Reply To: New book – “HaChareidim V’Haaretz”

AAQ – I am not saying these horrible things did not happen. I am saying that majority of people did not go through them. Again, this is anecdotal, I may be wrong. If you’ll give me numbers showing opposite, I’ll be happy to revise my views.

That is what deniers of other over-the-top atrocities often say when confronted with survivors and hard evidence which exists aplenty. As it happens, 51% of the Jewish population of Israel is Sephardic. The majority of Sephardim living today in Israel are descendants of approximately 900K refugees from Muslim majority countries immediately post ’48 (more than the number of “Palestinians” who fled in the opposite direction, but that is a different topic.) Most of those Sephardim fled with the shirt on their back, and were sent to “ma’abarot”. (The matzav of the Yemenite Jews was even worse, and is a story unto itself. The Yemenites knew nothing of Haskalah or secular influences whatsoever, and were easy prey for the vultures of the “Sochnut”.) The Histadrut, which has figured in the news recently, controlled 80% of the job market, including almost all non-skilled labor, and refused to employ parents who sent their children to Chareidi schools. Thousands of children were separated from their parents and sent to “reeducation camps” in Kibbutzim, sometimes under the guise of being sent to “Yeshivah”… Children were forced to eat treif, peyos (of Teimanim) were cut off by force, and much more was going on. Phony “Ra Banim” taught children (and sometimes parents) that Mitzvos no longer applied in the Holy Land. There are books about this, there are (at least) thousands of living survivors (in their eighties), as well as the living memory of entire communities. These events and their aftermath shape both Religious-Secular and Sephardi-Ashkenazi relations down to today. None of this is a secret. There are some particularly repulsive “parshiyot” that the State attempted to cover up, such as the abduction and trafficking of up to 5000 (mostly Yemenite) babies by government agencies, but the basic narrative is undisputed by both sides. The same goes for the pre-State “Chilun” of Ashkenazi children. Those who did it were proud of what they did, just like the Nazis were. The difference is that after the war, the Nazis feared being caught and punished so they went undercover, whereas the Erev Rav became the ruling class of the new State, so they weren’t afraid.