Religious Fundamentalism - A Threat to Health and Safety

Police outside the wedding at Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls High School last week

Government gives final warning over illegal Jewish weddings | Jewish News

The ultra-Orthodox Jewish Charedi community in Stamford Hill, London, have been warned to stop holding mass gatherings at weddings at the Yesodey Hatorah school during the present coronavirus emergency lockdown, or face the consequences, following a wedding at which a reported 150 guests were present.

This warning was given by the Faith Minister, Lord Stephen Greenhalgh at an emergency meeting with the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, Charedi charity Interlink and the Jewish Leadership Council. The meeting was attended by the Mayor of Hackney, Philip Glanville, the head of the police in the local area and senior Jewish figures.

The family that organised the event have been fined £10,000. Those who helped organise it, including the Yesoday Hatorah Girls School, are currently under police investigation.

According to Jewish News, this was but one of 50+ such ultra-Orthodox Jewish weddings, some with over 300 guests to be held since the lockdown was imposed. According to this report, there have been:

• 50+ strictly-Orthodox weddings across London during lockdown.
• Lookouts set to raise the alarm and money set aside to pay fines.
• Bride at one Stamford Hill wedding was 'Covid positive'.
• Police 'not doing enough' to prevent acts of lawlessness.
• Further simchas[weddings with mass attendance] held since last weeks wedding scandal.

WATCH 📽 // Wedding? What Wedding? Police given Simcha runaround. Video evidence emerges of police being allegedly misled about an illegal simcha on the premises. pic.twitter.com/GHyBOmemXL

— Jewish News (@JewishNewsUK) January 28, 2021

THE ALLEGATIONS

A source intimately involved in the Orthodox wedding scene, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “These illegal weddings have been going on for 10 months. We’re not talking about one or two. We are talking multiple weddings every day. All have 150-200 guests. At one wedding the bride was Covid-positive.”

THE VENUES

There are five venues that are used regularly, several sources confirmed – “anything that has a hall”. One is the taxpayer-funded Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls’ School in Stamford Hill. “It’s the one that was caught,” said one person.

The school’s long-time principal, Rabbi Avroham Pinter, died from Covid-19 last spring. The new principal is his son, Chaim, who became a director of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations in July last year.

Another is Belz Hall at 98 Clapton Common. There, two floors below ground, is a new, purpose-built banqueting space for simchas of up to 350 people.


“There are up to four weddings a week there, Monday to Thursday,” another source said, in a claim later corroborated by three other people.

“There are many entrances to the building, with smaller halls upstairs for Jewish studies, security guards on all the doors. They confiscate your phones as you go in so photos don’t get out. There’s literally a table with a mountain of mobiles.”

Another person familiar with the shifting set-up said: “At one point they were taking over warehouses in the countryside, warehouses in Canvey Island, trying to do it behind closed doors… I think that’s what will happen now.”

Two separate sources said there had been several large weddings at the Lismirrane Industrial Park in Elstree over the spring and summer.

Another venue cited as frequently hosting large weddings during lockdown is Ohel Yaakov Beth Hamedrash (Pshevorsk) Synagogue at 26 Lampard Grove, a synagogue associated with the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations.

Yet another venue cited as hosting lockdown simchas is Beis Ruchel D’Satmar School in Stamford Hill, an 840-pupil girls’ school that was raided by police in October for breaching number restrictions in place at the time

A Charedi source based in Stamford Hill said: “There are 20-30 venues [for weddings] in Stamford Hill, almost all tied to a community centre with [a] wedding hall, school, synagogue, mikveh, such as [the] Bobov [centre] on Egerton Road.”

THE SUPPORT INDUSTRY

As might be expected in such an insular community, there are a limited number of caterers, florists, photographers, videographers, musicians, organisers and security teams who are trusted to supply and support these large Orthodox weddings.

For instance, the same florist was quoted by five different sources as supplying flowers to big Orthodox weddings during lockdown in London and, in recent months, Bournemouth. One informed source said: “She has 85 percent of the market, at least.” The florist denied all knowledge and involvement.

Several also named a videographer as having filmed many of the weddings during lockdown, while Jewish News understands that there are three Israeli photographers who regularly fly in from Israel to take the snaps – and have done since March. One covered nine big Orthodox weddings in under four weeks.

Another photographer is reported to have contracted Covid-19 at one of the London weddings, subsequently forcing an entire El Al flight into quarantine on its return to Israel.

An Israeli involved in the set-up of weddings later said: “The mother of the chatan [groom] called me to tell me that she also had corona. She came to the wedding on Monday and she also had corona. She feels she got it at the wedding. You understand what happened in Stamford Hill now? Unbelievable. Unbelievable.”

Yet the increased risk is not leading to decreased incidence but only increased cost, with several sources telling Jewish News that some organisers of big Orthodox weddings are now asking for a £10,000 payment upfront specifically for the purpose of paying the fines if the wedding is raided by police.

THE PLAYERS

The Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations (UOHC) is an umbrella body representing more than 100 strictly-Orthodox synagogues around the country. It gets up to £500,000 per year from Kedassia Supervision Ltd, which approves kosher food for suppliers and caterers. Kedassia pointedly did not deny that it provides kosher supervision for the food at these weddings – a religious requirement if food is being prepared on the premises.

The UOHC also has a close relationship to Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls’ School. At least four board members are also governors of Yesodey. The UOHC vets prospective pupils, and its own Rabbinate is officially listed as the authority by which the school is guided. The relationship stretches beyond that, however. The UOHC says it “provides a range of facilities for the Orthodox Jewish community. These facilities include Simchas Nissuin.”

On marketing material, Simchas Nissuin is described as “a subsidised wedding scheme offered in conjunction with the UOHC”. Two venues are offered for a “total package”. One of them, Yesodey Hatorah, for £7,495. The school earns £750 for each wedding it hosts.

The lengths these ultra-Orthodox Jews have gone to in order to circumvent the coronavirus emergency laws has prompted Jewish barrister Daniel Greenberg, to make this astonishingly frank attack on the Charedi Community, in the Jewish Chronical:

Those who have attended illicit weddings under lockdown represent a self-indulgent sect that should be disowned by the rest of the Jewish world.

I have seen some surprisingly intelligent commentators support the idea that the Charedi world requires special consideration in relation to compliance with Covid-19 regulations in the UK, Israel and elsewhere, because those regulations are so challenging to their core lifestyle practices.

This is ridiculous: and offensive to everybody else whose lives also revolve around meeting people in lots of different contexts and gaining social, professional, spiritual and other support from them, and who have suffered in dignified silence for the benefit of the health of the public.

There is no reason why Charedim should have more need, or be any more entitled, to gather together than any other community. The idea that their day revolves around learning and praying adds nothing: both of those activities can be carried out alone, assisted to some extent by remote communication.

What Covid-19 has actually taught us about many members of Charedi communities is something that many of us have suspected for some time: that they have no connection whatsoever with Judaism in any meaningful sense.

As Chief Rabbi Mirvis powerfully put it in commenting on a large Charedi wedding in Stamford Hill broken up by the police for flouting Covid-19 regulations, this a staggering denial of the fundamental Jewish emphasis on health and safety. That is so much the case that it is difficult or impossible to recognise these people as practising any kind of Judaism that I recognise.

But the reality is that this is just a new emergence of something that many of us have known known or suspected for some time, and which now perhaps needs to be articulated clearly and publicly: much of the lifestyle for many Charedi communities is completely incompatible with the fundamental principles of Judaism.

He then went on to condemn a general culture of lawlessness within the Charedi community and the code of silence which facilitates it, with:

In the UK, benefit fraud appears to be endemic in parts of chareidi communities, with housing benefit in particular being manipulated through bogus shell companies and the like in order to support an otherwise unattainable lifestyle. This is incompatible with the fundamental Jewish principles of truth, yashrus (being straight) and avoiding falsehood of any kind.

And it is also inconsistent with seeking the right to coexist as a community within a decent rule of law society: as the judge said in the case of Kliers v Schmerler in 2018: "to be confronted by a plan of this nature [a purported tenancy agreement in order to obtain housing benefit] which, on the evidence, is common practice amongst esteemed and respected religious and community leaders, is one which must cause very great concern to any court seeking to administer the law and the process of justice and legal remedy in this country if not elsewhere".

Even where benefit is obtained without fraud, the Talmud emphasises the importance of people being trained to earn their own living: bringing people up to be dependent on charity is again contrary to fundamental Jewish principles.

Perhaps most important of all, an ancient talmudic concept of not handing fellow Jews over to the non-Jewish authorities, based on times and places without rule of law and with arbitrary and largely antisemitic criminal and civil authorities, has been increasingly turned into a kind of theological support for refusal to wash dirty linen in public, despite the fact that there are no effective private laundries.

It came sadly as no surprise to many of us when in 2013 the rabbinic leader of a major Charedi organisation in London was "outed" on television in secret film footage telling an alleged victim of abuse that it was forbidden to report the alleged offender to the police.

There is no foundation for this in Jewish law whatsoever, and it is based on nothing but the wish to preserve the reputation of the community at the expense of the pain and suffering of the individual. It is not surprising that there is abuse of various kinds, including child abuse and other domestic abuse, within Charedi communities, which consist of human beings: but it is not just surprising but appalling that any community should institutionally refuse to address abuse through the only effective mechanism, the criminal courts.

I admire many people who count themselves as Charedim. Some of them are deeply inspiring people. There are aspects of some Charedi lifestyles and communities that I find inspiring, although I would not want to share all of them.

And there are other aspects of Charedi life that I do not relish but to which I believe they have a protected legal right in the UK (something that has frequently arisen in my advice to Charedi communities over the years about the place of yeshivahs within the educational regulatory system, for example).

He then called upon the rest of the Jewish world to stand up and condemn a society that tolerates these abuses perpetrated by the Charedi Community (benfit fraud, child and domestic abuse and risking public health and safety):

But when the three things most publicly known about the Charedi world become benefit fraud, covering up abuse and breaking public health law, it is time for the rest of the Jewish world - including those Charedim to whom these things are abhorrent - to stand up and say clearly and loudly that any community that tolerates these three things has no connection with Jewish law or values and has become simply a self-indulgent and dangerous sect.

The biggest problem in all this is that Charedim look so very Jewish. Their obsession with the externals means that to themselves, to the outside world, and even to many other Jews, they appear to be the quintessence of Jewish life. In fact, many of them are the antithesis of fundamental Jewish principles in so many ways.

It is time for the rest of the Jewish community to disown those individuals publicly and allow them to go their own mad and dangerous way, and turn to the task of publicly representing a more balanced approach to Jewish practice as being the real continuation of the Jewish heritage in all meaningful ways.

What we have here is yet another example of religious fundamentalists living out their arrogant belief that they have a special entitlement to pick and choose which laws to obey and to disregard any that inconvenience them or interfere with their assumed right to practice their religion anyway they wish, regardless of any threat they pose to society at large and to the health and welfare of those with whom they come into contact.

In this regard, the Cheredi Jewish community of London are little different to the entitled American evangelical Christian nut-jobs and other religious fundamentalist throughout the world, who insist on holding their Sunday super-spreader events with no regard for the health and safety of their family or their local community. The coronavirus pandemic has brought the selfishness and basically antisocial nature of religious fundamentalists into sharp focus.

Religious groups have been a major obstacle in controlling the spread of this deadly plague, when we should have been able to rely on their support in the name of humanity.

If any good can come out of his terrible tragedy, we should never forget this lesson.

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