Anti-Charedi Hate Speech Spread Around UK Town April 18, 2007

From The Jewish Press:

An unsigned leaflet delivered to homes at Ramsgate, Kent, site of the Moses Montefiore synagogue and mausoleum, has angered residents who have always preserved a good relationship with the many Jewish visitors who visit the site…Recently, property magnate and prominent member of the Satmar community Samuel Berger announced his intention to rebuild the original kollel in keeping with the terms of Sir Moses’s will. The leaflet circulating in Ramsgate describes the reconstruction of the college in the image of what it called “a Charedi sect.”

“Sir Moses Montefiore had little tolerance for Charedim,” the author of the flier claims. “He regarded them as aloof and arrogant and criticized them for isolating themselves from the wider society. He would not approve of a Charedi college in his name.”

The leaflet continues, “Within a few years the Medical Centre will be in the middle of an ultra- Orthodox Jewish ghetto where no English is spoken, cars are not welcome on Saturday and ‘immodestly dressed visitors’ are subject to personal, probably violent, abuse.”

“Aloof, arrogant, abusive” — I don’t know what would be worse, if this were the work of a prejudiced Jew or of a anti-Semitic secularist.