JEWS VS. JEWS IN ZIONIST STATE

Jew vs. Jew: The Religious Conflict Tearing at Israel

By MATTHEW KALMAN / JERUSALEM/ Time.com

Israel's domestic culture war between religious communities and the secular courts took to the streets, Thursday, as tens of thousands of ultra-orthodox Ashkenazi (European) Jews paralyzed the streets of Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak in a protest march. The target of their outrage was the imprisonment of 43 couples for refusing to allow their daughters to attend a religious school where they would have to mix with the daughters of religious Mizrahi Jews (a term sometimes conflated with Sephardi and referring to those who hail mainly from the Arab world). Dressed in their Sabbath finery of tall fur hats and delicately-embroidered long black silk coats, men bound for prison were carried shoulder high by a dancing, singing throng through the streets of Jerusalem to the city's Russian Compound police headquarters. Some wore a red sash emblazoned with the legend "Holiness for the sake of heaven."

"We are going with gladness in our hearts," said Rabbi Eliahu Biton as he walked towards jail, although 22 of the convicted women and four of the men failed to appear.

The parents at the center of Thursday's drama, followers of Rabbi Shmuel Berzovsky who leads the tiny Slonimer Hasidic sect, chose two weeks in jail rather than send their daughters to the Beis Yaakov school near their homes in the religious West Bank settlement of Emanuel. Their reason? At the school, the Ashkenazi kids would mingle with religious Mizrahi kids, some of whom come from more secular extended families and therefore, say the Slonimers, could expose their sheltered daughters to unwanted influences from the wider world. And their imprisonment was the culmination of a two-year battle between the ultra-Orthodox sect, which effectively controls the school, and Israel's secular Supreme Court. Before the Beis Yaakov controversy, few people had heard of the Slonimer, named for the town in Belarus where their first rabbi lived 200 years ago, and the sect's internal power struggle between rival leaders in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak. But the fight over the schoolgirls has united the tiny group and transformed it into the latest torchbearers of a festering feud between the ultra-orthodox and the secular establishment. (See pictures of Jerusalem and its divisions.)

Thursday's demonstration was the largest in Jerusalem since ultra-orthodox protesters gathered in similar numbers in 1999 in a show of strength against the supposed anti-religious bias of Israel's Supreme Court. A decade on, the gap between the two entities is wider than ever, with running debates over such issues as the power of religious courts, state subsidies for religious students, religious exemption from military service and access to public roads on the Sabbath.(How the Sephardim gained political clout in Israel.)

In August 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that a separate stream created in Beis Yaakov school two years ago for the Slonim amounted to "rampant discrimination" against the rest of the pupils, who are 95% Mizrahi. The court ordered the school, which is financed by the state, to remove the physical barriers and integrate the classes. For six months, the parents defied the court. When the barriers finally came down, 43 families removed their daughters and then sent them to another state-funded school in Bnei Brak, an hour's drive away. But parents are not allowed to move their kids from one school to another in the middle of a school year without permission from the education authorities, and their departure left the Beis Yaakov school with too few kids to be viable.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that the parents must return their daughters to the now desegregated school by Thursday or report to jail.

The open defiance of the parents led opposition leader Tzipi Livni to wonder aloud at the future of the rule of law in Israel and the deafening silence of government ministers scared of offending ultra-orthodox parties that hold the balance of power. "I have heard that there is a group of people who have said ahead of time that they refuse to accept a Supreme Court decision," Livni told supporters this week. "There is no room for such declarations in a democratic state. I am not a fan of the Supreme Court's involvement in all issues, but when the political and state leadership does not accept decisions based on the values of the State of Israel, the Supreme Court has no choice."

Aviad Hacohen, the lawyer who filed the Supreme Court petition on behalf of Yoav Lalum, chairman of the Noar Kahalacha association, which battles ethnic discrimination in religious schools, tells TIME that the Slonimer refusal to have their kids attend school with the Mizrahi girls has resulted in the school excluding dozens of Mizrahi girls since last Fall. And, he warns, the problem in Emanuel is the tip of an ultra-orthodox iceberg threatening to sink the rule of law in Israel.

"This can lead to real anarchy," says Hacohen. "I hope the rule of law will prevail, otherwise it won't stop with the ultra-Orthodox and others will do the same. I wish I could tell you the law will win, but I'm not sure".

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WHO DETERMINES WHETHER ONE IS A JEW?

Who is a Jew? And who gets to decide? The case began when a 12-year-old boy, an observant Jew whose father is Jewish and whose mother is a Jewish convert, applied to enrol in Jews' Free School. The mother's conversion was not recognized. But a court ruling has voided the admissions policy. It has exposed bitter divisions in Britain’s community of 300,000 or so Jews, pitting members of various Jewish denominations against one another. Read on


Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question
By SARAH LYALL
Published: November 7, 2009

LONDON — The questions before the judges in Courtroom No. 1 of Britain’s Supreme Court were as ancient and as complex as Judaism itself.


David Lightman with his daughter, who was denied admission to the Jews' Free School because her mother's conversion was not recognized. But a court ruling has voided the admissions policy.

On the surface, the court was considering a straightforward challenge to the admissions policy of a Jewish high school in London. But the case, in which arguments concluded Oct. 30, has potential repercussions for thousands of other parochial schools across Britain. And in addressing issues at the heart of Jewish identity, it has exposed bitter divisions in Britain’s community of 300,000 or so Jews, pitting members of various Jewish denominations against one another.

“This is potentially the biggest case in the British Jewish community’s modern history,” said Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle newspaper here. “It speaks directly to the right of the state to intervene in how a religion operates.”

The case began when a 12-year-old boy, an observant Jew whose father is Jewish and whose mother is a Jewish convert, applied to the school, JFS. Founded in 1732 as the Jews’ Free School, it is a centerpiece of North London’s Jewish community. It has around 1,900 students, but it gets far more applicants than it accepts.

Britain has nearly 7,000 publicly financed religious schools, representing Judaism as well as the Church of England, Catholicism and Islam, among others. Under a 2006 law, the schools can in busy years give preference to applicants within their own faiths, using criteria laid down by a designated religious authority.

By many standards, the JFS applicant, identified in court papers as “M,” is Jewish. But not in the eyes of the school, which defines Judaism under the Orthodox definition set out by Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. Because M’s mother converted in a progressive, not an Orthodox, synagogue, the school said, she was not a Jew — nor was her son. It turned down his application.

That would have been the end of it. But M’s family sued, saying that the school had discriminated against him. They lost, but the ruling was overturned by the Court of Appeal this summer.

In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”

The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.

“The requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act,” the court said. It added that while it was fair that Jewish schools should give preference to Jewish children, the admissions criteria must depend not on family ties, but “on faith, however defined.”

The same reasoning would apply to a Christian school that “refused to admit a child on the ground that, albeit practicing Christians, the child’s family were of Jewish origin,” the court said.

The school appealed to the Supreme Court, which is likely to rule sometime before the end of the year.

The case’s importance was driven home by the sheer number of lawyers in the courtroom last week, representing not just M’s family and the school, but also the British government, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, the United Synagogue, the British Humanist Association and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

Meanwhile, the Court of Appeal ruling threw the school into a panicked scramble to put together a new admissions policy. It introduced a “religious practice test,” in which prospective students amass points for things like going to synagogue and doing charitable work.

That has led to all sorts of awkward practical issues, said Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, because Orthodox Judaism forbids writing or using a computer on the Sabbath. That means that children who go to synagogue can’t “sign in,” but have to use methods like dropping prewritten postcards into boxes.

It is unclear what effect the ruling, if it is upheld, will have on other religious schools. Some Catholic schools, accustomed to using baptism as a baseline admissions criterion, are worried that they will have to adopt similar practice tests.

The case has stirred up long-simmering resentments among the leaders of different Jewish denominations, who, for starters, disagree vehemently on the definition of Jewishness. They also disagree on the issue of whether an Orthodox leader is entitled to speak for the entire community.

“Whatever happens in this case, there must be some resolution sorted out between different denominations,” Mr. Benjamin said in an interview. “That the community has failed to grasp this has had the very unfortunate result of having a judgment foisted on it by a civil court.”

Orthodox Jews, of course, sympathize with the school, saying that observance is no test of Jewishness, and that all that matters is whether one’s mother is Jewish. So little does observance matter, in fact, that “having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish,” Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, chairman of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue, said recently.

Lauren Lesin-Davis, chairman of the board of governors at King David, a Jewish school in Liverpool, told the BBC that the ruling violated more than 5,000 years of Jewish tradition.

“You cannot come in and start telling people how their whole lives should change, that the whole essence of their life and their religion is completely wrong,” she said.

But others are in complete sympathy with M.

“How dare they question our beliefs and our Jewishness?” David Lightman, an observant Jewish father whose daughter was also denied a place at the school because it did not recognize her mother’s conversion, told reporters recently. “I find it offensive and very upsetting.”

Rabbi Danny Rich, chief executive of Liberal Judaism here, said the lower court’s ruling, if upheld, would help make Judaism more inclusive.

“JFS is a state-funded school where my grandfather taught, and it’s selecting applicants on the basis of religious politics,” he said in an interview. “The Orthodox definition of Jewish excludes 40 percent of the Jewish community in this country.”

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VIDEO TENTANG ZIONISM LWN ORTODOKS JUDAISM

Zionist Israeli Thugs are beating up and using tasers on members of the Orthodox Jewish Faith Neturei Karta.

Anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews protesting the desecration of graves by a highway construction project near Haifa were attacked and brutally beaten by private security guards hired by the Ministry of Transportation.

The group, known for being outspokenly critical of the State of Israel and its very existence were peacefully demonstrating at the time. This attack follows a long history of violence against the Orthodox Jewish community.

Consistent with fundamental Jewish beliefs, some of these protesters often take part in demonstrations, side by side with Palestinians, against the State of Israel and its inhuman policies toward the Palestinian people." The apparent strategy of using organized violence through private security personnel against these peaceful protesters is only one of many tactics used by the State of Israel to intimidate and discourage further protests. The police were nowhere to be found at the time or even hours after the melee. Several Rabbis and children were attacked with electric stun gun devices and knives, requiring some to be hospitalized.

Among the injured were Rabbi Leibl Deutsch and Rabbi Yisroel Rothchild, both of Jerusalem who were stabbed in the lower back and leg respectively. The Jewish cemetery at the heart of the incident dates back to the Second Temple era, over 2000 years ago.Some of the caves that comprise the cemetery have been destroyed as a result of the ongoing highway work and there are heightened fears of further desecration as the highway project continues unabated.

video rabbi dipukul samseng zionist




On April 26, 2005, thousands of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem gathered to protest the despicable events which occurred during a protest at Highway 6 near Kibbutz Rigavin when demonstrators against the Highway 6 expansion which was destroying ancient Jewish graves (from the second temple period)were viciously attacked by Security Guards.

In retaliation for the mass protest, Israeli police entered an Orthodox Jewish Synagogue in Jerusalem and attacked devout Jews who were in the shul to pray during the Passover Holiday.




An orthodox jewish man in Israel talks about how his grandparents, who lived in the holy land since before Israel was established, used to be friends with the muslims in the area. They were "like brothers." They used to "babysit each others kids". He says the problem isn't judaism or jews or muslims, but that the problem is zionism.

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