Fighting for equality - Rabbis demand the addition of kippah-wearing emoji
"We request the creation of a new emoji that will symbolize the Jewish religion, either a woman wearing a hat, a person wearing a kippah, or even an emoji of Torah books."
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFThe new hijab emoji.(photo credit: APPLE)
European rabbis are demanding social networks add a kippah-wearing emoji, saying that "Our daily struggle against antisemitism starts with the small things."Following the addition of a hijab-wearing emoji, rabbis sent a letter requesting the addition of a kippah-wearing emoji to Unicode, a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems, that sets the discourse for all the biggest social media companies in the world."When a child sees different illustrations, just like in the children's books on which he grew up, he is exposed to different skin tones, diverse professions and families with single-parent parents," said Gadi Gronich, chief of staff of the Conference of European Rabbis. "Sometimes that child acquires his knowledge from applications that take over the world. The emojis accentuate and symbolize the diversity of the population, and if we do not accept the differences there, how will we accept the difference in general?"Gronich claimed in his letter that "in a world where we hope to accept the different and be pluralistic, it seems that the Jewish religion and its symbols are not part of diversity. Our daily struggle against antisemitism starts with the small things of assimilating the Jewish religion on various platforms that expose it and become the norm. The omission of our religion and its symbols in such a wide media is leaving its mark and makes us the exception and those not represented.""I demand that the emoji developers incorporate our religion into the apps and not differentiate us from other religions - if there is an emoji of an Arab girl with a hijab, there is no reason for there not to be a Jew with a kippah or a woman with a shabbis," demanded Gronich in the name of European rabbis.The letter concluded, saying that "We request the creation of a new emoji that will symbolize the Jewish religion, either a woman wearing a hat, a person wearing a kippah, or even an emoji of Torah books, for the Jewish religion to be included in the daily discourse among app users."