PM: Respect courts, don't attack haredim

Slonim Rabbi calls Emmanuel affair epic battle of good and evil

By JONAH MANDEL
binyamin netanyahu 311 (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski )
binyamin netanyahu 311
(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski )
A day after the High Court of Justice decided to exempt all but nine of the 22 mothers sentenced to 2 weeks in prison, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stressed the importance of unity and respect, both toward the court and the haredi populace.
“One of the elements that unites the people is respecting the court’s orders. You don’t have to agree, but you have to execute the orders.
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Respect for the High Court of Justice is imperative, as is mutual respect,” he said in the Knesset’s plenum on Wednesday.
“Statements I heard about the haredi public would have caused an uproar had they been said about a different public or a Jewish community in the world,” Netanyahu continued. “We will seek a solution to the problem, but under the rule of law.”
The premier met with members of United Torah Judaism, who on Sunday had lambasted him for his ongoing silence on the segregated Emmanuel school affair, which had culminated in the imprisonment of parents who held the court in contempt by not following its order to return their girls to the Beit Ya’acov school once the segregation between the Hassidic and regular track had been removed.
Earlier on Wednesday, the Admor of Slonim Rabbi Shmuel Barazovsky hinted to his followers in a letter rich with eschatological allusions that the struggle with the court over the segregated Emmanuel school was the epic battle between forces of good and evil, with the court and its ruling representing the forces of evil. This apocalyptic battle scenario is the prelude to the end of the world in its current form, which precedes the arrival of the Messiah in some Jewish hassidic streams of thought.
“If I thought that the justices believed what they said, that the Emmanuel school is grounded in racial discrimination, I think I would act differently,” Barazovsky said in a letter. “But since I have no doubt that they know the truth, all of what they say is founded in lies.”
“That being the case, this is nothing but a battle between faith and heresy, between the power of holiness to the Sitra Achra’s [other side, evil force] power of impurity – a battle we always knew would break out at the end of time,” he continued. “And in a battle over the holiness of God [kiddush hashem] – even if we face a firing squad, we won’t back down or compromise at all.”
To all the “faithful people of Israel,” Barazovsky issued an appeal to join “this sublime struggle, the struggle that generations waited and wished for.”