About a community of anti-Zionist Jews - By Yirmiyahu Cohen

Ma'an
last month I wrote an article about Abraham Wieder, mayor of an American town of 20,000 Orthodox Jews, who wrote to President Obama praising his efforts to stop the bloodshed in the Middle East, while denouncing the Zionist state as a contravention of the Almighty’s command.

For many in the Middle East that may have been the first time hearing about these Orthodox Jews who oppose Zionism, and our community was inundated with questions: who exactly are we and what percentage of Jews do we make up? And most importantly, can the existence of this segment of Jewry raise our hopes that the long-awaited end of the Zionist regime may come from within?

To answer these questions, I would like to share with you some history of Zionism and of Orthodoxy, and of the large community of anti-Zionist Jews living in the American town of Kiryas Joel, from where Mayor Abraham Wieder expressed his support for Obama and his peace policy.

The town was founded by Rabbi Teitelbaum in 1977. At that time, 14 families of his followers moved into the new town. According to census data, Kiryas Joel grew faster than any other community in New York state from 2000 through 2006. Now it is home to over 20,000 Jews. Kiryas Joel grew by 51%, to 20,071 residents from 13,273, over the six-year period. The village has the youngest median age (15.0) of any population center of over 5,000 residents in the United States.

I personally grew up in America as a member of this community, and I spent seven years attending an excellent yeshiva in Jerusalem. At this yeshiva Zionism was not taught or encouraged, but it was rarely spoken against either. The focus was primarily on Torah study.

To trace the importance of these factors, we must look back to the twentieth century and the near death and rebirth of traditional Orthodox Judaism.......

... Zionism was at first a completely secular movement, to the point that some rabbis declared that the Zionists’ true purpose was to lead Jews away from Judaism, and the state was only a means to that end. In 1948, almost all the state’s leaders, and all of its army, were non-religious Jews..... Full story