An Open Letter to a Neturei Karta Leader

As you know, I recently published an article entitled "I Am Ashamed to Be an Israeli". The article seems to have had a very wide exposure and I have received many responses.

Among those I received were a series of email letters from someone associated with the wacko Neturei Karta movement, and - if I am not mistaken - he is actually the guy who runs their anti-Israel websites. He and I have carried on a correspondence of sorts all week. Below I have collected the essence of the notes I sent him and compiled them into this "Open Letter".

But first, some background information. Neturei Karta is a small sect of ultra-Orthodox "Jewish" religious extremists, best known for marching arm in arm with Yasser Arafat, and endorsing every anti-Israel terrorist and anti-Semite on the planet. The sect wants Israel destroyed and does not care if a Second Holocaust must take place in order to achieve this lofty goal, because Israel must not be set up at all before the Messiah comes (in their opinion) and - more generally - because many Israelis are secularists and some eat pork. No one knows how many people the sect has; they claim about 50,000, but I suspect the correct number is two zeroes less.

The Neturei Karta were originally set up as a splinter breakaway movement in 1938, mainly by fanatical ultra-Orthodox Hungarian Jews, splitting from the more mainstream Agudat Israel party and movement. Agudat Israel has made its peace with Israel's existence and has participated in the country's affairs, run for and been elected to the parliament, and even held cabinet posts.

"Neturei Karta" is Aramaic and means "Guardians of the City". The organization is motivated by intense hatred not only for secularist Jews, but for all Orthodox and observant Jews who happen not to share its ideas. It openly calls for Israel to be destroyed and it openly supports the worst genocidal anti-Semites on the planet from Arafat to the Assads - in order to "punish" those evil Jews who refuse to accept its religious notions.

Naturally, Neturei Karta has been adopted by all the bash-Israel organizations in the world and is celebrated by them as the only "true" representatives of Judaism. Curiously, the people who hail Neturei Karta are themselves often leftist secularists who would never consider backing religious lunatics from other faiths. The Islamofascists of course also love them. The Neturei Karta "rabbis" are cult figures roughly like Jim Jones from the Jonestown story. I guess Jewish Elmer Gantries might also be an accurate description.

Here is my message to the member of the Neturei Karta with whom I conducted the "dialogue" this week:

In the Amida prayer, which Jews recite three times every day, there is a section in which the minim are denounced. The minim refer to small treasonous groups of Jews who collaborated with the Roman enemies of the Jewish people, and the prayer explicitly mentions that these minim were tattlers, snitches, people who served the anti-Semites of their day as agents, and worked against Jewish existence and survival. Since then, of course, the segment in the daily prayer is understood to be a curse in general upon anti-Semites, and especially Jewish anti-Semites working against their own people. Jewish anti-Semitism was not born with the modern Israeli Oslo Left.

I mention all this because I can think of no more apt illustration of a cult of minim than the Neturei Karta. Your cult is nothing more than a pseudo-Jewish pagan group working against Judaism and for the enemies of the Jews.

You claim that you are simply opposed to Israel because it is full of pork-eaters and people who trample upon Jewish observance. Well, let me tell you something. The most secularist pork-eater on any kibbutz in Israel is halakhically (by Rabbinic law) far more Jewish and far more pure than all the "rabbis" in the Neturei Karta cult. And why do I say this? Because, as you know, there is a clear halakhic rule that says that living in the Land of Israel is itself shakul, or equivalent to, observing all 613 religious commandments or mitzvot. All of them. Even the ones reserved for priests and even the ones that may only be performed in the Temple (and so may not be performed today).

There is not a single "rabbi" in Neturei Karta who performs these 613 mitzvot. Yet, the worst pork-eater in Israel is already deemed equivalent to one who observes them all, even before he gets started. If he was circumcised at eight days of age, that already puts him even one more mitzvah/commandment ahead of you and your "rabbis". No, I am not suggesting that living in Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, should be regarded as a legitimate blanket exemption from all other religious precepts. I am simply saying that even someone who observes nothing at all in Judaism, but lives in Israel, is more Jewish and more religiously pure than the "rabbis" of your minim cult.

When you march in anti-Israel demonstrations alongside anti-Semites (the Durban conference comes to mind), when you endorse Arafat and his stormtroopers and serve as their public relations agents, when you support terrorists and excuse mass murders of Jews, you are acting as followers of the Evil Bil'am, not as sons of Jacob.

You say you want Israel destroyed because it was not set up properly, because the Messiah has not yet come? Do you really think that Israel can be destroyed without there also occurring a Second Holocaust? Don't you realize this is the unavoidable consequence of what you are proposing, and what the people you are supporting seek?

Let me tell you something. A ketuba, marriage contract, signed on the Sabbath is still a valid one and must be respected, even though signing it on the Sabbath is a prohibited violation of the day. A Cohen or priest who marries a divorcee has sinned, because such a marriage is prohibited by the Torah, but the marriage must be acknowledged and even accepted and honored. It stands. Whether or not Israel was created properly or at the correct time, the fact that it exists changes how Jews must behave and requires a certain amount of responsibility and arvut ze l'ze, or mutual support and defense, even from the most smug, self-righteous pretenders at religiosity.

Whatever you think about the erection of Israel, you have no right to endorse those seeking to destroy it and its population through violence, people seeking genocide of Jews. And if you do endorse such people and march with them, then you are nothing more than a disciple of the Evil Bil'am. You are a collaborator with Haman. You are worse than Dotan and Aviram.

Had you lived in Shushan in Persia in the days of Queen Esther and her Uncle Mordecai, you would have been marching arm in arm with Haman. After all, those Persian Jews also included many who no doubt violated the Sabbath and other religious principles. The Neturei Karta would have supported Haman as a way to "punish" them. How many rabbis of Rabbi Akiva's generation served as PR agents for the Romans, to justify their murdering Jews? How many said the murders were justified because, after all, so many Jews were not properly observing mitzvot?

In Elijah's generation, all except a few thousand Jews were acting as pagans. Strange, but I do not recall Elijah justifying anti-Semites murdering them. Indeed, Elijah endorsed the very worst pagan of all, King Ahab, when the king went on the war path to kill anti-Semites. Of course, if Neturei Karta minim had been around in those days, they would all have been in Syria, helping the evil Ben-Haddad murder the Jews.

The Neturei Karta "rabbis" are not recognized as Torah authorities by any Torah authority outside the cult. No Sephardic rabbis, no Ashkenazim, no Misnagdim, no Chassidim. No one recognizes Neturei Karta as a legitimate movement of Judaism. In essence, these rabbis - like me - see Neturei Karta as a pathetic minim cult. Can you name a single rabbi outside Neturei Karta who endorses the view of your own "rabbis"? Of course you cannot.

So you think collaborating with the worst anti-Semites on the planet, who openly endorse genocide of Jews, is better than collaborating with misguided radical secularists, who need to be pulled back to the traditions of Israel? You believe that when a Jew sins, he ceases to be a Jew? I wonder which books you are reading as replacements for the Torah. This is the level of the "logical reasoning" they are teaching these days in Neturei Karta ashrams (I hesitate to call them yeshivos)?

You insist the Zionists are the Devil, not the Palestinians. And of course, if the Palestinians are not the Devil, why should anyone think the Germans were? Since you defend the Palestinian right to murder my family, and as it happens we do not eat pork, then what is wrong with the Germans murdering lots of Jews? Why don't you guys march around in your pro-PLO parades with swastikas and put one on your website? And if someone happens not to keep the religious precepts of Judaism, what gives you the right to act as Public Relations man for the people who are seeking to murder such sinners?

The Neturei Karta cultists are inverted Bil'ams. The Evil Bil'am was ordered to curse Israel, yet ended up blessing the Tents of Jacob. You are the reverse. You are ordered by the Torah to bless Israel, but you curse the Jewish people. You have no concept of Jewish solidarity because you are not Jews; you are a pseudo-Jewish minim cult.

I really think you need to grow up or see a good shrink. So should your "rabbis".

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The true number of these Jewish pagans is less than 5,000. I mooned them and let them know any one who is an enemy of the State Of Israel is an enemy of the Jewish people, period and the memory of their name will be blotted out by God from under Heaven along with the Sons Of Amalek. Its really quite simple: by analogy if you were opposed to the existence of Italy and claimed to love Italians, people would consider you to be anti-Italian. People opposed to the existence of the Jewish State ARE anti-semites and I don't care if they claim to follow Jewish religious ritual; they're not Jews in my eyes. The Naturei Karta are about as representative of Jews and Judaism as a ham and cheese sandwich.

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