"Playtime" in Jerusalem yesterday (Reuters photo)

Anyone who may have been suspecting that, as memories and common human decency fade, the tragic series of events popularly known as the Holocaust has become nothing more than a dishonest and utterly arbitrary talking point for reactionary politics was finally proven right yesterday. Haredim – ultra-Orthodox Jews – demonstrating in Jerusalem’s Kikar Hashabbat Square over the weekend have once more dropped the “H-bomb” on Israeli civil society. While there’s nothing particularly unusual about that, this time they’re driving their point home by dressing their children and themselves up in striped concentration camp uniforms and yellow stars and reenacting Jewish suffering under the Nazi’s reign of terror in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Tempers have been flaring for years over the treatment of women in the Haredi community, where the separation of the sexes is a divine command. It would be bad enough if the debate merely concerned Haredi women, more and more of whom are being forced to roam Israeli cities in head-to-toe “Taliban” garb. Now the demands extend to women of all religious persuasions who could ever run a risk of distracting the men from more serious business. The restrictions the Haredim wish to impose on Israel include “kosher” buses, where women are forced to sit in the back, separate checkout lines for men and women in supermarkets, women being forced to cross the street when passing by synagogues, and a ban on women’s images in advertising and female voices on the radio.

Last week, riots broke out as Jerusalem police removed illegal signs that called for men and women to use separate sidewalks in Haredi areas, and also when local TV crews showed up to film the event. Then, on Tuesday, thousands of non-Orthodox protesters descended on the town of Beit Shemesh to demonstrate against what they perceive as the exclusion of women in what is supposed to be a modern, enlightened society. (I wrote about all this in my blog last week.)

Last night, up to fifteen hundred Haredi men assembled on Kikar Hashabbat Square to stage a counter-protest against what they call “the exclusion of Haredim.” They equate what they perceive as ill-treatment at the hands of secular society with the persecution of Jews during the Third Reich – not figuratively, but literally. The striped uniforms and yellow stars merely underscored the point.

“What’s happening here is exactly what happened in Germany,” one demonstrator told the Jerusalem Post. Others demanded that foreign troops be stationed in Israel to protect Haredim from secular Israelis, since “Zionists aren’t Jews” but rather “racists."

(Haaretz photo) 

If the Haredim thought the yellow stars would silence secular society submission, then they must really live in a different century. Today, hundreds of male and female activists boarded gender-segregated buses in Jerusalem and sat wherever they wanted. The demonstration remained peaceful, but it will hardly be the last word in this ongoing drama. 

Israel’s secular parties and press are outraged and embarrassed at yesterday's "stars and stripes" stunt on Kikar Hashabbat Square. In a statement issued this morning, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said: “Prisoner uniforms and yellow badges with the word ‘Jew’ written in German are appalling and shocking. The use of the yellow badge and young children holding their hands up in defeat is crossing the line.”

I’ll second that. Anyone care to join me?