The Israeli edition of the haredi newspaper Hamodia – which is essentially the house organ of the Gerrer hasidic sect, the largest hasidic sect in Israel, and of the hasidic half of the Ashkenazi haredi United Torah Judaism political party Ger largely controls – is reportedly the only haredi newspaper to allow coverage of the attack on an Orthodox IDF soldier by a mob of haredim in Mea Shearim last week.
Above: The officer's car after the attack
Hamodia Condemns Haredi Mob Attack On Orthodox IDF Officer – Sort Of
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
The Israeli edition of the haredi newspaper Hamodia – which is essentially the house organ of the Gerrer hasidic sect, the largest hasidic sect in Israel, and of the hasidic half of the Ashkenazi haredi United Torah Judaism political party Ger largely controls – is reportedly the only haredi newspaper to allow coverage of the attack on an Orthodox IDF soldier by a mob of haredim in Mea Shearim last week.
The soldier – a Zionist Orthodox officer in the Givati Brigade – went in his uniform to the über-haredi Jerusalem neighborhood to visit two of his soldiers, one of whom had just lost his grandfather. He was attacked by a haredi mob that stoned his car, shattering its windows, and almost did not escape. He was saved in part because his mother’s civilian car he was driving was armored because the family lives in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba near Hebron.
"The event," an op-ed published in Hamodia today wrote, Arutz Sheva reported, "was in every dimension crude, halakhicly unacceptable, and has no place and no backing from any religious authority. Whoever took part in it deserves every denunciation and condemnation.…No man has the right to attack soldiers because they are soldiers; no man has the right to embarrass them like that in public; and anyone who does so - does not speak for the haredi community, does not serve its purposes, and does not represent its values and way of life.…We have no part in this type of behavior and these acts will be judged by their outcome; they cause terrible blasphemy; they cause shame, tremendous damage and reckless incitement."
Arutz Sheva does not name the op-ed’s authors or explain why such a condemnation was not issued by the paper’s rabbinically supervised editorial board as the paper’s own opinion.
Top haredi rabbis – even so-called mainstream haredi rabbinic leaders – have also failed to publicly condemn the attack in a way that the condemnations could be attributed to them.
Those rabbis all vehemently oppose drafting any haredim into the IDF and insist their students' Torah study is what really protects Israel from harm, not its military.