The German Synagogue Shooter and the Irredeemable Anti-Semite

Following the recent anti-Semitic outbursts on the part of several American and British celebrities, there have been well meaning attempts to respond with outreach and education, hoping that athletes, musicians, and media personalities can be enlightened out of their prejudice. The success of these efforts remains in question. But, argues Ben Cohen, such an approach cannot work in every case. Take the example of Stephan Balliet who, on Yom Kippur of last year, , attempted to murder the worshippers in the synagogue in the German city of Halle; stopped by a reinforced door, he resorted to killing two passersby before the police arrived. Balliet’s trial, which began last week, reveals a disturbing truth about anti-Semitism:

[T]here are those, like Balliet, who reject notions [of tolerance] as a modern form of Jews poisoning wells, and who are perversely reinforced in their worldviews when they encounter Jews (or those they perceived as Jews) speaking about the Holocaust, or the evils of racism, or the difficulties faced by immigrants in their host societies. No conventional form of education is going to work in these cases.

If we have learned anything from Balliet’s trial so far, it is that we should assume that such attacks are always a possibility, in good times and in bad, and that our resources are best invested in preventing them. When it came to the synagogue in Halle on Yom Kippur last year, that challenge was as basic as stationing a police car outside the building—a measure that was, incredibly, not taken by the authorities in that city, despite the fact that it was Judaism’s holiest, and therefore busiest, day. The analysis of the lonely pathology that Balliet represents will continue, as it must, but it has taken more than enough lives already.

Read more at JNS

More about: Anti-Semitism, Germany

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