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100,000 haredi demonstrators protest segregated education ruling
17 June 2010
By Yair Ettinger

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox protesters gathered in Jerusalem and in Bnei Brak on Thursday to support the right of Ashkenazi Hasidic parents to keep their children in classes segregated from their Sephardi peers.

According to police, 100,000 people had come out to the Jerusalem streets to participate in the demonstrations.

The demonstrations were called after the High Court of Justice handed down a two-week jail sentence to parents in the settlement of Immanuel who refused a ruling requiring the Ashkenazi (European origin) and Sephardi (Middle Eastern origin) girls to study in the same classes.

Protesters snarled traffic in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, crowding onto balconies in city squares, waving posters decrying the court's decision and proclaiming the supremacy of religious law.

According to Israel Radio, some of the Ashkenazi protesters attempted during the rally to attack Sephardi Rabbi Ya'akov Yosef, son of Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and a leading figure against the discrimination. Yosef's students managed to guard their teacher, who had also been subject to an attempted attack during protests on Wednesday evening.

The protesters deny that the Ashkenazi parents are employing a policy of discrimination, defending them as having the right to send their children to school with people of the same level of religiosity as themselves. They say the two communities have different religious traditions and they do not want their children influenced by Sephardi practices.

The court has permitted the parents to defer the jail term of one of the parents until the other parent completes their term so that their children will not remain unsupervised. The court has also exempted the mothers of children with special needs. The prison term of one mother, who signed an agreement to comply with the court's ruling, has been overturned.

The protest in Bnei Brak began at 1 P.M. and ended just before 3 P.M. The protesters then began accompanying the bus that would bring the parents to the police headquarters in Jerusalem, to join forces with the thousands of people rallying there.

Dozens of the pro-segregation parents were to stand on the pedestrian bridge over Jerusalem's Bar Ilan Street wearing signs saying "prisoner sanctifying the name of heaven." Police had issued permits for 20,000 people to demonstrate in Jerusalem.

Heads of yeshivas and schools were urged by leading Ashkenazi rabbis to cancel classes Thursday so students could attend the protest.

The parents were ordered to arrive at the Jerusalem police headquarters in the Russian Compound at 5 P.M. on Thursday to begin carrying out their prison terms, after police asked the court to postpone the commencement.

The court had initially scheduled the sentencing to begin at 12 P.M. and then pushed it off to 1 P.M., before agreeing to the police request.

The 43 families of the Ashkenazi girls seemed elated Wednesday by the prospect of their impending arrest and two-week jail term, which some called "a historic stand for the sanctification of the name of heaven."

A leading spokesman of Israel's modern Orthodox stream on Thursday urged religious Zionists not to take part in the mass protests, regardless of the political price they may pay in the future for refusing to support the movement.

"I cannot take part in the racism and discrimination that is taking place, which is just the tip of the iceberg," said Rabbi Yuval Sherlo, who heads the joint army-yeshiva program in Petah Tikva.

Religious Zionism must "return to its historic role" and bring both sides to a compromise. "It's impossible to claim that this is Jewish law or that it is sanctifying the name of God," he said.

Ads appeared in newspapers on Thursday will call on people to avoid violence. Yerah Tocker, a spokesman for the protest, said "avoiding violence is one of the main emphases of the organizers."

"We want to protest the High Court ruling and declare that for all of us, in light of the ruling, Torah comes first," he said.

Despite the pledges of non-violence, police deployed in large numbers in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Beit Shemesh, Immanuel and near Ma'asiyahu Prison, where apparently the fathers of the girls were to be taken, and Neveh Tirza Prison, where the mothers were expected to go.

Police also called on drivers to avoid the area of the demonstrations in Jerusalem on Yermiyahu, Bar Ilan, Shmuel Hanavi and Hanevi'im streets, and in the Russian Compound.

The Courts Administration on Wednesday beefed up security around Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy, who headed the panel that ruled against the segregation. Levy, who wrote the sole dissent from the anti-segregation ruling, came out strongly against parents seeking rabbinic advice on the ruling. "No ruling of a court in general, or the High Court in particular, requires the authorization of any person, not even halakhic (Jewish law ) authority," Levy said.

Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman came out against Levy on Thursday afternoon, saying that he wasn't convinced that the ruling wasn't tainted by personal considerations.

Litzman, who arrived at the Russian Compound to show solidarity with the Immanuel parents, said that he respects the High Court of Justice and abides by its rulings when it comes to the operations within the Health Ministry, but that "if the court should require of me to perform actions that conflict with the Torah or Halakha (Jewish law), I would resign rather than do those things."

The High Court isn't racist

In the battle over segregation in schools, the issue is not Jewish religious law, but the racist social norms that characterize the entire ultra-Orthodox worldview.
By Yair Sheleg

The case of ethnic discrimination at a girls' religious school in Immanuel should be examined from the standpoint of both principle and practicality.

On the level of principle, there are no words to describe the shame provoked by this blatant ultra-Orthodox racism. This isn't a debate between a High Court of Justice ruling and orders from on high, as some Haredim would have us believe, because there is nothing in the leading halakhic texts, such as the Shulhan Arukh and the Mishneh Torah, that sanctions such discrimination.


Indeed, there could be no such ruling, since both Joseph Karo and Moses Maimonides, who compiled the Shulhan Arukh and the Mishneh Torah, respectively, were themselves Sephardim.

The issue, then, is not Jewish religious law, but rather the racist social norms that characterize the entire ultra-Orthodox worldview. (The Haredim, as we know, also discriminate against the newly religious. )

Nor is there any justification for comparing this obvious racism with the extent to which Sephardim, or religious Jews, are represented as justices on the High Court itself. Indeed, it is a pity that in the name of multiculturalism and the desire to "include" the Haredim in mainstream discourse, secular media figures fall into this simplistic trap.

The criteria for appointment to the Supreme Court must be the quality of the candidate's rulings, character and intellect. In my view, they also include the capacity for a complex, considered perspective on the needs and values of Israeli society.

On the practical level, however, the problem should be addressed more cautiously than it was in the High Court this week. There was no need to reach the point of attempting to impose integration by judicial fiat, even if this segregation is infuriating to any level-headed person.

In a society that contains communities whose identities are different from, and sometimes even polar opposites of, each other, there is a constant tension between the right of each community to maintain its way of life and the enforcement of universal norms of human rights. The test, as always, is one of maintaining this delicate balance, and of proportionality.

In this respect, it seems that the injury to the Sephardi students' human rights was not so grave as to warrant the imposition of integrated classrooms by judicial fiat, particularly in light of the fact that they could easily have avoided this slight to their dignity by relinquishing, from the outset, the dubious "right" to attend a racist school.

It would therefore be appropriate to make do with the court's long-term solution - revoking the school's state funding - instead of insisting on arm-twisting tactics during the two weeks remaining in the school year.

Analysis / The ultra-Orthodox are returning Israel to the middle ages

In a country established on the principle of integrating Jews from all over the world, the ultra-Orthodox have become a leading force behind racism and division in Israeli society.

By Yoel Marcus


From week to week, month to month, and year to year, our situation is getting bleaker. They do what their rabbinical leader tells them to do. They don't recognize the authority of the state, or its institutions or laws, aside that which is related to the government's coffers.

They don't recognize the national anthem or the Israeli flag. They don't recognize methods of birth control, and instead fulfill the religious commandment of being fruitful. They educate their offspring to hate the state.

In a country established on the principle of integrating Jews from all over the world - which succeeded rather well in terms of the secular society - the ultra-Orthodox have become a leading force behind racism and division in Israeli society.

When former Sephardi chief rabbi and Shas spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef - whose children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have studied and continue to study at Ashkenazi educational institutions - calls for the Sephardi public to send their children exclusively to Sephardi institutions, he is sowing the seeds of racism. And his reasoning is that anyone who studies at an Ashkenazi school "will have an Ashkenazi mind."

For a country working to bring Jews from around the world together, the Haredim are taking us back to the Middle Ages. "Racism" of this kind has almost entirely disappeared within the secular community. A huge number of "mixed" marriages are seen throughout the country, with the question of which community the bride or groom is from almost a thing of the past - or at least on the path to extinction.

Haredi racism is an abscess on Israeli society that needs to be removed as soon as possible. As it appears impossible to solve, and as if it's only getting worse, I am left with no other way to put an end to this other than reference to a poem by the German poet Heinrich Heine: "Rabbi Yehuda, a man of Navarre, and a Franciscan father by the name of Jose, in Toledo stand before Don Pedro (known as "the cruel" ) and beside him his wife Donna Blanca, on the question of whose God is greater. At the end of the debate, Don Pedro asks his wife for advice. I don't know who is right, she said, putting her hand on her forehead in thought and saying, 'But if the rabbi and the priest could both move back a little; both of them stink.'"