By Michael Berman
When Rabbi Zvi Schwartz began to build a new home for his institution of outreach and charity, he knew that he would face bureaucracies, architects, and contractors. He never imagined that the Reform movement would bring his dreams to a halt.
Lev L'Achim ("Heart to our Brothers") of Rechovot is an institution as great as it is diverse. Children from troubled homes find good meals and warm beds; their parents find counseling. The poor receive food, while IDF pilots get coffee and a friendly environment. All find a volunteer willing to study Torah with them, at any hour of the day.
"There is a myth of the charedi-chiloni [fervently Orthodox vs. secular] divide," says Rabbi Yosef Karmel, executive director of Lev L'Achim in America. "Lev L'Achim is disproving that divide." Rabbi Schwartz, director of the Rechovot branch, has worked in Jewish outreach in the city for 30 years. Today, his organization attracts thousands weekly.
In 1996, Rabbi Schwartz applied for a land grant from the city, which the city council approved by a strong majority. "We did not ask for land in this place," said Rabbi Schwartz, referring to the neighborhood of Ramat Yigal. "The city told us where to locate."
A small group of activists, though, claimed – falsely – that the center would shelter women involved with Arabs, and bring drugs to the neighborhood. Based upon this story, 18 residents filed suit against Lev L' Achim to stop the building. They needed a lawyer – and the same activists led them to Sharon Tal of the Israel Religious Action Center, the public and legal advocacy arm of the Israel Movement for Progressive (Reform) Judaism. IRAC took the case.
"Why does it bother them?" asks Schwartz. "This is against their mission [of advancing pluralism], isn't it?"
Rabbi Uri Regev, Director of IRAC, disagrees. He says the IRAC agenda is "very wide," and often focuses upon "ultra-Orthodox" institutions.
In this instance, he called the council's land grant an "abuse of authority and public funds." He conceded, however, that there exist no specific criteria for land grants, meaning that he could not specify the abuse. Furthermore, IRAC, according to Regev, "did not do a thorough investigation of the procedure followed in most cases" – and there are hundreds of such allocations every year.
What, then, was unique about this case? In Regev's opinion, "it was not wise discretion" to place a charedi institution in a secular neighborhood. In actuality, though, Ramat Yigal is a diverse and open neighborhood. Indeed, 200 residents petitioned for approval of the grant – many more than those who opposed it, even on the false information.
Moreover, Regev's perspective may be significantly at odds with those of IRAC's American supporters. In the United States, similar views were denounced by Jews of widely varying stripes as unseemly religious bias in cases from upstate NY (involving Orthodox synagogues) to northern Virginia (involving a Muslim school).
What happened next did not surprise those who have long perceived anti- religious bias in Israel's Supreme Court. Responding to the IRAC suit, that Court ordered the State's Attorney to issue unprecedented guidelines for land allocations. The city then moved to comply with those guidelines, although the State's Attorney said there was no cause for their retroactive application. Even so, the Court rejected the application for exactly that reason, for not following guidelines which didn't exist at the time.
Regev, for his part, said that "there isn't a shred of truth" to claims that the Court forced the city to take new action. He said that the defendants acted on their own initiative.
"I don't know what to say," answered Rabbi Schwartz. "We have the letters. The Court demanded this." And then he faxed documents from the State's Attorney's office, describing the guidelines and the Court order that created them.
The end result of IRAC's efforts to "defend" Ramat Yigal is an unsightly, abandoned building skeleton on which Lev L'Achim spent over $500,000. "Not a penny of it was sent from America," sighs Rabbi Karmel. "It was all from Rabbi Schwartz's students in Rechovot. These are not rich people."
Today, Sharon Tal has found a new battleground: Lod airport, where IRAC aims to close Chabad booths. According to the newspaper Ha'aretz, Tal's filing demands that Chabad either close down or change its philosophy, and "consent... to the establishment of other stalls from the various streams of Judaism." The local Chabad emissary, Rabbi Nachman Maidantzik, cannot understand being sued for a position Chabad never took: "If they want to come, we won't oppose them," he said. "We don't work against them."
IRAC, on the other hand, now has a lawyer focusing upon opposition to Orthodox outreach – supported by the American Reform community. "I can tell you what we're doing with a dollar," Karmel says. "What is being done with the Reform charitable dollar?"
[Michael Berman is a Baltimore-based dot-com CIO]
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