When Jews call ‘other’ Jews Parasites

Immoral, unjust, unequal, unsustainable financially or militarily are all descriptions of how the “center-left” political camp are trying desperately to convince our “right” wing government to put into law ‘conscription for all’, ‘burden for all’ or ‘privilege for all’ could be another way to market it.

If those reasons/outcomes aren’t enough to convince our lawmakers to write just laws then here’s one more that makes me cry for yesteryears, for today and for tomorrow’s future generations of the Jewish people. Alienation. From what, you may ask, Alienation from our Judaism.

I grew up with an Israeli father in America, son of Jewish Polish parents that fled Poland as secular Zionists in 1924 and 1929 to come build our homeland.  My grandparents were the black sheep of their religious families who all perished in the holocaust.  As secular Zionists my grandparents survived by coming to Israel. To my horror, I grew up listening to my Israeli secular Zionist grandparents, father, aunts, uncles, cousins speaking about religious Jews as parasites.  This was a term that I was familiar with Nazis using as they described the Jews.  How can this be that my Jewish Israeli family members are using this rancorous description for our fellow people? Gnawing at me was the question, What and how did this come about?

Unfortunately, my experience with my family isn’t unique.  I have lived in Israel for 31 years and I’ve heard hundreds of people on TV, on the street, in stores etc. use parasite to describe religious Jews.  In addition, I participated in the program Momentum: in brief, it’s a program to bring secular/uneducated Jewish women from around the world together with Israeli/secular and religious women to learn, get to know one another and be exposed to the wonderful values/customs/teachings of Judaism in a warm, inviting, fun, accepting week long program.  I was 1 of 11 Israeli women that were with 50 women from North America.  My biggest takeaway from the program was how terribly apparent and heartbreaking it was to learn that the other 9 Israeli women I was with were so uneducated, unfamiliar but more than that they were plainly alienated from Judaism.  They grew up in houses where they heard the same description as I had of religious Jews. “Parasites/leeches”! I delved into this phenomenon with the group during our debriefing conversations.  What I learned was that these Israeli Jewish women were robbed of their Judaism because of the deep hatred, resentment of “Religious” Jews in Israel.  All sounded too sadly familiar to what I had experienced all my life with my family of 3 generations.

In Israel, we now have 3 generations of citizens feeling alienated, hatred and resentment towards religious Jews.  This has actually robbed millions of Jewish Israeli’s of the beauty of Judaism.  Leaving us spiritually searching or void.  Where is the public outcry about this?  The Israeli public are smart, they came up with solutions: they turned to Buddhism, Hinduism, Atheism and whatever else spoke to them. There is no doubt that we can’t change the past.  What we can do is make the tough, brave and right decision for our continuity, sustainability for generations to come by enforcing the law ‘enlistment of all’.  Spiritual Robbery is another shameful, unholy fallout of the unequal, unjust, immoral, unsustainable ongoing exemption for military service for the Religious