The Disaster at an Egyptian Church Is a Symptom of Systemic Persecution—and a Country in Decline

Although Egypt’s Coptic Christians have been subject to numerous violent attacks by Islamist groups in recent years, it remains unclear whether the recent fire at a church outside Cairo was the result of arson or merely an accident. Samuel Tadros argues, however, that the conflagration—which left 41 dead, including eighteen children—was in either case a consequence of discriminatory legislation, and of Egypt’s disfunction more broadly.

Since 1938, the Egyptian regime had controlled the building of churches in the country through a set of laws and regulations that after a long process required the personal approval of Egypt’s ruler not just for every new church building but even for renovations, building bathrooms, or even repainting of old churches. During Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule, Copts were lucky if they received ten new permits per year for both new churches and renovations.

Faced with this grim reality, Copts resorted to the only way possible for them to have places of worship; they built churches illegally. . . . The buildings never had any safety measures and would never get any zoning approval from any regulatory authority, but they were the only option Copts had.

The reality is that the fire and deaths is the perfect illustration not just of the Coptic tragedy but of Egypt’s as a whole. One could start with the fact that firefighters arrived . . . an hour and a half late, despite their station being close by, and blame their slow response for the deaths, but in truth firefighters in Egypt have very little equipment or training to deal with such events.

The . . . collapse of Egypt’s fortunes since 1952 has been mirrored among its Copts. The country that once led the Middle East in modernization is today dependent on foreign handouts for its survival. The Cairo of literary giants and glamorous movies that were read and watched by every Arabic speaker in the Middle East hardly produces anything of cultural significance today. It is a country from which over a million Copts have migrated pursuing economic opportunities and religious freedom in the West. Or perhaps it is the reverse. A country that has been kicking out its minorities—from the Jews, Italians, and Greeks in the 1950s to the Copts today—is simply bound to decline and to meet repeated tragedy.

Read more at Providence

More about: Egypt, Middle East Christianity, North African Jewry

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