Word: orthodox
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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...
...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...
...first time, however, that the Shas party has been embroiled in a corruption controversy. Two Shas ministers have been convicted on corruption charges in recent years. Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem, explains that some parts of the ultra-Orthodox community tend to disregard secular law, despite a tenacious adherence to the minutest detail of Jewish religious ritual. Says Halevi: "You have a kind of borderless community that in its best expressions maintains international charity efforts that are second to none. But the dark side of this is a mentality that...