The rabbi’s foolish words

Hanoch Daum slams Rabbi Peretz for smearing non-Jews over Ushrenko murder

Hanoch Daum|Published: 11.05.09 , 00:51

For many years, former Shas member and Interior Minister Yitzhak Peretz sat at some attic without disturbing the public. Too bad he decided to pay us a visit, and also rather odd that he did. A man who built up such a sectarian party, which does not accept Ashkenazim or women into its ranks, is not really the person who should be telling us that non-Jewish Russian immigration brought terrible murderers to Israel.

“I predicted it; I said we will regret it for generations to come,” Peretz said in an interview with the “Haredim website” in the wake of the Ushrenko massacre’s resolution. “We have murderers here and we have anti-Semites…regrettably, all we can do now is watch the grim results of the weakness that overcame Israel’s leaders, ministers, and advisors.”

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Well, I’m not saying that it isn’t true: There are violent murderers among immigrants from Russia, yet the fact that they are Russian or non-Jewish is irrelevant to their horrific acts; just like Eli Pimstein’s goatee was irrelevant to the fact he killed his daughter (and he wasn’t a Russian as far as I recall). Similarly, that fact that the Orthodox mother who abused her children in Beit Shemesh was Sephardic had nothing to do with her horrific acts.

Moreover, a person whose party produced such an impressive number of prisoners could be expected to show a little modesty, at least when it comes to smearing entire sectors because of the acts of few.

Here is something that Rabbi Peretz, but not only him, must learn: Criminals make up their own sector. It’s a sector that comprises mean and cruel people devoid of compassion. People who think they deserve everything and that they are allowed to steal, hit, take bribes and take lives.

These people, and it doesn’t matter whether they live in some hut in Judea and Samaria or in an apartment in Rishon Lezion, or in the same Jerusalem neighborhood as Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, are bad people who must be slapped with tough sentences and be ostracized from the public arena. These people are the only ones responsible for their acts.

The killer of the Ushrenko family did not represent the Russian immigrant community, but rather, his own corrupt soul, just like Rabbi Peretz did not represent all rabbis with his foolish words, but merely himself.