The former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel has endorsed a bizarre belief that the Holocaust was divine retribution for Reform Judaism. He seems to have a lot in common with Jerry Falwell.
Rabbi Blames Reform Jews for Holocaust - Newsday.com
Rabbi Blames Reform Jews for Holocaust - Newsday.com
Members of the Reform Jewish movement filed a complaint with police Wednesday against a former Israeli chief rabbi who blamed the liberal Jewish movement for the Holocaust.
The complaint accused Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu of defamation after he told an ultra-Orthodox radio station last week that the Holocaust was punishment for Reform Judaism's liberalization of the religion...
Asked by a radio interviewer what was the sin of the 6 million Jews who were killed by the Nazis, Eliyahu quoted a biblical verse about divine punishment for altering a ritual and added, "Those people (victims) were not to blame, but the Reform movement began in Germany. Those tinkerers with the faith got their start in Germany."
Divine wrath, Eliyahu added, "doesn't distinguish between the virtuous and the evil." The lesson, he said, was not to make "even the slightest change" to Jewish practice...
Eliyahu, 77, who served as chief rabbi for Israel's Middle Eastern Jews from 1983-1993, did not respond to requests for comment faxed to his office.
In 2005, Eliyahu raised a similar stir when he blamed nations "that don't help Israel, but want to ... interfere in our affairs and harm us," for causing the devastating 2004 tsunami that killed nearly 230,000 people in Asia and Africa.
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