MK Rabbi Pindrus
In a special interview with Yated Ne'eman, Rabbi Yitzchok Pindrus, MK of United Torah Judaism from Degel HaTorah, explained that the current government, full of conflicts and disagreements, is based on one central pillar of agreement, and a secondary agreement. The main agreement is the desire to undermine the religious status quo and to legitimize the Reform movement, with getting rid of Bibi of only secondary importance.
"The media is not interpreting the events correctly," explains Rabbi Pindrus. "At least two of the central partners in the Coalition did not see getting rid of Netanyahu as a fundamental goal to fight for: Yemina and Ra'am. Second, after Netanyahu fell there is nothing to balance the different parties. On the other hand, if there is a topic that truly unites all the parties of the coalition, it is the desire to undermine authentic Judaism as it has been practiced for generations, by incorporating Reform and open Orthodoxy in the coalition. It is this that we try to bring out in our speeches, since this is something that is very confusing for the traditional Jews in southern cities or the mitchazkim all over.
They see the very big kippa on the head of rabbi Gilad Karib or even the small kippot on the people of Yemina and the "Torah veAvodah Faithful" and they do not understand what all the fuss is about. They are convinced that it is just politics among the religious. Our job is to bring out the true issues and to make it clear that they are trying to destroy the traditional Jewish presence in the public sphere.
On the other hand, some will say cynically that it is just that the chareidi parties have been left out of the spoils and that is why they are complaining.
Rabbi Pindrus dismisses this idea.
Just look at the coalition agreements. In the agreements with Labor, Meretz, Yisrael Beiteinu and Yesh Atid, it says explicitly that they will work to expand public transportation on Shabbos, civil marriage and all that it implies and a number of other similar initiatives.
Yemina claims that these agreements do not bind them, but only what they personally signed with Yesh Atid. But in their agreement, aside from the technical matters about how the government will operate, there are two laws that they want to pass urgently within two months: big changes to the laws of kashrus and the law of conversion. They demand that the municipal rabbis will no longer be in charge of kashrus, and that the supervision of conversion be taken out of the control of the Chief Rabbinate and given over to every local rabbi. There will be no central oversight of the standards applied by them.
The Minister of Religions argues that this will improve the delivery of religious services, but in practice it will destroy all standards. Obviously the whole point is to give the hundreds of local rabbis the opportunity to do as they see fit. They call it breaking the "monopoly" of the Chief Rabbinate, but we never heard anyone saying that we should break up the "monopoly" of the Ministry of Health to approve medicine, or the Environmental Ministry to police pollution.
