How an Israeli Consultant Helped Open Slovakia’s Doors to Iraqi Refugees

After Douglas al-Bazi, an Iraqi Catholic priest, brought hundreds of refugees from Islamic State into his church in the city of Erbil, he reached out to contacts in the U.S. for help. Soon he was working with two CIA veterans, who in turn enlisted the assistance of Aron Shaviv, an Israeli political consultant. Shaviv convinced the Slovak government—which has vigorously protested EU pressure to accept refugees—to settle Bazi and over 100 members of his Aramaic-speaking flock within its borders. Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:

[Shaviv’s] team tried at least a dozen countries before getting a hearing in Slovakia. “My policy was the path of least resistance—the first country that showed any kind of positive leanings was Slovakia,” said Shaviv.

[He] explained that it was important in Slovakia, still a very traditional Catholic country, to get both the Vatican and its local religious authorities involved. “We thought that the right approach was to get the Slovak church to take ownership and say ‘these are our people,’” said Shaviv.

And after many trips to the Vatican, [the church] came on board in saving Iraqi Catholics. “The . . . messaging that got them to really identify and take ownership was that this is the last Christian community on earth that speaks the language of Jesus,” Shaviv commented.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Iraq, Israel, Middle East Christianity, Politics & Current Affairs, Refugees, Slovakia, Vatican

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society