The religious wars between two ultra-Orthodox factions may soon be over.
Both sides have made peace overtures promising an end to the bitter feud between the Hasidim and Mitnagdim, which reached a peak during last year’s Knesset election campaign.
Rabbi Pinhas Menachem Alter, chairman of the Agudat Yisrael party’s central committee and brother of the aging rebbe of Gur, made the first move with an appeal for peace published Friday in the party newspaper, Hamodia.
The rival newspaper, Yated Ne’eman, published a front-page reply Sunday, welcoming Alter’s call.
The paper is the mouthpiece of Rabbi Eliezer Schach of Bnei Brak, head of the Mitnaged faction and the Degel HaTorah party.
The editorial stressed Schach’s own public protestations that he seeks peace and dialogue.
TROUBLE BEGAN LAST FALL
Relations between the two factions of the ultra-Orthodox community reached an all-time low recently, when both camps announced plans to establish separate schools so their children would no longer study together.
The long-simmering Hasid-Mitnaged feud which originated centuries ago in Eastern Europe, flared in Jerusalem last fall.
At that time, Schach demanded that the Agudah newspaper, Hamodia, reject election campaign advertisements from Chabad, the movement of Lubavitch Hasidim.
When Alter and other Agudah leaders refused, Schach broke away to set up his own party, Degel HaTorah, and his newspaper, Yated Ne’eman, which pursued a vigorous offensive against Chabad.
Chabad threw the weight of its influence to Agudah, which emerged from the elections with five Knesset seats.
Degel won two seats, considered a good showing for a party that did not exist a few months before Election Day.
A CALL FOR ‘PEACE AND UNITY’
Rabbi Alter, in his call Friday for “peace and unity,” noted that in rabbinic tradition the Temple was destroyed “because of needless hatred.”
He recalled that Agudah’s Council of Torah Sages had urged a reconciliation and that the founders of Agudah early in the century were leaders of the Hasidic camp.
His father, who was the rebbe of Gur, and the Chafetz Chaim, always worked “in close harmony and mutual respect,” he said.
Now he said he was proposing to convene the Council of Torah Sages to hear “all sides and all issues.”
In its response Sunday, Yated Ne’eman noted that Rabbi Schach in his address to thousands of supporters at the Ponevezh Yeshiva last week declared:
“My arms are stretched out for peace. Let us together consider whatever complaints there are.”
The Mitnaged organ reported that “rabbis and public figures now hope that a roundtable can soon be set up which will end the schism.”
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