marketplace and the cemetery, a woman came out of her house, wailing, whenever a funeral passed by. People carrying and following Chane’s coffin cried too, but as they neared the cemetery, this woman—who was a professional crier—started an earnest rendition of her act. She was given a few groszy as she kept on crying, bringing the others to tears. She repeatedly proclaimed, “Such a nice person, and to die so young.” Afterward, I overheard her asking, “Who died? What did he die of?”464 A memoir from Łuków provides additional examples: During the week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, live chickens, carp, pike, and whitefish would appear in the big yard in front of the building—the chickens in their cages and the fish in their tubs. … About two days before the most serious day of the year, Tateh [i.e., dad] would call us downstairs. With a prayer book in his hand, he would take a chicken or a fish and make us repeat his words as he swung them over our heads three times. “This is my chicken (or fish), this is my kaporah, my scapegoat; this chicken (or fish) will go to its death instead of me, and I will live a long life.” Today, many people just give charity instead of swinging the kaporah around their heads, but the truth is, it makes a deep impression on a child when they learn that they could have died, instead of the chicken or fish, for “their sins.” … During the Days of Awe, things were very quiet and thoughtful. We didn’t go to Tashlich, the tossing of the sins upon the waters, but we always made sure we were in shul in time for the blowing of the shofar, the ram’s horn. On Erev Yom Kippur (eve of Yom Kippur) … Before we left the house, dressed in our finest outfits, all brand new, except for our shoes—we had to wear slippers because you aren’t permitted to wear leather shoes on the holiest day of the year … Yon Kippur was also, except for Simchat Torah, the only Jewish holiday where women would come to shul at night. … The next day was spent fasting, and the women’s section of the shul would smell like bad breath and the spirits of ammonia the women had prepared in case they swooned from hunger. When the service finished at night, the men would blow the shofar and then go out into the street and bless the moon, a concluding part of the services.465 Jewish attitudes and superstitions reflected ancient religious traditions, and they were tenacious. They could be as objectionable for Christians as any Christian-held beliefs or biases were for Jews.466 Jews sometimes adopted fantastic beliefs about the malevolence of Poles—such as the totally unfounded notion, which surfaced in the 19th century, that the Poles were out to exterminate the Jews of Warsaw, and would hand out poisoned candy to Jewish children.467 The remnants of this attitude are still evident in Israel today, where both Christian churches and mosques are frequently vandalized. In the late summer of 1989, vandals damaged the remains of a 13th century Carmelite convent in northern Israel following threats from Jewish religious extemists directed at nuns carrying out an archaeological dig.468 During Holy Week of 1990, a large contingent of Jewish settlers, bankrolled by the Israeli government and egged on by rabbis and prominent Jewish leaders, illegally occupied St. John Hostel in the Christian Quarter of Old Jerusalem. When the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Dioderos I went to the site to protest, he was teargassed and mistreated by Israeli soldiers. “I went to protest peacefully,” the shaken patriarch said. “I was hit by a teargas can, knocked to the ground, my religious medallion was smashed and my robes were torn. This, in the holiest week of the year.”469 Such sentiments resurfaced again during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Israel in the year 2000, when anti-Christian graffiti were widespread and even a cursing ceremony, known as the pulsa de nura curse, was performed.470 Christian sites are frequently desecrated in Israel. These incidents receive little or not attention in the mainstream North American media. In 2009, a Franciscan church near the Cenacle on Mount Zion, regarded by tradition as the site of Christ’s Last Supper, was defaced with a spray-painted Star of David and slogans such as “Christians Out!” and “We Killed Jesus!” According to reports, the vandals also urinated on the door and left a trail of urine leading to the church.471 The year 2012 saw no less than seven attacks on Christian sites in Israel. In February, vandals hit the Narkis Street Baptist Church and the Valley of the Cross Monastery, both in Jerusalem; the Monastery of Notre-Dame de Sept Douleurs in Latrun, 25 kilometres west of Jerusalem, fell prey in September; next targeted was the Convent of St. Joseph on Mount Zion in early October. And finally the year 2012 went out with a bang, with three attacks in December—the Church of Our Lady in Kafr Bir’im in the early part of the month, the Valley of the Cross Monastery on December 12 (the monastery’s second desecration of the year), followed by the Church of Our Lady again on December 27. In February 2012, anti-Christian graffiti was found sprayed on the walls of a Greek Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem’s Valley of the Cross, and a Baptist Church in central Jerusalem. In both incidents, the graffiti included phrases such as “Jesus is dead,” “Death to Christians,” “Mary is a prostitute,” and “price tag.”472 The tires of churchgoers’ vehicles were slashed. In the early morning hours of September 4, 2012, the door of the Cistercian (Trappist) monastery in Latroun, near Jerusalem, was burned and anti-Christian graffiti was sprayed on the walls. Graffiti sprayed on the monastery walls included the words “Migron” and “Jesus is a monkey.” The arson and graffiti are suspected to be a “price tag” attack, following the recent evacuation of Migron, a settlement outpost in the West Bank. In a statement released later in the day and signed, among others, by the Latin Patriarch for Jerusalem Fouad Twal and Gerogio Lingua, Apostolic Nuncio for Jordan, and former Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, the Catholic Church severely condemned the attack, saying it was the results of an Israeli tendency to scapegoat Christians. “The Christian community awoke this morning … to discover with horror that once again it is the target of forces of hatred within Israeli society,” the missive said, adding “what happened in Latrun is only another in a long series of attacks against Christians and their places of worship.” Further on, the statement asked: “What is going on in Israeli society today that permits Christians to be scapegoat and targeted by these acts of violence?,” questioning why the unknown assialtants chose to “vent” their anger over the dismantling of West Bank outposts “against Christians and Christian places of worship?” “What kind of ‘teaching of contempt’ for Christians is being communicated in their schools and in their homes? And why are the culprits not found and brought to justice?” the statement asked, urging Israeli “authorities to act to put an end to this senseless violence and to ensure a ‘teaching of respect’ in schools for all those who call this land home.”473 In December 2012, vandals spray-painted “Jesus is a monkey” on the wall of the 19th-century Latrun Monastery west of Jerusalem and torched the structure’s front door. The year 2013 has seen a number of additional desecrations of Christian sites. On May 31, 2013, the words “Christians are apes” were written in Hebrew on the wall of the Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion in Jerusalem and church property was destroyed. “Christians are apes” and “Christians are slaves” was spray-painted on two cars parked outside the abbey. On August 20, 2013, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the Beit Jimal monastery near the city of Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem. The graffiti sprayed in Hebrew on the monastery walls included the words “Revenge” and “Goyim perish.”474 On April 1, 2014, vandals scrawled hate graffiti on a Catholic monastery near Beit Shemesh in central Israel and slashed the tires of nearby cars weeks before Pope Francis visits the Holy land. Slogans against Mideast peace talks with the Palestinians as well as graffiti disparaging Jesus and Mary were found on the outer walls of the Deir Rafat monastery close to Jerusalem.475 Another spate of hate crimes occurred in early May 2014. Anti-Christian graffiti was found on a wall adjacent to a Romanian Orthodox church on Hahoma Hashlishit Street in Jerusalem. The graffiti read “Price tag, King David is for the Jews, Jesus is garbage.” (That church building had been attacked in October 2012 in a similar fashion.) In addition, “Death to Arabs” graffiti was spotted on the door of a home and on an electrical box in the Old City of Jerusalem. In another hate crime attack, “Death to Arabs and Christians and all those who hate Israel” was daubed in Hebrew on an outer column of the Office of the Assembly of Bishops at the Notre Dame Centre in East Jerusalem.476 The assaults on Christian churches came to the attention of world media when, on June 17, 2015, arsonists targeted the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes at Tabgha (Tiberias), on the Sea of Galilee, causing serious damage to the church structure, roof, reception room, and the nuns’ office. As has become customary, anti-Christian graffiti, in Hebrew, was spray painted on a wall—a passage from a Jewish prayer, which religious Jews recite three times daily, that “False idols be smashed.” The same church had been attacked in April 2014 by Jewish youth who pelted worshippers with stones, destroyed a cross and threw benches into the lake. Since the beginning of 2015, a Greek Orthodox monastery in East Jerusalem and a church in the village of Jab’a were torched. According to a February 2015 report, the management of the Cooperative Village, Ahihud, established on the ruins of the displaced Palestinian village of al-Barweh in Acre, desecrated the Islamic and Christian cemetery of the village. The cemetery’s ground was covered with soil in a preparatory step to turn it into a cattle barn on the remains of dead Muslims and Christians. It turns out that since 2011, 17 Christian and Muslim places of worship have been torched in Israel with nobody indicted in any of the cases. Yeshiva students are suspected of being behind many of the attacks. It would be unthinkable that in a Western country attacks on 17 synagogues would occur in such a short time and, if they did, that the culprits would not have been found. The Israeli authorities have singularly failed to deal with this concerted aggression against holy Christian sites over the last few years.477 A June 21, 2015 editorial in Haaretz (“Till When Will Israel Let Its Churches and Mosques Be Burnt?”) made this very point clear, without mincing words: 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.478 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.479 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.480 (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.481 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.482
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.487 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 17th 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.”488 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.489 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.490 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.”491 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.”492 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.”493 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.494 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.495 Messianic Jews have experienced a long history of discrimination and harassment in Israel.496 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.497 Israeli Jews have been responsible for anti-Semitic incidents in Israel,498 and Jews have been caught engaging in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, France, Poland, and elsewhere.499 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.”500 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,
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.502
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. “My impression is that Christian clergymen are being spat at in the Old City virtually every day. This has been constantly increasing over the last decade,” said Daniel Rossing. An observant, kippa-wearing Jew, Rossing heads the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations and was liaison to Israel’s Christian communities for the Ministry of Religious Affairs in the ‘70s and ‘80s. For Christian clergy in the Old City, being spat at by Jewish fanatics “is a part of life,” said the American Jewish Committee’s Rabbi David Rosen, Israel’s most prominent Jewish interfaith activist. “I hate to say it, but we’ve grown accustomed to this. Jewish religious fanatics spitting at Christian priests and nuns has become a tradition,” said Roman Catholic Father Massimo Pazzini, sitting inside the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa. These are the very opposite of isolated incidents. Father Athanasius of the Christian Information Center called them a “phenomenon.” George Hintlian, the unofficial spokesman for the local Armenian community and former secretary of the Armenian Patriarchate, said it was “like a campaign.” Christians in Israel are a small, weak community known for “turning the other cheek,” so these Jewish xenophobes feel free to spit on them; they don’t spit on Muslims in the Old City because they’re afraid to, the clerics noted. The only Israeli authority who has shown any serious concern over this matter, the one high official whom Christian and Jewish interfaith activists credit for stepping into the fray, is Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger. On November 11, Metzger addressed a letter to the “rabbis of the Jewish Quarter,” writing that he had “heard a grave rumor about yeshiva students offending heaven … [by] spitting on Christian clergy who walk about the Old City of Jerusalem.” Such attackers, he added, are almost tantamount to rodfim, or persecutors, which is one of the worst class of offenders in Jewish law. They violate the injunction to follow the “pathways of peace,” Metzger wrote, and are liable to provoke anti-Semitism overseas. “I thus issue the fervent call to root out this evil affliction from our midst, and the sooner the better,” wrote the chief rabbi. Metzger published the letter in response to an appeal from Armenian Archbishop Nourhan Manougian, an appeal that came in the wake of a September 5 incident in the Old City in which a haredi man spat on a group of Armenian seminarians who, in turn, beat him up. This is not the first time Metzger has spoken out against the spitting – he did so five years ago after the most infamous incident on record, when Manougian himself was spat on by an Old City yeshiva student during an Armenian Orthodox procession. In response, the archbishop slapped the student’s face, and then the student tore the porcelain ceremonial crucifix off Manougian’s neck and threw it to the ground, breaking it. Then interior minister Avraham Poraz called the assault on the archbishop “repulsive” and called for a police crackdown on anti-Christian attacks in the Old City. Police reportedly punished the student by banning him from the Old City for 75 days. Seated in his study in the Armenian Quarter, Manougian, 61, said that while he personally has not been assaulted since that time, the spitting attacks on other Armenian clergy have escalated. “The latest thing is for them to spit when they pass [St. James’s] monastery. I’ve seen it myself a couple of times,” he said. “Then there’s the boy from the Jewish Quarter who spits at the Armenian women when he sees them wearing their crosses, then he runs away. And during one of our processions from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre this year, a fellow in a yarmulke and fringes began deliberately cutting through our lines, over and over. The police caught him and he started yelling, ‘I’m free to walk wherever I want!’ That’s what these settler types are always saying: ‘This is our country and we can do whatever we want!’” Where are the police in all this? If they happen to be on the scene, such as at the recent procession Manougian described, they will chase the hooligans – but even if they catch them, they only tell them off and let them go, according to several Christian clergymen. “The police tell us to catch them and bring them in, but then they tell us not to use violence, so how are we supposed to catch them?” asked Aghoyan, a very fit-looking 68-year-old. “Once a boy came up to me and spat in my face, and I punched him and knocked him down, and an Armenian seminarian and I brought him to the police station [next to the Armenian Quarter]. They released him in a couple of hours. I’ve made many, complaints to the police, I’m tired of it. Nothing ever gets done.” Said Rosen, “The police say, ‘Show us the evidence.’ They want the Christians to photograph the people spitting at them so they can make arrests, but this is very unrealistic – by the time you get the camera out, the attack is over and there’s nothing to photograph.” Victims of these attacks say that in the great majority of cases the assailants do not spit in their faces or on their clothes, but on the ground at their feet. “When we complain about this, the police tell us, ‘But they’re not spitting on you, just near you,’” said Manougian. Sitting inside the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa, Pazzini recalled: “Early this year there were about 100 Orthodox Jewish boys who came past the church singing and dancing. The police were with them – I don’t know what the occasion was, maybe it was a holiday, maybe it had to do with the elections. There was a group of Franciscan monks standing in front of the church, and a few of the Jewish boys went up to the monks, spat on them, then went back into the crowd. I went up to a policeman and he told me, ‘Sorry about that, but look, they’re just kids.’” Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby refused to provide an official comment on the situation on behalf of the Old City police station. “We don’t give interviews on relations between Jews and Christians in the Old City,” he said. “We’re not sociologists, we’re policemen.” The Jerusalem municipality likewise refused to be interviewed. “We have not received any complaints about this matter and we do not deal with things of this nature,” said assistant city spokesman Yossi Gottesman. … Rosen recalls that in 1994, after Israel and the Vatican opened diplomatic relations, he organized an international Jewish-Christian conference in Jerusalem, “and the city’s chief rabbi called me in and said, ‘How can you do this? Don’t you know it’s forbidden for us? How can you encourage these people to meet with us?’ “He told me that when he sees a Christian clergyman, he crosses the street and recites, ‘You shall totally abhor and totally disdain …’ This is a biblical verse that refers to idolatry.” Rosen noted that the Jerusalem chief rabbi of the time, like the more insular Orthodox Jews in general, considered Christians to be idolators. The people doing the spitting, according to all the Christian victims and Jewish interfaith activists interviewed, are invariably national Orthodox or haredi Jews; in every attack described by Christian clerics, the assailant was wearing a kippa. The great majority of the attackers were teenage boys and men in their 20s. However, the supposition was that they came not only from the Old City yeshivot but also from outside. Hintlian and Aghoyan noted that the spitting attacks tended to spike on Fridays and Saturdays, when masses of Orthodox Jews stream to the Western Wall. … Only a tiny proportion of the spitting incidents are reported to police. “When somebody spits at our feet, or at the door to the monastery, we don’t even pay attention to it anymore, we take it for granted,” said Aghoyan. We have no suspect or evidence to give the police, nor any reason to think the police care, he said. Pazzini, the vice dean of the seminary at the Church of the Flagellation, said the dean of the seminary had his face spat upon, but he rejected Pazzini’s urgings to file a police complaint. “He told me, ‘There’s no point, this is the way things are around here,’” Pazzini said. Even outrageous incidents, one after another, go unreported to the police and unknown to the public. About a month ago, when a senior Greek Orthodox bishop was driving into the Jaffa Gate, a young Jewish man motioned him to roll down his window, and when he did, the young man spat in the bishop’s face, said Hintlian. Father Athanasius says that about a year ago, he witnessed the archbishop of Milan, which is one of the world’s largest Roman Catholic dioceses, get spat at in the Old City. “The archbishop was with another Italian bishop and a group of pilgrims, and a class of about a dozen adolescent boys in crocheted kippot and sidecurls came by with their teacher. They stopped in front of the archbishop and his guests, the boys began spitting at the ground next to their feet, and then they just kept walking like this was normal,” said Father Athanasius. “I saw this with my own eyes.” Rosen, Rossing and Hintlian say the most frustrating thing is that there’s no longer anyone in authority who’s ready to try to solve this problem, and the reason is that the Christian community in Israel is too small and powerless to rate high-level attention anymore. “In the old days there were ministers and a mayor in Jerusalem who took the Christian minority seriously, but now virtually everyone dealing with them is a third-tier official, and while these individuals may have wonderful intentions, they have no authority,” said Rosen. As far as the current cabinet ministers go, he said the phenomenon of Orthodox Jews spitting on Christian clergy “is at most distressing to some of them, while there are other ministers whose attitude toward non-Jews in general is downright deplorable.” Among Christian victims and Jewish interfaith activists alike, the consensus is that two steps are needed to stop the spitting attacks. One, of course, would be much stronger law enforcement by police. The other would be an educational effort against this “campaign,” this “phenomenon,” this “tradition” – although it may be that there’s nothing to teach – that a person, even an adolescent, either knows it’s wrong to spit on priests and nuns or he doesn’t. “We can’t tell the Jews in this country what to do – they have to see this as an offense,” said Father Athanasius. “There’s only a small part of the population that’s doing it, but the Jewish establishment has to bring them under control.” 503 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. … 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. “My impression is that Christian clergymen are being spat at in the Old City virtually every day. This has been constantly increasing over the last decade,” said Daniel Rossing. An observant, kippa-wearing Jew, Rossing heads the Jerusalem Center forJewish-Christian Relations and was liaison to Israel’s Christian communities for the Ministry of Religious Affairs in the ‘70s and ‘80s. For Christian clergy in the Old City, being spat at by Jewish fanatics “is a part of life,” said the American Jewish Committee’s Rabbi David Rosen, Israel’s most prominent Jewish interfaith activist. “I hate to say it, but we’ve grown accustomed to this. Jewish religious fanatics spitting at Christian priests and nuns has become a tradition,” said Roman Catholic Father Massimo Pazzini, sitting inside the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa. These are the very opposite of isolated incidents. Father Athanasius of the Christian Information Center called them a “phenomenon.” George Hintlian, the unofficial spokesman for the local Armenian community and former secretary of the Armenian Patriarchate, said it was “like a campaign.” Christians in Israel are a small, weak community known for “turning the other cheek,” so these Jewish xenophobes feel free to spit on them; they don’t spit on Muslims in the Old City because they’re afraid to, the clerics noted. … Seated in his study in the Armenian Quarter, Manougian, 61, said that while he personally has not been assaulted since that time, the spitting attacks on other Armenian clergy have escalated. “The latest thing is for them to spit when they pass [St. James’s] monastery. I’ve seen it myself a couple of times,” he said. “Then there’s the boy from the Jewish Quarter who spits at the Armenian women when he sees them wearing their crosses, then he runs away. And during one of our processions from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre this year, a fellow in a yarmulke and fringes began deliberately cutting through our lines, over and over. The police caught him and he started yelling, ‘I’m free to walk wherever I want!’ That’s what these settler types are always saying: ‘This is our country and we can do whatever we want!’” Where are the police in all this? If they happen to be on the scene, such as at the recent procession Manougian described, they will chase the hooligans—but even if they catch them, they only tell them off and let them go, according to several Christian clergymen. … Sitting inside the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa, Pazzini recalled: “Early this year there were about 100 Orthodox Jewish boys who came past the church singing and dancing. The police were with them—I don’t know what the occasion was, maybe it was a holiday, maybe it had to do with the elections. There was a group of Franciscan monks standing in front of thechurch, and a few of the Jewish boys went up to the monks, spat on them, then went back into the crowd. I went up to a policeman and he told me, ‘Sorry about that, but look, they’re just kids.’” … Yisca Harani, a veteran Jewish interfaith activist who lectures on Christianity to Israeli tour guides at Touro College, likewise says the change for the worse came about 20 years ago. She blames the spitting attacks on the view of Christianity that’s propagated at haredi and national Orthodox yeshivot. “I move around the Old City a lot,” she said, “I come in contact with these people, and what they learn in these fundamentalist yeshivot is that the goy is the enemy, a hater of Israel. All they learn about Christianity is the Holocaust, pogroms, anti-Semitism.” Rosen recalls that in 1994, after Israel and the Vatican opened diplomatic relations, he organized an international Jewish-Christian conference in Jerusalem, “and the city’s chief rabbi called me in and said, ‘How can you do this? Don’t you know it’s forbidden for us? How can you encourage these people to meet with us?’ “He told me that when he sees a Christian clergyman, he crosses the street and recites, ‘You shall totally abhor and totally disdain…’ This is a biblical verse that refers to idolatry.” Rosen noted that the Jerusalem chief rabbi of the time, like the more insular Orthodox Jews in general, considered Christians to be idolators. The people doing the spitting, according to all the Christian victims and Jewish interfaith activists interviewed, are invariably national Orthodox or haredi Jews; in every attack described by Christian clerics, the assailant was wearing a kippa.504 When this practice was exposed in the liberal Israeli media, the reaction of Ashkenazi chief rabbi Yona Metzger was not grounded in so much in moral outrage as in a concern over adverse publicity and possible repercussions for Jews outside Israel. Had rabbis been exposed to a fraction of such abuse in any Christian country, it would have made headline news and resulted in diplomatic interventions led by the United States of America. In this case, however, the information has been hushed up. Haaretz returned to subject again in November 2011 when it reported: Ultra-Orthodox young men curse and spit at Christian clergymen in the streets of Jerusalem’s Old City as a matter of routine. In most cases the clergymen ignore the attacks, but sometimes they strike back. Last week the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court quashed the indictment against an Armenian priesthood student who had punched the man who spat at him. Johannes Martarsian was walking in the Old City in May 2008 when a young ultra-Orthodox Jew spat at him. Maratersian punched the spitter in the face, making him bleed, and was charged for assault. But Judge Dov Pollock, who unexpectedly annulled the indictment, wrote in his verdict that “putting the defendant on trial for a single blow at a man who spat at his face, after suffering the degradation of being spat on for years while walking around in his church robes is a fundamental contravention of the principles of justice and decency.” “Needless to say, spitting toward the defendant when he was wearing the robe is a criminal offense,” the judge said. When Narek Garabedian came to Israel to study in the Armenian Seminary in Jerusalem half a year ago, he did not expect the insults, curses and spitting he would be subjected to daily by ultra-Orthodox Jews in the streets of the Old City. “When I see an ultra-Orthodox man coming toward me in the street, I always ask myself if he will spit at me,” says Narek, a Canadian Armenian, this week. About a month ago, on his way to buy groceries in the Old City, two ultra-Orthodox men spat at him. The spittle did not fall at his feet but on his person. Narek, a former football player, decided this time not to turn the other cheek. “I was very angry. I pushed them both to the wall and asked, ‘why are you doing this?’ They were frightened and said ‘we’re sorry, we’re sorry,’ so I let them go. But it isn’t always like that. Sometimes the spitter attacks you back,” he says. Other clergymen in the Armenian Church in Jerusalem say they are all victims of harassment, from the senior cardinals to the priesthood students. Mostly they ignore these incidents. When they do complain, the police don't usually find the perpetrators. Martarsian left Israel about a year ago. He was sent back home by the church, as were two other Armenian priesthood students who were charged after attacking an ultra-Orthodox man who spat at them. The Greek Patriarchy’s clergymen have been cursed and spat on by ultra-Orthodox men in the street for many years. “They walk past me and spit,” says Father Gabriel Bador, 78, a senior priest in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. “Mostly I ignore it, but it's difficult. Sometimes I stop and ask the spitter ‘why are you doing this? What have I done to you?’ Once I even shouted at a few of them who spat at my feet together. They ran away,” he says. “It happens a lot,” says Archbishop Aristarchos, the chief secretary of the patriarchate. “You walk down the street and suddenly they spit at you for no reason. I admit sometimes it makes me furious, but we have been taught to restrain ourselves, so I do so.” Father Goosan Aljanian, Chief Dragoman of the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, says it is often difficult for temperamental young priesthood students to swallow the offense. About a month ago two students marching to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre beat up an ultra-Orthodox man who spat at them. They were sent away from the Old City for two weeks. “I tell my students that if they are spat at, to go to the police rather than strike back,” says Goosan. “But these are young kids who sometimes lose their cool.” A few weeks ago four ultra-Orthodox men spat at clergymen in the funeral procession of Father Alberto of the Armenian Church. “They came in a pack, out of nowhere,” said Father Goosan. “I know there are fanatical Haredi groups that don’t represent the general public but it’s still enraging. It all begins with education. It’s the responsibility of these men's yeshiva heads to teach them not to behave this way,” he says. Father Goosan and other Patriarchy members are trying to walk as little as possible in the Old City streets. “Once we walked from the [Armenian] church to the Jaffa Gate and on that short section four different people spat at us,” he says.505
The antipathy towards Muslims runs even deeper because of the political strife with the Palestnians that has mired the State of Israel since its inception. Responding to the question, “How should Jews treat their Arab neighbours?” in the May–June 2009 issue of Moment magazine, Manis Friedman, the Lubavitch rabbi from St. Paul Minnesota, wrote: I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle). Friedman, who is the dean of the internationally renowned Bais Chana Women’s Institute in West St. Paul, argued that “the first Israeli prime minister who declares that he will follow the Old Testament will finally bring peace to the Middle East.” The Israeli military has been flooded with pamphlets authored by various nationalist rabbis and approved by senior officers inciting hatred toward Palestinians and, more recently, accusing the Pope and the cardinals of the Vatican of helping to organize tours of Auschwitz for Hezbollah members to teach them how to wipe out Jews.509 Jewish settlers have also been compiling lists of Jewish businesses that employ Arabs with the intention of lauching a nation-wide boycott of “traitors” who allow “enemies” to earn money. Another group launched a campaign to issue “kashrut certificates” to businesses that do not employ Arabs.510 A shocking revelation was news of the publication, in November 2009, of a compendium of religious commentary that reads like a rabbinic instruction manual outlining acceptable scenarios for killing non-Jews. According to an article by Daniel Estrin entitled “Rabbinic Text or Call to Terror?” in the January 29, 2010 issue of the New York Forward: “The prohibition ‘Thou Shalt Not Murder’” applies only “to a Jew who kills a Jew,” write Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur of the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. Non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and attacks on them “curb their evil inclination,” while babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed since “it is clear that they will grow to harm us.” “The King’s Torah (Torat Hamelech), Part One: Laws of Life and Death between Israel and the Nations,” a 230-page compendium of Halacha, or Jewish religious law, published by the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva in Yitzhar, garnered a front-page exposé in the Israeli tabloid Ma’ariv, which called it the stuff of “Jewish terror.” … Yet, both [Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona] Metzger and his Sephardic counterpart, Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, have declined to comment on the book, which debuted in November, while other prominent rabbis have endorsed it – among them, the son of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Sephardic Jewry’s preeminent leader. Also, despite the precedent set by previous Israeli attorneys general in the last decade and a half to file criminal charges against settler rabbis who publish commentaries supporting violence against non-Jews, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz has so far remained mum about “The King’s Torah.” … In 2006-2007, the Israeli Ministry of Education gave about a quarter of a million dollars to the yeshiva, and in 2007-2008 the yeshiva received about $28,000 from the American nonprofit Central Fund of Israel. … But the book’s wide dissemination and the enthusiastic endorsements of prominent rabbis have spotlighted what might have otherwise remained an isolated commentary. At the entrance to Moriah, a large Jewish bookstore steps from the Western Wall, copies of “The King’s Torah” were displayed with children’s books and other halachic commentaries. The store manager, who identified himself only as Motti, said the tome has sold “excellently.” Other stores carrying the book include Robinson Books, a well-known, mostly secular bookshop in a hip Tel Aviv shopping district; Pomeranz Bookseller, a major Jewish book emporium near the Ben Yehuda mall in downtown Jerusalem; and Felhendler, a Judaica store on the main artery of secular Rehovot, home of the Weizmann Institute. … Prominent religious figures wrote letters of endorsement that preface the book. Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, son of former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, blessed the authors and wrote that many “disciples of Torah are unfamiliar with these laws.” The elder Yosef has not commented on his son’s statement. Dov Lior, chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba and a respected figure among many mainstream religious Zionists, noted that the book is “very relevant especially in this time.” … Previously, Israel has arrested settler rabbis who publish commentaries supporting the killing of non-Jews. In addition to Ginsburgh, the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva head, in 1994, the government jailed Rabbi Ido Elba of Hebron for writing a 26-page article proclaiming it a “mitzva to kill every non-Jew from the nation that is fighting the Jew, even women and children.” “The atmosphere has changed,” said Yair Sheleg, senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, who specializes in issues of religion and state. Previous governments took a tougher stance against such publications, he said, but “paradoxically, because the tension between the general settler population and the Israeli judicial system…is high now, the attorney general is careful not to heighten the tension.” In their book The King’s Torah, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, head of the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, and Rabbi Yosef Elizur-Hershkowitz describe how it is possible to kill non-Jews according to halakha (Jewish religious law). They say it is permissible to kill young children if it is foreseeable that they will grow up to be mortal enemies of the Jews, or to put pressure on an enemy leader. The book gained the exlplicit and implicit endorsement of hundreds of rabbis. According to Shapira, it is permissible to kill a non-Jew who threatens Israel even if the person is classified as a Righteous Gentile. His book says that any gentile who supports war against Israel can also be killed. Killing the children of a leader in order to pressure him, the rabbi continues, is also permissible. In general, according to the book, it is okay to kill children if they “stand in the way—children are often doing this.” “They stand in the way of rescue in their presence and they are doing this without wanting to,” he writes. “Nonetheless, killing them is allowed because their presence supports murder. There is justification in harming infants if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us. Under such circumstances the blow can be directed at them and not only by targeting adults.”511 Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba and the head of the Rabbinical Committee of the Council of Jewish Communities, and Rabbi Ya’acov Yosef, son of Shas spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef, provided endorsements for the book, and refused requests by the police’s National Serious and International Crimes Unit to arrive for questioning at the unit’s Lod Headquarters earlier this month. Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, head of the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva who wrote a three-page endorsement for the book, used his police questioning to say that the book’s conclusions are not practical Halacha, but rather in the realm of hypotheses and principles of Halacha. Hundreds of primarily national-religious rabbis took part in a convention “in honor of the Torah and its independence” on Wednesday, following Lior and Yosef’s summoning by police. Without endorsing the content of the book, the participants maintained that police should not get involved in matters pertaining to halachic discourse. Senior figures such as Ramat Gan Chief Rabbi Ya’acov Ariel and Rabbi Haim Druckman, head of the Ohr Etzion Yeshiva, were also present at the event.512 In August 2010, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Israel’s leading ultra-Orthodox party, renewed his venom against the “evil” Palestinians and said that they should all “perish.”513 His teachings in a Saturday sermon in an Israeli synagogue on October 16, 2010 represent an extension of his beliefs. They were not pulled out of thin air—Rabbi Yosef is an accomplished scholar of the Torah—but rather are part of a lonstanding tradition that is not generally revealed to outsiders. The Jerusalem Post reported: The sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews, according to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the head of Shas‘s Council of Torah Sages and a senior Sephardi adjudicator. “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel,” he said in his weekly Saturday night sermon on the laws regarding the actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on Shabbat. According to Yosef, the lives of non-Jews in Israel are safeguarded by divinity, to prevent losses to Jews. “In Israel, death has no dominion over them... With gentiles, it will be like any person – they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money. This is his servant... That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew,” Yosef said. “Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi [lord or master] and eat. That is why gentiles were created,” he added.514 The same message was reinforced when, in December 2010, more than 300 rabbis and religious figures, many of them state-employed, signed a public statement calling on Jews not to rent or sell properties to non-Jews—a move particularly aimed against Arabs—and calling on the community to ostracize those who do so. The document warned: “It is forbidden in the Torah to sell a house or a field in the land of Israel to a foreigner.” “After someone sells or rents just one flat, the value of all the neighbouring flats drops … He who sells or rents [to non-Jews] causes his neighbours a big loss and his sin is great. Anyone who sells [property to a non-Jew] must be cut off!” The manifesto quotes extensively from Jewish writings, including the Bible. It cites Exodus 23:33, which reads: “Do not let them live in your land or they will cause you to sin against me, because the worship of their gods will certainly be a snare to you.”515 The immediate problem started several months earlier: Usama Ghanaiem was at home with a group of friends when the mob attacked. It was a Friday night in late October, and about 30 young ultra-Orthodox Jewish men walking home from synagogue began throwing rocks at the apartment building where several Arab students rent accommodation in the northern city of Safed. One of the attackers eve fired a gun; another left a message “Death to Arabs” scrawled on the front door. … Mr. Ghanaiem and his friends, all college students from a number of Arab communities in Israel, have found themselves caught up in a nationwide campaign against Israel’s 1.2 million Arab citizens. It began with an edict issued by Shmuel Eliahu, chief rabbi of Safed, that prohibits Jews in the city from renting or selling property to gentiles, by which he really means Arabs. Close to 300 rabbis across the country now have signed onto Rabbi Eliahu’s original statement or onto similar statements.516 On the heels of the rabbis’ letter urging Jews not to sell or rent properties to non-Jews came a letter published by a group of wives of 29 Haredi rabbis calling on Jewish women not to date Arabs, work with them or perform national service in the same places where Arabs work: The letter was organized by the organization Lehava, which claims to “save daughters of Israel” from what it calls assimilation. Lehava also took part in the recent demonstrations against selling or renting homes to non-Jews. The group operates a shelter for women who leave their Arab partners and educate the public on what it calls the dangers that arise from contact between Jews and Arabs. The organization also called for the boycott of the Gush Etzion branch of the supermarket Rami Levi, where Arab and Jewish workers are on shift side-by-side. In the last few weeks, Bentzi Gopstein of Kiryat Arba, the director of Lehava, convinced the wives of important rabbis in the religious Zionist movement to sign on to the letter. Among the signatories were Netzhiya Yosef, wife of Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, Esther Lior, wife of Rabbi Dov Lior, Shulamit Melamed of Beit Alon and Starna Druckman of Kiryat Motzkin.517
Lior added identified Jews as merciful, shy and charitable – qualities that he claimed could be inherited. “A person born to Jewish parents, even if they weren’t raised on the Torah – there are things that are passed on (to him) in the blood, it's genetic,” he explained. “If the father is a gentile, then the child is deprived of these things. “I even read in books that sometimes the crime, the difficult traits, the bitterness – a child that comes from these traits, it's no surprise that he won't have the qualities that characterize the people of Israel,” he added.518
Hasidic Jews have been responsible for quite a bit of violence directed at fellow Jews and non-Jews, in Israel and abroad. Shops in Jerusalem have been repeatedly vandalized for selling Zionist literature or “immodest” clothing. The most savage beating of a rabbi in Poland in recent years was in fact perpetrated by Hasids who attacked Moishe Arye Friedman, an anti-Zionist rabbi from Vienna, on March 11, 2007, while attending commemorations for an 18th century Hasidic rabbi buried in Leżajsk.520 Hundreds of Hasidic pilgrims visiting the grave of Rabbi Nahman of Breslov in Uman, Ukraine, have been repeatedly involved in violent clashes with the police and locals and were responsible for the the stabbing of a non-Jew.521 These thugs are emboldened by the reluctance of the Western media to report such incidents and the support they receive from Jewish circles who rally to defend them against “anti-Semites.” When a story broke in a Swedish newspaper in August 2009 that the Israeli army may have secretly removed organs from Palestnian youths killed in clashes, the reaction was predictable and typical: blanket denials, demands by the government of Israel for official Swedish condemnation of the article, and accusations of blood libel and anti-Semitism. (Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman railed, “It’s a shame that the Swedish Foreign Ministry fails to intervene in a case of blood libels against Jews. This is reminiscent of Sweden’s stand during World War II, when [it] had failed to intervene as well.” He was seconded by finance minister Yuval Stenitz, who said, “This is an anti-Semitic blood libel against the Jewish people and the Jewish state.”) The reluctance of the Swedish government to interfere with the freedom of its country’s press even led to Israel imposing sanctions against Sweden. After an American academic released an interview conducted in the year 2000 with the then-head of Israel’s Abu Kabir forensic institute admitting to the harvesting of skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Palestinians and foreign workers, without permission from relatives, and possibly from Israeli soldiers as well, the Israeli military reluctantly confirmed the practice took place. The organs were used in Israeli hospitals for transplants and human tissues were sent to a special military skin bank for the benefit of injured Israeli soldiers. Doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies by gluing the eyelids shut. Allegedly the practice had stopped a number of years ago, but no one was ever charged or sanctioned. The Israeli government never distanced itself from its baseless attacks against the Swedish reporter, newspaper or authorities.522 In November 2014, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet passed a bill enshrininig Israel as the national state of the Jewish people only, even though about a quarter of the country’s citizenry is non-Jewish. Netanyahu’s pre-election pledge to never allow a Palestinian state and to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank, coupled with his anti-Palestinian rhetoric, gave him a stunning victory in the March 17, 2015 elections. A Zionist Union MP, Sheli Yachimovich, responded aptly to Mr Netanyahu’s comments on her own Facebook page: “No Western leader would dare utter such a racist comment.” If any Western politician were to act in this manner, they would be soundly and universally denounced, and their electorate lambasted. Unfortunately, the double standard of which many Jews complain usually works to their advantage. Writing in the New York Review of Books,523 David Shulman, Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an activist in Ta’ayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership, stated ominously: Benjamin Netanyahu has won again. He will have no difficulty putting together a solid right-wing coalition. But the naked numbers may be deceptive. What really counts is the fact that the Israeli electorate is still dominated by hypernationalist, in some cases proto-fascist, figures. It is in no way inclined to make peace. It has given a clear mandate for policies that preclude any possibility of moving toward a settlement with the Palestinians and that will further deepen Israel’s colonial venture in the Palestinian territories, probably irreversibly. … First, the notion that there will someday be two states in historic Palestine has been savagely undermined. We have Netanyahu’s word for it. If he has his way—and why shouldn’t he?—Palestinians are destined for the foreseeable future to remain subject to a regime of state terror, including the remorseless loss of their lands and homes and, in many cases, their very lives; they will continue to be, as they are now, disenfranchised, without even minimal legal recourse, hemmed into small discontinuous enclaves, and deprived of elementary human rights. Take a mild, almost innocuous example, entirely typical of life in the territories. Last weekend I was in the south Hebron hills with Palestinian shepherds at a place called Zanuta, whose historic grazing grounds have been taken over, in large part, by a settlement inhabited by a single Jewish family. Soldiers turned up with the standard order, signed by the brigade commander, declaring the area a Closed Military Zone; the order is illegal, according to a Supreme Court ruling, but the writ of the court hardly impinges on reality on the ground in south Hebron. Within minutes, three of the shepherds and an Israeli activist were arrested. The people of Zanuta live with such arbitrary decrees on a daily basis, as they live under the constant threat of violent assault by Israeli settlers, acting with impunity. In short, these Palestinian villagers are slated for dispossession and expulsion. We are doing what we can to stop the process, but it isn’t easy. The situation in the northern West Bank is considerably worse. Secondly, we may see the emergence in the West Bank of a situation like that in Gaza, with Hamas or other extremist organizations assuming power. It seems ridiculous to have to write this, but in case anyone has any doubt: there is no way a privileged collective can sit forever on top of a disenfranchised, systematically victimized minority of millions. We can expect mass violent protests of one sort or another (maybe, with luck, some large-scale nonviolent protest as well). Sooner or later, the territories will probably explode, and the Palestinian Authority may be washed away. At that point Netanyahu will complain loudly that you can never trust the Arabs. … Fourthly, and most important, the moral fiber of the country will continue to unravel. Already for years the public space has been contaminated by ugly, violent voices coming from the heart of the right-wing establishment. As Zvi Barel has cogently written in Haaretz, “Netanyahu has succeeded in overturning the principle that the state exists for the sake of its citizens and putting in its place the Fascist belief that the citizens exist for the state.” In accordance with that belief, there will be more hypernationalist, antidemocratic legislation, more deliberate and consistent attempts to undermine the authority of the courts, more rampant racism, more thugs in high office, more acts of cruelty inflicted on innocents, more attacks on moderates perceived as enemies of the state, more paranoid indoctrination in the schools, more hate propaganda and self-righteous whining by official spokesmen, more discrimination against the Israeli-Arab population, more wanton destruction of the villages of Israeli Bedouins, more war-mongering, and quite possibly more needless war.
Lehava’s Benzi Gopstein tells yeshiva panel that the Rambam’s ruling for destruction of idol worship is still valid. Chaim Levinson, Haaretz, August 6, 2015 The leader of the extremist anti-assimilation group Lehava allegedly called for churches to be torched, at a panel held this week for yeshiva students. Benzi Gopstein said he is prepared to spend 50 years in jail for doing so, according to a report by the Haredi website Kikar Shabbat. … The panel was debating whether Jews are commanded to eliminate idol worship, as the Rambam (Maimonides) states. After Gopstein responded affirmatively, Klein [Rabbi Moshe Klein, the rabbi of the Hadassah Medical Centers] hastened to interject, “It is a mitzvah according to the Rambam, but in our times the answer is no.” The issue generated an argument on the panel, with Gopstein defending his position that churches should be burned. In response to a question by Rabinovich as to whether he “is in favor of burning churches in the Land of Israel,” Gopstein answered, “Did the Rambam rule to destroy [idol worship] or not? Idol worship must be destroyed. It’s simply yes – what’s the question?” Rabinovich pressed the issue, saying, “Benzi, I must say I’m really shocked by what you’re saying here. You are essentially saying we must go out and burn down churches. You’re saying something insane here.” Gopstein replied, “What’s the question? Do you doubt it?” When Klein warned him the panel was being filmed, and that if the recording should get to the police he would be arrested, Gopstein replied, “That’s the last thing that concerns me. If this is truth, I’m prepared to sit in jail 50 years for it.” As the panel discussion unfolded, Rabinovich tweeted a message on his Twitter account: “I’m shocked to the core. I’m sitting at a panel right now with Benzi Gopstein, who says outright it’s a mitzvah to burn churches, and he is prepared to sit in jail 50 years for this.” Some of the yeshiva students who saw his tweet called him a “moser” (informer). … “For many months, we have waited for a decision by the attorney general regarding complaints against Gopstein for incitement to racism,” said Rabbi Gilad Kariv, director of the Reform Movement. “If even these remarks don’t lead to a quick decision to prosecute him, we can publicly declare that Israeli law allows incitement to racism and violence. What else has to happen for the State of Israel to seriously fight those who have decided to ignite the fire of hatred and fanaticism?”
Benzi Gopstein, head of Lehava, calls to ban Christmas in the Holy Land: 'Let us remove the vampires before they once again drink our blood.' Yüklə 2,16 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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