Thwarted Attempt To Transport Jerusalem Riots Stateside
The streets around the Israeli consulate in Midtown Manhattan had the normal midday rush at 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, but there was not a black hat or protestor was in sight.
The absence was notable because ultra-Orthodox organizers had called for a protest against the Israeli government at 2:30, across the street from the consulate on Second Avenue and 42nd Street. This was an apparently unsuccessful effort to import to America the ultra-Orthodox protests that have rocked Jerusalem every weekend for the last two months.
The ultra-Orthodox began their protests in Israel in response to the Jerusalem municipality’s decision to open a parking lot during the Sabbath, and grew when an ultra-Orthodox woman was arrested for allegedly starving her child. It got particularly bad this weekend when the Israeli government arrested a number of protestors and declined to release them on bail. The whole mess has signaled a new low in relations between Israel’s government and its ultra-Orthodox citizens though some who live in Israel have declined citizenship due to a belief that the Israeli government is illegitimate.
Posters went up in Brooklyn and in Jerusalem calling on people to “wake up” to the “Zionist Gestapo,” and the call for protest was posted on Yeshiva World News, a popular ultra-Orthodox Web site. That item was met with a few supportive comments; one person wrote, “Kudos to those who attend and stand with our brethren in Eretz Yisroel.”
But the majority of commenters slammed the idea of protesting the Israeli government —and they appeared to carry the day as no one actually showed up at the consulate on Tuesday afternoon. There is some talk that the protest was postponed, but it does not look like there will be burning trashcans on 42nd Street anytime soon.
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
