Hasidic elementary and middle school students from Satmar’s United Talmudical Academy school in Spring Valley held a public protest yesterday against Israel’s plan to draft haredi yeshiva students into the country’s military.
Cult Indoctrination? Satmar Children Hold Anti-Israel Demonstration, Equate Zionists With Hitler; “We are Jewish and [Zionists] are not Jewish,” Satmar Teacher Says
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
Hasidic elementary and middle school students from Satmar’s United Talmudical Academy school in Spring Valley held a public protest yesterday against Israel’s plan to draft haredi yeshiva students into the country’s military.
Children, most of whom would be hard-pressed to find Israel on a map or name Israel’s neighbors or enemies, held signs and banners attacking the State of Israel as their rabbis delivered speeches.
The signs reportedly equated Israel’s political leadership to the arch enemy of the Jewish people, the biblical pharaoh of Egypt who enslaved and would not free the Hebrews; the Roman emperor, Titus, who sacked the Jerusalem Temple; and a more recent enemy of the Jewish people – Adolph Hitler.
Rabbis accused Zionists of stealing the term Jew from those people – hasidim – who practice authentic Judaism, and called the looming haredi draft into Israel defense forces, “which are rife with immorality” the Zionists’ “latest attempt to exterminate the remnants of genuine Judaism,” according to a translation of one of those rabbinic speeches published in the MidHudson News.
A Satmar teacher said the protest was educational for the children.
“In Israel, they have a government that is against religious freedom, and because of that, we want to explain to the children that it is against our religion and we are not with [Israel]. There is separate Zionism and Judaism. They are not the same thing. We are Jewish and they are not Jewish,” Rabbi Moshe Kaplan, who teaches ninth grade at the Satmar school told the paper.