To the Editor,
Washington Jewish Week
Your editorial
“Provocation at the Temple Mount” (Aug. 22, 2024)
quite properly criticizes the provocative act of
Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar
Ben-Gvir He insists on the right of Jews to pray
at the Temple Mount, thereby altering the status
quo and promoting religious conflict. Rabbinic
authorities and the Israeli prime minister
disagree.
What is important to
know is that Ben-Gvir is a disciple of the late
Rabbi Meir Kahane, a hero to the settler
movement. In a different Israel, he was
considered a terrorist and racist and was
expelled from the Knesset. He advocated an
Israeli version of the Nazi Nuremburg laws, making
marriage between Jews and non-Jews illegal. Until
recently, Ben-Gvir had a portrait of Meir Kahane
on his living room wall. Professor Susan Heschel
of the Department of Jewish studies at Dartmouth
College calls Kahane “one of the most despicable
characters to emerge in post-war Jewish life.”
Followers of Kahane
have had a major influence upon Israel. In 1994,
Baruch Goldstein, a Kahane disciple, gunned down
29 worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.
Goldstein, together with Kahane, is viewed in
heroic terms by the militant settler movement.
Few Americans
understand the extreme views that characterize
Israel’s now dominant right-wing. At the funeral
of Kahane follower and Hebron killer Baruch
Goldstein, Rabbi Yaakov Perrin stated that “One
million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.”
Shmuel Hacohen, a teacher in a Jerusalem College,
said, ‘Baruch Goldstein was the greatest Jew then
alive, not in one way but in every way. There are
no innocent Arabs here.”
Few people understand
the religious intolerance which motivates the
ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlers on the West Bank.
Consider the statement of the former Sephardic
Chief Rabbi of Israel Ovadiah Yosef, who declared
that, “The only reason for the existence of
non-Jews is to serve Jews.” His funeral was
considered the largest ever in Israel with crowd
estimates reaching 800,000. He is a hero to
settlers. His picture is on postage stamps and
streets carry his name.
This contempt for
non-Jews, sadly, is widespread. Rabbi A.I. Kook,
widely admired in Israel, said of Jews, “We are of
a much higher and greater spiritual order than
non-Jews.”
Few Jewish Americans
are aware of the bigotry that characterizes
Israel’s increasingly influential ultra-Orthodox
religious community. They should be as committed
to vigorously oppose and isolate intolerance
toward non-Jews as they are to oppose
antisemitism. Sadly, that is not the case at the
present time.
Beyond this, the
American Jewish community, which quite properly
supports separation of church and state and
religious freedom in the United States, is largely
silent about the fact that Israel is a theocracy
with a state religion. Non-Orthodox rabbis cannot
perform weddings, conduct funerals or have their
conversions recognized. These double standards
are not going to be able to exist into the future.
Sincerely,
Allan
C.Brownfeld.
Editor of ISSUES, the quarterly journal of
the American Council for Judaism