Zehut Chairman Moshe Feiglin calls upon the government to cancel the Western Wall Plan and to understand that the Reform community in Israel is a far cry from the Reform community in the US.
“This has nothing to do with prayer, faith or spirituality. It is about power struggles, arm-twisting and politics. In this case, I completely agree with the Ultra-Orthodox. The claim that there are many denominations of Judaism and each denomination deserves equal rights to prayer at the Kotel is absurd,” said Feiglin.
“There are 40 Reform synagogues in Israel, and most days of the week, they are empty. As opposed to them, in over 15,000 Orthodox synagogues in Israel, Jews continue to pray and serve G-d as has been accepted throughout the generations,” Feiglin added.
“There is no reason to surrender to outside pressure. There are almost no Reform Jews in Israel. What we are witnessing is pressure applied upon Israel by means of the US, in order to force Israel to create state recognition of the Reform denomination. We must remember that the Kotel is a national area, at which Jews have prayed according to Jewish law for tens of years. It is absurd to cram all those visitors into a small space in order to afford equal space to a minority that makes up a fraction of a percent of visitors to the Kotel,” Feiglin added.
Feiglin noted that the current plaza reserved for the Reform is generally empty. “The Reform and all those who wish to pray together received the Israel Plaza. It is a beautiful spot at the southern edge of the Western Wall. Everyone who looks to the right from the Mugrabim Gate can see this beautiful plaza, which, for some reason, is always empty. So now they are demanding a plaza the size of the Kotel, when they don’t even manage to fill up their current plaza. This is Reform coercion. They want to coerce the entire public into adopting values with which it does not identify,” Feiglin concluded.
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