Scenario One: Commando Units in Tel Aviv

As the school year finally began this year in Israel, following the teacher’s strike, Meretz MK Yossi Sarid made an appeal on the “Voice of Israel” radio newsreel.

Sarid advised principals, teachers and parents to be on the lookout for Rabbis or Yeshiva students who may lurk anywhere near schoolyards, kindergarten teachers or nursery school promoters who may want to seduce children to enter their preschool programs, and/or “anyone with a religious look” who may be “encroaching in your neighborhood”.

Sarid then followed with an “assurance”.

This year, Sarid said reassuredly, “we have set up commando units, yes, commando units, in every secular neighborhood. We have set up hotlines throughout the country. The job of the commando units and the hotline is to warn of encroaching religious people before they grab our children”.

And in one of the leaflets distributed at secular schools and neighborhoods, pictures of little children with yarmulkes being herded into a nursery school were captioned “Let’s stamp this out while they’re young”.

Sarid’s “hotlines” worked.

Staffers now operate such hotlines, with ample budget provided by one of Israel’s “pluralism” lobbies, with ample funds provided by contributors from North American non-Orthodox religious Jews who think that they have contributed to promote dialogue and pluralistic religious thought amongst Israeli Jews.

The results are real.

Many Israeli Secular schools and neighborhoods have now effectively eliminated any religious or Jewish content to their lives, reinforcing the continuing Israeli phenomenon of Jewish communities that develop almost an anti-Semitic modus operandi. Instead of welcoming, say, Reform or other forms of Jewish observance into secular schools and neighborhoods, the plethora of antireligious organizations have initiated a system that mitigates against any religious or Jewish influence whatsoever, while the various religious groups have simply abandoned their interest in making the effort to influence these communities that are now devoid of Judaism.