Rabbi Threatens To Quit Naftali Bennett’s Right Wing Party Over Lesbian Aide
Image by getty images
JERUSALEM (JTA) — A rabbi who is a leader of the Jewish Home Party has threatened to leave the party because a spokeswoman for its leader, Naftali Bennett, is a lesbian.
Rabbi Yisrael Rozen, the head of the Zomet Institute, which researches how technology can be used under Jewish law, on Wednesday resigned from the party’s presidium, and on Thursday threatened to leave the party altogether.
“I have nothing against her or against them (homosexuals), but I think that this community is wrong and defiant and that outwardly expressed homosexuality is an impossibility in a party that purports to represent religious Zionism,” Rozen reportedly wrote to the leaders of the Jewish Home Party.
Bennett’s media advisor Brit Galor Peretz is married to her female partner Adi, and that they are raising two children.
Bennett insisted the party would not dump Peretz.
“Anyone who thinks I need to discriminate against a person because of his sexual orientation, gender or skin color will encounter a total refusal from me,” Bennett said in a tweet, which quoted from the Jewish text Ethics of the Fathers, after Rozen’s objections became public.
מי שחושב שעליי להפלות אדם על רקע נטייתו, מינו או צבע עורו, ייתקל אצלי בסירוב מוחלט.
חביב אדם, כל אדם, שנברא בצלם. pic.twitter.com/2Wh22ydOB8— Naftali Bennett בנט (@naftalibennett) August 17, 2017
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
