Trois-Riviere Québec’s Mendy Pape goes by the pseudonym Nick Parker on Facebook to avoid hostility from the ultra-Orthodox branch of Judaism, from which he began to break away as a teenager. “You’re coming from a community where every action, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, is calculated, with no access to computers, TV, or newspapers,” he said. Yet Pape, whose mother has excommunicated him, believes ultra-Orthodoxy to be a wholesome way of life, just not for everyone. The Hillel organization, which supports ultra-Orthodox leavers, says about four hundred—out of a population of 13,000—cut their roots annually. Local Chabad leader Yisroel Bernath facilitated Pape’s transition, as he has that of many other young people who have rejected the ultra-Orthodox life. Pape’s experience reflects the New York YouTube movement—It Gets Besser—that employs social media to support ultra-Orthodox youth who are contemplating separation from their community. (Gazette, 5/3/13) [IT 4.3 2013]
Ultra Orthodox Jews, or Haredi, are spreading throughout Israel and pressing their puritanical ways on the country. One shopkeeper complained that the Haredi were passing out notes “to people like me, telling me I couldn’t wear blouses like this,” referring to a sleeveless top. “Then, one Friday night . . . I left my two kids alone—teenagers. They were playing music, not too loud, and this Haredi neighbor comes and pounds on the door shouting, ‘goyim’ [non-Jews] and demanding they turn off the music. It really scared them.” [csr 8.2, 2009)
This is a reflection of growing conflict and violence as fundamentalist Jews confront secular Jews and traditional municipal governments. For example, Haredi protested the opening, on the Sabbath, of a parking lot just outside the Old City of Jerusalem. When welfare officials took custody of a half-starved Haredi boy and arrested his mother for abuse, Haredi took to the streets and burned large bins of garbage, throwing rocks at police and setting fire to the child welfare office. Police have sometimes broken up such protests with pepper spray and arrested protestors. [csr 8.2, 2009)
Last year, ultra-Orthodox rabbis forced department stores in Tiberius to cover up mannequins that displayed bathing suits in its windows. They’ve also persuaded billboard companies to excise pictures of women, including Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni. Busses with service to Heredi communities are now segregated; women sit in the back. (Some ultra-Orthodox women said they liked the separate seating arrangement.) Females in the Knesset [parliament] choir were not permitted to perform inside the main Knesset chamber so they wouldn’t offend Haredi in the audience. “A day will come when there won’t be a single secular mayor anywhere,” says Meier Porush, a Haredi leader who almost won Jerusalem’s mayoral election last year. Israeli novelist Amos Oz suggested in 1982 that Zionism [the movement that built Israel] was “a passing, secular interlude, a historical and political upheaval, and that halachic Judaism [the kind practiced by the ultra-Orthodox] would return to overwhelm Zionism and re-absorb it.”[csr 8.2, 2009)