Jews against Israel
Neturei Karta, a Zionism-denouncing, Palestinian-embracing subculture within ultra-Orthodox Judaism, is suddenly sharing the spotlight in the antiwar movement.
salon.com
By Michelle Goldberg
March 13, 2003 | MONSEY, N.Y. -- On Saturday, when thousands of antiwar activists converge on the White House, there will be a small, silent group of Hassidic rabbis in black hats and curling sidelocks among them. Because it's the Jewish Sabbath, a day when Orthodox Jews abstain from all work, the rabbis can't take to the podium. If they could, though, their message would mirror that of ANSWER, the zealously anti-Zionist group that called the march. Israel, the rabbis believe, is the source of all the world's suffering, as well as the catalyst for a war driving the world toward catastrophe. America, says Rabbi Chaim Sofer, has been "hijacked by Zionists. This whole war is to secure the assets of the Israeli occupation. We, as Jews, have an obligation to tell the truth about this war."
Sofer and the other rabbis are part of Neturei Karta, a strongly anti-Israel subculture within ultra-Orthodox Judaism. They're bound by a conviction, once shared by most Orthodox Jews, that Zionism is an affront to God and that peace won't prevail until the state of Israel is dismantled. The group, which claims thousands of members worldwide, was founded in Jerusalem around 1940 by rabbis opposed to attempts to create a Jewish state. There are branches of Neturei Karta in Israel, Europe and New York, where members make appearances from time to time to burn Israeli flags on Israeli Independence Day, which Neturei Karta's spiritual leader, the late Grand Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, called "the terrible Day of Blasphemy."
A thin, sharp-featured man with a black beard, flashing dark eyes and a Yiddish accent, Sofer lives with his wife and eight children in Monsey, an ultra-Orthodox enclave in upstate New York. Private buses regularly make the hour-long trip between the town and the Hassidic section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Sheets run down the buses' center aisles, separating the bearded, black-clad men from the women, most of whom, in the ultra-Orthodox manner, keep their hair covered with wigs.
Except for the profusion of synagogues and all the signs in Hebrew, Monsey looks like an average East Coast suburb. Sofer keeps an office in a boardinghouse on Saddle River Road, a few yards from the ramshackle white home of Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss. Rabbi Hilel Deutsch, a 50-year-old who was born in Jerusalem and who emigrated to New York because he was unwilling to live under Zionists, is almost constantly by Sofer's side, and various other rabbis and rabbinical students drift in and out. While most of Monsey's rabbis shut out the secular world, Sofer is constantly online, printing out articles from publications like Alexander Cockburn's far-left, aggressively pro-Palestinian publication, Counterpunch, and newspapers from as far away as Pakistan. "We need to communicate globally," he says. "We can't sit in our basements anymore."
Neturei Karta garnered some publicity in 1999, when the group held a conciliatory meeting with the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan. Yet coming from a community that holds its insularity sacred, the rabbis, some of whom speak only Yiddish, have consistently felt frustrated by their inability to get their message out. Now, as the bloody tensions between Israel and the Palestinians, and the impending war with Iraq, galvanize a global protest movement, Neturei Karta has suddenly found people willing to give them a platform and an audience.
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