Rav Ovadia Slams Jewish Home
Elad Benari, Arutz 7, Jan 20 2013
After the Likud, Tzipi Livni’s Ha-Tnua and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, Ha-Beit Ha-Yehudi (Jewish Home) was attacked on Saturday by the Shas party’s spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, whose numbers are dwindling according to the polls. During his weekly Torah lesson on Saturday night, Rabbi Yosef chose to slam the party, which is headed towards being the Knesset’s third largest party after Tuesday’s election. He said:
These are religious people? They come to uproot the Torah. Those who elect them deny the Torah. This is the Jewish Home? This is the Jewish Home of the goyim. They come to promote civil marriage, to promote public transportation on Shabbat. These are religious people? You cannot call them religious. You must not vote for them.
Rabbi Yosef’s ostensible reason for the attack was a statement by Jewish Home candidate Ayelet Shaked, a traditional but not normatively religious woman, who said she was in favor of civil marriages. Rabbi Yosef was probably also irked by the fact that Jewish Home chairman Naftali Bennett had publicly declared that his party would like to have the Ministry of Religious Affairs, currently held by Shas, in the next government. Factually, it is impossible to reconcile Beit Yehudi’s having Torah scholar Rabbi Eli Ben Dahan on their list, as well as religious leaders Nissan Slomiansky and Avi Wortsman, who have done much to spread Torah education, as well as two women with head coverings, with the Rabbi’s accusations. Jewish Home responded to the harsh criticism by saying:
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef is an important spiritual leader of many communities in Israel, and we revere and respect him. The goal of the Jewish Home is to be a bridge between the parts of society and we will continue to do so. If we are being attacked by all parties at the same time, it must mean we are doing something right.
The Shas attack came after Bennett’s party was attacked over comments made by another candidate on its list, Jeremy Gimpel. Gimpel came under attack as an “extremist,” the Left’s word for Beit Yehudi, as opposed to the Shas claim of their not being extreme enough, on TV’s Channel 2 on Friday night, when a video of him jokingly telling a Christian group that the Dome of the Rock would one day be blown up was shown. MK Yoel Hasson of Tzipi Livni’s Ha-Tnua later filed a motion with the Elections Committee to disqualify Gimpel over the taken-out-of-context banter. In his motion to Elections Committee Chairman Judge Elyakim Rubinstein, Hasson claimed:
The delusional and moonstruck list fielded by the Beit Yehudi aspires to set the Middle East on fire and start WW3.
Some saw Hasson’s words as delusional in themselves. If these weren’t enough, Netanyahu also attacked Jewish Home on Saturday, over its supposed exclusion of women. Likud’s campaign ads have portrayed Beit Yehudi as male chauvinist, despite the fact that there are three women in the first dozen people on the list, and only one woman in Likud-Beitenu’s first dozen. Netanyahu told Channel 2 and Channel 10 that he is not ruling out adding any party to the coalition. He said:
Our principles are very clear. I was happy to hear that Bennett corrected his statement [about refusing orders to evict Jews]. I refuse to accept refusal of orders, and the exclusion of women. Most of the religious Zionist public opposes the exclusion of women, and disobeying orders, and that is a good thing, and they will continue to receive their representation within Likud.
Behind the attacks across the board is the fact that most polls have shown that the Jewish Home will be the third largest party in the Knesset, after Likud-Beitenu and Labor. One poll released on Thursday even showed Bennett’s party passing Labor and achieving 17 seats, making it the second largest party.
Jewish Home a party of goyim, says Shas mentor
Gabe Fisher, Times of Israel, Jan 20 2013
The right-wing Orthodox Jewish Home is no home for Jews, and Israelis should not vote for the party, Shas party spiritual leader and former Sephardic chief rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, said during his weekly sermon on Saturday. Yosef said:
They call themselves Jewish Home, but this is not a home for Jews, it is a house of goyim. They want to uproot the Torah, to institute civil marriage. It’s forbidden to vote for them. These are religious people? Anyone who votes for them denies the Torah. They are all wicked, haters of Torah and mitzvot. They want to have public transportation on Shabbat. A Jew who wants to marry won’t have to go to the rabbinate, have you heard? How can they call themselves religious? How can we give a hand to this?
Yosef’s comments came after Ayelet Shaked, #2 on the Jewish Home party’s list, alluded last week to the need to institute some form of civil marriage in Israel. Jewish Home also has been explicit in supporting easier conversion to Judaism, stating that it would seek to wrest control the conversion process from the ultra-Orthodox after the elections. Yosef’s comments came after a scrap late last week between Jewish Home’s Maftali Bennett and Shas’s Eli Yishai. On Wednesday, Bennett wrote on his Facebook page:
After the elections, we shall demand control over conversions. There are hundreds of thousands of Israelis who want and need conversions, but the system that is supposed to help them has become corrupt.
Yishai said in response:
It turns out the Jewish Home doesn’t really want to safeguard Judaism. If the conversion process is supervised by them, there will be mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Traditional and observant Jewish voters should therefore avoid them. It may be true that there are some problems with the current conversion system. For the last decade, it was run by Rabbi Haim Druckman, of the National Religious Party.
Ultra-Orthodox rabbis in the Chief Rabbinate have been vehemently fighting Druckman-led initiatives whose purpose is to ease the conversion process. Some rabbis have even advocated the annulment of Orthodox conversions that to their mind aren’t sufficiently stringent. In addition to conversion, religious authorities control a number of key life-cycle events in Israel, including marriage and burial ceremonies, which must be conducted according to Jewish, Christian or Muslim tradition.
Niqnaq 