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Badatz Court Condemns Jews at Holocaust Denial Conference
Arutz Sheva

The Beit Din Tzedek (BaDaTz) joined other hareidi religious rabbinic courts in formally condemning an anti-Zionist group that participated in a Holocaust denial conference in Iran 10 days ago.

The Hareidi Badatz Court issued a statement saying, “We strongly denounce the participation of people calling themselves hareidi religious Jews, who joined Jew-hating gentiles … to commit an awful desecration of G-d throughout the world.”

The seven-member delegation to the two-day Iranian conference was photographed hugging and kissing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.”

The same group had attended the funeral of chief terrorist and former Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat. Later documents showed that they have also been funded by Palestinian Authority terrorist organizations.

Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger called for a cherem (excommunication from the Jewish community) of the group last week. He was quickly joined by the leadership of the Eida Haredit, an anti-Zionist Jerusalem-based council of Hassidic courts and other hareidi religious groups, including the Neturei Karta, that was equally harsh in its response to the group’s actions.

In a sharply-worded editorial published Thursday, the Ha’Eida newspaper said, “That tiny group of wierdos is liable to incite hatred against hareidim.”

Editor Shmuel Popenheim wrote in his article, “Those people’s distorted anti-Zionist zealotry, which is sanctified in their eyes above and beyond the opinion of our Torah sages, brought them to that conference.”

The Satmar Chassidic sect also quickly distanced itself from the group, which according to the Haaretz news service was comprised of American and West European members of the virulently anti-Zionist Neturei Karta and Satmar Chassidic groups.

The Satmar Chassidic Court issued a statement last Thursday calling on Jews “to keep away from them and condemn their actions,” an order tantamount to placing the men in cherem, similar to the call by Rabbi Metzger on Thursday.

The participation of the Neturei Karta members at the conference organized and led by Ahmadinejad was “act of madness,” said the Satmar statement, adding that the group had “trampled on the memory of their ancestors and people. They embraced the disciplines and followers of their murderers."

Israel Hirsch, one of the Neturei Karta participants of the conference, said his group “shares a common platform with Ahmadinejad when it comes to the so-called myth the Zionist movement created around the Holocaust.” A resident of Jerusalem’s Mea She'arim neighborhood, he said he "wanted to make it clear in Tehran that Zionism uses the Holocaust as an excuse for the existence of the Zionist state in the Land of Israel.”

Hirsch went on to say that the Iranian claim is logical. “They aren’t saying that there wasn’t a Holocaust,” he insisted. “But who perpetrated the Holocaust? The Nazis, the Germans. So they should at least pay compensation to the Jewish nation and establish a Jewish state within Germany and not within the land of Israel, which belongs to the Palestinians.”

This same group kissed and hugged Ahmadinejad when he appeared in New York to attend the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in September. They also exhorted Jews to pray for a Hizbullah victory during the second war with Lebanon after two IDF reservists were captured by the terror organization in a cross-border raid this summer.

The ruling was signed by Badatz chairman Rabbi Tuvia Weiss and other rabbinic judges and distributed in Jerusalem on Wednesday.


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