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- Dispute in Israel Over Drafting Ultra-Orthodox Jews Threatens Netanyahu The New York Times
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Israel’s ultra-Orthodox reject criticism, defy virus rules
JERUSALEM (AP) — Mendy Moskowits, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Belz Hassidic sect in Jerusalem, doesn’t understand the uproar toward believers like him.
In recent weeks, ultra-Orthodox Jews have defied coronavirus restrictions by holding big funerals for beloved rabbis who died of COVID-19, celebrating large weddings, and continuing to send their children to schools. The gatherings have led to clashes with police and an unprecedented wave of public anger toward the religious community.
On Tuesday night, hundreds of ultra-Orthodox demonstrators protested lockdown restrictions, set dumpsters on fire, and faced off with police officers in Jerusalem.
Moskowits, like many other ultra-Orthodox faithful, says Israeli society doesn’t understand their way of life and has turned his community into a scapegoat.
“The media gives us, in my opinion, a very bad misrepresentation,” he said.
The ultra-Orthodox community makes up about 12% of Israel’s 9.3 million people. But it has wielded outsize influence, using its kingmaker status in parliament to secure benefits and generous government subsidies.
Ultra-Orthodox men are exempt from compulsory military service and often collect welfare payments while continuing to study full time in seminaries throughout adulthood. Their schools enjoy broad autonomy and focus almost entirely on religion while shunning basic subjects like math and science.
These privileges have generated disdain from the general public — resentment that has boiled over into outright hostility during the coronavirus crisis.
Gilad Malach, a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, says ultra-Orthodox believers accounted for over a third of the country’s COVID-19 cases in 2020. Among Israelis over 65, the ultra-Orthodox mortality rate was three times that of the general population, he added.
Health Ministry data show vaccination rates in ultra-Orthodox areas lag far behind the national average.
Ultra-Orthodox noncompliance, Malach said, stemmed in part from members not believing that they “need to obey the rules of the state, especially regarding questions of religious behavior.”
Ultra-Orthodox, also known as “Haredim,” follow a strict interpretation of Judaism, and prominent rabbis are the community’s arbiters in all matters. Many consider secular Israelis a recent aberration from centuries of unaltered Jewish tradition.
“We have rabbis. We don’t just do what we have in our minds,” Moskowits said. “We have listened to them for a few thousand years. We will listen to them today as well.”
While the ultra-Orthodox community is far from monolithic, many rabbis have either ignored or even intentionally flouted safety rules. The 93-year-old Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, one of the most influential spiritual leaders, has insisted schools remain open throughout the crisis.
On a recent day, scores of ultra-Orthodox girls cascaded from a grade school in the Romema neighborhood that was operating in violation of the law. Few wore masks or maintained distance from others. Classes went on at nearby boys’ elementary schools and yeshivas.
“We can’t have a generation go bust,” said Moskowits, who lives in Romema. “We are still sending our boys to school because we have rabbis who say Torah study saves and protects.”
In a community that largely shuns the internet, rabbis plaster “pashkevils,” or public notices, on walls in religious neighborhoods to spread their messages.
Some notices urged people not to get vaccinated, even using Holocaust imagery to scare people. “The vaccine is completely unnecessary! The pandemic is already behind us!” one read, comparing the rush for vaccinations to boarding a train to the Auschwitz death camp.
Ultra-Orthodox leaders say such views are held by a radical minority. Most people respect safety rules, they say, and the virus is spreading because communities are poor and people live in small apartments with large families.
Moskowits, a 29-year-old father of two, said some families have up to 10 children and just one bathroom. From 14, boys are sent to boarding schools and spend only the sabbath at home.
For many, lockdown “technically, physically doesn’t work,” Moskowits said. He called it a “human rights violation.”
Moskowits, who grew up in the U.K., speaks English with a British accent, but his vocabulary is heavily seasoned with Yiddish and Hebrew words. He wears the black velvet skullcap, pressed white shirt and black slacks typical of ultra-Orthodox men — but no mask, despite the government requiring them in public. He said he contracted COVID-19 in March and claims a letter from his doctor excuses him from wearing a mask.
A real estate developer, he punctuates his workday with prayers at a neighborhood synagogue, and tries once a week to pray at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, the holiest place where Jews can worship. Once a day, he performs ablutions at a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath, and he regularly studies religious texts with a partner.
The religious community is growing rapidly even though economists have long warned that the system is unsustainable. About 60% of its population is under 19, according to the Israel Democracy Institute.
Protecting the ultra-Orthodox way of life — or Yiddishkeit — is the community’s ultimate aim. If that means infections spread, that’s a price some members are willing to pay.
Ultra-Orthodox people “sacrifice most of their lives for the next generation and for preserving Yiddishkeit. We give away everything,” Moskowits said.
This view is hardly universal.
Nathan Slifkin, an Orthodox rabbi living in Israel, complained in a recent op-ed in the Jewish Chronicle that members of the Haredi community “genuinely see no connection between flouting the restrictions and people dying from COVID.”
Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, head of an ultra-Orthodox ambulance service called ZAKA, lost both his parents to the virus in January. He says rabbis urging followers to violate coronavirus regulations have “blood on their hands.”
Funerals play a central role in traditional Jewish life, and the pandemic has made them all too common. Cars with megaphones drive through religious neighborhoods announcing deaths and funeral details. Pashkevils notify communities when a prominent rabbi dies.
Shmuel Gelbstein, deputy director of a Jerusalem funeral society for the ultra-Orthodox community, said this year has been “very busy, very difficult regarding mortality, both when it comes to ordinary deaths, plus of course coronavirus, which is certainly an amount that adds to the load.”
Funerals for two leading Haredi rabbis who died of COVID-19 each drew an estimated 10,000 mourners last week.
Israel’s non-Orthodox majority was outraged at what they saw as contempt for the rules and selective enforcement by authorities.
But the ultra-Orthodox claim they are being unfairly singled out, noting that demonstrations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — protected under free speech laws — have been permitted to continue during the pandemic.
Moskowits explained that for the young men who flocked to these funerals, prominent rabbis are “a huge part of your life.”
“When these younger guys go to a funeral, they feel that their father died,” he said. “Nothing stands in the way. He will go to the funeral anyway.”
Covid Hastens Exit from Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox Community
JERUSALEM — When the pandemic swept through Israel, it upended Racheli Ohayon’s life in unexpected ways.
The 21-year-old phone center worker had questioned her ultra-Orthodox Jewish upbringing before but always stifled such thoughts by drowning them in even stricter religious observance.
Suddenly she was off work and under lockdown, her routines disrupted, holed up at home with seven younger siblings and plenty of time on her hands.
“When I had a lot of time to think, the questions flooded up again,” she said. “Suddenly, the rabbis didn’t know what to do. They aren’t doctors.”
She came to a decision that ranks among the most egregious offenses in the ultra-Orthodox world: She quit the community and took up a secular lifestyle.
As the virus has rampaged through Israel in recent months, it has shaken the assumptions of some in the insular ultra-Orthodox world, swelling the numbers of those who decide they want out.
Organizations that help ultra-Orthodox who have left the fold navigate their transition from the highly structured, rules-based lifestyle into modern Israeli society have noted a rise in demand for their services.
Experts attribute the departures to a breakdown of supervision and routine, a rise in internet use during the pandemic and generally more time for questioning and self-discovery.
“If they are not in their usual educational frameworks and are on the internet, meeting friends and going to the beach, that leads to a lot of exposure,” said Gilad Malach, who directs the ultra-Orthodox program at the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent think tank in Jerusalem. “They think of options they don’t think of when they are in yeshiva, and one of the options is to leave.”
For many, breaking away means being cut off by their families and leaving a tight-knit support system for an unfamiliar culture. In extreme cases, parents of offspring who leave sit shiva, observing the traditional mourning rituals as if they were dead.
While there is no comprehensive data on the scale of defections, Naftali Yawitz, who runs the division of the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry that helps fund those organizations, said there had been a “very significant wave” in recent months of both new leavers and more veteran ones seeking help.
One of those organizations, Hillel, which operates an emergency shelter with the ministry as well as rent-free, halfway apartments for leavers, has a waiting list for the shelter in Jerusalem, the first stop for many with nowhere to go. It has also noted a 50 percent increase in former ultra-Orthodox seeking help over the last year.
Out for Change, the other main organization, offered leavers the option of registering with the group for the first time last year, in part to help formalize their status in dealings with the authorities. Even though many are traumatized and conflicted by the break and reluctant to identify themselves, more than 1,300 signed up.
This was just what the ultra-Orthodox rabbis had feared and why some were so insistent on keeping their religious education institutions open in violation of lockdown regulations. In a letter calling for girls’ schools to reopen, Leah Kolodetzki, the daughter of one leading rabbi, said that in her father’s opinion “boredom leads to sin” and puts girls in “severe spiritual danger.”
Israel Cohen, a prominent ultra-Orthodox political commentator, played down concerns about the increasing flight from the ultra-Orthodox, known as Haredi in Hebrew, accusing Hillel, for one, of exploiting the health crisis to recruit more leavers with a publicity campaign. But he acknowledged that the Haredi leadership was afraid of losing control.
“There was a sense that the coronavirus caused not only physical harm, in terms of sickness and death, but also spiritual harm,” he said.
The pandemic has only accelerated a growing trend.
Even before the coronavirus crisis, the number of young adults leaving ultra-Orthodox communities had reached about 3,000 a year, according to a study by the Israel Democracy Institute, based on data up to 2018.
The desertions do not threaten the Haredi demographic clout. The more than one million Haredim account for over 12 percent of the population, and their high birthrate more than makes up for the numbers who are leaving.
Studies show that many leavers do not abandon Judaism altogether but are seeking more individualism and the ability to make their own choices about their lives.
But the deserters often find themselves in a netherworld, estranged from their families, community and the only way of life they knew and, lacking a secular education, ill-equipped to deal with the outside world.
Most Haredi boys’ schools teach little or no secular subject matter like math, English or science. Girls tend to study more math and English at school and go on to seminaries where they can learn certain professions like accounting.
After years of campaigning by activists, the Israeli government and the military recently introduced new policies recognizing former Haredim as a distinct social group, entitling them to special grants and courses to help them go to college, as well as funding for job training programs.
“These are strong people who left their comfort zone, where they had few choices to make and everything was clear-cut,” said Nadav Rozenblat, the chief executive of Out for Change. “If you chose to leave, it shows that you have motivation and backbone. It’s like being a new immigrant in Israel.”
The pandemic has also pried open the fault line between the Israeli mainstream and the ultra-Orthodox, who have been hit hard by the coronavirus and have been assailed by critics for their resistance to antivirus measures.
The battle over health and safety only compounded existing resentments. For years, officials and experts have sounded alarms that the rapid growth of the ultra-Orthodox population threatens the economy. About half of all Haredi men study Torah full time and subsist on government welfare. Most Haredi women work in low-grade jobs to support their families while also being primarily responsible for raising the children. Under a decades-old arrangement, most Haredi men avoid military service.
Those concerns have persuaded the government to offer financial incentives to young Haredi adults to forgo full-time study in religious seminaries, enlist for military service (an obligation for most other Israeli 18-year-olds), take academic or training courses to make up for the gaps in their education and to join the work force.
Under the new policies, those who left Haredi communities will be eligible for the same benefits, including educational and vocational programs offered to Haredi soldiers serving in special Haredi military units.
Similarly, the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry recently began defining ex-Haredim as a special category eligible to receive vouchers for vocational training courses, the same as those granted to Haredim.
The ministry is also planning to open a preparatory course for those hoping to pursue higher education.
“It’s not just about learning the ABC in English, but the social ABC,” said Mr. Yawitz, of the ministry. “It’s about how to speak to people. To learn from zero what is normal and what is not.”
Mr. Yawitz left the ultra-Orthodox world himself as a young teenager. Cut off by his family, he lived on the streets and was arrested at 17 for drug dealing before he was pardoned and rehabilitated. His personal struggle became the subject of documentary film.
Increasingly, though, the definition of ultra-Orthodox has become more flexible as the community frays at the edges. Some Haredim who have joined modern life have found options in some of the less rigid sects, allowing them to remain on the margins of the community rather than leave it altogether. Others live a double life, outwardly maintaining a strictly Orthodox lifestyle but secretly breaking the rules.
Dedi Rotenberg and his wife, Divan, discovered they were both closet doubters only months after they had been married in a match, the traditional method of arranged marriage in Haredi communities. About 15 months ago they finally moved out of Bnei Brak, the ultra-Orthodox city near Tel Aviv where they had both grown up, for a secular life in the south.
“There are a lot of things I still have to get used to,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “Slang, movies. At least once a week I hear my friends talking and I have no idea what they are saying.”
Ms. Ohayon had attended an ultra-Orthodox girls’ school where the only history taught was Jewish history. The school had computers, she said, but they were not connected to the internet. She had never been to see a movie, never worn a pair of jeans.
When she had to stop work because of the pandemic, she began testing the boundaries. She bought a smartphone and discovered new worlds of information and music through Google and YouTube. She joined her local library in Petah Tikva and started reading secular literature that had previously been off-limits.
One novel in particular, “The Sweetness of Forgetting” by Kristin Harmel, jolted her out of her cloistered world. The novel follows a Cape Cod woman’s discovery of her secret family history, which spans the Holocaust and three different religious traditions.
The exposure to new cultures, people and ideas had a profound effect.
“I grew up with a sense of the Haredim being special and different,” she said. “I discovered I’m not so special or different, that there are millions like me. That’s what suddenly made me say ‘That’s it, I’m leaving.’”
Israel’s Leaders Clash with Ultraorthodox Over Covid-19 Lockdowns, Vaccines
BNEI BRAK, Israel—Israel’s attempt to suppress a roiling pandemic has collided with a hard-hit ultraorthodox community that has proven resistant to lockdowns and suspicious of the nation’s mass vaccination campaign.
On Sunday, thousands of ultraorthodox mourners attended two funerals of famous rabbis who died from the coronavirus. The mourners flouted bans on public gatherings of no more than 10 people on the same day that Israel’s cabinet extended a strict lockdown that includes barring all international flights. Thousands of men dressed in black wool hats and suits crowded together, many without masks, images of the event show. Fearing violence, police steered away from arrests while some top Israeli politicians seethed.
“This is how unequal enforcement looks,” said
Benny Gantz,
the defense minister and head of the Blue and White party. “Millions of families and children are locked in their homes and abide by the rules while thousands of haredim crowd the funeral, most of them even without masks,” he said, using the Hebrew word for ultraorthodox.
The funerals followed anti-lockdown protests in Bnei Brak and other ultraorthodox cities the week before, in which ultraorthodox men threw rocks at police, lit dumpsters on fire and knocked down street signs and light poles.
Many of the mourners crowding together for a rabbi’s funeral on Sunday in Jerusalem weren’t wearing face masks.
Photo:
Ariel Schalit/Associated Press
Israel’s health officials have also struggled to coax ultraorthodox to take a Covid-19 vaccine. While much of Israel has lined up for vaccinations, the ultraorthodox population has been slower to get on board, with some doubting the safety of the vaccine and others suggesting the country’s citizens are being used to test its efficacy.
“This isn’t a vaccine. It’s an experiment,” said
Izhar Mahpud,
a 57-year-old resident from Bnei Brak, an ultraorthodox city just east of Tel Aviv that has been one of the hardest hit by Covid-19 in the country. “I’m not ready to be a rat in a laboratory.”
Israel aims to vaccinate much of its population by March and get the economy going again, allowing the tiny nation beside the Mediterranean sea to serve as a global showcase for how to beat back the deadly virus. But the ultraorthodox have undermined those lofty goals, largely by bucking lockdowns and shying from vaccines.
Israel’s ultraorthodox make up about 12% of the population but account for nearly one-third of the country’s coronavirus infections. Israel currently has 68,331 active coronavirus cases with new infections hovering at about 7,000 a day.
Officials are scrambling to get the latest surge under control. A British variant of the virus accounts for about 70% of current coronavirus infections, even as almost one-third of Israelis have received the first dose of a vaccination. Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu
last month banned all international flights and lawmakers passed a bill Sunday doubling fines for lockdown violations.
Ultraorthodox Jews argued with Israeli police officers during a protest over coronavirus lockdown restrictions in Ashdod last month.
Photo:
Oded Balilty/Associated Press
Public health officials say the ultra-Orthodox community is particularly vulnerable to the fast-moving virus. Their large families typically live in crowded apartments and traditionally shun electronic communication that helps get information out about the vaccines.
Data from Israel’s health ministry shows Israel’s ultraorthodox are getting vaccinated at a lower rate than other groups. Among those over 60, to whom the campaign has been open the longest, 85% of all Israelis have taken the vaccine, compared with 78% of Israel’s ultraorthodox.
Ultraorthodox and Arab towns are lagging behind in overall immunity to the virus due to the lower vaccination rates, according to
Eran Segal,
a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science who presented his findings to Israel’s government on Sunday evening. “It’s going to slow down the decline of the pandemic,” said Mr. Segal.
Health officials say that infections in ultraorthodox communities have gone down in recent days, as some leading rabbis have endorsed vaccinations. There are also efforts under way to combat misinformation and get residents to take the vaccine.
In the large ultraorthodox city of Bnei Brak, local officials have set up a war room. In the oval-shaped, wood-paneled room on the top floor of city hall, with portraits of important religious figures lining the walls, young ultraorthodox sit around a large circular table with large jugs of hand sanitizer and work the phones. They stare at spreadsheets with information about everyone who has or hasn’t been vaccinated.
Officials had called nearly 10,000 people who hadn’t been vaccinated—and spoken with nearly 7,000 of them. About 5,000 said they wanted a vaccine but hadn’t been able to get one yet. Another 1,500 or so didn’t want to be vaccinated. The city officials work to overcome any obstacles raised on the calls.
For those who don’t have a ride to a vaccination center, they arrange one. If would-be vaccine recipients can’t get in touch with their health insurance providers, they also help. And if anyone they reach doesn’t want to take the vaccine, they note why.
Avi Blumenthal, who leads the health ministry’s outreach to the ultraorthodox, said he and his staff are combing through lists of Israel’s ultraorthodox towns to find the rabbis who are against vaccination, and seeking answers. In one instance, an ultraorthodox community in Jerusalem had low vaccine rates that many attributed to its rabbi’s alleged antivaccine stance. But when health officials interviewed the rabbi, they learned he was actually pro-vaccine—someone had spread a rumor attributed to him that the vaccine is dangerous.
An ultraorthodox Jewish man received a coronavirus vaccine in Jerusalem last month.
Photo:
abir sultan/epa/Shutterstock
Yehuda Shaish,
63, who runs four ultra-Orthodox schools in Bnei Brak and nearby towns, said he waited until the rabbis blessed the vaccines. “After the rabbis authorized it, I went happily,” he said.
Even with rabbis’ blessings, many ultraorthodox remain skeptical about vaccines. Yedidya Hasson, 28, who manages a network of WhatsApp groups with 30,000 people in which some members have questioned the wisdom of vaccines and coronavirus restrictions, says he won’t take the vaccine at least for now because he fears possible health risks.
“When it comes to vaccines,” he said, “I think that the media in Israel is hiding the truth.”
Some ultraorthodox leaders say that while community mistrust may help to explain resistance to vaccines and recent displays of civil disobedience, that distrust doesn’t justify violating rules that endanger public health. “You expect from religious men to be more moral,” said Rabbi
Dov Halbertal,
a prominent ultraorthodox lawyer and commentator. “But when it comes to the biggest test of saving lives, we are failing.”
Write to Felicia Schwartz at Felicia.Schwartz@wsj.com
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Israel coronavirus: some ultra-Orthodox Jews resort to violence and slurs over lockdowns
More widely, police actions against them are seen by many Israelis as a long overdue effort to end the exceptionalism that has characterized the ultra-Orthodox for decades. It’s allowed them to shirk military service, live on state benefits and often act as king makers in Israeli politics, critics and political rivals say.
Bnei Brak, a largely ultra-Orthodox city of more than 200,000, and the small Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim have seen the worst of the violence.
Extremists within the community have been blamed for graffiti on a Jerusalem wall which said that the city’s police chief was “Hitler.”
The atmosphere has become so febrile that some Haredim, as the ultra-Orthodox are collectively known, have pinned yellow Star of David badges on their jackets and labeled recent police crackdowns in Bnei Brak as “Kristallnacht.”
These allusions to the Holocaust and allegations of Israeli “Nazism” have been widely and immediately condemned by rabbis and politicians from within the Haredi community. But the same leaders have been equivocal, at best, over whether to obey the country’s lockdown and social distancing regulations during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The leader of the Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox community, Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, has repeatedly ordered the community’s schools to stay open in defiance of government regulations over many months. Recently the rabbi is reported to have said that they should not open if confrontation with the police looked likely.
The rate of Covid-related deaths in people over 65 among the ultra-Orthodox was estimated last December to be about 3.6% higher than the Israeli norm, according to the Ministry of Health.
Health ministry data show Haredi communities to be suffering infection rates of well over 20% of those tested, and ultra-Orthodox patient admissions are among the highest in the country.
Haredi families have an average of seven children and are (alongside Israeli Arabs) the poorest community in the country. They live in densely packed areas where the men are encouraged to spend a lifetime in religious study.
Almost half of the Haredi population lives in material poverty, according to the OECD.
Although rarely integrated with other parts of Israeli society, they live highly active social and religious lives. Gathering frequently in large numbers is a central part of their cultural life.
“Every day for hours, we are in synagogues, we are meeting each other, we are together in lessons, we meet the rabbis every day, more on Shabbat,” Dov Halbertal, an ordained rabbi and expert on Jewish law, told CNN.
“In the end it is very difficult practically [to socially distance]. Besides we are big families, we have people of every age, we have 10 people in one small apartment, it’s very difficult… To be locked in the apartment, you are used to a social life,” he said.
An ultra-Orthodox Jew himself, Halbertal is also deeply critical of fellow rabbis who, for almost a year, have led their communities in rebelling against nationwide regulations intended to lower Israel’s Covid-19 infection rate.
He said that many rabbis feared their followers would suffer spiritual damage if they stayed away from study and communal prayer. And that some feared younger members would stray from their congregations altogether.
“The rabbis can lose their power over communities,” Halbertal added.
But he condemned the Haredim for putting themselves above secular laws intended to save lives.
Halbertal spoke on a street in Mea Shearim where almost every corner is plastered with posters announcing the recent deaths of ultra-Orthodox people. They have not all been killed by Covid, but it’s hard to avoid a sense that there are more of these black-and-white notices than usual.
“I love the ultra-Orthodox that I belong to. But I see that the moral failure is so deep and for me I cannot sleep at night thinking of the deaths — of their blood in the earth shouting for us. We fail in the time of our test, of our moral test as religious people,” said Halbertal.
Israel’s government is considering extending a strict lockdown due to end on Sunday for another week, and some politicians have called for a doubling of fines for breaches of social distancing regulations.
Infection rates and deaths have been falling slightly but they remain high even as Israel continues to lead the world in vaccine rollout, with around a third of those targeted for vaccination having had their first shots.
Bnei Brak’s mayor, Avraham Rubinstein, insists that his city is getting to grips with the Covid regulations and condemned violence and attacks on the police.
“There are a few people who are behaving violently. We denounce them. We don’t want them, and their own communities don’t want them. Their communities gave them over to the police,” he said, just a few days after he’d been personally threatened on the city’s streets by mobs of extremist Haredi youth.
Rubinstein insisted that most schools and synagogues are closed and that the municipality was vigorously driving the vaccination campaign. But health ministry data suggest it still has far to go in places like Bnei Brak, with just 12% receiving their first dose. Many other Haredi communities are in the low single figures.
Part of this poor vaccination record may be explained as a result of a boycott encouraged by anonymous red posters seen all over Mea Shearim.
They say that the media is part of a plot to hide evidence that the inoculation campaign began at the same time that a new Covid variant emerged in UK and dub the shot a “vaccine of death.”
These same posters may also be why a CNN team filming in the area was attacked by yeshiva (religious school) teenage students who tried to break a camera, and called the media “murderers.”
Michael Schwartz contributed to this report.
Five Israeli police officers wounded in clashes with ultra-Orthodox demonstrators over coronavirus restrictions
Five Israeli police officers were wounded Sunday in clashes with ultra-Orthodox demonstrators protesting coronavirus restrictions in cities across the country.
Police reported the five officer injuries and at least four arrests as large crowds of ultra-Orthodox protesters confronted officers in multiple cities in Israel, The Associated Press reported.
Israeli law enforcement has been mostly hesitant to crack down on people in the ultra-Orthodox community for noncompliance with COVID-19 requirements, including by reopening schools, praying in synagogues and holding large weddings and funerals.
But on Sunday, officers were faced with the crowds of demonstrators speaking out against the restrictions.
In Bnei Brak, young men challenged police and threatened journalists, leading an officer to fire his pistol into the air to deter the crowd, according to the AP. Two days earlier, ultra-Orthodox demonstrators had attacked a police vehicle in the city.
Law enforcement used tear gas and putrid-smelling water to break up hundreds of ultra-Orthodox protesters who were outside of a reopened school and calling police “Nazis.” Dozens of demonstrators also faced off with police in Ashdod outside of an ultra-Orthodox school.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin NetanyahuBenjamin (Bibi) NetanyahuMORE condemned disobedience of the coronavirus restrictions, saying a small minority of people were behaving in an “unacceptable” way.
“I expect all citizens of Israel to respect the safety guidelines,” he said, according to the AP. “That includes all the sectors, including the ultra-Orthodox.”
Israel has one of the highest rates of infection of any country in the world, with an average of more than 8,000 cases being confirmed per day. Health experts have attributed the recent spread of the virus to the lack of compliance among the ultra-Orthodox community.
Israel has recorded almost 600,000 COVID-19 cases and nearly 4,400 fatalities, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
COVID-19 has disproportionately affected the ultra-Orthodox community, which makes up more than one-third of Israel’s cases while being slightly more than 10 percent of the population.
The uptick in cases could endanger the success of Israel’s vaccination effort after the country has vaccinated more than a quarter of its 9.2 million population, according to the AP.
The protests also come as Netanyahu announced that the nation will shut down its international airport to almost all flights beginning on Tuesday until Jan. 31. Exceptions will be made for a small amount of humanitarian cases and cargo flights.