Tel-Chai Nation

The case is being made in Israel Hayom by a Haredi woman, Esty Shushan, on how, unlike in the US, the leaderships of Haredi communities in Israel during the Covid crisis have been nothing short of a fiasco:

Under the auspices of the existing system, initiatives promoting reforms in the ultra-Orthodox education system have been blocked, and the same fate befalls any attempt to improve the situation of Haredi women. The victims of sexual assault and domestic abuse are silenced and abuses in the workplace are allowed – and the list continued.

Power corrupts, and the ultra-Orthodox leadership has received unlimited power. True, most Haredi voters elected it, but under the auspices of state laws, Haredi cities were "red zones" long before the coronavirus pandemic made it all the rage.

This absolute power, however, was not used by community leaders to bring order into the chaos of the coronavirus outbreak. Yes, Haredi leaders are skilled in mobilizing voters to the ballots come Election Day, but they failed to use their power to stop the catastrophe that is slowly but surely killing off these voters.

The outcome of the Haredi leadership's decision-making process during the first coronavirus outbreak was terrible, but they could be chalked up to the uncertainty of dealing with something never before seen. But what happened during the second outbreak is nothing short of gross negligence.

This is different in many ways from what's seen in the USA, where, other than the Satmar, most ultra-Orthodox are trying to maintain good health standards during the pandemic. Here, it's more the fault of the Haredi leaderships who, in their socialist-influenced mindsets, have caused a lot of problems, and still are, as per this Jerusalem Post article:

Torah trumps everything for the Haredi Jewish community, a top Israeli political scientist tells The Media Line in explaining why hundreds of ultra-Orthodox schools reopened Sunday in open defiance of the government’s coronavirus rules.

“For them to have tens of thousands of young men risk their lives in order to study Torah is a more healthy way of living than forfeiting study of Torah in the community in order to try to do away with what the state thinks is the best way of eliminating the virus. They think they are doing something that promotes health,” says Prof. Dan Avnon, the Leon Blum Chair in Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Unfortunately, if they don't do the same in your everyday actions as we read them stressed in the Torah, then they haven't fulfilled what the Torah says at all. Instead, they've only risked making others ill by passing on the germs, if they're infected with them, beginning with, but not limited to, other residents of the Haredi community.

The ultra-Orthodox sector has been a major source of the spread of the coronavirus in Israel. A recent report from the Israel Democracy Institute, citing analysis of Health Ministry data by Prof. Eran Segal, a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and others, finds that the rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the Haredi community in October is five times greater than non-Haredi Israeli Jews and seven times greater than Israeli Arabs, accounting for 50% of the total infections this month despite being only 12.5% of the population.

“The rampant flaunting of the law and regulations by the ultra-Orthodox stems chiefly from their distrust of the authorities, the low level of enforcement by the police, priorities that elevate religious tradition and community life above public health considerations, and the living conditions of the ultra-Orthodox,” the report states.

Of course, when there's Haredis who commit violence against police, it makes it hard to enforce the law in those very neighborhoods, so that's another part of the problem. And this is why it'll be very difficult to rid ourselves of the Coronavirus properly, while at the same time, the Haredi community here sends itself on a cascade to disaster.

Labels: haredi corruption, Israel, Knesset, misogyny, Moonbattery, political corruption