Alleged attack sets off debate

By Michael Orbach

On May 11, Noa Raz, a member of the groups Israeli Gay Youth, and Women of the Wall, claimed that a charedi man accosted her on a bus from Be’er Sheva. The man asked if the marks on her arm were from tefillin. When she replied affirmatively, according to Raz, the man attacked her while shouting, “Women are an abomination.”

A brief story about the alleged attack was published by JTA with the headline “Woman attacked for tefillin imprint.” Days later, Rabbi Avi Shafran, Agudath Israel’s director of public affairs, in his weekly Am Echad newsletter, criticized JTA for treating the allegation as a fact.

“Considering the dearth of any corroboration, one might be forgiven for wondering if Ms. Raz’s account is entirely factual or perhaps exaggerated, maybe even fabricated,” he wrote. “No responsible journalist outside the Arab world and North Korea would ever dare report an unsupported allegation as fact. Yet the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s headline read ‘Woman attacked for tefillin imprint.’”

The headline of the online article was changed several weeks later but not before it had been picked up by several other news outlets including The Forward, and referenced in the Jewish Week in a column by a Conservative rabbi, Gerald Skolnick, of the Forest Hills Jewish Center. The incident, Shafran maintained, underscores the negative portrayal of charedim in the media.

“Recent days have shown us how malignant the world media can be when their biases show,” Shafran explained. “But our own Jewish media, too, harbor ugly prejudices of their own. Whether or not some unbalanced haredi in Beersheba is guilty of a hate crime remains an open question. But that the crime of spreading hatred was recently committed in the Jewish world seems painfully clear. “

Ami Eden, editor-in-chief of JTA, and himself Modern Orthodox, defended the story and noted that the JTA files close to 70 news briefs a week.

“Rabbi Shafran was absolutely right to criticize our initial headline and opening sentence,” Eden explained. “But in the end it was Rabbi Shafran who is guilty of ‘assuming the worst about other Jews’ — by incorrectly claiming that ‘ugly prejudices’ were responsible for our mistake.”

Eden said that there was no double standard in place about the portrayal. “Raz was willing to put her credibility on the line by filing a police report,” Eden said. “If a Haredi man were to file charges with the police saying he was attacked by a member of Women of the Wall, we’d definitely write something about that.”

Rabbi Skolnik took a harsher tone. “Sadly, this kind of incident is not a new phenomenon,” he said. “The hatred that comes out of certain sectors of the community against non-Orthodox expressions of Judaism is not something that I’ve made up or imagined. If you’ve been in a situation at the Kotel where Charedi passers-by feel constrained to spit at you, or hurl verbal insults, or throw garbage, or question your very right to be, you would understand why I used the imagery that I did in that article — because it rings true. We are doing to ourselves what others have done to us.”

Raz herself said that the response to the incident has been “heartwarming.” Her inbox has been flooded with letters of support. She said she wasn’t too bothered by Rabbi Shafran’s comments and hadn’t read them prior to being contacted by the Jewish Star.

“He’s using the journalism ethics angle to do what charedi people do in Israel — claiming that every claim against charedi people is anti-Semitism or secular media promoting a hate claim.” She clarified: “You can’t blame the entire charedi community but you can blame the environment that they create. This is not to say that they’re all violent but they should take care of the message they’re sending to their supporters and their children.”

While there hasn’t been a response from the charedi community in Israel to the incident, Raz said, one came from her own brother who has been transforming into a charedi of late.

“He called me and a few of his friends called me to say it was horrible,” she said. “They said they hoped it won’t create more hatred in society.”