Rabbi Shmuel Feierstein, Rabbi of Shaarei Tikva and the Marriage Registrar for Samaria, wrote Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu a pained and sarcastic letter this week, asking him whether he should freeze marriages in Samaria for the duration of the freeze on construction in Judea and Samaria.
"Since I am in charge of registering marriages throughout Samaria," he began, "I request that you clarify, following the construction freeze, if I am also to stop opening marriage registration files for the next ten months. I ask this based on the understanding that not all of the couples who marry are veterans of elite IDF reconnaissance units and that most will have trouble living in military tents, but rather would require reasonable and normal living quarters like all people. Or perhaps the proper thing would be to exile the newlyweds to places outside Judea and Samaria, and distance them from their communities and families?”
"Should we rabbis turn to our flocks and immediately freeze all childbearing for the next ten months, since after all, enlarging the families in Samaria will force them to enlarge their homes as well?”
'An absurd march'
"The esteemed Prime Minister doubtless understands,” Rabbi Feierstein wrote, “that this is an absurd march which takes us in the direction of dark times and places, when Jews were restricted to their zones in accursed anti-Semitic Europe; when the local man of means decided where his Jewish subjects could live and where they could not live.”
"Honorable Prime Minister – life cannot be stopped,” the rabbi stated. “Fresh and flowing life is unstoppable throughout our sovereign land – the land of our forefathers. Please do not lend your hand to racist demands that have been blown over here from Europe and from the leaders of the US.”
"The entire world would have been seethed and raged if a similar demand had been dictated to Hispanics and blacks in one of the states in the US, or to the Arabs of Ramle and Lod in our country. From every liberal leftist media podium, the entire world would have excoriated the enormous horrific racism,” the rabbi noted, and implored Netanyahu to cancel the freeze order.