Haredi Rabbis Make Play For Young Secular Souls

Last updated on: March 8, 2011 at 7:01 pm by Jeffrey L. Falick

Haredi Rabbis Make Play For Young Secular Souls 2011-03-08T19:01:00-05:00 Jeffrey L. Falick

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If you thought the American Orthodox kiruv (outreach) merchants were bad, wait until you hear what they’re doing in Israel. According to a report on Ynet (Hebrew only), adolescent boys from secular backgrounds are being recruited into Torah study groups right off the soccer field and basketball court. Parents who have made the decision to raise their children with secular values are being undermined.

“The children are changing right before our eyes. They’re filling their heads with nonsense,” one of the parents said this week. In the schools they are warning, “They repeat extreme statements like a mantra. [These rabbis] are exploiting their naivete.”

The parents were kept completely in the dark by the rabbis who have arranged these gatherings.

School officials are reporting that they come to school late, claiming that they’ve been praying and threatening teachers who “dare” to interfere with their new religious agendas. Worse yet, they are displaying some very disturbing new ideas:

“…The situation is the worst in classes on democracy, history and citizenship. When the instructors attempt to give a lesson to the students, every statement relating to equal rights becomes an opportunity for the entire class to hear extremist statements like, ‘A gentile is an animal and has no place in the World to Come.’…”

They’re also harassing classmates from mixed backgrounds whose mothers are not Jewish, which is the case for many from the former Soviet Union.

It’s doing wonders for their patriotism, too. On Herzl’s birthday one youngster turned over Herzl’s official picture and declared that it is forbidden to celebrate him since he was “a heretic,” a familiar trope among Haredi Jews.

One father put it this way:

“The rabbis and all their Torah lessons don’t teach them to be better people; the opposite is the case. They sow fear and make them believe that if they don’t [take on these beliefs] their future will be bad…”

Even more traditional families are finding that their children are becoming tyrants about observance.

Of course, the rabbis are playing innocent (though they do admit to the racism which they justify as a Torah principle). They are obviously filling some kind of need for these kids and the schools and parents had better respond with some common sense alternatives before their kids turn into full grown Haredim and become strangers to both their families and any kind of enlightened value system.

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