Posted on 06/27/2005 5:13:17 AM PDT by voletti
Russia has ordered an inquiry into a 16th century Jewish religious law to ascertain whether it constitutes racist incitement and anti-Russian material, a media report said. Russia’s state prosecutor has ordered an examination into ‘shulhan arukh’, a code of Jewish Halakhic law compiled in the 16th century, and a probe against a Jewish umbrella outfit in Russia for distributing a Russian translation of an abbreviation of the religious law.
The probe was launched after some 500 public figures, including members of the Nationalist Rodina Party, in a letter to the prosecutor’s office urged to outlaw the Jewish religion and all its organisations operating in Russia, daily Ha'aretz reported.
The affair being closely watched in Israel has raised concerns for the Jews of Russia, who have come under increased anti-semitic attacks recently, the report said.
(Excerpt) Read more at expressindia.com ...
What a vindictive little man tarring a whole nation because he was denied the high rabbinite position? Yup, history is all about such things.
It's amazing how many people are more then willing to jump in bed with communists or their stooges as long as they can fulfill their manic hatred for one man Putin (or maybe it's for Russia and Russians in general?).
No they are not - ever read a science text and understood it? The Russians are prividing nothing that can be turned into a nuclear weapon. They are even taking back spent all nuclear fuel. The issue is Iran develpoing the ability to enrich its own nuclear fuel - a technology the Russians are not selling Iran - the fear was that the refined Russian nuclear fuel would make it easier for Iran to take the enriched the uranium and turn it into weapons grade fuel. Russia is taking back all the fuel and thus is no longer part of the Iranian nuclear equation.
It is called reading.
Dang, how did that foot go so far up in your mouth? This article was already exposed as a fake. Read the comments where freepers prove it so.
Aha! You are a fountain of knowledge - there is only so much I can learn reading books and scanning the internet. Thank you.
Offensive what? The only thing they gave them (and I personally wouldn't have done that either) is a light water reactor, all fuel rods are returned. China, through proxy Pakistan is the one giving them missile tech, just like they gave Pakistan before that.
The main Nazi org in Russia is the Soviet Bolshaviks. Every time they make a "march" on Moscow it ends up with a wall of cops in battle rattle going Seattle on them.
Gusinsky did not get to appoint the Chief Rabbi. Putin did. This is not appropriate. That is a job for the Jewish Community not a secular governement.
"He is a bitter, angry, vindictive little man"
You know him personally?
Let's be honest here. You have already stated that your immediate family has ties to the Chabad organization in Russia.
Me: "Rabbi Kogan lived throught the Soviet repression"
You: "Yes and this makes him a hero exactly how?"
With all due respect, have you gone through it?
I did not start by saying Rabbi Kogan was a gedolai ha'dor, but neither would I smear him with sinat chinam.
What "vindictive little man?" You and others here are very good at changing the subject.
A Rabbi of long standing in the community translates a seminal Jewish text, gets called by Moscow prosecutors to defend it against spurious charges, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev says, ""To take a traditional Jewish text and try to ban it reminds us of the official state-sponsored anti-Semitism that we saw in czarist Russia," and you attribute it to occupational jealousy?
What distortion is this?
The text in question is fundamental to Orthodox Judaism and needs no defense. The Chabad in Russia should be uniting against this attack on Judaism. I hope the Shulchan Aruch is greater than petty squabbling over secular positions.
What's amazing is the degrees some go to and with whom they get in bed just to bad mouth a country.
The text in question is a Reformed rewriting of the text that is offensive to the Orthodox Jews.
Yeah, sure. That's a good one. Yeah we can trust the ayatollahs to return all that spent fuel. We can trust KGB Putin to make sure they do too.
MOSCOW, Russia - Looking out from his sixteenth-floor office in a Moscow skyscraper, Arsen Revazov can hardly believe that this is a country where it was once illegal to learn Hebrew or celebrate Passover.
He emigrated to Israel 15 years ago — one of a million Jews who fled the Soviet Union to escape institutionalised anti-Semitism and economic stagnation. But today he is back in Moscow — with his wife and two children — living an openly Jewish life and running an advertising business. “I just realised that there were so many more opportunities in Russia than in Israel. It is like the difference between New York and Arizona,” Mr Revazov, 38, told The Times. “Almost all my friends in Israel have come back, too.”
An estimated 100,000 Jews have returned to Russia in the past few years, sparking a dramatic renaissance of Jewish life in a country with a long history of anti-Semitism.
President Putin will cement Russia’s new relationship with its Jewish community today when he begins the first visit to Israel by a Soviet or Russian leader.
“This sends a message to the world that the Moscow-Arab coalition is over,” Berl Lazar, one of Russia’s two chief rabbis, said. “It’s eerie that it is happening at Passover. Here, during our holiday, the Russian President is visiting the Holy Land.”
The Soviet Union was one of the first states to recognise Israel in 1948, but later severed ties and backed Arab regimes to balance US support for Jerusalem.
Relations were reopened in 1987, when President Gorbachev allowed Soviet Jews to emigrate. Roughly one in four Israelis is now of Russian origin.
Five years ago, Rabbi Lazar opened a seven-storey, $20 million (?10.5 million) Jewish centre with a synagogue, swimming pool and kosher restaurant, built mostly with donations from abroad. Last year, work started on a bigger, $100 million complex, including a school, a medical centre and Russia’s first Jewish museum, using funds mostly raised in Russia. The land was given by Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow, in the clearest sign yet of government support.
“At first people were afraid to give their names to the centre. They had had enough trouble in the past,” Rabbi Lazar said. “Today, being Jewish here is like anywhere else in the world.”
You are mistaken and missing crucial information.
The text in question is a text based on the Oral Tradition, a text that Reform Jewry does not believe in since they do not believe in the Oral Torah (She B'al Peh), the Torah that was given orally and handed down through generations before it was written down.
Thus this text has nothing to do with Reform Judaism and everything to do with Orthodox Judaism.
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"Reform Judaism was born at the time of the French Revolution, a time when European Jews were recognized for the first time as citizens of the countries in which they lived. Ghettos were being abolished, special badges were no more, people could settle where they pleased, dress as they liked and follow the occupations that they wanted.
Many Jews settled outside of Jewish districts, and began to live like their neighbors and speak the language of the land. They went to public schools and universities, began to neglect Jewish studies and to disregard the Shulchan Aruch."
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/The_Origins_of_Reform_Judaism.html
ORTHODOX JUDAISM
Religious Jews today disagree on what Judaism is and what it should be. Orthodox Jews claim to hold the true religion of Judaism. In fact, Orthodoxy only began to organize and solidify its beliefs in the nineteenth century, in direct response to the Reform movement. To this day, there is less agreement among Orthodox Jews about what being Orthodox means—especially about how particular laws should be followed—than there is disagreement in any of the other modern movements. So, for example, the State of Israel has two “chief” rabbis to serve the Orthodox—one of them serving the style of Orthodoxy (Ashkenazi) that developed in Europe and the other serving the style of Orthodoxy (Sephardi) that developed in what today are primarily Arab lands. Among Ashkenazi Jews, many of the Orthodox follow the laws of the Torah as explained and expanded in a multi-volume code of Jewish law called the Shulchan Aruch that was written by Rabbi Joseph Karo in the sixteenth century.
http://www.rossel.net/basic04.htm
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Further the Jewish Community including the Lubavitch Orthodox Rabbi Lazar appear united in protesting the actions of the Duma and acknowledging recent surge in anti-Semitism. As well they should.
"The Great Hate Debate
Russian Jewish leaders differ on value of Duma repudiating anti-Semitic letter signed by some nationalist lawmakers.
Leaders of the fractious Jewish community in Russia are taking opposing positions on whether a vote last week by the lower house of Russia’s parliament to condemn an overtly anti-Semitic statement signed by 19 of its members amounts to progress in the fight against anti-Jewish bigotry.
Yet four major Jewish leaders — Chief Rabbis Berel Lazar and Adolf Shayevich; Vladimir Slutsker, president of the Russian Jewish Congress; and Mikhail Chlenov, secretary general of the Eurasian Jewish Congress — agreed in separate phone interviews that the recent upsurge of anti-Semitism in Russia is more intense than anything since the mid-1990s. They said it has caused deep worry among the estimated 500,000 Jews living in Russia.
Rabbi Lazar and Slutsker, the two pre-eminent Jewish leaders in the country, praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a staunch and indispensable ally of the Jewish community in the fight against anti-Semitism. But Rabbi Shayevich, a bitter rival of Rabbi Lazar, said Slutsker is “too close” to Putin to be an effective advocate for Jewish concerns or in the struggle for human rights and democracy, which many in Russia and abroad believe Putin himself to be imperiling.
About the Duma vote, Rabbi Lazar, a Chabadnik who has been in Moscow since 1989 and heads the most powerful Jewish umbrella body in Russia, the Federation of Russian Jewry, or FIOR, said, “There is no question this is a step forward. Much more needs to be done, but it is very positive the letter was repudiated by the Duma.”
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=10509
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“Russian prosecutors have launched a preliminary investigation into a Russian Jewish organization for publishing a 500-year-old Jewish text.
Two weeks ago, Moscow prosecutors declined to open a criminal case against the authors of a letter calling on Russian authorities to ban Jewish religious organizations as extremist. Now, prosecutors have said they intend to investigate a Jewish organization that published the Shulchan Aruch, which the authors of the anti-Semitic letter had cited as evidence for their claim.
The preliminary investigation has led at least one Russian Jewish official to draw parallels to anti-Semitic events in Russia’s past. However, it is not clear whether the initial investigation will lead to a full probe of the Jewish group, the Congress of Jewish Religious Organizations and Communities of Russia, or KEROOR.
The events are motivating Russian Jewish groups that often squabble with each other to find common ground in opposing the prosecutors’ actions.
The letter, which first surfaced in January, called for an investigation into the activities of Jewish religious groups in Russia that work according to “the morals of Shulchan Aruch,” a code of practical halachah, or Jewish law, that the letter claims contains norms that are offensive to Orthodox Christians.
Alleging that Jews believe in “anti-Christian morals,” the signatories also demanded that Jews be banned from employment in the civil service and in the media.
The letter, which had 20 Duma deputies among its 5,000 signatories, urged a criminal prosecution of KEROOR, which published a Russian translation of Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, an abridged version of the code, in 1999.
The news that the prosecutors are investigating a Jewish group generated a front-page report on Thursday in one of Russia’s national dailies, and prompted all three of Russia’s major Jewish groups to respond.”
http://www.virtualjerusalem.com/news/worldjewry/?disp_feature=THgJ9a.var
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For the record, Al Jazeerah and Storm Front want to see a copy of the petition requesting the ban. According to them it contains information with quotes from the Shulchan Aruch showing Judaism is "an extremist and racist ethnicity that hates non-Jews". That is the ostensible reason for banning it.
Yes, the Russians are screwing the pooch on playing footsies with Iran. Iran presents a bigger danger to them - reminds me of Stalin arming the Germans prior to WWII.
American Christians, meet Russian Jews.
You can't hide spent fuel - Russia does not oversea the return alone - the UN overseas it - with Americans dominating the UN inspection branch in question.
All of a sudden you trust the UN, and all of a sudden you trust Americans for that matter! Will it be the State Dept.?
I see your point, But the headline was disturbing.
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