Tel-Chai Nation

The Haredi health minister, Yaakov Litzman, who's contracted COVID himself, stirred up plenty of understandable anger over his contempt for rules the health ministry he runs tried to set in place due to the crisis:

The news of Litzman’s diagnosis sent shockwaves across Israel because it meant that not only was the nation’s top health official running his department from home during a pandemic that has killed more than 54,000 globally (and at least 60 locally), but that the entire senior echelon of Israel’s government had to go home as well. Following Litzman’s diagnosis, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mossad Director Yossi Cohen, National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat and Hadassah Hospital CEO Zeev Rothstein all went into quarantine since they all had met with the health minister in recent days.

Litzman found himself the target of widespread anger following reports in the Hebrew press claiming that he had contracted the virus after attending an illicit prayer gathering of the sort that had been banned recently by his ministry, with one unidentified Cabinet member claiming that he had “put all of our lives in danger,” The Times of Israel reported.

Litzman denies the allegation, insisting he only attended such services when they were still permitted and was sure to keep his distance from other worshippers on those occasions.

His defense, however, speaks to a broader controversy: Litzman’s critics say he downplayed the situation initially and was slow to institute, and then enforce, social distancing measures in the haredi community, including refraining from closing synagogues and stopping prayer quorums, or minyans, in a timely fashion.

Litzman “was strikingly reluctant to acknowledge and internalize the threat posed by the pandemic,” The Times of Israel’s editor in chief, David Horovitz, wrote Friday in a column.

“He resisted the stringent limitations on public movement his ministry’s senior officials sought to impose — stalling regulations that might otherwise have come into effect early last month just before Purim, and pleading in vain with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just 10 days ago to allow synagogues to stay open for at least small groups of worshipers standing two meters [about six feet] apart,” Horovitz wrote.

But Dr. Gilad Malach, director of the Ultra-Orthodox Society Program at the Israel Democracy Institute, told reporters on Monday that he believes Litzman truly did not understand the danger of the spreading virus.

Born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany following World War II, Litzman was raised in Brooklyn’s heavily Jewish Borough Park neighborhood, moving to Israel as a teenager and eventually becoming a close confidant and adviser to the Gerrer rebbe. It was in this capacity that he entered politics in the late 1990s, heading the Agudat Israel faction of the United Torah Judaism party and rising to become one of Israel’s most prominent haredi politicians.

The problem is that Litzman, like a lot of other Haredis who stick to an insular lifestyle that eschews vital information on how life is built, science included, clearly made no attempt all these years to live as an informed person, and worst, seems to believe religion alone will ensure he's safe from every hazard around. But all he's done is prove he's not even informed about the themes in the Torah that can warn about the dangers of living insularly, why it pays to work and defend the country (including through military service, which so many insular Haredi clans shun), and in the end, all it proves is he has no true faith in the Torah he claims to uphold. And above all, that he's not qualified for the role health minister.

There's also his other alleged offenses to consider:

Even before the current crisis, Litzman’s tenure has been marked in recent years by multiple controversies. In August, the Israel Police recommended that he be criminally indicted for bribery and aiding an alleged pedophile.

Litzman is accused of pressuring Jerusalem district psychiatrist Jacob Charnes to say that accused child molester Malka Leifer was mentally unfit to stand trial. She is accused of molesting several girls as the principal of a haredi girls’ school in Australia.

The extradition battle over Leifer, who fled Melbourne in 2008 with the assistance of haredim there after the allegations surfaced, has dragged on for several years, frustrating her accusers.

According to an investigation by Israel’s Channel 13 that aired last year, Litzman allegedly intervened improperly to aid at least 10 sex offenders from Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community.

“Yaakov Litzman is probably the most hated figure in Israel by those following the Malka Leifer case,” said Manny Waks, the CEO of Kol V’Oz, an organization that addresses child sex abuse in Jewish communities around the world.

Waks said that Litzman’s reappointment needlessly complicated otherwise friendly relations between Jerusalem and Canberra and caused a rift between the State of Israel and the Australian Jewish community, whose leaders had previously called for the minister’s ouster.

Litzman also faces bribery charges for allegedly helping to prevent the shutdown of a food business that the Health Ministry determined had serious sanitation violations. And he is accused of offering special benefits to Health Ministry employees in exchange for them preventing the Jerusalem-area restaurant and catering service from being closed.

That too is a serious breach of health standards. Another strong suggestion the man doesn't have a clue what his job requires.

In a letter addressed to Netanyahu last month, a group of leading Israeli medical professionals demanded Litzman’s ouster, accusing him of allowing the country’s public health system to deteriorate under his watch. A copy of the letter obtained by the local news website Ynet complained bitterly about numerous “deficiencies” brought about by the minister’s neglect.

“Despite efforts to deal with the needs, those have only increased with hospitals that are in the country’s periphery, offering inferior care while Israel itself was falling behind the rest of the world in the quality of care, while private medicine was allowed to thrive at the expense of public health services,” the doctors wrote, calling for someone with a medical background to take over.

In 2013, Bloomberg rated Israel’s health system the fourth most efficient worldwide, and it was still ranked sixth in 2018. But experts have been warning of mounting problems.

According to a 2019 report by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies, “there are systemic failures in planning, budgeting, and regulation by the government especially in light of the increasing needs of Israel’s aging population.”

The center reported a 22% decline in the number of hospital beds over a 15-year period and asserted that Israel’s hospital system is “characterized by a diminished ability to handle emergencies” — an issue determined by the government’s approved budget.

If Litzman has anything to do with those negligencies, it's another reason why he can't remain in the position, and clearly, he's extorting the government lest he presumably take some traitorous action in revenge. Interestingly enough, Litzman even refused an offer to be appointed housing minister, despite this possibly being a role he could excel in.

It's high time somebody stood up to his corruption. If anything, he's bound to go down in history as the most irresponsible and corrupt health minister, to the point where now, he suffered COVID infection himself.

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