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From: hfavr@mtuxo.UUCP (a.reed)
Newsgroups: net.religion.jewish
Subject: The assimilated, the frum, and antisemitism
Message-ID: <1439@mtuxo.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 23-Mar-86 05:04:54 EST
Article-I.D.: mtuxo.1439
Posted: Sun Mar 23 05:04:54 1986
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Frank Silbermann writes:
> Have you ever heard assimilated Jews speaking disparagingly of Orthodox
> (esp. Chassidic) Jews?  If so, then try to find out why.  Whatever
> reasons you can discover come up with will probably sound like the same
> excuses gentiles have given for disliking Jews throughout history.

I beg to differ. The only secular Jews whom I have known to bear any
animosity toward the Orthodox, and especially toward the Haredim, were
secular Israelis who personally suffered as a result of violent coercion
practiced by the Haredim in Israel.

In one case, an Armenian Christian, who is a close friend of one of my
cousins living in Jerusalem, lost an eye when his car was stoned by
Haredim, while driving through the city one Saturday morning. Now, as
far as I know there is no Halachic justification for throwing stones
without, at minimum, making sure that the victim is actually a Jew
desacrating the Shabbat, rather than a non-Jew ignoring it. Yet every
week the Haredim throw deadly stones, quite without bothering to check
whether the car they are stoning is driven by a Jew.

In another case, a Hungarian woman who married a Jew after being
converted by a Neolog (Hungarian Reform/Conservative) rabbi, and later
made aliah with her husband, was buried next to her husband in a
Jewish cemetary. A gang of Haredim dug up her corpse and dumped it in a
shallow unmarked grave in the Moslem cemetary of another town.

I have heard too many reliable reports of this kind of thing to believe
that these were exceptional events. The Haredim in Israel engender
hatred by coercing secular Israelis to conform to the wishes of the
Haredim, on pain of violence if they don't. Since Jews in other countries
never presumed to coerce their neighbors in any way, the claim that
there is any similarity between anti-Haredi sentiments and western
anti-Semitism is patently absurd. Rather, the psychotic compulsion to
make others conform to one's ethnic standards, which outside Israel is
the defining characteristic of the anti-Semite, in Israel has become the
most obtrusive characteristic of "Jewish" Haredim. I've lived there, so
I know.

				Adam Reed (ihnp4!npois!adam)