The Israeli Press

Yair Ettinger writes:

Instead, they have chosen to hypnotize their readers with a modest scandal of their own. The party dailies, Yated Ne’eman (affiliated with the Degel Hatorah faction of United Torah Judaism party) and Hamodi’a (affiliated with the party’s Agudat Yisrael faction) both recently published on their front pages a letter from Rabbi Eliahu Weintraub, a prominent rabbi of the Lithuanian branch of Orthodoxy represented by UTJ. Weintraub lashed out in his missive at the popular independent Haredi weekly Bakehila, comparing it to a pig, and describing it as and "defiled," while warning that anyone who flips through the paper is likely to have problems in the next world. The letter, which was distributed also in the form of a pashkevil, a poster glued to the walls of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, appeared the day after Bakehila had published an interview with that very same Rabbi Weintraub.

Bakehila published the interview to mark the beginning of the Hebrew month of Elul. Journalist Tzvi Yakobson conducted the interview, and it was fairly unexceptional for the ultra-Orthodox press, dealing as it did with matters of morals, Torah study, and the return to a more religious way of life, in anticipation of the month of mercy and penitence. Its title was a quotation from the rabbi: "Superficiality destroys everything."

Weintraub, however, attached a completely different headline to the updated version, noting that it was actually the commercial Haredi press that "destroys everything." In his letter, Weintraub said: "Recently two yeshiva students came to me to speak about moral affairs and the month of Elul in our generation, and I had no idea what was hiding behind their ‘rabbinical manner.’ I spoke with them in all innocence, unaware in advance that they were among those who distribute an infamous weekly to the public. They put the remarks into a paper called ‘Bakehila,’ which has a bad name and which has caused many heads to roll, and continues to possess such intentions, Heaven forbid! Putting my remarks inside this defiled weekly served them as an authorization of the importance of the above mentioned weekly, and thus the pig was able to remove its hooves and to declare that it had been purified." And the letter continued: "It should be made clear and simple to anyone who reads weeklies of this type that he is playing with his entire future in the next world, whether by the distortion of Torah wisdom or by insulting the honor of learned sages." The rabbi called for a boycott of the journalists who work for Bakehila and noted: "Even though our words are directed at one specific weekly, I declare that the remarks relate to all those newspapers distributed every single week whose management is not placed in the hands of the great scholars of our generation, may they live long. And the individual will bear testimony for the entire public."