Jerusalem, June 17: Around 80,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews on Thursday held a mass protest in Jerusalem, a police official said, with the number rising rapidly as thousands more flooded into the city.
“There are about 80,000 in Jerusalem now and more are arriving all the time,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said. “It will probably reach 90,000 or 100,000.”
Thousands of police were on high alert as protestors rallied against a supreme court ruling to jail a group of parents of European origin, or Ashkenazis, who are refusing to send their daughters to a school with Jewish girls of Middle Eastern descent, or Sephardis.
In Jerusalem, thousands of protesters massed in a celebratory atmosphere near the western entrance to the city, the vast majority men dressed in the traditional black of the ultra-Orthodox, one media correspondent said.
As the defiant parents arrived to address the throng, the fathers, all of whom were dressed in special hats and clothes usually reserved for festive occasions, were swept up onto the shoulders of the crowd who broke into spontaneous dancing.
Some held banners proclaiming “The Torah Rules!” referring to the supremacy of Biblical law over the secular justice system.
Others carried placards reading “The Prisoners of Immanuel are representatives of Israel,” in reference to the defiant parents, all of whom come from the illegal Jewish settlement of Immanuel in the northern Palestinian West Bank.
The parents and ultra-Orthodox leaders were expected to address the crowd from a makeshift stage made out of two lorries which straddled the width of the road.
The parents, who represent more than 40 families, were on Thursday to begin a two-week jail sentence for contempt of court, but Rosenfeld said their detention had been delayed from midday (0900 GMT) until 5:00 pm in order to allow the protests to play out peacefully.
The Jerusalem protest was expected to include a march to police headquarters at the Russian Compound in the city centre, where the errant parents were to present themselves to start their jail term — a period of two weeks which could be extended.
Media reports said the court was considering a compromise proposal under which the rebel parents could set up a privately funded parochial school for their children, outside the state-regulated system.
The incident began when the supreme court intervened in a dispute at an Orthodox school in the Immanuel illegal Jewish settlement in the northern Palestinian West Bank, where parents from the strictly observant Slonim Hassidic sect of Ashkenazi Jewry refused to let their girls go to school with girls of Sephardi descent.
The court had given the parents until Wednesday to send their children back to school or face jail for contempt of court. The parents refused.
The dispute was described by the liberal Haaretz daily as “the most dramatic state-religion clash to break out here.”
In a bid to calm tensions, President Shimon Peres on Wednesday met deputy education minister Meir Porush, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi party United Torah Judaism (UTJ), who was expected to ask for a presidential pardon for the parents.
The Slonim parents say their objections are not racist but are based on differences in religious observance between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi traditions.
Yakov Litzman, an MP from the United Torah Judaism party, told army radio: “There is a set of rules (in the ultra-Orthodox community). We don’t want televisions in the home, there are rules of modesty, we are against the Internet,” he said. “I don’t want my daughter to be educated with a girl who has a TV at home.”
There are about 1,300 Slonim families in Israel, most living in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, as well as several dozen families in Immanuel and Kiryat Gat southwest of Jerusalem.
The sect was established in 1858 in a town of the same name in what is now Belarus.
In Israel, the Slonim subdivide into two groups which both follow different rabbis — the Slanim, or “blacks”, who revere a rabbi with a black beard, and the Slonim, or “whites,” after their white-bearded rabbi.
—Agencies