Police to investigate haredi site

Website suspected of contempt for calling Emmanuel judge anti-haredi.

By JONAH MANDEL
butt kisser 311 (photo credit: screen shot)
butt kisser 311
(photo credit: screen shot)
The Attorney General's office recommended that police launch a criminal investigation of the haredi website Tzofar on Thursday, after writer Shmuel Kooper produced numerous diatribes against Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy.
Kooper and Tzofar's editor are suspected of contempt of court, after publishing a May 17 column about the religious, Sephardic judge who presided over the Emmanuel case. The headline on the column was: “His tongue is deep inside the rectums of the Ashkenazis at the Supreme Court.”
Levy headed the three-member panel that recently ruled on the segregated school in Emmanuel, and ultimately ordered parents who refused to return their daughters to the Beit Yaakov school to prison for contempt of the court, after a previous verdict had a division barrier erected in the school removed. The court said that the separation was on racial grounds, as it created a de-facto division between the majority of the Sephardi girls and those in the so-called hassidic track. Parents of girls from the hassidic track said that the motivation to the separation was religious stringency, as evident in the fact that approximately a quarter of the girls there were Sephardi.
Yoav Laloum, who along with his Noar Kahalacha NGO filed the original petition against the state-funded Independent Education Center under which the school operated, was a prime target of the Tzofar, which claimed that he was on the New Israel Fund's payroll to “fight the Torah of Israel.” Levy too became subject of repeated attacks on the website, in which he was called “a lowlife,” who hates haredim and is seeking to appease his “Ashkenazi masters.”
In a decision pertaining to the Emmanuel affair from the end of June, the court had requested of the attorney-general to look into “irregular remarks” against the court and especially one of the justices, presumably Levy, “to examine whether these are to be considered contempt of the court.”