In a pig's eye
| By Leora Eren Frucht |
October, 28 2001 |
(October 31) - A legal battle over the sale of pork in the center of Beit Shemesh, reports Leora Eren Frucht, highlights the growing open animosity between the haredi sector and the Russian immigrant community
 'Because people come for the pork. Then they buy lots of other things,' says Olga Palay.
(Debbie Zimmelman) |
Olga Palay got a reprieve last week. The High Court of Justice gave the town of Beit Shemesh 45 days to explain why they want Palay to move her business from a central neigborhood of town to the industrial zone - something Palay says would be a death knell for her store.
"I just hope the court eventually decides in our favor," says Palay. "Me and a million other Russians."
Olga Palay sells pork. That's not all she sells, but it's the pork that roused the city council to pass the controversial law forcing stores such as hers to operate only in the remote industrial zone. The city argues that the sale of pork in residental neigborhoods of Beit Shemesh offends the feelings of the religious population.
Palay's is one of six stores, concentrated in two mixed neighborhoods of Beit Shemesh, that sell pork. All are owned and run by immigrants from the CIS and serve mainly other immigrants who miss the taste of the old country - not only the taste of pork, but that of a plethora of other imported products from sweets and ice cream to wines and fruit juice, that are sold in these Russian-language grocery shop-cum-clubhouses.
The sale of pork is fast becoming a flashpoint in relations between two diverse groups whose numbers have swelled in recent years. The issue pits the growing haredi population, many of whom left Jersualem in search of cheaper housing, against the Russian immigrants who began settlng in Beit Shemesh a decade ago, spurred on by government-subsidized public housing projects. Today each group numbers roughly 12,000. Together they make up about 40 percent of the town's 60,000 residents, which also includes a burgeoning community of some 6,000 English-speaking immigrants.
In court, the dispute between them is being waged by, on the one hand, the city of Beit Shemesh, backed by the Interior Ministry, and on the other, Yisrael Ba'aliya MK Marina Solodkin and Shinui activist Yigal Yasinov.
This is more than a skirmish about where to sell sausages.
It is, in many respects, a struggle for the character of the city - and as each side sees it - the country itself.
And it is being waged not only in Beit Shemesh, but in other cities as well, among them Karmiel (also a party in this week's High Court case), Beersheba and Tiberias (where such laws are being considered), and Ashkelon, where a similar law was passed but not yet implemented.
The pork battle is also a test of whether two significant sectors of the population - deeply at odds with each other - can live side by side, and, if so, at what price.
THE GIVAT Savion shopping center in the Givat Sharett neighborhood of Beit Shemesh seems an unlikely place for a culture clash. It's a small, drab, dilapidated structure that is half empty. There's a supermarket in the basement, a few stores on the ground floor and only one store on the top floor - the rest are boarded up.
But this is the vortex of the conflict - the place where two of the controversial pork shops are located (The other four are along one block in Migdal Hamayim, also a mixed neighborhood.) In Givat Savion, the evidence of a cultural showdown is, literally, on the wall. At least half the signs in the shopping center are in Russian. The graffiti, however, is in English and Hebrew - the two most prominent phrases scrawled on the stairwell are: "Sex Pistols," (a reference to the British punk rock group that is still a cultural icon for some of the city's secular youth); and, in Hebrew, "The call of the hour: Return to Religion."
"This is a traditional city," maintain the proponents of the pork ban. Indeed until the arrival of the Russian immigrants, there were no pork shops in this development town established 50 years ago by North African immigrants.
Palay's was the first.
On this particular morning, Marina Vigdarov, an immigrant from Moscow, is stocking up on black bread and cheese. She's been shopping at Palay's shop two or three times a week since it opened 10 years ago. Sometimes she buys pork there.
"We're used to the taste. It's nostalgia - something from Russia. We don't eat it davka to upset people," says Vigdarov. "I tried the meat at the supermarket and didn't like it. There are stores in Israel that sell food for the Asian population, so why is it forbidden to have stores that cater to Russian tastes?
"I work as a babysitter for a religious American family," she continues. "They don't care what I eat or what I wear. What's important is that we behave with respect for each other. What kind of country is it that prohibits us from eating what we want?"
But the city is not prohibiting the sale of pork. It just wants to move it to the outskirts of town.
"That is as good as closing the store," counters Palay, as Vigdarov nods her head in consent. "There is virtually no public transportation to the industrial zone, and many of my clients are pensioners. They walk over here every couple of days. They don't have the strength or money for a long commute."
"Going to to the local grocer is one of the few pleasures that elderly Russian immigrants have," says Alex Milman, a 30-year-old immigrant from Russia, who works next door to Palay's shop. "Their lives are difficult. They don't speak the language. They are often forced to move from one apartment to another; they're taken advantage of by unscrupulous landlords. Coming to the shop where they can catch up on the gossip in their own language and buy the foods they're used to is one of the few things they look forward to."
PORK is just a small portion - perhaps five percent - of the total sales in these shops. So why not just stop selling it?
"Because people come for the pork. Then they buy lots of other things," says Palay. "If it weren't for the pork they would probably just shop at the supermarket downstairs."
For Palay, it's not just a matter of livelihood. For her, like many Russian immigrants, the municipal law restricting the sale of pork violates a sacred principle: "the right to sell what we want where we want." The Russian immigrants thought they had left behind a totalitarian country for a free, openly capitalist society. That, to them, is the essence of a much longed-for democracy. "If they succeed in forcing the stores to move, then there is no democracy here," declares Palay angrily.
"Religious people shouldn't be exposed to pork as they walk through the neigborhood on the way to the doctor or wherever," says Mordechai Berkovitz, the lawyer defending the city in the High Court case.
One floor up from Paley, Irena Zluktenko, operates a rival store. But one would have to search hard to find Zluktenko's unmarked store - the only shop in the center's abandoned upper floor.
Inside, there are wines from Georgia, and an array of products from Russia including cranberry juice, ketchup, sardines, candies and even imported popsicles. And, of course, locally-produced pork.
Zluktenko used to run a delicatessen in Kiev before coming to Israel seven years ago. Olga Beloff, a native of Uzbekistan, works for her.
Both women are unmoved by the argument that selling pork is an affront to the religious population.
"You know, they say that about everything," says Beloff, who lives in a mixed neighborhood in Givat Sharett, not far from the store. "I have several haredi neighbors," she continues. "Whenever my daughter wears pants or a skirt above the knee, they tell her it's not right. She is six years old. I don't say anything when they criticize my daughter's clothes. But privately, I tell her not to listen to them. Still, I know she feels bad."
"They don't want the Russians here," says Zluktenko. "All the Russians feel it. They want the town to be haredi. But we are too many in numbers. We won't go along with it."
Shinui activist Yigal Yasinov, representing the store-owners, also sees the law as an effort to drive away the immigrants. Why not stop selling pork, if it's only 5% of the sales, Yasinov is asked.
"If you give up on one thing today, then tomorrow you'll be forced to give up on something else. Today, it's pork. Tomorrow, it's shrimp. Or having separate departments for meat and dairy products. Step by step, they want to bring the immigrants to the point at which they will leave Beit Shemesh. That's the goal," says Yasinov, himself an immigrant who heads Shinui's forum for Russian immigrants.
"The city of Beit Shemesh got a lot of government funding in order to absorb the Russian immigrants," says Yasinov. "If it was such a religious city why did they bring them here?"
IT'S NOT surprising that many Russian immigrants believe that the haredim want them out of Beit Shemesh, maybe even out of Israel.
Behind the anti-pork law stand powerful people who have not hidden their views of the Russian immigrants. At a rally in Beit Shemesh two years ago, Rabbi David Benizri, head of a local yeshiva and brother and spiritual mentor of Labor and Social Affairs Minister Shlomo Benizri (Shas), condemned the immigrants, saying they had brought with them abomination, prostitution and pork sales. Deputy Mayor Moshe Abutbul, also of Shas, raised the possibility of a "separate town for the Russian gentiles."
Today, Abutbul says that he "still thinks it was a mistake to bring over the Russian immigrants without first giving them the necessary information to make them Jewish. "This is a city of Torah," he says, "and with all due respect to the Russians, we didn't pray for so many years to bring them here in order for them to act like they did in Moscow."
Such opinions about the Russian immigrants are also expressed at the grassroots level, often in a more warped form. Moshe, a haredi resident of Beit Shemesh, blames the Russian immigrants for "putting this into our lives," he says, pointing to one of the pork shops. "A traditional population can't tolerate this," he says on his way out of a pet shop, where he has bought a couple of goldfish.
"Pigs eat dirt; they're impure, and whoever eats a pig becomes contaminated in body and soul. Instead of being a man, he becomes a beast. That's what leads to prostitution," he says, casting a glance at the immigrants entering the pork shop.
Moshe wouldn't give his full name out of "concern for being accused of slander," he explained. "But this is what our Torah says."
Those behind the law restricting the sale of pork, insist that they speak not just for the haredim - about 20% of the population - but for the overwhelming majority of traditional Beit Shemesh residents.
"Most of the complaints I get are not from haredim," says Abutbul. "They're from secular people who accidentally bought non-kosher meat there, and come to me to cry about it."
"This is an affront to the feelings of the vast majority of Beit Shemesh residents," concurs lawyer Berkovitz. "We speak for the majority."
BUT THAT is not exactly the way most residents see it.
"No one else but the haredim seems to be up in arms about this. There are far more important things for the country to worry about," says Ilan Rubinstein, 30, who came to Israel from London a year and a half ago and settled in Beit Shemesh.
Rubinstein, who considers himself part of the national religious camp, is a real estate agent whose office is next door to Palay's shop. At dusk, as shoppers stock up on pork sausages in one store, one can see the silhouette of a man davenning in the next office, where Rubinstein works.
"It's sad and disturbing to me that there's a demand for pork in Israel," says Rubinstein. "But at the end of the day, this is not the way to bring people closer to religion by imposing your will on them. It would be more effective to demonstrate the values and depth of religion by example."
AVRAHAM Tachvilian agrees. The soft-spoken, gray-haired man in a knitted kippa is one of the original residents of Beit Shemesh. His family settled there in 1958, upon arriving from Iran. He was seven. Today he owns a woman's clothing shop across from Palay's store, and considers himself a devout Jew.
"I don't care if they sell pork there," says Tachvilian. "This shopping center is half dead. If the two Russian stores are closed, no one will shop here anymore."
Tachvilian recalls that he used to have another store in the shopping center; business was so bad that he was ready to give the shop away for free "just to have someone else pay the city taxes. When the Russians arrived, the place picked up. Now most of my clientele are Russians; they come here to buy food at the Russian grocery shops, and on their way out they see something in the window here and come in to buy. They're good, decent people. Without them, no one would come to my store.
"Of course it bothers me that pork is sold in the country," continues Tachvilian. "But the Russians came to the country with a certain mentality. They were cut off from Jewish life for 70 years. We can't just tell them: don't eat it. Imagine if someone told me: don't eat rice. I wouldn't like that. It's their food, and they can't change overnightÉ I believe that in a generation or two their children will have learned more about being Jewish, and they won't eat pork any more. The differences between us and them will have vanished."
Do the haredim want to drive out the Russian immigrants?
"I don't want to talk about that," says Tachvilian. "Let's just say that if the haredim would come and teach the immigrants and try to be more accepting of them, things would be different. If they would try to bring them closer to religion, instead of just talking about non-kosher foodÉ."
Tachvilian adds that he doesn't see the point of moving the stores to another area. "The problem is that pork is sold and eaten by Jews in Israel. What difference does it make if it's here, in this shopping center, or there, in the industrial zone? As for the Russians who work in the shops, Tachvilian says, "to their credit, they always tell newcomers that the food there is not kosher. They don't want to make an extra dollar by cheating someone. They are fair about it," he says.
"I think whoever wants to sell should be able to sell. No one forces you to buy the food," says "Motti," another shop-owner who preferred not to give his real name so as not to insult any of his clients. A native of Beit Shemesh, Motti says he grew up with religious and traditional people. "We live well together. I get along with them all."
But the haredim, he says, are another story. Motti scoffs at the claim that the sale of pork is offensive to haredim.
"What about this?" he says, pointing to a prominent video-dispensing machine, at the entrance of the shopping center. It is full of pornographic films, and hard for any passerby to miss the images of bare-breasted women. "Isn't that offensive to them? Why is it okay for this to be here, but not the grocery store?
"Living with them is impossible," continues Motti. " If you're not 'black' like them, you can't live here. They don't want to live with anyone who is different than they are."
In fact, a number of non-haredi residents - ranging from secular to traditional to national religious - say that if any group is upsetting the balance in Beit Shemesh, it is not the Russian immigrants, but the haredim.
IN ARGUING his case, Berkowitz, the lawyer defending the city law, boasts that "in five years time, Beit Shemesh will be a haredi city - more like Bnei Brak than Jerusalem."
"That," says real estate agent Rubinstein, "is wishful thinking for some." What's more, he adds, "it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. People say it to scare non-haredim away. They're trying to engineer things to turn out that way."
But the haredim have done more than talk. A recent build-your-own-home project for the general population was frozen indefinitely when haredim tried to take it over. The project, called Shahar, was to be situated on an isolated hill - far from any haredi neighborhood, and was intended for the secular and traditional population.
"A haredi developer signed up dozens of haredi families in order to make it into a haredi neighborhood," recounts Beit Shemesh real estate agent Tzahi Cohen. "Most of them weren't really planning on buying there - the idea was to prevent non-haredim from buying, and they succeeded," says Cohen, who wears a knitted kippa. "It's a pity. They scuttled the project."
Lawyer Berkovitz, in fact, points to the fate of the Shahar project as evidence that Beit Shemesh is indeed becoming haredi.
"Hardly any secular people signed up," he notes proudly in an example of self-fulfilling prophecy.
There are two exclusively haredi neighborhoods in Beit Shemesh. One, Givat Hamenuha, is in the older part of town and closes its gates on Shabbat. The other is the two-year-old Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet, which straddles Ramat Beit Shemesh Aleph, a mixed neighborhood built a year earlier. In order to reach the main part of town, residents of Aleph must drive by (though not through) the haredi neighborhood.
"A friend of mine was stoned on Friday on his way to Ramat Beit Shemesh," says Motti, adding, in a burst of hyperbole, that "going to Ramat Beit Shemesh on Saturday is like going to Gaza."
Alex Milman recalls an incident last year in which a woman driver was dragged from her car and beaten by the angry haredi residents of Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet.
To be sure, many religious residents of Beit Shemesh are disturbed by the proliferation of pork shops in their town. Tzahi Cohen, for example, would like to see the shops moved to the industrial zone. "Pork is a symbol that totally contradicts Judaism and as a believing Jew, that bothers me," he says.
But even Cohen wonders whether the legislation, and subsequent court case, were necessary. "I think if we had talked about it, we might have reached some understanding without forcing people to do something by law É. Maybe the politicians are responsible. Rather than trying to make peace among citizens, they're using this issue for their own interests - to drum up votes," he says, specifically citing the haredi parties and their rival, Shinui.
MANY observers, like Cohen, ask whether there was room for compromise instead of confrontation.
"We did compromise," insists Abutbul. "We would have liked to ban the sale of pork entirely. Instead, we only restricted it to the industrial zone."
But when pressed, Abutbul admits that a total ban on the sale of pork would never have stood up in court since it is a clear violation of the Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation.
"Yes, we knew such a law would be struck down in court so we agreed on this painful compromise. And it is a compromise for us."
A compromise with themselves, perhaps, - but not with the other party. Yisrael Ba'aliya MK Solodkin, one of the petitioners representing the immigrants, says she understands the haredi concern about the spread of the stores.
"We are not fighting an ideological war on the backs of olim. We were ready to compromise," says Solodkin. "We could have taken steps to control or prevent the proliferation of the stores beyond certain neighborhoods. For instance," she says, "we could have agreed that there would be no stores near yeshivot or synagogues, or we could have decided together upon the location of such stores, taking into account the population in the neighborhood.
"We suggested this from the start. There was no need to go to court. But it takes two to tango, two to compromise. And the other side did not want to. They preferred to enforce a ban."
The effort to move the shops is certain to be a protracted battle. In the end, the city may succeed in moving - and closing - some of them. But at a cost.
Yasinov maintains that secular residents are fleeing Beit Shemesh, driving down housing prices. "The city is getting a bad name," he says.
Certainly the clash is only inflaming passions among the two feuding groups whose stereotypes of each other are being steadily reinforced. More and more, immigrants are seen as "pork-eating goyim and prostitutes," while haredim are viewed as "Taliban-like religious extremists who flout the principles of democracy."
Vigdarov, who wants to keep buying the food she likes at the store near her home, says the law has prompted her to volunteer for the Shinui party.
"They are the only ones who will stand up to this religious coercion," she says.
And if the haredim are disturbed by the lack of Jewish observance among the Russian immigrants, the last thing the law is doing is bringing these immigrants into the fold.