Israel's haredim sent
poken and unspoken m
in a mass rally a
the Supreme Court.

LARRY DERFNER
Israel Correspondent

Jerusalem

n the fight for Israel between
theocrats and democrats, the con-
ventional reasoning had the secu-
_
liar side winning. That reasoning
counted a batch of Supreme Court rul-
ings and the influx of nearly 1 million
secular Russians in the last decade.
Now, after an unprecedented one-
quarter million haredi (fervently obser-
vant) Jews gathered in Jerusalem with
little notice, that notion has been
rocked.
As the mass of haredim came out to
pray to protect the Jewish people from
the Supreme Court, Israelis saw a
remarkably unified minority in action.
And many of them were scared.
After all, the haredim had only a few
days' notice for the turnout. Their rabbis
screamed a few curses at Supreme Court
President Aharon Barak, put up a few
posters, and snap — 250,000 haredim
showed up.

2/19
1999

There had been fear of vio-
72,
lence, which would have
brought heavy police reprisals. ffs,
But their rabbis told them to
cool it, to not even carry signs;
everyone obeyed. In the end, it
was a tremendous show of
strength, but strength held in 0
0
check. It was an unspoken
warning: We can marshal our
troops in an instant, and
restrain them, or not do so.
This is just the beginning,"
warned the demonstration
leader Menachem Porush, the
grand old man of Agudat
Yisrael, the haredi political
party at the forefront of the
anti-court sentiment.
"We are going to win," vowed Rabbi
David Yosef, the influential son of Shas
spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. In
recent days, father and son had led the
verbal assaults on Barak and the judges,
calling them "enemies of Israel," "evil
doers," and, in the elder Rabbi Yosef's
words "unclean copulators. "

Above: A demonstrator,
one of hundreds of thousands
of haredi Jews who crowded
downtown Jerusalem to
demonstrate against the
Israeli Supreme Court
Sunday, calls out in prayer.

LO-: About 50,000
secular Israelis hold a
demonstration in downtown
Jerusalem in support of
the Israeli Supreme Court
Sunday, near where hundreds
of thousands of ultra-Orthodox
Jews protested against the court.

Before all this, many said that the
haredim's verbal barrage on democratic
Israel was an optical illusion. It seemed
they were only gaining power in the
political realm, and only insofar as it
concerned their world — filling a need
for more government money for syna-
gogues, yeshivot and draft deferments for
young men.

It didn't seem to affect the lives of the
other 90 percent of Israel. Israel at large
has become steadily freer from religious
laws, thanks mainly to the Supreme
Court's sustained erosion of the .
Orthodox monopoly over many areas of
Israeli life.
Added onto that was the new pros-
perity and mobility that Israelis had

