The following is excerpted from a Times of Israel at http://tinyurl.com/q9p5k2p
By Haviv Rettig Gur
Economy Minister Naftali Bennett on Sunday morning railed against what he called “incitement” by one of the most senior religious figures of Shas. In a video (http://tinyurl.com/q4nbc9r) posted Sunday morning on the haredi website Kikar HaShabbat, Rabbi Shalom Cohen, a member of Shas’s Council of Torah Sages and the head of the influential Porat Yosef Yeshiva, is seen calling national religious Israelis “Amalek” and suggesting that they aren’t Jews.
Referring to the national religious Israelis by the colloquial Hebrew term - "כפה סרוגה" “knit kipa” - the preferred headgear for such Jews — R. Cohen declared in a sermon delivered Saturday night that “as long as there are knit kippot, the [divine] throne is not whole. That’s Amalek. When will the throne be whole? When there is no knit kipa.”
Bennet replied “For those who don’t know, Amalek is an expression referring to someone who must be wiped off the face of the earth. No less. At this very moment, thousands of knit-kipa wearers are standing guard from the Syrian border to the Egyptian, from brigade commanders down to the lowliest soldiers, and are spitting blood to defend even the honorable rabbi.”
Bennett added: “In these very days, memorial services are being held for my comrades-in-arms who sacrificed their lives in the [2006] Second Lebanon War, some of them secular and others wearers of knit kippot. Some of them fell in ways that earned them medals for valor. The rabbi is calling them ‘Amalek’.”
Bennett bemoaned the fact that R. Cohen’s words were delivered as he stood next to a seated Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas’s spiritual leader, who is viewed by many Sephardi Israelis as the most influential living rabbi.
NOW you know why we still must suffer Tisha b’Ab.
This divisiveness gives me reason to believe we will once again be expelled from Israel; Jew hating Jew.
It is ABSOLUTE HUTZPAH to denigrate fellow Jews the way the misnamed R. “Shalom” Cohen – “Shalom”?? – does; the unmitigated gall of R. Ovadia Yosef to allow this person to utter such stupid statements without objecting.
I would never say that the haredim deserve all the disrespect they get from the heloni and the "כפה סרוגה" - the latter group in which I include myself, but as long as haredi “leadership” insists on making such non-Jewish statements, the haredi leadership and those who follow them blindly, will suffer the disrespect of others.
We – Jews – cannot afford, cannot allow, this divisiveness. It cost us our nation twice already. G-d forbid it should cost us modern Israel as well.
Yohanon dot Glenn at gmail dot com
