Jerusalem Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar today (Tuesday) slammed the Reform movement following the Supreme Court petition they submitted to revive what is known as the Western Wall deal. The deal would expand the existing mixed gender prayer area at the site, join the entrances to the traditional and mixed prayer areas and create a committee for administering the Wall which would include non-observant Jews.
"I learned that there was a hearing regarding the Western Wall, the petition of the 'accursed villains' who are perpetrating every transgression in the world against the Torah ... they marry gentiles with Jews, they have neither Yom Kippur nor Shabbat, but they want prayer ... One shouldn't think for a minute that they want to pray. What they are after is to desecrate the sacred," he said in his weekly shiur Torah class), as quoted by the haredi news website Kikar Hashabbat.
"[This continued] until G-d intervened and canceled the previous bad plan; but the Reform movement sat idly by. The court took over the matter and warned them to implement the plan and if not, the court would rule.It was foreseeable and predictable.We said publicly that this silence reveals a prior agreement."
He explained that the Reform movement is worse than Holocaust denial in his eyes for denying even more of Jewish history."They are trying to blind the public and say that 'the haredi extremists invented it (halakha)'. It's exactly like Holocaust denial. They scream, 'Why in Iran are there Holocaust deniers?' They deny more than the Holocaust ... They deny the Temple, all the Mishnaic sources and all the Talmudic tractates that speak of the men's sections and the women's sections. Is that something anyone doubts? Did we invent this ourselves?
"It is a destruction that is being created in our time; destruction, real destruction, but just as we didn't give up after the destruction itself for almost 2,000 years, we have not given up because of them, nor are we afraid of them."
He also criticized the Supreme Court."It's always seeking equal rights. Equality is a good thing, but equal rights can be taken to extremes ... We see where it leads; even in security matters many countries are destroyed in the name of holy equality. But what does equality have to do with this? Is the Western Wall an object that belongs to us? It has no owner, not the government, not the court, and not the rabbi of the Western Wall. It is holy to God."