Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel Compare Other Jews to Nazis

Dino Grandoni
Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel Compare Other Jews to Nazis

On Saturday, members of what the AP and The New York Times call Israel's community of ultra-Orthodox Jews protested against secular Israelis by comparing them to Nazis -- a move which got the latter (predictably) riled up. Ultra-Orthodox Jews organized the attention-getting protests in Jerusalem's Mea Shearim neighborhood on Saturday over "growing incitement against their community" in Israel, as The Times reports -- incitement against efforts by some of them to not-so-subtly impose their strict religious mores on the rest of Israeli society that isn't as religious. Examples of that imposition include the incident of an 8-year-old Israeli schoolgirl being spit at for her supposedly immodest dress and others where female Israeli soldiers were ordered to sit at the backs of buses by strictly religious Jews, according to the AP and Times, which they reported on last month. But on Saturday, the ultra-Orthodox protesters took a different PR tact in the escalating tensions between them and other Israelis by offering AP and Reuter photographers the opportunity to grab incendiary pictures of Jewish boys dressed up in striped concentration camp uniforms emblazoned with "Jude" yellow stars (above) and a handcuffed boy meant to imitate a famous photograph from a Warsaw ghetto (below). And the firebrand Nazi comparisons understandably upset less religious Jews in Israeli. "We must leave the Holocaust and its symbols outside the arguments in Israeli society," Moshe Zanbar, head of a Holocaust survivors' group, told the AP. But getting the attention of the likes of Zanbar and other secular Israelis was the entire point of the protest. So whether or not the Nazi imagery was justified, it certainly worked.

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From the protests:

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From 1943 Warsaw: 

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