Haredim ultra-Orthodox protest/ Photo Ohad Zwigenberg
A group of young Haredim – ultra-orthodox Jews– blocked a downtown Jerusalem intersection just after 3 P.M. local time on Thursday. The Haredim simply stoped, formed a circle, and began to sing and dance for about twenty minutes in the middle of a pedestrian cross walk, thereby blocking traffic.
The incident took place on the middle of Betzalel Street, one of Jerusalem’s busiest intersections, and lasted for about twenty minutes.
From the signs which these Haredim were holding, it seems that they were angry about possibly being drafted into the Israeli army. The members of this community enjoy draft deferments as long as they are full time students in yeshivot — Tora academies. While in the last government a new law was passed to end the system of deferments for Haredim, this only happened because their political parties were not included in it.The current coalition government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and which has been in office for two years does include Haredim and so it voted to keep the yeshiva deferments.
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Haredim ultra-Orthodox protest Photo Ohad Zwigenberg
In the video below you can see the disruption that these Haredim caused. At one point some people from a restaurant across the street tried to push them out of the way of the cars. The funniest part came when one woman got out of her car to try and push some of the men out of the way. The men can be heard shouting at her in Hebrew, “It is forbidden for women to touch men!”
What idiots!
They all ran away when someone said that he thought that the police were on the way. How brave.
Will the Haredim in Israel ever stop trying to tell everyone else in the country what to do while refusing to do anything themselves for the defense of the country? Of course not. The Haredim do things like this while taking a great deal of money from Israeli tax payers every year to fund their lifestyles and their yeshivot.
