Honour, haredi-style

Religious Affairs: Honour, haredi-style

Which restaurants and food products are kosher and which are not? Who is allowed to get married and who is not? Who can be a rabbi and who cannot?

Last week, elections took place to choose the state-empowered body – the Chief Rabbinate Council – that is supposed to answer these questions. The elections were an upset. The non-hassidic, Lithuanian-haredi rabbinic leadership, which gradually has been gaining more power within the Chief Rabbinate, suffered a major setback. Two of its veteran members, Rabbi of Rehovot Simcha Hakohen Kook and chairman of the Neighbourhood Rabbis Council Moshe Rauchverger, who is also a neighbourhood rabbi in the Haifa area, were voted out of the council.

Violence against non-Jews

US report:   Rise in violence against Messianic Jews and Christians

Violence against Christian evangelical and Messianic Jewish communities in Israel increased significantly during the period between July 1, 2007 and June 30, 2008, according to the US State Department’s Annual Report on International Religious Freedom.

The report, released last week, put blame for the “tensions” on “certain Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities.”

But except in one case, the report, which noted numerous incidents of discrimination or violence against Christian or Messianic Jewish communities or individuals, failed to prove that the perpetrators were Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox.

According to the US State Department, Jehovah’s Witnesses representatives reported a significant increase in assaults and other crimes against their members over the past 12-month period. Violent incidents were up from one to two a month in early 2007 to eight to nine a month in early 2008.

On October 23, 2007, suspected arsonists set fire to the Narkiss Street Baptist Church in Jerusalem. The pastor of a Russian Messianic Jewish congregation that meets in the church said that Yad L’Achim , a haredi anti-missionary organization, had threatened him and his congregation over the few years leading up to the attack.

Rabbis & Crime

FailedMessiah.com Covering Orthodox Judaism Since 2004

Rabbis & Crime. There are over almost 700 hundred posts on religious criminals on this index page.

Here is a summary of the Brooklyn haredi community’s attempts to deal with alleged serial child molester Rabbi Yehuda Kolko. Haredi leaders were unable to deal with Rabbi Kolko and, at the same time, refused to turn him over to police. The end result was almost 40 years of child molestation.

Posts on alleged haredi child rapist Avrohom Mondrowitz are here.

Mondrowitz fled the US for Israel at the urging of haredi leaders as he was being indicted for raping young boys. He lived safely in Jerusalem for over 20 years, under the protection of the Ger hasidic community and its rebbes, the latest of whom, Rabbi Ya’akov Aryeh Alter, is pictured at right.

At this writing, there are over almost 700 hundred posts on religious criminals on this index page. It is quite large and may take a few minutes to completely load. The posts are chronological, newest at the top of the page, oldest at the bottom.