Rabbi David Fendel, the dean of the hesder yeshiva in Sderot, has penned a letter in support of the dean of the Midbara k'Eden yeshiva in Mitzpeh Ramon, Rabbi Tzvi Kustiner, who recently spoke out against LGBT organizations.
"I have heard the impassioned words emerging from the pure heart of Rabbi Tzvi Kustiner, who begs people not to submit to the terrorist tactics used by LGBT organizations which seek to destroy the sanctity of Jewish family life," he wrote.
"Where does this brazen chutzpa come from, which leads them to actually take pride in doing what the Torah forbids? It is like a person raising a flag that says, 'I eat chametz on Pesach,' or, 'I am a proud Shabbat desecrator,' or 'I commit adultery with a married woman.'"
Rabbi Hendel added, "How can someone with a Jewish heart entertain the idea of holding such a march specifically in Jerusalem, and specifically in the three holy days leading up to the festival of Shavuot [Tabernacles], which celebrates the giving of the Torah? Is there any greater cynicism than this? They have no sensitivity whatsoever to the sacred."
"Sexual identity is not the essence of a person," he continued. "A person is much, more than his sexual orientation. And we must be humble in the face of the Torah, and sometimes, we simply have to say - this is something I cannot do because the Torah forbids it, and I must do the right thing."
"We will not shrink at proclaiming the truth," Rabbi Fendel continued. "No amount of brainwashing can alter what is true. Health Minister Horowitz has himself proclaimed to have brought about a 'revolution' in this area, just one more area that this illegitimate government has damaged."
Rabbi Kustiner has also protested outside the home of Yamina MK Nir Orbach, with statements such as, "Don't be afraid to say: Homos, go home. Take your courage into your hands and tell LGBT people to go home. They are evil. Why does no one say a word when they tell us to say 'parent one' and 'parent two?'"
In a letter he penned to graduates of his yeshiva, Rabbi Kustiner wrote, among other things, "With regard to individuals, many of these young people are attracted to their own sex because of complex emotional trauma they have experienced. A great many of them were sexually abused as children. These young people are called to demonstrate true spiritual heroism in their everyday lives and they are beloved to us in every way.
"And they need our help," he continued. "They need to receive psychological treatment that will help them, and among our own student body there are such young men, who struggled long and hard with this issue and eventually found healing and today, they lead normal, healthy family lives."
Rabbi Kustiner then stressed that the LGBT organizations "exploit the distress of these young people instead of helping them, in order to advance their own extremist agendas. What they want to do is to re-engineer the nature of normal family life. They say and write this explicitly, and their methods are aggressive and even violent."
"Let me bring you an example of what they are doing," he continued. "Last week, in a school in the south of the country, children were shown a play about the Holocaust, about a priest who saved several children from death and after the war, the father came to reclaim them. However, the children did not want to leave the priest, and so the solution found was... to build a new family with two fathers, the priest and the children's biological father..."