Reform Leader Compares Ultra-Orthodox Jews To Islamic Fundamentalists

Rabbi Uri Regev, director of Reform Judaism’s Israel Religious Action Center, warned that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 should make clear the need to fight against both Israeli and Palestinian “zealots.”

In a talk at Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple in Cleveland, Regev accused the Israeli Orthodox establishment of limiting religious freedom by fighting any attempt to grant state recognition to Reform and Conservative conversions or weddings. He also said that individual members of the Orthodox community had vandalized Reform and Conservative religious institutions.

In his talk, which was reported in the Cleveland Jewish News, Regev spoke about the dangers of Islamic terrorism. He added, “In Israel we have our own religious extremists who feel they have the right to rule other people’s lives, spreading the venom of fundamentalism.”

Regev asserted that some fervently Orthodox Jewish leaders in Israel have used hate-filled and violent language to describe liberal and secular Jews and their institutions.

“We need to band together to fight religious zealots on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides,” said Regev. “If we don’t learn from the Sept. 11 loss of human lives, we haven’t learned anything.”

Orthodox leaders expressed outrage at being compared with Muslim extremists. “How can you even think about comparing a Jew of any sort to the Arabs who flew into the World Trade Center and killed 5,000 innocent people?” asked Rabbi Pesach Lerner, executive vice president of the National Council of Young Israel. (Washington Jewish Week, Oct. 25, 2001)

Rabbi Avi Shafran, spokesperson for Agudath Israel of America, described accusations that fervently Orthodox Jews had vandalized institutions as “apocryphal.” He charged that Regev is “comparing murderers, hateful murderers, with people who simply want to maintain the standards of the Jewish religion with regard to things like conversion and Shabbat.”

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that, “Regev clarified that he was not criticizing all of Orthodoxy or even all the fervently Orthodox as the Cleveland article implied. Still, he stands by his speech. ‘The point that I made is that we are waking up too late when we express our concern and outrage when the actual assault takes place,’ he said. ‘What we need is to understand that it’s the religious fundamentalist hate speech that precedes those outbursts that we should be more conscious of, concerned about addressing.’”

Regev said he was particularly concerned about a Sept. 7 article in the Israeli edition of the Orthodox newspaper, Yated Ne’eman, which described Reform and Conservative Jews as “destroyers of religion,” “criminals,” and “enemies of God.”

He also pointed to a sermon one of Israel’s chief rabbis, Eliyahu Bakshi-Doren, gave in 1996, in which he defended the violence of the biblical zealot Pinchas, and suggested that bloodshed in defense of Judaism is “like a doctor who spreads blood with his scalpel, but saves the patient.”

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, who heads the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, rejected the comparison of ultra-Orthodox Jews with Islamic terrorists, but said that Rabbi Regev was right to speak out against “hate speech” in the Orthodox community. He declared that, “We need to confront our own fundamentalism in the Jewish community, just like every religious community does.”

Rabbi Yoffie also backed Regev’s more specific complaint about regular attacks on the Reform movement in the Orthodox press: “There are vicious attacks demonizing us as the devils of the Jewish world. These aren’t taken out of context. If you read the Orthodox press, this is a staple of what they publish. It’s deeply disturbing.”

Editorially, The Forward (Oct. 26, 2001) noted that, “... to say that Judaism’s fundamentalists are far less prone to violence than the extremists of other faiths is not to say that there is no danger of violence. There have been enough cases of religiously inspired vandalism, assault and worse originating in the Orthodox community in recent years to warrant some serious soul-searching. To say that isn’t bigotry or Orthodox-bashing, but simply honest