Word: orthodox
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Saturday night, Aug. 1, killing two and wounding 15 more. While the authorities have been careful not to speculate on a motive for the crime, the city's stunned gay community was not hesitant about assigning blame for the atmosphere they believe was conducive to the crime. Pointing to Orthodox Jewish gay-bashers, gay activists say the shots fired in the club for teenagers - the most serious in a series of verbal and physical attacks on their community - were a violent manifestation of Israel's ongoing culture war. The attack spotlights the tensions within Israeli society as it tries...
...Aviv that is the epitome of Israeli gay rights is only a short bus ride from one of the more inflexible Orthodox communities in the country, Bnei Brak. And in all matters connected to religion, gay rights are considered subservient to traditional Jewish teaching, in which male homosexuality is outlawed and lesbians simply do not exist...
Israel has long struggled with the demands of modern society and the increasingly strident calls from the ultra-Orthodox to bring public life more in line with rigid Jewish teachings. There is no separation of church and state in Israel, where religious facilities - including those for the Muslim and Christian communities - are funded by the government but controlled by the religious establishment. There is a wary standoff between the state judicial system and the religious courts, leading to increasingly frequent showdowns over cases involving divorce and religious conversion. (Read how opposition to gay rights unites Israel's contentious faiths...
Passions can run high. Advertising billboards featuring scantily clad women are periodically destroyed. There is a legal battle under way over demands to run separate public buses for men and women on routes serving ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. Recently Jerusalem has seen weekly protests over a municipal decision to open a parking lot on the Sabbath. Last year, a former Health Minister from the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party blamed a series of small earth tremors on the rise of homosexual activity. Earlier, Shas had led religious opposition to gay couples' being granted the right to adopt children...
...same week that Saar decided to remove “al-naqba” from textbooks in Arab schools, a real “catastrophe” exploded in the usually quiet, solemn streets of West Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood. There, Jews of the ultra-orthodox Toldot Aharon sect protested en masse the arrest of a mother of five, taken into custody for starving her three-year-old son until he weighed no fewer than seven kilograms. Toldot Aharon is among the most conservative Hasidic sects that constitute Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox Eda Haredim community...