The Agudah and Misplaced Values

The Beis Yaakov school, a Haredi girls primary school in the Israeli city of Emmanuel has been denying admission to any girl from a Sephardic family. They refuse to even entertain the idea of admitting a girl who is not Ashkenazic. This blatant case of racism found its way to the Israeli Supreme Court and the court fined the Israeli Beis Yaakov system 5,000 NIS a day until the school agrees to integrate.

The response from the Haredi rabbinic leadership has been unequivocal opposition to the idea of allowing Sephardic girls into the school. Rabbi Shalom Elyashiv, the preeminent rabbinic leader of Haredi Ashkenazi Jewry in Israel, called for protests against the Supreme Court. He furthermore said that he would be willing to sit in prison rather than allow Sephardic girls into the Beis Yaakov school in Emmanuel. He compared the efforts of the Israeli court to end racism to the Czarist Russian anti-Semitic authorities.

The elite rabbinic leadership (the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah) of the American branch of the Agudas Yisrael convened an emergency meeting to discuss their response. The head of this rabbinic group, the Novominsker Rebbe, issued a statement on behalf of the organization essentially agreeing in whole with the response by their Israeli counterparts. They affirmed the position that one should rather sit in jail than send their Ashkenazic daughters to school with Sephardim.

This should be compared to a recent proclamation by the very same Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah on the subject of the ordination of a female Orthodox rabbi. They condemned the agreement reached between Rabbi Avi Weiss, one of the rabbis who ordained her and the Rabbinical Council of America, a rabbinic body representing Modern Orthodox and Centrist rabbis. They specifically condemned the decision of the Rabbinical Council of America to acknowledge the value of women's leadership in Orthodoxy and to not outright reject the notion. [Specifically the following quote: The RCA reaffirms its commitment to women's Torah education and scholarship at the highest levels, and to the assumption of appropriate leadership roles within the Jewish community.] They declared that any synagogue that has a woman in a leadership position is not Orthodox.

The very same organization that supports blatant and outright discrimination in the Jewish community condemns Orthodox women who want to teach Torah and serve as a spiritual, halakhic and moral guide for the Jewish community. Even if one finds personal resonance in the Agudah's condemnation of female leadership and does not see it as an obvious case of sexism, how can anyone ever take them seriously? They have lost all moral standing and respect by openly supporting discrimination solely on the basis of one Jewish racial background over another.