News Brief

(IsraelNN.com) Sefi Rachlevsky, a leftist writer who was a guest of the Knesset's Interior Committee Wednesday caused uproar when he compared the Jewish law regarding marriage to the Nuremberg laws enacted by the Nazis. The committee was discussing the Chametz Law governing the sale of chametz during Pesach, and Rachlevsky chose the occasion to blast laws based on Jewish religion, which he said were racist.

In an utterance that seemed designed to disturb the largely hareidi-religious group of Knesset Members present, Rachlevsky said: "There is no room on the eve of Holocaust Day, or on any other day, for laws with racist content." He then mentioned the law governing marriage which he said prevented him, as a Jew, from marrying a non-Jew, and said: "This formula is too close to those laws in Nuremberg."

The hareidi-religious MKs pounced on Rachlevsky, calling him a lunatic for comparing Torah law to the Nuremburg laws and recommending that he be committed to a mental institution. They refused to let him continue speaking, and committee chairman Ophir Pines did not try to defend him, saying that he too was offended, as a secular Jew, by what he termed Rachlevsky's "chutzpah."