Time to Extend Israeli Law to Meah Shearim.
A woman is caught on tape detaching the feeding tube from her starving three-year old in Hadassah Hospital, after years of bringing the child in with unexplained medical conditions and bodily injuries. She is arrested by authorities for child endangerment and jailed. In response, her community backs her up, burns property and assaults police and social workers.
This story makes no sense until you add that the woman is haredi, a member of Neturei Karta sect in Jerusalem’s Meah Shearim.
As citizens of Israel look on in astonishment today as the streets of its capital are set on fire and innocent passersby are subject to a pogrom of stones and curses, we long-time inhabitants of Jerusalem are not surprised.
For years, police and government authorities have treated Meah Shearim, the hotbed of virulent haredi anti-Israel provocations, as the French have treated the Arab suburbs of Paris, the banlieues: as a separate country, afraid to engage with its inhabitants, to enforce the laws of the nation.
It is a no-go zone, where citizens take the law into their hands, and inhabitants are subject to mob rule.
I saw this personally when I was writing my play Women’s Minyan, which was based on the following true story: A haredi woman in Meah Shearim, mother of 12, found out her sexually abusive husband was having an affair with a married woman. When she finally stopped covering for him, and demanded he move out and give her a divorce, she found herself not only thrown out of the house, but attacked by armed haredi thugs who arrived at her doorstep. Read more >