Protests planned for ceremony honoring far-right rabbi

By JEREMY SHARON
Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg (photo credit: WIKIMEDIA)
Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg
(photo credit: WIKIMEDIA)
Left-wing politicians and protestors are planning to stage a protest at a prize giving ceremony honoring far-right religious leader Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg in Givat Shmuel on Thursday.
Transportation Minister and senior United Right leader MK Bezalel Smotrich is expected to give an address at the ceremony, while Education Minister Rabbi Rafi Peretz, also of United Right, will be welcoming those attending the event.
The award for “creativity in Torah” is being bestowed on Ginsburg by the Institute for Torah and Wisdom in Givat Shmuel, an organization that receives funding from the education ministry.
Ginsburg is infamous for having written a pamphlet called “Baruch Hagever” praising and justifying the actions of Baruch Goldstein who massacred 29 Palestinians in the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994.
Ginsburg, who is the president of the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva in the Yitzhar settlement, was charged in 2003 with incitement to racism against Arabs over his book “Order of the Day - Root Treatment,” although the charges were dropped after he issued a letter of clarification.
Activists for the Democratic Union party plan to protest the event, and described Ginsburg in a statement to the press that he was “the ideologue” behind so-called “price tag” reprisal attacks against Palestinians and someone who “determined that Arabs do not have any right to live in the State of Israel.”
Head of the Democratic Union party MK Nitzan Horowitz will attend and speak at the protest, together with party electoral candidates Mossi Raz, Rabbi Gilad Kariv of the Reform movement and Yaya Fink.


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