Raanana Mayor Nachum Hofri has clarified that he does not intend to fire his campaign spokeswoman, Hana Beit-Halahmi, despite controversy over offensive comments she made about Judaism and religious Jews.
In response to rumors that he planned to fire Beit-Halahmi, Hofri wrote on Facebook that his spokeswoman “will be with us until 22.10.13.”
Beit-Halahmi most recently caused an uproar when she wrote that Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning over the destruction of the First Temple and Second Temple, “is essentially a cause for celebration.”
After her comments were publicized by Arutz Sheva, she offered a clarification, saying, “My post this morning was wrote jokingly, because the amount of violence and needless hate around the politics of force at the Western Wall raises questions about what would happen if it were more than a wall.”
“Gog and Magog,” she answered herself, referring to a massive war prophesied in the Bible.
Beit-Halahmi had previously caused offense in 2010 with serious criticism of Jewish youth in Judea and Samaria. In an article titled, “Berlin 1939, we have returned to you,” she wrote, “The hilltop youth, and settler youth in general, have taken the place of the Hitler Youth.”
“Fighting to replace the Brown Shirts are the Oz unit, right-wing organizations in the territories, and those 35 rabbis who signed a letter against renting apartments to Arabs,” she continued.
“So what do we have here? Nazis – settlers, Kahana Chai – Brown Shirts, Hitler Youth – Hilltop youth, Rabbis, Aryans – Pure Jews… Checking the purity of the Aryan race – who is a Jew… Jailing children of foreign workers – prison camps and concentration camps – prison for refugees in the desert – concentration camps… I opposed comparisons to the Holocaust, until they stopped being comparisons to the Holocaust and started being a remarkable similarity between people, ideas and processes in pre-Holocaust Germany and in Israel here and now,” she wrote.