Jerusalem is Burning

A special two-for-one on blog entries tonight. This evening, I was cleaning up the dishes from dinner, when something outside caught my eye. Out of my window, I could see huge flames and billowing smoke coming from the middle of Mea Shearim – the Haredi neighbourhood just north of my apartment. Of course, I grabbed my camera, put on my shoes and went to check it out.

After wandering through the streets, following my vague sense of where the flames ought to be, I finally came to Nathan Strauss Street. I was greeted by an image out of a war zone. The street had been blocked off with overturned garbage dumpsters that had been set on fire. There didn’t appear to be any violence going on, as I saw a few kids dropping more bags of garbage on the burning piles.

Here are a few pictures I took:

Shocked and confused, I kept walking down the street, passing four or five more fires. After a few minutes, I reached a blockade set up by the police. I approached a soldier surveying the crowd and asked him what was going on. “I tell you what’s going on. We put a criminal in jail and the Haredim don’t like it,” he answered.

I had seen the news story on Ha’aretz.com this week. A 19-year old Haredi man, Yisrael Valls, was in custody after being charged with killing his 3-month old son. It’s a sickening story. Apparently the man (and I use the term loosely) confessed to slamming his 3-month-old baby against the wall. He said he was frustrated because the child would not let him sleep. He also said he felt disgust over a deformity in the child’s neck muscles. (For the full story, cut and paste this into your web browser: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/704502.html)

The Haredi community wanted Valls to be set free before Passover, and warned that if he was not, “Jerusalem would burn” – and so it did. The Haredi community recognizes the authority of their own tribunals over that of the Israeli government, and wanted Valls turned over to them. My cynical side says they want to deal with it internally to avoid having all of the details made public and drawing attention to the insular community.

I have to admit, I was troubled by the news story, but I told myself, “Every community has its sick people.” Unfortunately, I’m not sure I can explain away the revulsion I feel for people who would set the streets on fire to free a child-killer.

It almost seems fitting that after a Passover evening in which I felt such solidarity with the Jewish people of Israel, something like this happens and I see clearly the Ultra-Orthodox community saying to me as a secular Jew, “We are not like you. You are not one of us. Let us deal with our own.”

If anyone else can make sense of this, please help me out.

- Seth