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Religious Conflict in Israel
| Article
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13468 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
3,663 Words |
| Author
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Mark Shapiro
Mark Shapiro is currently in Ethiopia researching a study of
the Falashim. |
The popular image of Israel is that it has a strongly unified population. Only cohesiveness, it is commonly believed, could enable this small state to survive surrounded by nations bent on its destruction. It comes as a great surprise for most Americans, including many American Jews, to read about the intense religious animosity between secular and traditional religious communities in Israel.
In the summer of 1986, dozens of bus shelters, worth more than half a million dollars, were burned down by ultra-Orthodox extremists because their walls exhibited "obscene" advertising posters. Other shelters were spray-painted. The spray-painters even attacked people waiting for buses. When police attempted to arrest the offenders, extremists from the Meah Shearim section of Jerusalem torched a police car and burned all the public trash cans in their neighborhood. The city retaliated by suspending trash collection in the area. For weeks the garbage rotted in the hot summer sun.
The secular population did not take this lying down. An organization calling itself "Terror Against Ultra Orthodox" sprayed walls in religious areas with obscene drawings and antireligious slogans. In one night raid it pasted Playboy centerfolds on the entrance of a seminary. Following this, the secular extremists moved from vandalism to viciousness. On June 11, 1986, the entire country was shocked when a Tel Aviv synagogue was torched by an arsonist who left a note vowing to destroy a synagogue for every burned bus shelter. Shortly afterward a yeshiva in Tel Aviv was ransacked. The school belonged to a group of religious Jews not suspected in any Orthodox extremism. Clearly the antireligious backlash had become indiscriminate. President Chaim Herzog quickly spoke out against this increased militancy:
It is a nightmare the devil himself could not have created. We have reached a state of emergency between nonreligious and observant Jews. This might be the last hour to stop the deterioration.
Most of the violence took place in Jerusalem, where the Orthodox have their greatest power. Although there are no current statistics on the total number of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem, they probably comprise close to 50 percent of the population and are gaining in numbers. More significant, however, are those Jews known as the ultra-Orthodox (haredim) who have been implicated in the religious violence. They number between 80,000 and 85,000, about 27 percent of the Jewish population of Jerusalem, up from the 1978 figure of 52,000. The ultra-Orthodox Jews have been uncompromising
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