"Not enough was done from the very beginning. Not enough attention was paid to the disappearance of Aaron. So I want to say to the Israeli government: treat Aaron as if he were an Israeli soldier missing. Because we know what the Israeli government does when an Israeli soldier goes missing - every resource in the world is put into it."
Above: aaron Sofer, a.h.
In a post meant to dispel the myth that the Israeli government and police did not do enough to try to find missing 23-year-old haredi yeshiva student Aaron Sofer, who was tragically found dead in the Jerusalem Forest Thursday, apparently of natural causes, Rabbi Natan Slifkin points out that lots of adults go missing each year in Israel. The public doesn't really know much about them, Slifkin says, and their cases get only minimal (and sometimes no) publicity.
The cases that do get heightened media attention and huge searches with multiple army units joining police are cases in which terrorism is thought or known to be the cause of the disappearance. And despite the war and the reprisal killing of an Arab boy in the Jerusalem Forest not that far from where Sofer went missing, there was no indication terrorism played a role in Sofer's disappearance. And therefore, there was no media frenzy and no overwhelming use of of tens of thousands of searchers.
Playing into that myth was haredi New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who issued this bizarre statement before Sofer's body was found:
"Not enough was done from the very beginning. Not enough attention was paid to the disappearance of Aaron. So I want to say to the Israeli government: treat Aaron as if he were an Israeli soldier missing. Because we know what the Israeli government does when an Israeli soldier goes missing - every resource in the world is put into it."
As Slifkin rightly points out, someone who risks their life to defend Israel and is kidnapped by Arab terrorists or captured by an enemy force gets disproportionate help from the IDF and the government precisely because he risked his life to defend others. One of the promises made to IDF soldiers is that the IDF will never leave them on the battlefield and will never stop trying to find them if they go missing or are abducted.
To ask the IDF and the country to do the same in this case, to go well beyond normal police procedure to find a man who was not a citizen of Israel and who belongs to a group that openly opposes serving in the IDF, is bizarre. The average missing Israeli gets the same (or even less) devotion of state resources as Aaron Sofer got, and to demand more in the way Hikind did, to ask Israel to treat Sofer as a missing IDF soldier, is both distasteful and bizarre.
Almost every August and on other extended yeshiva breaks, Israel's rescue forces have to pluck stranded haredim from the mountain sides, streams, lakes and deserts they have become lost or stranded in. Haredim who don't know how to swim and who are not wearing life vests decide to kayak, haredim who have never walked on anything but level concrete decide to go hiking in the wilderness, and haredim who should know better go off road hiking not far from West Bank villages full of young, angry Palestinians looking for Jews to lash out at.
And this doesn't even touch on the hasidic penchant of sneaking into purported tombs of long dead biblical and ancient rabbinic figures in remote areas in the dead of the night – even when those tombs are in closed military areas and, in the case of Joseph's Tomb, even when they are in the control of the Palestinian Authority and are closed to outside visitors, except for a few days per year.
How many times has the IDF had to rescue these haredim? A lot. (The PA has even rescued a few.) And when one of these incidents happens, the IDF and the government does not refuse to help because the stranded or drowning or endangered haredim are are haredim. It does what has to be done to rescue them.
The only reason this did not happen so far this year, is that top hasidic and non-hasidic haredi rabbis banned all haredim from going to vacation spots and on hikes during this summer's yeshiva break. Why? Not over safety concerns. Instead, they issued the ban because having haredim visible vacationing and enjoying themselves in the middle of a war in which pretty much every non-haredi Jewish Israeli had a friend or relative fighting in Gaza would be unseemly – especially when haredim openly refuse to serve, not due to pacifism, mind you, but due to the stated belief that their Torah study is so important, it should not be disrupted in any way, even to protect the lives of other Jews.
And then we have this:
…[I]n the charedi community, it was widely believed that Aaron Sofer had been abducted. A [Sofer] family member publicly quoted Rav Chaim Kanievsky as saying that Sofer was alive and [was] being held in an Arab village.…
Did Kanievsky, non-hasidic haredi Judaism's #2 rabbi, really say this? Even if he did, his handlers will now likely deny it or spin it and Sofer's family will, like the good haredim they are, find a way to agree with that denial or spin.
In a world where science is a bad word and where rational thought is discouraged, going to an aged rabbi with no real knowledge of the world for advice and blessings is de rigueur. Eight-and-a-half years ago, the then-#2 non-hasidic haredi rabbi, Aharon Leib Steinman, did not know what a credit card was or that a person could use one over the phone to make a purchase or a give a charitable donation. That did not stop him from becoming the #1 non-hasidic Ashkenazi haredi rabbi several years later – a position he holds today.
Aaron Sofer's death was a tragedy.
The haredi narrative around it is sad and sometimes bizarre, but it is in no way surprising.
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