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Chief Rabbis protest Messianic in Bible QuizJewish believer emerged as top qualifier from Israeli public schoolsBy ICEJ News Chief Rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger wrote a protest letter to MK of Education Yuli Tamir that said allowing Bat-El Levi, from Beersheba, to compete "is a transgression of Halacha and is a distortion of the goal and essence of the quiz... Bible quiz participants have always been Jews who believed in the Torah handed down by Moses." "It is unacceptable that a member of a cult that has removed itself from the Jewish faith will take part in a quiz dedicated to a book that has been holy to the Jews since their inception as a people," wrote the rabbis. The annual Bible Quiz has become an honored traditional on Independence Day that is carried on Israeli cable television, and the winner will be immediatley congratulated by the prime minister on Thursday. Israeli youths from different segments of society qualify in tough preliminary competitions and Levi has emerged as the representative of the public schools. The protest against her broke out last week when the haredi anti-missionary group Yad Le’Achim discovered her family attends a Messianic Jewish congregation in Beersheva, in the Negev. The other four finalists have been under pressure to drop out of the event. But Tzurit Berenson, 15, said she and the other participants are planning to compete on Thursday. "We asked our own rabbis what to do and they told us that we should participate," said Berenson, who said she has been preparing for years to compete in the Bible Quiz. The spokesperson for Education Minister Yuli Tamir of the secular Labor Party said that Tamir does not plan to call off the quiz or request Levi to step down. "It is too bad that on the 60th anniversary we are dealing with these sorts of things. This should be a time of celebration, not of controversy,” said Lital Apter. “The point of the quiz is to check the participants' knowledge of the Bible, not to scrutinize their faith. The legal department in the Education Ministry verified that Levi is Jewish according to the criteria of the state. That's good enough for us," she said, according to The Jerusalem Post. |
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