Open Season on the Orthodox

...And few if any media outlets, other than the Jerusalem Post, noted how after the summer of 1997 altercation Orthodox folks admonished those who reacted angrily, and came to the assistance of non-Orthodox Jews...

...There was only one problem: it never happened...

...The Edah Haredit, an Israeli religious court, considered the main religious authority by Israel's most right-wing haredi element, issued posters that read: "With the authority of our holy Torah, we warn elders to in turn warn the young to perpetrate no violence whatsoever...

...Nearby guards] did nothing to stop the stoning, apparently assuming that the man was getting just punishment for his crime: using electricity on the Sabbath...

...I was appalled and told him so...

...Many Jews, and no doubt many more non-Jews, have read news reports of confrontations at the Western Wall, often on Tisha B'Av (the anniversary of the Temple's destruction) or Shavuot (which commemorates how all Jews stood as one at Mt...

...These inexcusable expressions of outrage are prominently featured by the press (invariably notified of die likely photo-op beforehand by the non-Orthodox groups' organizers...

...This was pointed out by Reform philanthropist Robert Lappin in a June 25, 1999 Forward essay...

...The Times quotes an unnamed Shalom Bayis spokesman who explained the phenomenon this way: "Men who refuse to give ghets [divorces] are often hounded, threatened, and even beaten up by their wives' backers...

...Orthodox men involved in messy divorces were marrying off their young (daughters—but withholding the names of the new husbands as a means of protecting themselves, the story went...

...Without so much as even a last name to no with, and no real substantiation (Yossi did eventually make one purported concubine available for interviews), everyone from the JTA to the BBC, from the Washington Post to somewhat less staid publications such as Marie Claire, reported on the concubine trend as if it were established fact...

...The press was all eyes and ears—and keyboards...

...Outraged comparisons were made to the treatment of blacks in the 1950s American South...

...its basis is seldom explored in the media...

...Likewise, the Reform movement, despite its declared commitment to personal autonomy, will not include Humanistic Judaism or Hebrew Christian congregations under its umbrella, as the Central Conference of American Rabbis made clear in a published responsum available on the CCAR Internet site (www.ccarnet.org...

...Two of them grabbed the brightly colored prayer shawl from around the man's neck and cracked it like a whip in his face...

...Are there no other places to practice Jewish feminism in the world, in Israel or even in Jerusalem that they must do it at the one site where it most infuriates large numbers of other Jews...

...The Orthodox consider all born Jews and anyone halachically converted to be every bit as much a part of the Jewish people as the most observant rabbi...

...The rather straightforward and reasonable notion that multiple standards for conversion will yield multiple Jewish peoples in Israel is seldom given expression in news reports...

...Forty thousand men, women, and children united in heartfelt prayer...

...Even common property has to have rules...

...Since the Wall's capture in 1967, separate areas for men and women have been designated, and anyone who wishes can approach the Wall...

...Alen were to sit in the front rows, women in the back...

...Greenberg why, he responded that "there was no need to interview the strictly Orthodox people at the scene because they were making their views amply and loudly known...

...It was a gross, but far from singular, example of the "anything goes" attitude often adopted by the media for Orthodox Jews...

...They were cursed and hit with rocks...

...Is it outrageous for the Jewish state to have a standard—not to mention one with the weight of history and Jewish religious tradition behind it—for conversion...

...At one Kotel confrontation, it was alleged, Orthodox youths hurled feces at the nontraditional worshippers...

...I he duped included the New York Times, which ran three separate articles on the issue over the spring of 1995...

...The story, after all, was compellingly written and important...

...This report appeared in the November 15, 1994, issue of the Arizona State University daily paper, the State Press...

...Then the adorable little children, who only seconds ago were throwing candy [at a bar mitzvah boy], turned into savages and started picking up rocks and hurling them at the man...

...It was not, of course, and Yossi is now nowhere to be found...

...In the Bible, Israelite men with wives— predominantly kings—took legal mistresses...

...The stockpile story turned out to be pure balderdash...

...the New York Jewish Week upped the ante to two...

...Moreover, the Orthodox alone are faulted for their inability to accept the validity of other groups' conversion rituals...

...for our times...

...Essentially, all the plan entailed was the installation of automatic ticket punching machines in the backs of several buses whose men and women passengers felt more comfortable sitting separately...

...only the "Orthodox monopoly"—with evil and unfair undertones—is blamed...

...It was then, I think, that I had a revelation of sorts...

...Who are [haredim] to define who are the only authentic Jews...

...In New York City, in the summer of 1996, a man identified only as Yossi claimed that the biblical institution of concubinage was being revived in the Orthodox community...

...Tragically, the Orthodox have become the Jews' own Jews...

...Jews aren't really Jewish...

...Rabbi Ami Hirsch, director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, told Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on February 2, 1999, that the Western Wall, "belongs to all Jews...

...But the JTA, paraphrasing Yossi, reported that "at least 20 girls have been betrothed by their fathers in the past several months alone...

...Not a single word written or spoken at any point by the event's organizers, or by any of those who led the crowd in heartfelt prayer for the preservation of Jewish tradition in the Jewish state, could remotely be characterized as angry...

...like a big-league pitcher [one Hasid] cocked his arm and flung [a] rock at the man in the wheelchair...

...The New York Times even allotted op-ed space for an expression of umbrage at the rabbis' alleged statement...

...The press was well aware of this unprecedented gathering, but most chose to ignore it...

...His comment, and hasty rephrasing, were reported by the New York Jewish Week on August 15, 1997...

...Oh, my God...

...Yet only the Orthodox .ire pilloried for their principles...

...Only a few cases of minor betrothal have surfaced in New York in recent months," the Times said on May 27, "but they are enough to cause concern the practice is spreading...

...As it turns out, one year prior to the coverage of the concubine trend, Yossi had also managed to fool the press into swallowing a story about a flood of Orthodox child betrothals...

...Whether or not one agrees with the Orthodox position is beside the point...

...said feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin...

...Furthermore, as the 'Jerusalem Post noted the day after the Jewish Week reported Ms...

...Nonetheless, the headline writer's carelessness was reproduced nationwide—with predictable results...

...Seldom, though, does one find either the Food and Drug Administration or the Immigration and Naturalization Service condemned as a monopoly...

...Some people, mostly Americans, tried to stop the rock throwing...

...Indeed, subsequent reportage has all but ascertained that I'affair feces—according to Lisa Hostein, editor of the JTA— "probably didn't happen" (Long Island Jewish World, July 17, 1999...

...The gathering was called in response to the Israeli Supreme Court decisions that the Orthodox felt threatened to dismantle the Jewish state's religious status quo...

...But apartheid it was not...

...The New York Times ran no article, only a photo with the caption "20,000 Vent Anger Against Israeli Court...

...In the responsa committee's words, "There are limits...

...The story quickly made other Israeli papers and eventually crossed the Atlantic...

...Media reports promote the impression that non-Orthodox Jews are not welcome at the Wall...

...and drolly answered: "Its spokesman, who goes by the name Yossi, claims that it has some 100 member rabbis—all of whom insist on anonymity...

...Anyone who has been at the Kotel, though, knows that it always has and still attracts Jews (and, for that matter, non-Jews) of all stripes and is, at least in the absence of provocative acts, a place of profound peace and prayer...

...he asked in a June 27, 1997, column in the Forward...

...Notably unreported in most media reports of Kotel confrontations is the trenchant but boring fact that only a minuscule percentage of the Orthodox Jews who gather at the site have reacted at all to the nontraditional groups...

...Yossi reportedly had a concubine service, christened with the rather ironic name Shalom Bayis (peace in the home), and claimed that he had serviced hundreds of satisfied— though unidentified—customers...

...In the end it became apparent, at least to attentive readers, that the bus Lines in question exclusively serviced Orthodox neighborhoods (two lines in two cities—B'nei Brak and Jerusalem) and that the program had been designed and promoted by Israel's Transportation Ministry—hardly a haredi hotbed—in order to increase local ridership...

...The Times also reported that there might be as many as 20 such cases, citing the unnamed Shalom Bayis source...

...it had been recommended for publication by the chairman of the university's journalism department and the director of the school's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism...

...The Kotel, according to the rabbinic body, "does not represent Jewish cleaving to God nor the experience of prayer...

...After several weeks, the report was exposed as a reporter's hoax, complete with references by name to nonexistent rabbis (Arutz-7, March 3, 1998...

...Yet no other specific cases were ever subsequently described...

...Groups of American non-Orthodox Jews and clergy, declaring their equal rights to the Wall, have chosen the Kotel plaza for mixed-sex services, a practice regarded by the Orthodox as flouting Jewish religious law...

...others, unfortunately, react with anger, vented by casting objects at the nontraditional worshippers...

...I have no problem acknowledging [that] our rally—I mean our prayer service—was political and provocative," confessed David Breakstone, a Conservative educator and organizer of Tisha B'Av 1997's egalitarian minyan at the Kotel...

...Reasonable people might well disagree about the wisdom of even so benign a commercial promotion...

...They were haredim, though, and so they had to be angry, no...

...One report, first published in the New York Times on June 13, 1997, received exceedingly wide coverage and has since become a deeply cherished legend in some circles...

...Non-Orthodox writer Hillel Halkin was one of the rare voices of reason in the wilderness...

...On August 12, 1997, after a Tisha B'Av Kotel clash, the Jerusalem Post reported that "inside the [Kotel] plaza, some 30,000 worshippers were oblivious to the tumult that was taking place outside...

...The practice had allegedly become widespread in New York, although it has been in disuse among Jews for several thousand years, rendered both impractical by secular laws and inadvisable by traditional Judaism's ideal of monogamous relationships...

...It appears," asserted Jacob Stein, a past president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, that "we [non-Orthodox] cannot worship at the Kotel without the risk of physical attack...

...On August 12, 1997, for example, a piece about a Kotel confrontation by the New York Times' Greenberg began, "Jeered by strictly Orthodox Jews who called them 'Hamas,' 'terrorists,' and 'Christians,' about 150 Conservative and Reform Jewish men and women were shoved away from the Western Wall by the police...

...Within hours of the first reports of such outrageous behavior, a friend of mine, an official in the Reform movement, phoned to get my reaction to his "inside information"—that bags of dung had apparently been discovered stockpiled in a yeshiva near the Kotel...

...The rest of the article featured a number of statements from members of the Reform and Conservative activist groups, but none from an Orthodox spokesperson...

...Another widely reported story in 1997 concerned Orthodox-inspired gender-segregated Israeli buses...

...In a JTA report, Yossi claimed that the biblical practice of kedushei ketana (betrothal of a minor) had been revived...

...Their services often feature women cantors, which the tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews who traditionally gather at the site consider an assault on traditional Jewish modesty...

...Though the misreportage was serious enough for the paper to dismiss the reporter from his job, Yediofs eventual apology was buried on page 19...

...Though it was a mere two days before Purim, 40,000 Jews, mostly haredim, gathered in a bone-chilling rain for an hour and a half to pray and recite psalms...

...fumed Reform Rabbi Stephen Fuchs, in the Hartford Courant on February 3, 1999...

...The Times might be forgiven for disregarding the official police estimate and undercounting the crowd by half, but "anger...

...In fact, Jews born to Jewish mothers and non-Jewish fathers who do not affiliate Jewishly are considered full Jews by Orthodoxy but not by the Reform movement...

...The press's selective vision regarding the Orthodox manifested itself when the Orthodox held a prayer gathering in lower Manhattan on February 28, 1999...

...But this ugly canard presented a particularly incendiary image, which, thundered from the pulpit and the press, has generated immense ill will toward Orthodox Jews, despite its apparent lack of mooring in reality...

...We can only raise money by bashing the Orthodox" (reported in the Jewish Voice and Opinion, September 1997...

...Pogrebin's shock, the plan turned out to be entirely voluntary...

...The Los Angeles Times correction appeared two days after the original article and was allotted two column inches on page 3. The pain and anger that followed in the wake of the misreportage are keenly felt even today—and the distortion the headline trumpeted continues to be perpetuated by certain Jewish organizations and religious leaders, and the press...

...They sat on mats in front of the last remnant of the Second Temple, mourning its destruction 1,927 years ago...

...So I'm not Jewish after all," began the piece, written by Jewish movie producer Marty Kaplan...

...It is routine to read that the Orthodox seek to disenfranchise other Jews in the Jewish state when all that is really happening (and has happened for the more than 50 years of Israel's existence) is that attempts are being made to maintain conversion standards accepted by all religious Jews for millennia...

...The group simply stated that Orthodoxy rejects non-Orthodox philosophies...

...Unable to wipe the blood from his eyes, the man was blinded...

...It is the pointedly nontraditional mode of worship that offends, not the presence of Jews of different bents...

...And a graphically outrageous cartoon in the Los Angeles Times portrays a menacing Der Sturmer-style silhouette of an identifiably religious Jew's hat and earlocks atop a broken-armed menorah with the caption "Only I am a Jew...

...The rabbinical group, of course, had proclaimed no such thing...

...Likewise glossed over is the fact that Orthodox religious authorities have regularly and unequivocally forbidden any violence against the groups...

...reprinted from the Cleveland Jewish News...

...In the spring of 1997, while observant Jews were joyfully celebrating Purim, the Los Angeles Times was creating a Jewish communal crisis that would result in an unprecedented outpouring of hatred against Orthodox Jews...

...Asked why he was reluctant to publicize his movement's positive accomplishments in Israel, an unnamed but honest Conservative rabbi told journalist David Bedein "There's no money in that...

...The JTA report described the details of only one alleged case...

...The Conservative movement's own conversion standards require it to consider most, if not all, Reform conversions ineffective...

...Much of the anti-Orthodox animus— from the exaggerated reports to the entirely fabricated ones, from the principle pillorying to the subtle name-calling— should sound sadly familiar...

...The way the Orthodox are portrayed and projected today is painfully reminiscent of the way all Jews have been portrayed by their enemies...

...Some of the Kotel regulars react with pain...

...New York Times correspondent Joel Greenberg, for instance, reported on August 12, 1997, that the Western Wall, "which used to attract Israelis of different religious backgrounds, has in recent years become a preserve of the strictly Orthodox...

...And yet the press has consistendy portrayed the Kotel confrontationists as innocent victims, veritable freedom riders...

...Pressed for the truth, the aspiring 24-year-old senior journalism major who had penned the piece admitted that the entire account, from start to finish, had been the product of her own fertile imagination...

...But perhaps nowhere is the media bias against Orthodoxy more evident than in the reporting of internal political matters in Israel...

...but if a husband holds knowledge precious to his daughter's future, he can trust, at least, that he won't be killed...

...To this day, the image continues to be invoked, despite the fact that the New York Jewish Week could not find any victims of the alleged act...

...When I asked Mr...

...I reported their remarks extensively...

...I understood clearly why the Times's man on the scene had not bothered to follow journalistic norms (or the rules of fair play) by quoting a responsible Orthodox spokesperson or noting any of the well-publicized warnings against violence issued by respected haredi leaders: He didn't want to...

...AVI SHAFRAN SHABBAT AT THE KOTEL MA’ARAVI , JERUSALEM'S Western Wall, people standing in prayer, a paraplegic in a motorized wheelchair, a group of Hasidic men turn their heads and then...

...CNN lead with "Orthodox rabbis: Most U.S...

...It might seem a minor quibble: A tossed banana peel or stone, after all, is sufficiently objectionable...

...The press presumed anger because it alone is regularly reported about haredim...

...The Jewish Telegraphic Agency QTA), a newswire to which virtually every Jewish weekly in the country subscribes, also reported that "haredim pelted a group of men and women worshippers with human excrement...

...His reference, I confirmed with a careful rereading of the article, was to the rude jeers...

...The rock hit him in the middle of his forehead, his neck reeled back and blood oozed down his face...

...Similarly unnoted was the fact that the (Reform) Council of Progressive Rabbis in Israel declared that the Wall should not be considered by Reform Jews "as possessing any sanctity...

...The New Israel Fund, for example, ran a full-page ad in the New York Times (and in numerous Jewish publications) a year ago that declared in its "grabber," which took up more than half the page, "It's time for American Jews to tell the Israeli Government exactly what we are...

...On November 29, after the article had been read by thousands, the newspaper printed a retraction: A law student had demanded corroborating facts, and none were found...

...In February 1998, a story appeared in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot: The Orthodox rabbinate directed a man to divorce his wife because she had been raped...

...In a front page headline on March 22, an Orthodox rabbinical group reportedly declared that the "Non-Orthodox" are "Not Jews...

...The United States government maintains standards, too, for everything from food labeling to immigration...

...The paper reported details of one such ease, that of an 11-year-old girl, who was only spared "a future of spinsterhood" by i ruling of Orthodox judges...

...With a bit of perspective born of hindsight, the Forward, in an editorial, rhetorically asked, "Just who is this renegade group [Shalom Bayis...

...the mixed services at the Kotel constitute] a foolish, insensitive, and unnecessary provocation that has nothing to do with religious freedom...

...Besides evoking the obvious echoes of blacks sitting in the back of the bus, for me it evokes signs in hotels that said, 'No Jews and no dogs allowed"' (New York Jewish Week, July 18, 1997...

...Yet despite the utter lack of substantiation (which would surely condemn any other similarly outlandish story to most respectable newsroom shredders), and despite condemnation of the practice by dozens of respected Orthodox rabbis, this story persevered...

...In fact, in terms of the injury done to the Orthodox community and intra-Jewish relations, it pales beside some of the more subtle, hence more believable, misreportage that has appeared in recent years...

...For more information on this topic visit our Web site at www.momentmag.com and click on Related Links...

...responsible haredi reactions are not...

...They echo something all too well known to students of Jewish history...

...The overwhelming majority simply ignore the visitors' presence...

...Despite their protestations to the contrary, the non-traditionalists mean to rankle, as is evident by their own comments...

...Sinai to receive the Torah...