Ultra-Orthodox Jews rally round parents jailed for defying Israeli court ruling

• Families want Ashkenazi girls educated separately
• Gulf widening between religious and secular Jews


* Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 June 2010 19.59 BST


Ultra-Orthodox Jewish boys protest by wearing handcuffs on a bus carrying Ashkenazi parents to jail Ultra-Orthodox Jewish boys protest by wearing handcuffs on a bus carrying Ashkenazi parents to jail in a row over their daughters' schooling. Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

The parents of 43 ultra-Orthodox girls were tonighton their way to prison for two weeks today after defying a court order over their children's schooling that has highlighted the division between Israel's religious and secular communities.

More than 100,000 ultra-Orthodox men marched through Jerusalem to show their support. "They are going to jail with joy," said Barry Dubin, 28. "We ultra-Orthodox parents will not cave in to the courts."

The parents are Ashkenazi, originating from Europe, and are in a long-running battle to have their daughters educated separately from Sephardi girls originating from north Africa and the Middle East.

They reported to a police station this evening, according to a police spokesman. The mothers and fathers were being sent to separate jails to serve their sentences. Jerusalem's centre was gridlocked as a result of the march. Police were standing by in the city's Jewish religious areas last night, the spokesman said.

The relative scale of the demonstration, for a city whose Jewish population is half a million, was enormous. Another demonstration in Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, attracted thousands more.

The reason for wanting separate education, the parents claim, is not racism but a desire to remove their daughters from the influence of those they consider less strict in their religious observance. Watching TV at home, having access to the internet, and a laxer dress code among the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox have been cited.

The ultra-Orthodox school in the illegal West Bank settlement of Emmanuel segregated the girls, a move that was subject to a legal challenge resulting in an order to reintegrate. The parents of the 43 girls refused to send them back to mixed classes, leading to sentences for contempt of court.

Underlying the case is the rejection of what the ultra-Orthodox community's sees as state interference in their religious practice and life. "We don't give our girls all the knowledge that there is in the world," said Esther Bark, 50, a mother of seven daughters watching the male-only demonstration today. "We shelter them, and that's why they need a sheltered school. We can't mix a whole assortment of girls in one school."

As police helicopters throbbed over the mass of black-hatted demonstrators, Aaron Shuv, 28, said: "We only follow the rules of God. The Torah [scriptures] is above all government."

The issue had nothing to do with discrimination, said Dubin, a father of two. "No court in the world should have the right to tell me how to educate my sons or daughters. The court went against our rabbis."

Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox community has swollen to a third of the Jewish population, assisted by a high birthrate and departure of thousands of secular residents. The secular population is increasingly resentful that its taxes support welfare benefits for the ultra-Orthodox, who reject paid work in favour of religious study.

The political leverage of the ultra-Orthodox has also increased since the election resulted in a coalition dependent on the support of small religious parties.

"The ultra-Orthodox community is getting stronger and stronger," said Yitzhak Brudny, a political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. "The tensions between the religious and secular communities have become especially pronounced. It's both a class war and a cultural war. The ultra-Orthodox are dirt poor. Among secular Israelis and moderate Orthodox Jews, they are seen basically as parasites. And they have no desire to integrate with other communities."

Secular Israelis were enraged by the ultra-Orthodox refusal to abide by the law on the schooling issue.

"For many years the culture war has hung over us like a dark cloud, like a threat," Yossi Sarid, a former member of the Knesset, wrote in the Ha'aretz newspaper. "Now it is happening; the war has erupted. The great Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] rebellion has begun and is raging on several fronts … It will destroy basic values, without which a democratic, developed state cannot exist. It will be lost unless it fights back."

Ultra-Orthodox Jews rally round parents jailed for defying Israeli court ruling | World news | The Guardian

Someone should point out to these Ultra-orthodox that they depend on a 21st century war machine to keep them (and their precious daughters) safe.

That machine required modern people. And money. Money is best generated by a modern economy.

So either they modernise or they are going to face the Arabs without a technological edge. Wanna bet on how much the rabbis, the Torah and Yavhe would then help?

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There was a long and thoughtful essay on this topic in the 10 June New York Review of Books:

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment

by Peter Beinart

In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.

The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”

That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.

Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.

Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives. [...]

The article has far more to say than this brief excerpt indicates. Those interested should read the whole thing, and also the response from Abraham H Foxman in last week's edition, followed by a response from Beinart.

There are cogent arguments here. I am not going to suggest what anyone else's response should be.

Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

Someone should point out to these Ultra-orthodox that they depend on a 21st century war machine to keep them (and their precious daughters) safe. That machine required modern people. And money. Money is best generated by a modern economy. So either they modernise or they are going to face the Arabs without a technological edge. Wanna bet on how much the rabbis, the Torah and Yavhe would then help?

Amen to that

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Originally Posted by roadkill

There was a long and thoughtful essay on this topic in the 10 June New York Review of Books: The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment by Peter Beinart In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen. The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.” That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state. Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends. Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives. [...] The article has far more to say than this brief excerpt indicates. Those interested should read the whole thing, and also the response from Abraham H Foxman in last week's edition, followed by a response from Beinart. There are cogent arguments here. I am not going to suggest what anyone else's response should be.

Great stuff. The zionist bully-boys can silence the public expression of decent Jewish values, but they can't destroy the people and their children with their racist filth. More power to honest Jewish elbows!

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