The New Middle East (31 page)

The ultra-Orthodox, as is their intention, stick out like a sore thumb from the rest of Israeli society. They are lumped together by the rest as one big mass of scrounging layabouts. The only workaround they regularly use is chemical hair remover, which the men dab on the ends of their beards to keep them in check without actually cutting them. And the women will often wear cheap, and therefore ill-fitting, wigs to cover their own hair for the sake of modesty. The uniformity with which the Haredim dress tends to be seen by the majority as a symbol of the uniform uselessness of the Haredim to the wider society. But like everything in modern Israel, even that is not as simple as it seems.

Yeruham Klausner was holding two identical wide-brimmed black hats. ‘Now these,’ he said to me, ‘are two very different hats.’ At first and even second glance, to the non-ultra-Orthodox eye, the men of the Haredi community often dress exactly the same. In fact they look just like Yoel Weber and Mr Klausner – long beard, black suit, white shirt and big black hat. But the similarities mask the differences. Yeruham Klausner was in his sixties and sold hats for the famous Ferster Hat Company. Their motto is ‘We don’t sell hats; we live hats.’ He could spot one of his from across the street and he could also tell which sect the wearer belonged to.

This is a community where high fashion is seen as a pointless indulgence that distracts from devotion to the Almighty. But it does not deny individuality, so trends within hat wearing are constantly changing, though they border on the microscopic. Lately the fashions have drifted towards the hats getting higher, millimetre by millimetre. There has been more movement on the rim, which has jumped by two centimetres in recent years. The width of the almost indistinguishable black ribbon is another magnet for change.

While I was in Mr Klausner’s shop in Jerusalem his mobile phone rang. It wasn’t a particularly fancy one, but like all phones these days it could do the basics: Internet, texting, take pictures and make calls. At least it could when it left the factory. Mr Klausner’s phone was now kosher, and it had a little rabbinical stamp on it to prove it. This meant it had been stripped of all its functions apart from being able to make phone calls.

Mr Klausner did not strike me as the kind of man who might form illicit relationships via SMS, take photographs of women who were not his wife, or spend hours surfing the murkier corners of the Internet. Regardless of that, the temptation had been removed. However, having a kosher phone is more about being
seen
not to want to have access to these things. It is another mark of religious observance.

Everyone else on the globe, eventually, ends up being influenced by fashions championed by pop stars and models that are transmitted around the planet by the mass media. This is a community that shuns that. So I asked Mr Klausner: who sets the trends among the Haredi hat buyers? ‘Often it’s a particular rabbi,’ he told me.

He may wear his hat in a certain way and then it’ll be copied by his followers. Or sometimes a man will walk in and say: ‘I’ve had the same style for ten years, I want something different. Perhaps a pinch or a little more height,’ and then, after there’s a big Jewish holiday where his hat has been seen, there will be a rush of requests for a similar look. Sometimes it’s the young people wanting more width so they can turn down and style the brim.

I asked him how long the men took to choose their hats. ‘Around an hour,’ he said. ‘They’ll be wearing the same hat every day for two years, so they want to be sure. But if anyone spends more time than that, then his thoughts are clearly too much with himself and not enough with God, so I throw him out of the shop.’

The way the Haredim dress is a deliberate and a very important part of their attempt to isolate themselves from a world they hold in contempt. But within their own community the differences in clothing, like the differences in their lifestyles and their relationship with the state of Israel, are very important and can be very divisive.

It was a long narrow stone corridor and she knew we were waiting at the end of it to put faces to the disgust felt across the country. She began to walk as casually as she could, but the more doors she failed to enter along the way the more she piqued the interest of the photographers. She was a fragile little woman in her fifties, but the scarf that covered her head, and her clothing, which was black and shapeless, undermined her attempt at studied nonchalance.

The instinct to hide must have been bubbling up inside her. Suddenly she gave in to it. Two doors up from the one I was standing at her pace quickened sharply and she brought her hand to cover her face. The camera shutters went off and the pushing and shoving, the unedifying trademark of my profession, began in earnest. As she reached the courtroom door her left hand pushed it open as her right reached up to touch the small thin metal cylinder found on the door frame of every Jewish home and building. It is called a mezuzah. It can come in other shapes, but what is important is that it contains passages of a particular prayer written by a specially trained observant Jew in a tradition that dates back to the instruction from God that Jews must mark their dwellings to protect their first-born sons from the tenth plague visited on the Egyptians in the First Testament.

Mrs Ostrowitz’s first-born son was about to become notorious, and he needed all the help he could get.

The courtroom was tiny, and looked more like a cluttered office than legal chambers. It was presided over by Judge Simon Fienberg, who decided he didn’t have the space to accommodate the day’s larger-than-usual collection of reporters and photographers, so he left us clogging up the corridor outside. Technically Judge Fienberg was dealing with a pretty straightforward case of vandalism. Two men and one teenager had been arrested the night before and had quickly confessed to the crime. What made this case unusual was what they had written and where they had written it.

They were all members of the extreme Neturei Karta sect of the Haredi community. Two weeks earlier they had crept to the front of Yad Vashem, the nation’s memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War, and in the early morning light had scrawled across its walls in Hebrew using black spray paint the words: ‘Thanks Hitler for the wonderful Holocaust you organised for us’.

They were caught after they exchanged text messages by mobile phone congratulating each other on their actions. Of the three suspects, a man called Avraham Ben Yosef was released under bail conditions. The unidentified minor was spared the parade before the press. Elhanan Ostrowitz was not. He arrived in a crisp white shirt that he wore beneath his thin prayer shawl. He was in his mid-twenties with a short ragged brown beard and ringlets hanging from his temples. He wore a kippa, handcuffs, and a vacuous expression that he maintained as he walked towards the courtroom chaperoned on either side by a plain-clothes policeman. He seemed utterly indifferent to the circumstances in which he found himself.

He was, as requested, remanded in custody for five days. As we milled around before the hearing we found the lawyer for the youngest of the three accused. He was dressed in cargo pants and training shoes. His one concession to the usual formality of the justice system was a black tie, though it was strung around his neck by a piece of elastic, so it was at best a half-hearted effort. He was cagey about whether his client had been in trouble for this kind of thing before. However the court heard that the vandalism at Yad Vashem was the culmination of several months of attacks on a range of national monuments including those commemorating soldiers killed in action. These young men had been brought up by their families to believe that the Holocaust was the collective divine punishment of the Jews for the sins of the secular and the Zionists.
⁹
Mrs Ostrowitz was hiding her face, but she wasn’t hiding it in shame.

If the vast majority of Israelis simply don’t get the ultra-Orthodox, then the vast majority of the ultra-Orthodox simply don’t get the Neturei Karta and other fringe groups like them. The Neturei Karta made headlines in Israel for sending a delegation in 2005 to meet with the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at his ‘World without Zionism’ conference in Tehran. They then issued a statement saying: ‘It is a dangerous distortion, to see the President’s words, as indicative of anti-Jewish sentiments.’ They were, they said, ‘saddened by the hysteria’. They are used to it by now though.

More recently their members laid a wreath in Lebanon at the tomb of a Hezbollah leader, and the sect regularly takes part in pro-Palestinian protests, burning the Israeli flag. But they are not even the outer edge of the fringe. Members of their sect denounced what has been described in Israel as the ‘Jewish Taliban’ cult, a small group of newly religious ultra-Orthodox women who cover themselves entirely in thick black cloaks so nothing at all of them can be seen.

Stories about the utterly obscure elements of the ultra-Orthodox are combined in the Israeli mainstream media with a constant diet of items that reinforce the message that the Haredim are all mad or bad for Israel. Headlines scream: ‘Rampant child abuse in ultra-Orthodox families’,
¹⁰
or ‘Modesty Patrol lynched me’.
¹¹
This invective has been around for years, and grew out of the clash of ideas between Zionism and the teachings of Orthodox Judaism.

Back at the creation of the state, while the numbers and influence of the Haredim remained small and insignificant, they were tolerated because they could be ignored. But the growth in their population combined with the country’s political system, which produces huge fractious coalition governments, has given the Haredim much more political power. Or, as the country’s most liberal newspaper, the English-language
Ha’aretz
, headlined in an op-ed by one of its leading commentators, Amir Oren: ‘Israel’s Haredi minority is ruining the majority’s life’.
¹²

The Babylonian exile in 586 bc saw the beginning of the movement of Jewish people out of the Middle East to form new communities in Europe and North Africa.
¹³
Israel’s Jewish population is broken down into three main strands based on the geographical origin of their ancestors who branched out from the original community. The Ashkenazim came from central Europe. The Sephardim are the descendants of those Jews expelled from Portugal and Spain in the fifteenth century during the Inquisitions established by the Catholic Church. The Mizrahim are Jews originally from the Middle East and North Africa. These were also areas to which many Sephardi Jews had fled, so these two groups have a shared modern history and are politically closer today than they are to the Ashkenazim. The Ashkenazim are often seen by the rest of society as the core of the self-serving establishment. Men from Ashkenazi backgrounds earn a third more than the average monthly salary.
¹⁴

‘But the most basic thing to understand about this country is that this is not a country of European Jews,’ says Professor Alexander Yakobson from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Department of History.

Whether one thinks it was a wonderful thing or one thinks it was a colonial enterprise, it is always those poor German Jews or those sinister Zionists, but they are all Europeans and they are Westerners and they came to Palestine and they established a Western colonial outpost. It is true the pioneering labour Zionist elite that led the creation of the state were largely homogeneous. But within this salad which is called the Jewish Israeli society, roughly half of it originates from the Middle East. With a Libyan component and Moroccan, Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, Yemenite and so on.

The complications of managing this society, which is so mixed and so divided between the secular and the religious, go back to the creation of the state.

The Zionists who led the struggle to create a homeland for the Jews were driven by political not religious zeal. Zionism emerged from nineteenth-century central and Eastern Europe. It offered a modern alternative to traditionalism, but one that still claimed to be no less legitimately Jewish. The Haredi way of life started then, as a reaction to this modernity. The Zionist leadership could see the conflict that would exist within the new Jewish society because the same tensions existed within the diaspora as Zionism grew in strength. David Ben-Gurion led the struggle for the creation of Israel and became its first prime minister. In the year before the nation was born he sought to settle where the boundaries between religion and state would fall. On 19 June 1947 he wrote a letter to the World Agudat Israel Federation, which was the political arm of Orthodox Judaism, in which he said: ‘we have no intention of establishing a theocratic state.’ But he was striving for unity among the diaspora and so set out ‘The Structural Foundation for Religio-Political Accommodation’ in the new state of Israel.

This was based on four points. The first and second were that the legal day of rest would be Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, and that state kitchens would serve kosher foods. The third was a promise regarding marital affairs: to ‘do all that can be done to satisfy the needs of the religiously observant in this matter and to prevent a rift in the Jewish People’. This led to the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate having jurisdiction over all personal status issues, not just marriage, without a civil alternative being available. Finally, and as it turned out even more importantly for the modern state, they would ‘accord full freedom to each stream to conduct education according to its conscience and will avoid any adverse effects on religious conscience’.
¹⁵
The details set out by Ben-Gurion’s points were not legally binding, but they became known as the ‘Status Quo Agreement’. It has been the basis for managing the communal relations between the secular and religious. Or rather it was the basis for all the squabbling and shady backroom deals through the years, particularly once the Haredim started to wield political power.