Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on November 3, 2020

Theodor Herzl could never have imagined this scene, not in his wildest dreams.Representatives of the Reform, Conservative, religious-Zionist and haredi (ultra-Orthodox) religious movements sat beneath a picture of Herzl last week in the Ben-Gurion board room at World Zionist Organization headquarters in Jerusalem. There they joined all Israeli right- and left-wing parties along with the faction of General Zionists, which I represented, in signing an agreement to share the leadership and budgets of the international Zionist movement.Yes, haredim in the Zionist movement. An ultra-Orthodox party called Eretz Hakodesh ran in last winters election for the Zionist Congress and won 25 out of the 152 seats allocated to the United States. Just to put this in perspective: Those 25 seats came from approximately 20,000 votes, while the Reform movement received just over 30,000, and the Conservative movement a mere 14,000 votes. This is not to be taken for granted, given the strong stance against the Zionist movement advocated by the ultra-Orthodox since Herzls time and throughout the 20th century.Cynics will suggest that the haredim only joined in order to gain access to budgets, or to minimize the influence of the non-Orthodox streams in Israel, and that they dont truly believe in Zionism. But in order to run for the Zionist Congress, Eretz Hakodesh had to sign the Jerusalem Conference, which among other things calls for:1) Strengthening Israel as a Jewish, Zionist and democratic state... marked by mutual respect for the multi-faceted Jewish people.2) Ensuring the future and the distinctiveness of the Jewish people by furthering Jewish, Hebrew and Zionist education.3) Settling the country as an expression of practical Zionism.

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See original here:
Haredim joining the Zionist movement is good for Jews opinion - The Jerusalem Post

Category: Zionism
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