The following is a first hand account of an incident that a woman witnessed during last year's ‘Gay Pride’ protest:
Every night, yeshivas were letting their students out to riot in the streets. Garbage cans were dumped and strewn in the streets and their contents set on fire. Many people, particularly the elderly and small children, had been rushed to hospitals suffering from respiratory difficulties due to the toxicity of the smoke that was belching throughout residential neighborhoods. Public health officials were warning that the carcinogens in the air were at dangerous levels. I personally was in bed for 3 days with a severe respiratory infection caused by being forced to inhale these fumes every day. Almost every morning, our bus would have to stop and carefully navigate around burning piles of rubbish. Sometimes, people would have to get off the bus to remove these burning piles so the bus could get through and soil their hands and clothes in the process. I stood at Kikar Shabbat one evening and watched boys as young as 8 and 9 running through the streets setting anything within their reach on fire. A white van made the big mistake of traveling through Kikar Shabbat. The van was pelted with objects. When the driver stopped and got out of his van, it was overturned and torched. Nobody even knew if this driver was “for” or “against” the very thing the rioters were rioting about! I asked one of the boys – about age 10 – “do you know why you’re doing this?” His answer: “Because it’s fun!” The following Shabbos, an acquaintance of mine told me that her sons were “not going to shul today, they need to sleep in and catch up on their rest because their rebbe had let them out to go rioting almost every night this week.”
That woman was Mrs. Miriam Shear. It is part of a longer narrative explaining what led up to her beating in a public bus by a Charedi thug. It was part of her explanation of why she insisted on keeping her seat on a bus. The rest of her story can be found at Rabbi Horowitz’s website.
Reading this latest from Rabbi Horowitz’s gives me tremendous hope. It reflects my very deepest feelings. I truly feel vindicated for the many times I have presented almost identical views. I again applaud the courage of this man for giving Mrs. Shear a platform to tell her story. And what a story it is! Thanks to Mrs. Shear and to Rabbi Horowitz for telling it like it is. The Torah world needs people like you. A lot more.
