Reach out across the great Israeli divide to individuals on the other side, and they’ll respond in kind

Photo: Meir Alfasi

T

here are moments when it’s crystal clear to everyone present that what they’re experiencing has a meaning beyond the actual event itself.

Just such a scene took place last Thursday night at a double hachnassas sefer Torah in central Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square.

For an hour and a half, traffic came to a halt. Café goers videoed. Shoppers clapped along. From balconies and rooftops, people stopped to look at the display of pure Jewish joy in the streets below.

To many participants, it was clear that there was a subtext: that here in the center of Tel Aviv — a secular bastion that had once been home to a bustling religious life — Jewish observance was at home.

Personally, the celebration in downtown Tel Aviv felt like a glimmer of warm daylight at the end of a dark tunnel featuring weeks of anti-chareidi bile. It felt like the unspoken answer to a tacit question.

With Israel racked by infighting over contentious issues of identity, is the country capable of uniting around a shared Jewish vision?

AT a rough estimate, I’ve now experienced more wars, knife intifadas, and missile attacks than your average person is prescribed antibiotics over their lifetime.

But grizzled veteran that I am, rarely have I felt more uneasy about life in Israel than over the past few weeks.

Sadly, not due to the external security situation. But because the torrent of venom from Middle Israel that has greeted a string of chareidi tragedies has me questioning the country’s basic moral health. And because the disturbing reaction of law enforcement to the disasters raises the specter of two-tier justice.

Those questions began a few weeks ago with the death of Yossi Eisenthal, a sweet 14-year-old boy who was run over by a bus driver who’d been trapped in an anti-draft law protest in Yerushalayim.

It’s for the courts to decide the driver’s culpability, but what was shocking was the online reaction, which featured widespread mockery.

“He died and didn’t draft,” read many, many posts on mainstream websites — a reference to the, “We’d rather die than draft” call used by a chareidi fringe.

Yossi was a boy with a golden heart, but his death was greeted with a shrug, or worse — with malice.

Despite the fact that the boy wasn’t present at the protest that infuriated the driver but was mowed down around the corner, when it turned out that the boy’s family belongs to the Peleg Yerushalmi, a group that blocks roads in protest at the arrest of yeshivah bochurim, there was a widespread sense of “he deserved it.”

The sense of unease was compounded last week in two further incidents. On Monday morning, news broke of a tragedy at a childcare center in which two infants had died and dozens more were being rushed to hospital.

From the moment that it was reported that the horrific incident had unfolded in the chareidi Romema neighborhood, it was all too obvious how things would pan out.

“Children found sleeping in bathrooms and closets!” screamed the media headlines. “Dozens crammed into dirty apartment where illegal preschool operated!” went others.

Predictably, much of the initial reporting proved to be false — and in fact the story never passed the smell test of basic reporting.

There was no way that the well-dressed babies pictured belonged to neglectful parents who would happily leave their six-month-old to a chamber of horrors.

Far from the slovenly crime scene of reports, the apartment looked like any other middle-class Israeli home.

None of that mattered to the talkback commentators on Israel’s secular websites.

“Do the chareidim love their children?” was one pearl.

“What does it have to do with us?” asked a second.

“Let’s guess… chareidim,” was a third.

These were far from isolated examples. The overwhelming tone was poisonous.

Beyond the media reaction, something seemed badly askew with the justice system’s response. Naturally, the two women in charge of the daycare center were taken in for questioning.

But then the police refused to release them to house arrest. That, despite the fact that the mothers of the dead babies left the shivah to testify that the women in question were loving caregivers, not the monsters that the prosecution was intent on painting them as.

Also, despite the fact that the bus driver who’d rammed a crowd of teens and killed one just two weeks before was almost immediately released.

Two days later, came the final installment. Naftali Tzvi Kramer, a 17-year-old bochur in the Satmar yeshivah in Moshav Komemiyus was knocked over by a bus driver who was driving dangerously.

That the driving bordered on criminal negligence became obvious within a short time. But long before the incriminating video of his driving appeared, the same sickening cycle repeated itself.The headline writers rushed to note that the victim had been at a protest — and the comments erupted in hatred.

“Karma.”

“One less parasite.”

“What — G-d didn’t help again?”

I’M as aware as the next person that the chareidi position on the draft is widely seen as detestable. But the inhumanity of the online reactions to the three incidents was both inexcusable and chilling.

And I can’t help suspecting that the fact that in all three cases, the same pattern of judgmental reporting, savage comments, and overzealous law-enforcement recurred, collectively tells another story.

Very simply, chareidim are judged differently. Things that could never be said about Arabs or Sudanese asylum seekers are sayable when it comes to the chareidi community.

It’s not that someone sits there in a newsroom or a justice ministry office and says, “Let’s discriminate against these people.”

It’s more subtle and pernicious than that — a matter of instinct.

I prefer to think that much of the harsh rhetoric is due to the anonymity of the Internet. That most of these news-site posters would never write the same words if the victim was their next-door neighbor.

If that’s the case, then the inhumanity on display over and over again when it comes to the chareidim is the end result of a process — one that begins with dehumanization, which is itself a function of unfamiliarity.

That distance is one of the strangest aspects of Israel as a country. A tiny place where everyone’s mechutan’s step-nephew serves in the Mossad and knows when Trump will bomb Iran, Israel is also a place of vast gulfs between demographics.

Israelis know everything about people who are like them, part of their “in-group.” But “The Other” down the road often remains a state secret.

A number of years ago I met a secular man who lives literally on the corner of Ramat Gan and Bnei Brak. With salon windows that look out into Shikun Vizhnitz, he was practically a Vizhnitzer.

Yet he knew nothing about chareidim. He lived in a gated building, ferried his children to their secular schools, and traveled to work as a software engineer in Tel Aviv, with almost zero contact with his next-door neighbors.

Mainstream Israelis and chareidim pass by each other like ships in the night. They exist as “The Other” — faceless stereotypes, who can be rehashed in lurid media portrayals devoid of humanity, individuality, or warmth.

In the secular stereotype, chareidim are lazy beggars who only live to leech off a majority whom they despise. The chareidi equivalent mutters darkly about tradition-hating leftists who exist solely to secularize all religious Jews.

Over their chasmic divides, Israel’s parallel societies peer at each other as anthropological curios — strange creatures from a different world. Interactions that happen in the aggregate — one faceless bloc against another, competing for scarce resources in the public and political spheres — are what allow medieval portrayals of the chareidim to fester.

When tragedy strikes, it’s that subconscious portrait that dictates the instinctive reaction of reporters, law enforcers, and social media users alike.

The reason that I’m confident that the hatred comes from a sense of distance is because the experience of those who cross Israel’s chareidi-secular divide in both directions is fundamentally at odds with what you’d expect based on the media storms listed above.

Spend a Shabbos in Tel Aviv, and no one will bat an eyeash as you perambulate down Rothschild Boulevard wearing a shtreimel and rebbishe Turkish tallis, while ingesting Yerushalmi kugel with pickles.

If a secular person breaks down within range of most chareidi areas, within two minutes, Yedidim will change their tire, Yad Eliezer will send them a food basket, and Yad L’Achim will extract their children from an Arab village.

Which brings me back to Dizengoff Square, and last Thursday’s double joy of two sifrei Torah, one Ashkenazi, one Sephardi, destined for Rav Yaakov Hillel’s Shalom LaAm kiruv organization.

Each of the seforim had its own story. As the large LED screens on the float heading the procession showed, the Sephardi one was written in memory of Yaakov Hillel, the famed mekubal’s grandson and namesake, who died in Lebanon last year while serving in the Golani brigade. The second was donated in memory of Eliyahu Goode z”l, from Baltimore.

The display of Torah joy felt like closure and — dare I say — a tikkun of sorts. Because it was in that very square that one of the worst Jewish scenes of recent memory took place.

Mere days before October 7 — on Yom Kippur — a secularist mob tore down the mechitzah at a large outdoor Ne’ilah and disrupted the tefillah of the hundreds gathered. Other protesters invaded adjacent shuls.

It was the shocking finale of the justice-reform battle, which morphed from a campaign against legal reforms into a wider attempt to stem the rising tide of religious influence in the country.

As pictures of the wrecked minyanim were beamed around the world after Yom Kippur, there was a widespread sense that a line had been crossed.

Many of those dancing around Dizengoff last week were aware of the event’s wider resonance.

But it wasn’t just symbolic: The many locals delighted at the display of Jewish joy were a reminder that beyond the anti-religious contempt that still persists in the public square, Israel’s silent majority values tradition.

To be clear: Israel’s draft issue isn’t going away, and anti-chareidism isn’t a mirage. It’s a major organizing force in political life.

But last Thursday night in Dizengoff was a reminder of something that makes fewer headlines, but is just as fundamental. Go beyond the aggregates, and reach out across the great Israeli divide to individuals on the other side, and they’ll respond in kind.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1097)