MERCAZ USA Newsletter — Fall 2009

Masorti Institutions Under Attack

Fire — both physical and verbal — has recently been set against Masorti institutions in Israel.

In July, the entrance to the Masorti synagogue in Modiin, Yedid Nefesh, was damaged in an arson attack. The incident came just two weeks after members of the community, which numbers about forty families, placed a sign on the facade of the synagogue identifying it with the Masorti Movement. It should be remembered that Yedid Nefesh was one of six non-Orthodox synagogues that received funding last year for building purposes from the Israeli government.

While the Modiin police reject the charge that the incident was religiously motivated against Masorti Judaism and has the characterized the attack as the work of "bored youths on summer vacation", not in keeping with the general accepting attitude in the city, the congregation has, nonetheless, suffered in the past its share of Orthodox opposition.

Also, this is not the first arson attack on a Masorti synagogue. Back in June 2000, arsonists threw Molotov cocktails in the building that houses the Masorti congregation in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot.

At the same time, an Orthodox scholar of rabbinic literature, Prof. Shmuel Glick, was rejected as president of Lifshitz College, a prominent Religious Zionist institute for teachers' training in Jerusalem, after having initially been offered the position, because he had in the past taught at the Masorti-affiliated Schechter Institute for Jewish Studies.

Though known as strictly Orthodox, Rabbi Glick was opposed by a number of Orthodox supports in what appears to be a long-standing power struggle at the college.

As Prof. David Golinkin, President of the Schechter Institute, remarked "[Glick] has been teaching halacha, responsa and the history of Jewish education for years at Schechter. This episode is a tragedy for Religious Zionism in Israel. The moderated are disappearing or silent."

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