Aaron HowardJewish Harold Voice
Jewish community newspaper serving the Houston and Texas Gulf Coast area since 1908

A bill before the Israeli Knesset that would give full authority for conversions to the Chief Rabbinate is causing a huge controversy in Israel and in the United States.The Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee approved 5-4, on first reading to plenum on July 12, a bill that would give the Israeli Orthodox rabbinate a monopoly on conversions to Judaism. The bill must go before second and third readings before being brought to a vote in the Knesset and can be revised during the process.

Under current practice, Israel recognizes only conversions performed by Orthodox rabbis inside Israel. But, under the Law of Return, people converted by non-Orthodox rabbis outside the country are automatically eligible for Israeli citizenship like other Jews. The proposed legislation would give Israel’s chief rabbinate the legal power to decide whether any conversion outside Israel is legitimate.

The groups most likely to be affected would be about a half-million immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union and those who converted to Judaism abroad and could now be denied Israeli citizenship.

The bill, supported by various religious and right-wing parties, essentially would give the Israeli Orthodox rabbinate the power to decide who is Jewish and who is not. At the same time, it would delegitimize non-Orthodox rabbis outside Israel. Opponents of the bill say that passage of the bill would defeat efforts to promote a more flexible and Halakhic conversion process and would marginalize the non-Orthodox Jewish movements.

The bill has set off a storm in and outside Israel.

“I understand the concern of the Conservative and Reform movement,” said Rabbi Barry Gelman. “From the perspective of Israel, it is already a fact that the rabbinate controls conversions in Israel. They also have retroactively nullified conversions. They have already been notoriously well-known for deciding which conversions are good and which are not good – that is, not acceptable according to Halakha.

”Rabbi Gelman is senior rabbi of United Orthodox Synagogues and president of the International Rabbinic Fellowship, a worldwide organization of rabbis founded to promote Modern Orthodoxy and serious study of Torah and Halakha and to advocate policies and implement actions on behalf of World Jewry and humankind.

“The key here, which is why I’m not so concerned yet, is what this bill does is turn into law what, in fact, is already being done,” said Rabbi Gelman. “So, how much is really being lost in that part of the negotiations? That remains to be seen, which is why I’m not ready to stand squarely behind the bill.

“On the plus side, the bill would allow city rabbis in Israel to perform conversions without the need to work with the Chief Rabbinate’s rabbinical courts. That could help in two ways. One, which is significant, is it could help liberalize the conversion standards so that the close to half-million Russian immigrants who are of Jewish stock – if not Halakhicly Jewish – can convert. The new bill is taking an approach to conversion that would not necessarily require complete mitzvah observance.

“Second, the bill will generally offer a more realistic and, in many cases, a user-friendly process for everybody.

So, there is a lot of plus side.

“The American movements are looking at the bill from the American perspective. There are very few Reform or Conservative conversions done in Israel. This bill could be the answer to the problem that many people in Israel have been complaining about. But, because it may call into question some conversions done in Israel, it has caused an uproar.

”Because of the possible upsides to the legislation, Rabbi Gelman explained that he was not ready to condemn the bill. He was hopeful that Conservative and Reform movement leaders, who have arrived in Israel on Sunday to lobby the bill’s chief sponsor, Israeli Beiteinu MK David Rotem, will find a way to alter the language in a way that is more acceptable to American critics.

One important question raised by Religious Zionists: Does the Chief Rabbinate understand their responsibility toward making conversion a realistic possibility for these half-million Russian Jews?

And, a second question raised by the Conservative and Reform movements in the United States: Does this bill disenfranchise the majority of American Jews?Rabbi Gelman argues there are well-established Halakhic ways to make the conversion process doable for these Russian Jews.

“These are not necessarily methods we would use for individual converts,” he cautioned. “But because the issue of these Russian Jews and the future of their children as well as the future of the state is affected, the rabbinate should be exercising nationalist or Religious Zionist Halakhic thinking. They should realize their decision would affect the entire country.

“We have handed the keys to the kingdom to anti-Zionists.

“But, there are city rabbis who are Zionist. There are city rabbis who understand what needs to be done in regards to converting these Russian Jews. So, that’s why I think the bill has an upside for the state. I understand it has a downside for Reform and Conservative Jews.

”Danny Horwitz, rabbi of the Greenfield Chapel at Beth Yeshurun, has been a Conservative pulpit rabbi for 30 years. He views the conversion bill as a move fraught with political peril.

“Sometimes, power politics takes precedence over what’s best for the citizens – in this case, members of the Jewish people,” said Rabbi Horwitz. “The bill is designed to place total control over the definition of Jewish identity in the hands of the Chief Rabbinate, probably the most extreme ultra-Orthodox element in Israel with any power. Not only will this be a problem in terms of recognizing conversions, but in its current form, it could affect the status of people who want to make aliyah. The rabbinate has the desire to maintain control over conversions. But, they have also retroactively annulled conversions.

“The bill maintains a certain amount of power and employment within the ultra-Orthodox community. But, as we know, the current situation of the ultra-Orthodox community is not sustainable. A majority from the ultra-Orthodox community does not work. So, where does their money come from? It must come from the government. They currently have a certain amount of votes in the Knesset. But, I also foresee a situation in 10 to 20 years where you may reach a point where 50 percent of the people who are 18 years old won’t serve in the army.

”For Conservative and Reform Jews throughout the world, the bill makes no sense, argues Rabbi Horwitz.

“Given Israel’s need to deal with much more existential problems, it doesn’t make sense that Israel would create this kind of slap in the face to the communities of Jews who have stood behind Israel. That’s part of the reason why [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu came out on Sunday against the bill.

“However, I don’t take it for granted just because he came out against the bill that it may fail.

”Rabbi Horwitz also views the conversion bill as harmful to Modern Orthodox interests. “In general, modern Orthodox have allowed the status quo in Israel to continue,” he said. “They have hoped they would remain legitimized – that their conversions would remain legitimized by the Chief Rabbinate. Now, many of them are having their conversions rejected by the Israeli rabbinate. In my judgment, if they don’t stand up for the rights of those who are being undermined, they will also be squeezed out of the business of conversions.

”What should American Jews do? Rabbi Horwitz suggests that U.S. Jews must make a separation between those existential issues and the conversion bill.

“We have to stand with Israel,” he said. “But, we also have to be willing to say to Israel: This is not the kind of Israel we want to see. You can’t expect young American Jews to support a people whose thinking is the same ilk as the folks in Tehran. When you have women attacked for carrying a sefer Torah at the Western Wall, that’s not going to warm the hearts of American Jews. It’s not realistic for Israel to expect that every Jew will give them a pass for this behavior and allow Judaism to be defined by its most extreme elements.

“Ben-Gurion said in 1939, when the British created the White Paper: ‘We will fight the Nazis as if there was no White Paper and fight the White Paper as if there were no Nazis.’

“I think we ought to fight the enemies of Israel as if we didn’t have this internal problem in Israel. And, we ought to deal with the internal problem of freedom of religion in Israel as if she did not have external enemies.”

What should have been the happiest time of Sagit’s life turned into a nightmare. According to their documents, her mother and grandmother are Jewish and her parents were married by a Chabad rabbi, but even so, she’s being asked to convert in order to marry. The new regulations provide that this can happen to you too!

Rivkah Lubitch
Ynet News

Sagit (not her real name) and her fiancé are getting married in September. At least that’s what they thought till now. But there’s a small detail standing between them and the hoped-for wedding: confirmation that Sagit, whose parents married as Jews in Israel years ago, is Jewish. Until Sagit manages to prove she’s Jewish to an investigator of the rabbinic court she won’t be able to get married in the State of Israel. This case is an example of the implications of the new guidelines that the Office of the Chief Rabbi of Israel published last week, regarding the possibility of holding inquiries into the Jewishness of any person. In the wake of my article about the new guidelines, Sagit called and told me her story. She came on aliyah with her parents when she was 9 and has been living in Israel for 19 years. Even though her family wasn’t observant in Russia, everyone in Mogilov, Belarus, knew they were a Jewish family. When she registered to get married, she was sent to a rabbinic court investigator. The investigator, who apparently was particularly unfriendly, asked to see documentation. Sagit and her mother presented the birth certificates of Sagit’s mother and her grandmother in both of which it was written that they were Jews. This should have been enough. It’s true that the documents were replicas and not originals, as is the case with most of the documents of immigrants from Russia, but the mother’s document was a replica from 1958, when she was 12 years old (at that time, who would have considered forging a document in order to add that she was Jewish?) Regarding the replica of the grandmother’s document, testimony was brought before the court in Mogilov that the grandmother was known to be Jewish and that her parents had been killed in the ghetto. But the rabbinic court in Israel isn’t prepared to accept the ruling of the court in Mogilov. After checking with the archives of the offices in Mogilov, it turned out that they don’t retain original documents from before 1962.

‘Convert? Why should I convert, I’m Jewish!’

The rabbinic court investigator sent Sagit to the project “Shoreshim” run by the organization “Tzohar.” They also didn’t receive her kindly there. According to her, the investigator said something like “I really hope that you are telling the whole truth” or “think very, very carefully about what you’re saying.” At the end of the day Tzohar’s investigator told her “I could have helped you more if you had come to me first.”

Sagit’s questions are excellent. I don’t have any answers. Another interesting part of the story is that Sagit’s parents were married according to religious law by Rabbi Mordechai Shmuel Ashkenazi, the rabbi of Kfar Chabad, after their aliyah to Israel. In Russia there weren’t Jewish weddings, and her parents were happy about the idea of holding a religious wedding ceremony after they came to Israel. No one forced them to do it. They did it because they are Jewish. The rabbi of Kfar Chabad would not have officiated at their wedding if he hadn’t looked into the matter, with the help of Russian speakers, and ascertained that they were indeed Jewish. When they told the investigator this, he said: “That’s not evidence. They didn’t know how to investigate then, and they couldn’t have known if your parents were Jewish or not.”

The investigator suggested that she convert. “Convert? Why should I convert, I’m Jewish!,” Sagit says. Even from the purely religious perspective this is an outrage. Who knows how many Jews will “turn into” non-Jews because of some investigator who thinks that a particular document is insufficient to prove that they’re Jews. I wonder: Could the investigator prove that he’s Jewish? Can the dayanim - who are now questioning whether tens of thousands of people are Jewish – prove that they’re Jews? Is this something that can even be proven? Let the Jew who can prove that he’s Jewish step forward. In fact, other than someone who has a certificate of conversion, there is no Jew in the world who can prove he’s Jewish. Rivka Lubitch is a rabbinic pleader who works at the Center for Women’s Justice , tel. 02-5664390.

By Patrick Moser (AFP) – Dec 22, 2009

JERUSALEM — Once a month a group of Jewish women risk arrest and brave a crowd of angry ultra-Orthodox men calling them Nazis, to pray at the Western Wall, the holiest place in Judaism.

In this Holy City, where the focus of differing opinions is more often on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, these religious Jews say they face discrimination just because of their gender.

Their adversaries, including the rabbi of the Wall, say the women have no business wearing such religious garments as yarmulkes and prayer shawls, or carrying the Torah, the Jewish holy book.

Such things, the ultra-Orthodox Jews say, are reserved for men.

Worse yet, the women have also come under fire for singing, with some rabbis complaining this could provoke feelings of lust among the men praying on the other side of the partition.

On a recent Friday, about 200 members of the Women at the Wall (WoW) showed up to pray at the main Jewish pilgrimage site despite pouring rain and insults hurled from across the partition that separates the men’s section from the far smaller one reserved for women.

Men sporting the black coats and wheel-shaped fur hats that identify ultra-Orthodox Jews yelled out at the women, calling them “Nazis,” and telling them to “go to church”.

The scene is similar just about every first day of the month on the Jewish lunar calendar. It is then that the WoW women pray at the Wall — also known as the Wailing Wall or by its Hebrew name Kotel. The wall is revered by Jews as the remnant of their Second Temple, which the Romans destroyed in 70 AD.

In November, WoW member Nofrat Frankel, a Conservative Jew, was briefly detained by police for wearing a talit — prayer shawl — and carrying a Torah.

The offence can carry a maximum sentence of six months jail and a fine of about 3,000 dollars.

Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovich called the women’s behaviour “an unbearable provocation”.

WoW leader Anat Hoffman, meanwhile, insists the Jewish holy books do not support the kind of discrimination she says women are subjected to.

“There is nothing in Judaism about this. This is fundamentalism; it is a desecration of this place,” she told AFP at a recent Hanukah candle-lighting ceremony the women and their supporters staged in the Kotel square, behind the segregated praying areas.

In 2003, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Women of the Wall could not hold vocal prayers at the Wall as this presented a threat to law and order.

Hoffman said the police commander for the Wall recently told her the women could be arrested for wearing fringed black and white prayer shawls like those used by the men. “He did say something flowery would be okay,” said Hoffman.

She wore a paper crown with the inscription: “The Kotel is for all,” and smiled as she joined the crowd in singing traditional Hanukah songs. The women’s voices startled an elderly ultra-Orthodox man who promptly scurried away.

The ultra-Orthodox call themselves Haredi, Hebrew for “those who fear God”. Over the years, they have gained control of the Kotel, imposing their ways with little regard for other strains of Judaism, says Hoffman.

“The Western Wall is now seen as the disco of the ultra-Orthodox,” she said, pointing to the prayer section where most of the faithful were clad in the black outfits that identify Haredi men and where a loudspeaker blared religious songs — sung by men.

Rabinovich insists he does his best to accommodate all the visitors to the wall. “But the type of prayers of this group is not part of the Jewish traditions,” he told AFP.

“I wonder what this type of prayer will achieve when they hurt the feelings of other people who are praying.”

Peretz Rodman, a more moderate rabbi, compared the recent detention of Frankel to religious persecution in the former Soviet Union.

“An Orthodox rabbinic colleague commented to me on the day of the arrest: ‘That?s what it was like 40 years ago in Moscow: wearing a talit and carrying a Torah in public could get you arrested,” Rodman wrote in a YNet News opinion column.

“But that was the Soviet Union, a repressive totalitarian state; this is Israel in the 21st century’,” said Rodman, a former president of the Rabbinical Assembly of Israel.

By Jennifer Green, Ottawa Citizen

December 19, 2009

OTTAWA — In the midst of a nasty global battle over who is a “true” Jew, Ottawa’s Rabbi Reuven Bulka has stopped converting people to Orthodox Judaism.

Would-be converts must now travel back and forth to Montreal since no other rabbi in the nation’s capital has undertaken the time-consuming and expensive process.

“We send them now to the Montreal rabbinic court,” Bulka says. “I wish I could tell you that it’s straightforward, but they are having trouble with Israel, too.

“Nothing in Israel stays in Israel,” he says of the dispute over who is really Jewish. “It’s going to go overseas.”

There are thousands of converts — Reform, Conservative and Orthodox — who are considered Jewish outside Israel but will not be considered Jewish in Israel if the rabbis have their way.

For the past few years, religious authorities in Jerusalem have accused migrants to Israel of converting to Judaism to take advantage of the country’s Law of Return, which gives Jews automatic citizenship. They also fear that many convert to marry an Israeli Jew without any intention of observing Orthodox requirements.

However, disallowing their conversions would be tantamount to banning them and their offspring from the faith, at least in Israel. Going to live in Israel has transcendent religious implications for the faithful, who view it as an in-gathering of the diaspora. Jews say they are “making their aliya” or “ascending” to the ancient land. Those who move away “descend.” Non-Jews have to follow a much more torturous route to citizenship and many don’t make it. They may also have trouble arranging religious marriages, and have to resort to civil ceremonies.

Religious authorities in Jerusalem believe thousands of Russian Jews, many with gentile spouses, simply want to improve their standard of living. The migrants live in Israel for a while, go to another country for a less challenging conversion and then apply for citizenship.

Several years ago, the Chief Rabbinate challenged these conversions, but the High Court of Justice ruled they had to be allowed. Meanwhile, it established a commission in which Judaism’s three streams — Reform, Conservative and Orthodox — were to work out consistent standards. Before long, though, the fervently Orthodox strand, the most rigid, nixed the entire process.

The situation collapsed into a vicious flurry of challenges, with one judge trying to invalidate thousands of conversions performed by the country’s own conversion agency. In another case, the son of a Reform rabbi and Holocaust survivor was told he had never been Jewish because his Toronto conversion was invalid. One deaf person was not allowed to convert because his handicap prevented him from fulfilling one of the ritual observances.

Finally, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar — the top Jewish religious figure in Israel — announced he would no longer recognize the conversions of the Rabbinic Council of America, which oversees all of Canada and the United States.

“It was nuts,” said Bulka. “It was totally wacky. Had that happened, every single conversion (in North America) would have been in jeopardy.

“They were challenging every conversion in the book.”

At one point, Chief Rabbi Amar said he did not want to allow any converts to come to Israel under the Law of Return.

That prompted Ottawa resident Barbara Crook, a 10-year convert to Orthodox Judaism, to write this editorial in The Jerusalem Post: “According to Jewish, law, I have all the obligations and privileges of any Jew born of Jewish mother. But if (Amar) gets his way, when the time comes to make aliya, I will be denied the basic right of equality to other Jews under the Law of Return. Rabbi Amar wants to change Israeli law so that only Jews born to a Jewish mother would be entitled to automatic citizenship.”

“In other words, all Jews are equal but some are less equal than others.

“Beyond my personal outrage, I find it hypocritical that a rabbi in his position would try to subvert Torah law for his own political purposes. He is angry that both the conversion process and the Law of Return have been abused by a minority of converts. And it appears that he is also trying to use this proposed change to delegitimize Conservative and Reform conversions.”

Converting to Orthodox Judaism means dramatic lifestyle changes that can be hard to maintain year in, year out. Many Jews keep two or three separate sets of dishes, and some have separate kitchens, to honour dietary restrictions. Women dress modestly and some wear head coverings. The laws of the Sabbath can be particularly convoluted and onerous. Electrical switches cannot be turned on, nor can a family drive to the synagogue. They must walk.

When a convert doesn’t meet the standard, the question arises: Is the conversion still valid? Was it ever valid in the first place?

Chaim Mendelsohn, of Chabad Centrepointe, explains it like this: “We’re having a big problem in the Jewish world. People are becoming converted to orthodoxy and they are not living the religious lifestyle. I have this in my own congregation. The fact is there are many, many people who convert and then they don’t actually end up living that. I guess it started to become scandalous.”

Eventually, the Chief Rabbinate approved a list of about 15 rabbinic council courts and approximately 40 rabbinic judges whose North American conversions would be accepted. Any rabbi who wanted to be added to the list would need the approval of two leading Yeshiva University rabbis and one from the chief rabbinate. If a rabbi was no longer on the list, his conversions were “subject to re-evaluation.”

Bulka, who was already thinking of retiring, decided to drop conversions. He had led the Congregation Machzikel Hada for more than 40 years, and had been co-president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. As people came forward for marriages or other religious matter, his conversions were reviewed but none were disallowed. He has since reconsidered retirement, but not conversions.

Rabbi Seth Farber, of Israel’s Jewish Life Information Centre, wrote in a 2008 opinion piece for the Jerusalem Post: “If the state can’t rely on a local Orthodox rabbi to perform conversions, then Orthodox rabbis will eventually cease writing letters of conversion and simply begin to write letters of Jewishness (I’ve already seen this happen).”

Two other American rabbis pointed out in another Post article that the American rabbinic council had moved away from its “trademark commitment to providing a home for both right- and left-wing voices.”

Now, the right ruled, said Marc Angel and Avi Weiss, both long-time members of the Rabbinical Council of America.

“Not only is the convert’s status questioned here, but the respected position of the local rabbi is also at stake… . What makes this chapter especially sad is that the new arrangement not only undermines the power of the local rabbi as teacher and spiritual guide, but even worse, puts fear into the hearts and minds of many wonderful converts who are upstanding Torah-observant and God-fearing Jewish souls.”

Bulka agrees.

“The people who suffer the most are the one who have made this tremendous move. A person who genuinely embraces the Jewish faith … you can’t help but have transcending admiration for someone like that. It’s not an easy thing.”

Some rabbis are trying to outdo each other in severity, he believes.

“It’s nice to say, ‘I am better because I am stricter,’ but (one) can also argue that what you are doing is therefore placing barriers in front of people who want to embrace a faith.”

We’ve been seeing a lot of this, but what is the consensus amongst Russian Jews?

….you’re thoughts

sarahstrnad:

This video is almost a year old now, but the issue of Israeli Conscientious Objectors does not receive as much attention as it disserves.  My friend Maya who I worked with at Rabbis for Human Rights is one of the young women featured in this piece.  She served time in jail and for the next month is on a speaking tour of the US to talk about conscientious objection, the occupation, and the work she is doing.

Helping an elederly Jew affix a mezuzah on his door.

CHABAD.ORG

Our Russian-built horseless carriage has just returned us from a road trip through Belapolya, Charevka, Putyivil, Shostka, Yampol, Seredina-Buda, Kralivets and Altinivka.

Many interesting things happened, including, but not limited to, a 93 year old man putting tefillin on for the first time in 80 years, meeting a little Gorsky Jew living in a hut in a one-street shtetl, getting our documents thoroughly checked at a police station in the Russian-border town of Seredina-Buda (by no one less than the chief of police), and finding ten Jews living there too.

Near the end of our journey, we stopped off at the home of a woman in Kralivets. We spoke for a while, said a little l’chaim, and ate apples from her garden. She then told us that she had a Torah, and asked if we wanted to see it.

Now you see, whenever anyone in this country tells you that they have a Torah, they most likely mean a book with Hebrew writing in it. But we weren’t rushing anywhere so we told her that we would love to see it.

She went into her house, and came back with a wrapped up scroll. We unwrapped it and laid it out on the table. It was a detailed sketch of a deer being attacked by wolves. In the corner was a signature and a date in 1943. We flipped it over. It was an entire section of a Torah scroll, the writing as legible as if it had just been written.

The old woman explained that a young man had found a drawing in a frame amongst the possessions of his grandmother, and had given it to her when he discovered the Jewish writing on the other side.

“Here,” she told us, “take it with you.”

We looked a little closer at the letters that some scribe had written long ago:

“Remember what Amalek did to you on the road, on your way out of Egypt… you must obliterate the memory of Amalek from under the heavens. Do not forget.”

We wrapped up the scroll, got into the car, and went on to our next stop so that we would be able to put tefillin on with the villagers there before sundown.

stolencamera:

This photo taken Aug. 10, 2009 shows an ultra-Orthodox Jew blowing a horn on a flight circling over Israel. A planeload of Israeli rabbis and Jewish mystics held an airborne prayer meeting in the belief that it could help check the spread of swine flu in Israel, an Israeli newspaper reported Tuesday Aug 11 2009. (AP Photo/Yehuda Shlezinger)

US Jews Hold Vigil in Solidarity With Israeli Victims of Gay Center Attack

ewish leaders in Washington have held a vigil to show solidarity with Israeli victims of a shooting attack on a gay community center in Tel Aviv that killed two people and wounded 15 others. Rabbis at the vigil called for an end to hate crimes and criticized Israel’s ultra-orthodox community for excluding gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender individuals.

At least 150 members of Washington’s Jewish community, gathered Monday night to remember two Israelis killed by a masked gunman at a Tel Aviv gay community center on Saturday.

Many of them sang songs and drew banners appealing for tolerance and denouncing prejudice and homophobia.

Organizers of the vigil included rabbis from several Jewish denominations and gay and lesbian Jewish activists. They condemned the shooting as a hate crime and called for the perpetrator to be brought to justice.

Israeli police are searching for the gunman, who opened fire on teenage boys and girls attending a support group meeting at the community center. The gunman killed a 26-year-old man and a teenage girl in the worst ever attack on gays in Israel.

Jewish community leader Mark Pelavin addressed the vigil on behalf of the North American Union for Reform Judaism.

“Despite the feelings of anger, frustration, and sadness that envelop our hearts, we gather here tonight - to mourn, to remember, and above all, to offer our own solemn promise that none of us will rest until all of us are safe,” he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the attack as a violation of Israel’s democratic values.

Martin Peled-Flax is a representative of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. He told the crowd that Israel regards itself as one of the most pluralistic societies in the Middle East.

“Israel has made major steps over the last two decades so that society would become accepting of people who are different - of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender individuals. Today, there are openly gay career army officers, there are openly lesbian Israeli diplomats,” said Pelde-Flax.

But, many Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews do not approve of the homosexual lifestyle, viewing it as contrary to Jewish law. Their leaders have strongly denounced annual gay pride parades held in several Israeli cities.

An Orthodox rabbi at the Washington vigil accused some ultra-Orthodox Israelis of creating an environment that encourages acts of hatred against gays. Shmuel Herzfeld urged ultra-Othodox Jews to do some soul-searching.

“One of the things I am suggesting is a communal statement that synagogues sign on to, and that has language that creates a playing field that makes it clear that such language and violence will not be accepted, that people who are gay are welcome to pray and participate in synagogue life and that religion is not about excluding and hating but about finding areas where we can come and be in the presence of the divine,” said Herzfeld.

Leaders of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish minority quickly condemned the Tel Aviv shooting as murder and called for the gunman to be caught and punished.

Israeli police have not identified the attacker as belonging to any particular religious or ethnic group. But the shooting has intensified the controversy in Israel over the growing prominence of the country’s gay community.