Haredim under the microscope

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for haredim. First there were the Jerusalem protests against the opening of a municipal parking lot on Shabbat that yielded harrowing tales of bystanders caught in the crossfire. Then came the story of the Chasidic mother who allegedly removed her child’s feeding tube in the hospital, and another who was convicted of severe child abuse. What could top that? How about the bust of a vast money laundering ring and the black market trafficking in human organs that took down dozens of clergy and politicians in New Jersey? And now we have allegations of complicity in murder to round out this litany of shame.

To be clear, there are no indications as yet that an ultra-Orthodox Jew is responsible for the murder of two Israelis at a gay and lesbian community center in Tel Aviv over the weekend. But some have suggested that the climate of gay-bashing in which some Orthodox leaders have engaged directly led to the murders, and a backlash against a community already on the defensive is widely feared.

Matthew Wagner reports:

The Internet site ‘Hadarei Haredim’, which has a chat forum and reports internal haredi news, led Sunday morning with the headline "The

Anti-Haredi Incitement Club: the police are still investigating but the club’s community is already accusing – the murder is a result of haredi incitement."

Kikar Hashabbat, another online haredi news site, led with an editorializing piece entitled, "Our blood has been cheapened: the incitement parade against the haredim has begun."

The article continues: "Under a façade of love, the abnormal community in Israel spreads hatred and blackballs the entire haredi sector."

If any community should be feeling vulnerable right now, it’s Israel’s gay community. Haredim are well organized and politically powerful and are, more often than not, the ones meting out the violence, not the other way around. Ilan Sheinfeld summed up the community mood in the Jerusalem Post:

This is a dark day, not just for the homosexual, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community but for the whole of Israeli society. The murderer’s burst of bullets set us back years to when homosexuality was considered a crime and an aberration as defined by law.

I marched on Saturday night, together with hundreds of men and women from my community, expressing our grief and our rage on the streets of Tel Aviv, the city we always regarded as the only safe place for us; the place where we might live our mono-sexual lives peacefully, the city that on Saturday night became an abattoir.

….

Over the last few years, the most inflammatory statements imaginable against my community have come from the Knesset podium. Those same ministers and MKs who denigrated the community must account for the young people’s blood spilled on Saturday night.

These events proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the homosexual-lesbian community must not remain silent in the face of homophobia, discrimination, interference in personal and family life or any attempt whatsoever to tie our hands, dictate our way of life or otherwise threaten our identity.

Though some have responded to each incident with claims of a conspiracy to defame haredim, some community leaders, to their credit, have broken with their insular habits and called for a long hard look in the mirror. Nathaniel Popper reported last week in the Forward about haredi leaders speaking out on business ethics in the wake of the New Jersey scandal, while one of the community’s most articulate spokespersons, Avi Shafran of Agudath Israel, referring to the Jerusalem rioters, wrote:

The rioters may have been boys, but they were our boys. And if boys of ours can imagine that acts of destruction and hooliganism are somehow the right way to stand up for Shabbos’ honor (leave aside the way to bring non-observant Jews to appreciate the day that is me’ein olam haboh), there is much, much work to be done to teach them what Torah is and what it isn’t.