Raising Their Voice Against The Pullout

At Midtown rally with a major Lubavitch presence and protests worldwide, Jews express solidarity for settlers and displeasure with Israeli government.

Mixing chants of “Not One Inch” with “We Want Moshiach Now,” a crowd of mostly Orthodox Jews packed a Midtown street Tuesday afternoon to protest Israel’s pending disengagement from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.

The vast majority of participants appeared to be members of the Chabad Lubavitch movement, who packed children from day camps into a penned-off section of Broadway near Times Square and began the rally with them chanting psalms.

Police Department sources estimated the crowd at 1,000, although the master of ceremonies at the event, Dr. Joseph Frager, said he believed five times that number were present.

“We were very pleased with the turnout, and we’re going to do it again and again,” Frager said.

At the height of the rally, organized by the Alliance for Eretz Yisrael, participants and spectators filled the sidewalks on both sides of Broadway between West 40th and 41st streets. Others distributed fliers, held signs and clashed with Satmar anti-Zionists on the periphery of the protest area.

Twenty-four other rallies were planned for Tuesday in major American cities such as Miami, Philadelphia, Denver and Chicago, as well as internationally in Amsterdam, Antwerp, London, Paris, Melbourne and Montreal. In Washington, D.C., some 200 protesters gathered near the Israeli Embassy.

Taking place as settlers and their supporters face off with the Israeli army in and around Gaza, the rally here featured mostly less-than-strident rhetoric, as well as musical productions like Avraham Fried singing “Gush Katif, we are with you.”

When Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who has led several delegations of American Jews to Gaza, took the microphone and sharply criticized Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, rally organizers tried to cut him off.

“It just shows how pathetic the situation is,” Hikind said later. “They didn’t want me to mention Sharon’s name. It’s OK to mention Shimon Peres, but not the man who was the architect of [disengagement], who is obsessed with unilateral withdrawal.”

In his brief comments before the crowd, Hikind noted that when Likud’s Sharon ran against Amram Mitzna of the Labor Party, Sharon said withdrawal from a single community in Gaza would be a victory for terrorism. Hikind then began a chant of “Shame on you” directed at Sharon.

Frager in his remarks claimed support for the pullout was plunging in both America and Israel, but a poll last week in Globes, an Israeli business magazine, said 54 percent of Israelis favored the pullout, while 40 percent were against it. And an Anti-Defamation League poll last week said some two-thirds of American Jews were backing the pullout.

“The government of Israel is running scared,” Frager said.

Other rally speakers included Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, spiritual leader of the West Bank town Efrat; Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America; Young Israel leader Rabbi Pesach Lerner; and G. Gordon Liddy in a barely audible phone hookup from Gush Katif, where he was doing his national radio show.

The large Chabad representation was a result of declarations by the late rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, that it is forbidden to relinquish any land held by Israel.

In a flier distributed at the rally, the rebbe was quoted as saying in 1990, “heaven forbid, to think of, or even worse, to speak about the possibility of giving even the smallest measure of Eretz Yisroel to non-Jews.”

Rabbi Leibel Groner, who served as the rebbe’s personal secretary, was listed as a speaker at the rally but he did not address the crowd. Tuesday morning, prior to the rally, he would not speak to The Jewish Week when reached by phone.

An organization of Chabad rabbis calling itself Pikuach Nefesh, Hebrew for “saving lives,” has been prodding the Lubavitch community to speak out against the disengagement, placing signs around the sect’s Crown Heights stronghold imploring community members to attend the rally. But Chabad leaders insisted the movement had no official position on opposing concessions of land.

“The rebbe wanted it to be a Jewish campaign [not only a Chabad campaign], and therefore didn’t want Chabad to be officially the prominent speakers behind it,” said Rabbi Aaron Raskin, a member of a prominent Chabad family and leader of Congregation Bnai Avraham in Brooklyn Heights as he walked to the rally, where he was one of the speakers. “That would perhaps diminish the other leaders and other communities from coming out.”

Others believe the rebbe wanted them to focus more on bringing Jews worldwide closer to Jewish observance — the central Chabad mission — than on getting involved in Israeli politics.

Rabbi Raskin called it a “mistake” that the Chabad movement didn’t speak out strongly in the early and mid-1990s, when Israel signed and implemented the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians that later collapsed into violence.

“If we would have protested it then, perhaps we wouldn’t have come to this situation today,” he said.

Chani Tessler, 29, of Crown Heights, holding a placard in one hand and her 18-month-old daughter, Perel, in the other, said she came to the rally because “when people see that people all over the world are gathering together and saying that they are not willing to accept what the government is doing, then we hope that the message comes across. Deep down, Sharon does not believe that what he’s doing is good.”

As she spoke, a passer-by snapped: “Palestine belongs to the Palestinians!”

Hikind said he was planning another mission to Gaza.

“It’s not over,” he vowed. “Things are very fluid. You never know.”

Hikind added that he prayed that tensions between opponents of the pullout and the Israeli army did not result in violence, but said he was encouraging the settlers to peacefully resist the transfer.

“If I was there,” he said, “short of raising my hand, I would do everything possible to resist.”