MERCAZ Newsletter — Spring 2008

Ex-Chief Rabbi's Words Stoke Hatred

Israel's Masorti Movement threatened legal action against former Sephardi Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu for saying during his weekly Torah lecture last November that "the reek of hell wafts" from Reform and Conservative synagogues, and it is therefore forbidden to walk by them.

In his lecture, Eliyahu related that he was once invited to a circumcision in a building that contained three synagogues, one Orthodox, one Conservative and one Reform. The Orthodox synagogue, he said, was on the top floor, "and I wondered how I would enter and pass by these synagogues, from which the reek of hell wafts...They told me that there was a sort of kitchen through which one could go up without passing those synagogues, and I told them that I would only go up via that kitchen, and only if I would not pass the entrances to those forbidden synagogues."

This is not the first time that the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi has made wild assertions against non-Orthodox Jewry. Last Spring, rabbi Eliyahu accused the Reform Movement, which arose in the 19th century in Germany, with angering God and thereby causing the Holocaust: "Those reformers of religion started in Germany, and because it is said that the wrath of God does not distinguish between the righteous and the evil ones — this was done."