10.10.98
As advertised in our web-site, the World's Seventh Congress of Secular Humanistic Jews was held on October 8-10 in the Dan-Panorama Hotel in Tel-Aviv. Yesterday evening (10.9.98) the following events took place:
Religious compulsion and violence were demonstrated yesterday at the "Dan Panorama" hotel in Tel-Aviv, while the participants of the Congress of the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews were gathering for a formal Friday night dinner.
The hotel's Kashrut inspector forbade the dinner's organizers to light candles, as part of the Shabbat reception ceremony, as customary in their countries. He also forbade the various delegations members to photograph the ceremony under the claim of "breaking the Shabbat." His demands enraged all the participants, about 150 men and women, the representatives of Jewish communities from the U.S., France, Belgium, Russia and Israel, who had already started the ceremony.
The inspector was joined by several Orthodox Jews, who were spending the Shabbat in a hotel. Following the loud argument ("Are you Jews, You?" screamed an excited skull-cup bearer), Mr. Sherwin Wayne of Detroit, the Federation's Chairman, was pushed and beaten.
It should be noted that the Conference dinner's area had been separated by a partition from the rest of the hotel's dining hall.
The Conference participants, most of them from abroad, who had been holding discussions and listening to lectures about religious and state issues in Israel for five days, could feel the hand of the religious authorities in Israel on their own. Their offense at the attack on their right to observe their customs as they wish and as they are used to, and the expressions of compulsion and violence which had been directed against them, brought them to make some practical decisions: Mrs. Connie Wollberg of the well-known travel agency Gate-1 in Detroit, who brings many groups of Jewish tourists from the U.S. to Israel, announced that, upon her return to the U.S., she would stop all her relationships with the "Dan" hotels chain. This declaration of boycott was joined by the members of the rest of the delegations from Europe.
The Federation Chairman, Mr. Sherwin Wayne, declared that upon his return to the U.S. he would start action to stir up the leaders of the non-Orthodox Jewish communities around the world to change their attitude toward the religious authorities in Israel. Israel's previous absorption Minister, Yair Tsaban, the Conference President, expressed the sense of shame shared by the citizens of Israel, who had descended to such level of concessions to illegal, inhumane, religious compulsion.
This event was witnessed, quietly and painfully, by Mr. Aybee Nathan, paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, who had been invited to receive the honors of "Humanist of the Year" from the Federation and the Institute for Pluralistic Judaism in Israel. "It was more than just a symbolic event," said the Federation Chairman, Mr. Sherwin Wayne at the evening's conclusion speech, "because Aybee Nathan symbolizes the courage, the determination, the opposite of apathy and lethargy, the readiness to do what the heart believes in and the loyalty to the cause" - all the elements so missing in the indifferent secular Jewish society in Israel.
