I love Ramat Beis Shemesh. My son and his family live there and we stay there every time we visit Israel. Ramat Bet Shemesh is an interesting community. It is a suburb of the city of Bet Shemesh and was built in an area that has natural physical beauty with a gorgeous view of the surrounding mountainous area. The natural beauty of that location is matched by an equally beautiful architectural plan whereby the houses, stores, and synagogues all were built using Jerusalem stone and arranged in the tradition of the best of Suburban America with convenient malls a beautiful park centrally located and the peace and tranquility one might expect in a suburb like this. The developers had planned for it to be an upscale secular city but had a difficult time attracting secular buyers. The city has, however, attracted religious Jews who need more affordable housing than is traditionally available in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak.The result is a burgeoning religious community comprised of religious Jews many of whom are American or at least Anglo... divided between Datim and Charedim with a tilt toward the Charedi side. There are a few secular Jews as well but they are negligible it seems.
But all is not well. From yesterday’s Jerusalem Post:
A family living in Ramat Beit Shemesh has been targeted by a group of haredi extremists in the community who deemed that members of the family were not "religious enough" for its taste, police and the family said Monday.
The family, which is haredi and has lived in the predominantly haredi community for the last six years, has been subject to four nights of protests outside their home.
The target of the demonstrators has been the family's two eldest sons, 22 and 20, who no longer wear haredi garb and are modern Orthodox, the mother of the family said."
“Her two sons were beaten up on the way home Friday night by extremists, who have held a demonstration outside their home every night since then, calling on the family to move out, she said.
After police arrested two haredi protesters who took part in the Sunday night demonstration, hundreds of haredim rioted Monday afternoon on a main road leading into the neighborhood in Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet, setting trash bins on fire and pelting police with stones.
Some have tried to blame the messenger. They have accused the media of presenting a one-sided view. Well, that is a fair accusation because the media does report from a vantage point of bias as reporters are human and bring their prejudices with them when they view events and report on them. Many defenders of the proteters said the two boys were really involved in criminal activity.
The problem is that this has happened before both in Ramat Bet Shemesh and other Charedi cities. There are some people who are self appointed vigilantes who seek to “honor the Torah” by creating a Chilul HaShem. They are not Kannoim but Reshaim... evil people who have nothing better to do with their time and will look for any pretext to cause trouble. This is likely what happened here. It was an opportunity to cause trouble under the guise of religious protest and activism.
Were the two boys who targeted by Charedim really involved in criminal activity? I don’t know, but I doubt it. A poster on the Areivim List who is very Charedi and never misses an opportunity to defend Charedim tells of experiences and put it this way:
This sounds like a bit of a replay of what went on in Beitar for awhile and I can assure you that if the boys were actually doing anything criminal the neighbors most certainly would have involved the police.
What sounds more likely is that the boys were just not frum enough and all attempts to pin something on them to get rid of them had failed and so some people were sent to beat them up and then when those people were [rightly] arrested a riot ensued.
In Beitar a couple of years ago there was an all-out pogrom against all boys of a certain age one Friday night and the mayor of our city had told the police to stay away, which they did, until someone called them in when things got way out of hand. There was a meeting at which a number of community leaders and Rabbonim spoke to several hundred men of the city and got them all riled up and out for blood. When one man
tried to stand up and call for moderation and non-violence they threw him out of the shul the rally was held in. All day long there had been trucks going around blaring the orders of all of the city's rabbonim to attend this rally, so plenty came and they knew what they were there for. For weeks before that, the "powers that be" in Beitar had been flooding the local publications with slander against teenage boys, who they attributed all sorts of crimes and other nefarious doings to that later turned out to be either made up completely or done mostly by adults trying to make the city's kids look bad.
The pogromers were mostly chassidim, but there were a good number of
Litvaks in there too. They were using iron bars to smash heads in and
one of them ripped a potted tree out by the roots [Remember, this was
Shabbos] to try to smash in the windows of the police station where the police had taken two boys to protect them from being murdered by the enraged mob. Now, except for one or two brats, NONE of these boys had been involved in criminal activity of any sort nor did they intend to be. At one house, a boy was home with his family that some people didn’t like and so they tried to smash their way into his building to lynch him and his ill mother and the other women of his family were standing at the glass door of their building screaming and piling their furniture up against the door to try to keep the mob at bay...
Remember, this is a very Charedi individual.
And this brings me back to the incident in Ramat Bet Shemesh. Any community which tolerates such activity is in effect promoting it. These rioters think they are God’s soldiers. Who puts these ideas in their heads? Why do they think a Charedi becoming modern orthodox is worth of such retribution... and are worthy of expulsion from a neighborhood?
Of course all of Chardei leadership would condemn those rioters (at least I hope that is the case). But some of them will just as easily rationalize it... almost excusing and nearly justifying it as understandable.
Certainly the rioters are to be judged as individuals. I am a big fan of individual responsibility and not blaming the entire community for the actions of a few. But one cannot ignore the Chinuch that they must be getting. They constantly bash Modern Orthodoxy as illigitimate.
Thus, the corrective action lies in the source of the problem, their Chinuch. It is time for Charedim to stop painting DLs (the Modern Orthodox) as evil. This is what they plant in the heads of their Children and students and... you reap what you sow.
