Word: meas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Just before sundown every Friday, a bearded Jew with a ram's horn blats a warning through the crowded, ghettolike section of Jerusalem known as Mea She'arim. The Sabbath approaches. Until sundown Saturday, no one may work, smoke, cook a meal, answer a telephone, or carry money on his person. Yellow signs outside the quarter warn that on the Sabbath only emergency vehicles, such as fire trucks and ambulances, will be allowed on its narrow, cobbled streets. Generally, not a car is moving and quiet reigns...
...into this reverent hush, two Sabbaths ago, that 500 cheerful American and European Baptists drew up in 20 buses, having come, on tourism bent, through the Mandelbaum Gate from Jordanian Jerusalem. The Orthodox Jews of Mea She'arim were dumfounded with outrage-and none more than a lean, hawk-eyed man who has a fair claim to the title of the world's most orthodox Orthodox Jew. On occasion, he even shows up in sackcloth and ashes. He is Amram Blau, 63, leader of a fanatical Mea She'arim sect called the Neturei Karta (guardians...
...Shabbos! Shabbos!" Blau and his partisans take their religion so seriously that they even refuse to recognize the state of Israel. To that end, Blau refuses to touch Israeli money. His weekly bulletin is the only publication in Israel without a license from the government. In Mea She'arim, Blau's word is law, and periodically he has also tried to enforce his views on the rest of Jerusalem. Before police could stop him, he often dashed onto the field at Saturday soccer games to steal the ball from the players and run off shouting "Shabbos! [Sabbath] Shabbos...
Blau's followers in the Neturei Karta number about 350 families, but they can muster some 3,000 other Orthodox Jews from Mea She'arim for their periodic protests against Israeli secularism. Last year they picketed a public swimming pool that permitted mixed bathing, after Blau warned that "Jerusalem will be turned into a huge brothel...
...Blasphemy! Heresy!" Blau has been fighting Zionism since he was old enough to grow a beard. Grandson of a Hungarian immigrant who helped build Mea She'arim in the 19th century, Blau learned as an article of faith that the Jews had been dispersed from ancient Israel for their sins. Since only the Messiah could re-establish Israel, Blau naturally looked upon the efforts of Chaim Weizmann to set up a secular Jewish state as nothing less than blasphemy...