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In Israel, the Ultra-Orthodox Face Their Own Coronavirus Battle

As is the case in New York City, ḥaredi Jews in Israel are receiving special scrutiny for their alleged and real violations of social-distancing restrictions. Most recently, pictures have circulated of closely packed mourners at the funeral of the Pittsburgher rebbe, who himself died of complications from COVID-19. And as in New York, not all criticism of such scenes is external. Haviv Rettig Gur writes:

[T]here is another group troubled and frustrated by ḥaredi behavior: the Ḥaredim themselves, whose acknowledgment of their community’s failures to cope with the pandemic, and the accompanying frustration and despair, now dominate their media and politics. Accusations of betrayal course through the community’s internal debates.

During the cholera epidemic that struck his city of Vilna in 1848, Rabbi Israel Lipkin of Salant told his followers that they were permitted to eat in small portions during the Yom Kippur fast if they feared that strict adherence to the fast would weaken them and render them more susceptible to the illness.

According to a later account of the decision by his son Yitzḥak Lipkin, the great Lithuanian sage was concerned not only about his community’s health but about its reputation as well. He feared that a fast that weakened his followers during an epidemic would lead non-Jews to say “that it is for the faith of Israel that they brought the sickness upon themselves.”

An anxious exhaustion has set in across broad swaths of the Israeli ḥaredi community, which feels uniquely threatened by the pandemic and the lockdown. Ḥaredi journalists and leaders don’t know how to get their communities to abide by the government-set restrictions, even as the virus cuts a deadly path through their neighborhoods, felling family members and beloved rabbis. They know, keenly and viscerally, how bad they look. They have no idea what to do about it.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Coronavirus, Israeli society, Ultra-Orthodox

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic