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Jewish World Review March 18, 1999 / 1 Nissan, 5759
Jonathan Rosenblum
Israel’s "Little Rock Central High"?
Two weeks later, the nine students succeeded briefly in entering the high
school while a large mob orchestrated by Faubus was busy beating four black
journalists they had mistaken for the students. But when the surging mob
reached the gates of the school, the black students were removed to save
their lives.
Little Rock Central High was not successfully integrated until President
Eisenhower brought in crack paratroopers to disperse the mobs around the
school and protect the nine black teenagers for several months.
It is safe to say that no group watched the unfolding events in Little Rock
with more horror than American Jews, traditionally the most liberal group in
America. Certainly it would not have occurred to any American Jew that the
events taking place in Little Rock would one day find their parallels in the
Jewish state.
Now they have.
A religious school opened this past September in Tzoran, a bucolic
residential community of 1,500 young families, nestled among the
agricultural settlements east of Netanya. Even before the opening, the
school already provoked mass protest rallies and threats from local
organizer Gidi Bleicher that physical force would be used, if necessary, to
block the establishment of a religious school in Tzoran.
Meretz saw another golden opportunity to fan the flames of religious war,
and at a Shabbat-rally in mid-October Yossi Sarid called upon the citizens
of Tzoran to expel the forces of darkness from their midst.
When the 25 six and seven-year-olds whose parents registered them for the
new school arrived for the first day of classes, they were confronted by a
mob of sixty chanting adults, some of whom had brought along attack dogs and
tied them to the school gate.
Somehow the principal summoned up the courage to march her charges past the
screaming mob and the dogs, past the vulgarities aimed at her and her
colleagues, into the school building. Once inside she closed the windows
despite the heat, as curses and stones rained down on the tiny two-room
school for the first hours of the morning. That scene was repeated every
morning for the first months of the school's existence.
I would like to believe that the mob outside the school did not intend to
physically harm the children, despite the threats of physical violence. But
one thing is clear. Their intent was to terrorize little children by forcing
them to run a daily gauntlet of verbal abuse and physical menace.
Subsequent events revealed that the protesters were prepared to go pretty
far indeed. The night of parent-teacher meetings in mid-November, they
poured hot tar on the outside of the school and covered the school walls
with disgusting slogans and pictures, causing tens of thousands of dollars
of damage. Four were arrested.
After a court threw out a legal challenge to the school's existence in
early December, vandals broke into the school that night, smearing walls and
breaking furniture. And the next morning furious demonstrators, again
accompanied by large dogs, barred entry to the school. The school principal
videotaped them, and four more arrests were made.
Not surprisingly, a few parents feared for their children's safety and
removed them from the school. More surprising is that the overwhelming
majority of the parents stuck out the demonstrations, the social ostracism,
and having refuse dumped on their lawns and eggs and tomatoes thrown at
their homes.
A year ago those parents fit the standard Tzoran profile -- young,
educated professionals, and secular. That is their crime. For if the blight
of Judaism can infect Tzoran, it can do so anywhere.
Some of the parents are still not observant, but they have decided that
they want a Jewish education for their children. They have seen another side
to their former friends -- the ones carrying the placards proclaiming "A
war between light and darkness'' -- and it has been, shall we say,
enlightening.
The protesters have reached truly Orwellian heights of inversion of words
from their plain meaning. A widely-circulated pamphlet, under the heading
"A free Tzoran,'' calls upon the citizens of Tzoran to "enlist'' to defend
"the honor of man and his freedom.'' Another popular sign at the protests
reads, "Enough of religious coercion.''
One marvels at the mental gymnastics required to portray intimidating
children and parents from choosing a particular schooling as the furtherance
of "freedom.'' And how, one wonders, the honor of man is advanced by
hurling epithets at young, religious women, or scaring little children, or
turning the parents of those children into targets of abuse for daring to
depart from the local orthodoxy?
The only religious coercion in Tzoran today is by those who can not bear
the thought of Judaism being taught in their Meretz citadel. What we are
witnessing is a reprise of the threats directed at poor, frightened
immigrants in the '50s that they would lose their Histadrut work cards if
they sent their children to religious schools. Same war, new means.
We have all grown a bit weary of Bialik's quip that the Jewish state would
only find its place among the nations when it produced its own Jewish
thieves and prostitutes. We have them aplenty -- and Jewish drug addicts,
child abusers, wife-murderers, and rapists too.
And now we have our own homegrown Orval Faubuses and Bull Connors. Only
their names are Yossi and Gidi. In place of Southern red-necks and good ol'
boys, we have our local humanists and enlightened ones.
Somehow I don't think Bialik would have been
proud.
SEPTEMBER 2, 1957, National Guardsmen, their bayonets fixed, ringed Little
Rock Central High School. They had been placed there by Arkansas Governor
Orval Faubus to prevent nine black students from integrating the high school
that day.
JWR contributor Jonathan Rosenblum is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post.
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