EnglishGuttman_0.pdf application/pdf Object
A PORTRAIT OF ISRAELI JEWRY: Beliefs, Observances, and Values among
Israeli Jews 2 0 0 0
Shlomit Levy Hanna Levinsohn Elihu Katz
Highlights from an In-Depth Study conducted by the Guttman Center of the Israel Democracy Institute
for The AVI CHAI Foundation
The Israel Democracy Institute and The AVI CHAI Foundation
June 2002
In attack-conscious Israel, even a crematorium needs protection - Haaretz, February 6, 2008
In terrorism-conscious Israel, security has been beefed up even for the crematorium of a company providing Israelis a choice of burial services, but the potential assailants are apparently Jews.
The firm, called Aley Shalechet (”Autumn Leaves”), was the first company in Israel to offer “alternative burial services,” notably cremation.
In August 2007, a day after the location of the company’s crematorium was revealed in an ultra-Orthodox newspaper, unknown assailants broke into the grounds of the firm on Moshav Hibat Zion and torched its facilities, causing serious damage to the crematorium, and igniting a public debate on burial services outside the Orthodox Jewish norm.
No one has been charged in the relation to the arson, though Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, founder and public face of the ultra-Orthodox ZAKA rescue service an the self-styled operations officer of the Eda Haredit religious organization, was temporarily detained by police after reports surfaced that he was seen at the site the morning of the crime.
The company had kept a low profile until the attack, its offices situated at the end of a hallway in a nondescript mall in central Israel. Since its operations were publicized, however, Aley Shalechet has been the subject of concerted efforts by religious authorities to have its activities banned, saying that it violates Jewish law and desecrates the memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, whose bodies were incinerated in Nazi ovens.
Haredi sect brands Chief Rabbi Metzger ‘Zionist stooge,’ wicked - Haaretz, February 5, 2008
The strongly anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect of ultra-Orthodox Jewshas attacked Ashkennazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger as a “very well paid Zionist stooge” and a “a wicked emissary of evil” who should be expelled from Israel, following Metzger’s reported comments proposing that poor Gazans be moved to a Palestinian state established in the Sinai.
The statements, reported in Haaretz last week, spurred an angrily worded response from Neturei Karta, which has often taken vocally pro-Palestinian stances against Israel.
Denouncing Metzger’s Sinai proposal, the group refered to him as the “so-called Chief Rabbi of the so-called State of Israel” and as a “very well paid Zionist stooge”.
Referring to Zionism as an “idolatrous cult,” Neturei Karta called for Metzger to “removed from the Holy Land,” describing him as “a wicked emissary of evil”.
Metzger had said that his plan would be to “take all the poor people from Gaza to move them to a wonderful new modern country with trains buses cars, like in Arizona - we are now in a generation where you can take a desert and build a city. This will be a solution for the poor people - they will have a nice county, and we shall have our country and we shall live in peace.”
Avirama Golan, Splintering into tribes in the name of unity - Haaretz, February 6, 2008
An emotional advertisement in the newspaper Hamodia this week urged ultra-Orthodox Jews to come to Jerusalem en masse yesterday. The Haredi community knew that this would be a political-diplomatic demonstration, but the official pretext was an injury to Haredi educational institutions. Only for that is it permissible to abandon Torah study and take to the streets.Representatives of the national religious community also took part in the “mourning.” Seemingly, this is a new alliance. In reality, it is a process that has gained strength in recent years and has made the Zionist rabbis superfluous, split the national religious movement and created new political splinter groups.
Professor Yisrael Aumann, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, recently joined one of these splinters. Ahi (literally, “my brother,” but also a Hebrew acronym for “land, society and Judaism”), is a movement established by MKs Yitzhak Levy and Effie Eitam. It plans to hold a membership drive and then allow its members to directly elect its Knesset slate, because the negotiations it held on a joint list with two other factions, Moledet and Tekuma, failed. Levy and Eitam argue that the registration drive will redefine the leadership of the religious right, and in the end, everyone will reunite. But Tekuma, Moledet and the National Religious Party all protested the move in an angry letter to leading rabbis.
It is hard to imagine the magnitude of the resentment percolating through the religious right. The only common denominator among the various splinters is the claim that all are working to unify the nation. In the name of this unification - and after the NRP was swallowed up in the National Union faction, along with Moledet (a party of religious and secular rightists) and Tekuma (a religious faction headed by rabbis) - Ahi is now threatening to shed the old NRP, headed by MK Zevulun Orlev, like a discarded skin.
The past three weeks have further exacerbated the recourse to isolation and feelings of alienation from the institutions of the state, which part of the National-Religious youth have felt ever since the evacuation of Gush Katif [in 2005], and all the more forcefully following the major clash over Amona, some two years ago.
It was enough to view a few days ago the dozens of girls, most students at religious girl’s high schools in the West Bank’s Benjamin region, who protested outside the Jerusalem Magistrates Court and sang with hoarse voices - almost unbelievably - the anthem of anti-Zionist Haredi sect Neturei Karta:
“In the rule of heretics we don’t believe, and their constitution we don’t acknowledge. In the way of the Torah we will go, in fire and in water. In the way of the Torah we will go sanctify the name of the heavens.”
Extreme right-wing activists are expected to use severe violence to disrupt any move to evacuate outposts or settlements, even the destruction of a few homes, according to an evaluation recently presented to the government by the security establishment and law enforcement officials in the territories.
The evaluation states that the violence during any attempt at evacuation would be more serious than that seen during the evacuation of Amona two years ago.
However security officials do not at this stage foresee an increased threat to the lives of senior politicians, because the extreme right does not appear to believe the Annapolis process will succeed and therefore the settlements are not in danger.
Advertisement
After the evacuation of Amona two years ago, the ideological foundations and plans of actions were reformulated against future evacuations. In a booklet distributed at one of the extreme-right rallies, the message was that violence might deter the government from additional evacuations.
“The war must be brought to the field of the enemy,” the booklet said. “In this matter and in this situation [evacuation], the IDF is the enemy.”
The security establishment believes that any attempt to evacuate settlements will result in violence against the security forces, large-scale disturbances, and endangerment of human life. The experts also see widespread refusal of orders in the IDF.
Religious party leader: Same-sex families undermine Judaism - Haaretz, December 10, 2007
Judaism does not recognize same-sex parents and therefore, the High Court decision to recognize their adoptions undermines the foundations of a Jewish state, National Religious Party Chairman Zevulun Orlev said on Sunday.
“There is no choice but to fix the legislation to determine that a family comprises a man and a woman,” Orlev said.
The panel reopened Sunday the debate on a lesbian woman’s right to adopt her partner’s son, in response to the state’s petition against a previous court ruling in 2000.
Nicole and Ruthie Brenner-Kadish formalized the adoption in California, and then petitioned the High Court, asking it to instruct the state to recognize the adoption.
As opposed to Orlev, Meretz MK Zahava Gal-On said that “the decision is one more step toward the annulment of the institutionalized discrimination of same-sex couples. It’s about time the state recognize these couple as they do adoptions completed by couples that are not of the same sex.”
In its 2000 ruling, a three-justice panel sided with the Brenner-Kadish couple, and ordered the Population Registry to list both of them as the child’s mothers. An Interior Ministry official refused, however, saying that “biologically speaking the existence of two parents of the same gender is impossible.”
Uzi Benziman, A strange struggle for Jerusalem - Haaretz, December 9, 2007
Jerusalem as a whole is losing its productive backbone and is deepening its dependence on state handouts. Young, secular, educated people able to earn a wage are leaving it in droves, followed by their parents. The city leadership is in the hands of ultra-Orthodox elected officials who imbue their managerial style with concepts derived from their world and priorities. This process stems from demographics whose significance is highlighted by the following projection: In about eight years the number of students in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox elementary schools will be more than three times the number of students in secular and religious public schools.
That is the backdrop against which we should judge recent statements by groups that call on the public to keep Jerusalem united. A ludicrous gap exists between the organizations’ rhetoric and the forces shaping the city. The fiery slogans the heads of these organizations spout, the noisy rallies they initiate, the poetic declarations by Knesset members when they try to hold the state to its obligation to keep Jerusalem unified are about a city looking more and more like Safed (with all due respect to that city). Some areas of Jerusalem are increasingly more reminiscent of Umm al-Fahm (with all due respect to that city).
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
In the outpost of Shvut Ami, next door to Palestinian village of Funduq, settler youth plastered the walls of a building owned by a Palestinian family.
Isabel Kershner, Young Israelis Resist Challenges to Settlements - New York Times, December 8, 2007
SHVUT AMI OUTPOST, West Bank — For two months, Jewish youths have been renovating an old stone house on this muddy hilltop in the northern West Bank. The house is not theirs, however. It belongs to a Palestinian family. And their seizure of it along with the land around it for a new settlement outpost is a violation of Israeli law. The police have evicted the group five times but they keep coming back.
Yedidya Slonim, 16, one of the renovators here, who grew up in another West Bank settlement, Tzofim, said of the police: “We come back straight away, as soon as they’ve gone. They come every week for half a day. It doesn’t bother us so much.”
The cat-and-mouse contest here lays bare a key dilemma of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute: Israel has pledged that it will permit no new settlements in the territory it has occupied since the 1967 war, no more expropriation of Palestinian land and the dismantling of unauthorized outposts — like this one — erected since March 2001, but it has never applied the muscle needed to do so.
“Shvut Ami is a chronicle of failure of law enforcement,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer who represents the Palestinian owners of the house on behalf of Yesh Din, an Israeli volunteer organization that fights for Palestinian rights. In this respect, he said, the area is “a jungle.”
Avraham Burg: Time to attack - Haaretz, August 28, 2007
There is no theological difference between certain rabbis from Hebron, the former Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and the evangelical preacher hoping for Armageddon at the site of our Megiddo. Those who say that “God’s law is first” are no different from one another, whether they wear a rabbi’s skullcap, Hezbollah’s turban or the cloak of a North American spiritual leader. They are all engaged in a cruel battle against me. They are the enemies of freedom and democracy, and are hostile to liberty, equality and the status of women.
In a world like this, we must form new coalitions. The division between “us” and “our enemies” cannot be based merely along national or familial lines, or in beliefs and genetics. The world is divided into a coalition of some Jews, some Christians and some Muslims, versus other members of their nations and religions. Democracy versus theology.
This is not a “gentle” argument, but rather war - the rabbi against the sovereign, the “Jewish” against the “democratic,” halakha and sharia against civil law, the church against the state. They cannot live under the same roof, and they are currently fighting the most ancient and most modern war - religion versus state.
And in war, like in war: The legal standing of the inciting rabbi is the same as that of the inciting sheikh, because both are equally hostile. One wants to see me dead physically, and the other wants to see me dead democratically and morally. Since I oppose the death sentence in all cases, I cannot thus condemn my domestic enemies. But the army of the democratic state, as well as its systems of governance, must purify itself from all the enemies planted by theocracy. The “army of God” must not be permitted to gain control of the institutions of state power.
Shtrasler, The donkey’s burden - Haaretz, Dec. 4, 2007
“Secular teachers are not teachers, they are donkeys,” declared Shas’ spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, in his weekly sermon Saturday night. They are donkeys because they do not teach the Torah, he explained to his audience.
But it seems not only the teachers are donkeys. Israel’s entire secular population takes pains to ensure its children study mathematics, English, science, history and Torah, so they can become productive citizens living by their labor and paying high taxes - which are then divided among Yosef’s followers. They also enlist in the army, are wounded and killed - in part, to protect Yosef’s home. Whoever behaves this way must truly be an ass.
One of the teachers’ demands is for fewer pupils per classroom. The public school system is home to the greatest overcrowding, which is less prevalent in the public-religious system and least felt in the Shas and United Torah Judaism religious schools. The reason for this stems from the division of public-religious and ultra-Orthodox education into dozens of different offshoots, each with its own school.
Thus, tens of millions of shekels are wasted on these small, inefficient schools, which are convenient for the sheep in Yosef’s flock; they benefit daily from longer school days, lunches and transportation - all paid for by the state, which lacks the funds to offer the same conditions in the public school system. In other words, to offer the donkeys the same.
Gideon Levy, Longing for Deri, Haaretz, December 2, 2007
In a tailored suit, his beard well groomed, and no longer bespectacled, Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai shuttled from interview to interview: “Nothing will emerge from Annapolis.” This minister of nothing now constitutes the government’s right-wing benchmark, competing with Avigdor Lieberman over who is more extreme and who will be first to quit the government.
These two ministers represent ethnicity, and both paint their ethnic focus in strong nationalist colors. But while Lieberman represents a party that was founded on racism, Yishai received a relatively moderate party and took it to the extreme right. Seeing him makes one long for the party’s founder, Aryeh Deri. Deri’s Shas was not a left-wing party, but it expressed relatively moderate political positions and even refrained from undermining the first Oslo agreement (although it opposed Oslo II).
The new Shas, on the other hand, acts and talks as if it is seeking war, and is doing its utmost to undermine the prime minister’s efforts - which seem sincere - to end the conflict. This is not just a matter of ideological oscillation. The problem is that Yishai is leading a broad public - some of whom are moderate - to racism, extreme nationalism and hatred of Arabs. He has restored the old status quo to its glory: Mizrahim, versus the Arabs and peace. His views, therefore, are disastrous.
Completely lacking the charisma and personal charm of his predecessor, Yishai has benighted views: He recently spoke about “medication” for homosexuality. He has said he finds the sale of pork, civil marriages and workshops for Jewish and Arab teenagers equally disgusting, which brings him in line with his uncivil spiritual mentor, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.
AMONA, West Bank/Feb. 2006
A Jewish settler struggles with an Israeli security officer as authorities evacuate a West Bank settlement near the Palestinian town of Ramallah after Israel’s Supreme Court cleared the way for the demolition of nine homes at the site. This photo won first prize in The World Press Photo awards. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)
Teibel, Subject of AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo says God on her side, ap, 4/19/07
AMONA, West Bank (AP) — The photo caught the world’s attention: a lone 15-year-old girl holding back a wall of riot police moving in to demolish Jewish homes illegally erected in the West Bank.
Speaking for the first time since The Associated Press image won a Pulitzer prize this week, the girl, who would identify herself only as Nili, said God was on her side during the confrontation.
“In the photo you see me — one person as it were — against many. But that’s only an illusion,” said Nili, now two weeks shy of her 17th birthday, as she stood amid the ruins of the nine homes demolished in Amona in February 2006.
“Behind the many stood one man — (Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert,” who ordered the demolition. “Behind me stood the Lord Blessed Be He, and the people of Israel.”
Nili, a shy, gangly teen born in Israel to American parents, was one of several thousand Jewish protesters who barricaded themselves behind barbed wire and on rooftoops in an unsuccessful effort to keep club-wielding riot troops from demolishing the homes built on private Palestinian land.
Poll: Only 20% of Israelis consider themselves secular, Haaretz, November 23, 2007
Just 20 percent of Jews in Israel describe themselves as secular, according to a recent poll. Since the early 1970s, surveys that have measured Israeli Jews’ affinity to tradition have fluctuated among various communities. But the recent figures represent a new low point for the secular community. For example, in 1974, the number of those describing themselves as secular stood at more than 40 percent.
The new Democracy Index conducted by the Guttman Center at the Israel Democracy Institute, is based on 1,016 interviews. It includes a breakdown along general national and cultural origins, namely Ashkenazim (Jews of European descent), Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern descent) and Israelis (both the subjects and their parents born in Israel).
Advertisement
Of the Israelis, 85 percent claimed some form of religious affiliation, compared with 93 percent of the Mizrahim and 64 percent of the Ashkenazim.
Describing themselves as religious were 56 percent of the Mizrahim compared with 17 percent of the Ashkenazim.
The current survey, as in previous polls, reflects a link between secularism and age, education and political views. Younger people are more religious, people with academic degrees are more secular, and the secular tend to identify more with the left.
Former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu speaking in Jerusalem in 2002. (Eyal Warshavsky / BauBau)
Israel’s Conservative movement threatens to sue ex-chief rabbi - Haaretz, November 20, 2007
Israel’s Masorti (Conservative) Movement is threatening legal action against former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu for saying that “the reek of hell wafts” from Reform and Conservative synagogues, and it is therefore forbidden to walk by them.
Eliyahu, a leading religious Zionist rabbi, made the remark last week during his weekly Torah lecture. It was later reprinted in the bulletin Kol Tzofayich, which was distributed in synagogues throughout Israel over the weekend.
In his lecture, Eliyahu related that he was once invited to a circumcision in a building that contained three synagogues, one Orthodox, one Conservative and one Reform. The Orthodox synagogue, he said, was on the top floor, “and I wondered how I would enter and pass by these synagogues, from which the reek of hell wafts … They told me that there was a sort of side kitchen through which one could go up without passing those synagogues, and I told them that I would only go up via that kitchen, and only if I would not pass the entrances to those forbidden synagogues.”
Attorney Yizhar Hess, secretary general of the Masorti Movement, responded that “Rabbi Eliyahu crossed the border of good taste, and his hateful, malicious words scorned an entire community. It is inconceivable that a religious leader should use expressions that constitute a call for civil war. The rabbi would do well to retract his statements and apologize to the millions of Jews whose honor he impugned.”