Netanya Forbids Sale of Pork July 18, 2007

Kol ha’kavod, Netanya! One love, nothing but love, and hi-fives all around.

The Netanya City council passed a by-law yesterday forbidding the sale of pork within city limits. YNet brings us the story:

The Netanya City Council approved a bylaw prohibiting the sale of pork in the city on Tuesday. Those opposing the law called it “religious coercion and violation of the dominant status-quo in the city”.The bylaw was passed despite the legal council’s opinion that it would not be approved by the Interior Ministry or the High Court of Justice due to the fact that before such a decision is reached a poll must be taken among the population in areas where non-kosher meat vendors may choose to set up shop.

Netanya Mayor Miriam Fierberg urged also Israeli MKs to legislate a law to completely prohibit the sale of pork products in Israel.

Some 70 stores specializing in pork products can be found in Netanya’s city center, and most of their customers are immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

Again, this is not religious coercion. Religious coercion is forcibly saying, “stop eating pork”. This is saying, “order your pork wherever, you’re just not buying it in Netanya.”And let us not forget that a large percentage — and in recent years, a slight majority — of the immigrants coming in from the Soviet Union are not Jewish. One non-Jewish Russian IDF soldier was even found to be a Neo-Nazi, and Israeli neo-Nazi activity is on the rise.

Fifty percent of Netanya’s City Council members are religious or traditional, which led to the passing of the bill, with only three out of 25 council members opposing it; one council member abstained.

Do the math. 13 religious members means 12 non-religious. Eight non-religious council members voted for this bill. Why is this? They obviously didn’t see it as “religious coercion”.When a country calls itself “the Jewish state” and you move there, you might think you would pay just a little respect to Judaism. No one is asking for strict kosher supervision, no one is mandating even the Scripturally ordained separations between meat and dairy. All the Netanya city council is saying is that someone must go elsewhere to buy their pork chops.

While I can’t see Israeli MKs lining up to pass an all-out ban on pork products in Israel, Ms. Fierberg’s sentiments are coming from the right place. She wants to see at least some semblance of Judaism transposed onto “the Jewish state”. And the reason I can’t see it happening is, to me, quite lamentable — you simply can not force people to respect the faith of their ancestors. You simply can not compel people to believe that G-d cares about them in their daily lives, down to what they ingest. You simply can’t.

The chiloni (non-religious — “secular”, as I found when I was there, is actually a bit of a misnomer with many) Israeli is becoming increasingly detached from Judaism. Much of this is because of corruption in the Rabbinate, much of this is because of a breakdown in (or downright absence of) dialogue between religious and non-religious communities. And you have outreach organizations working round-the-clock to try to fix these rifts. And, G-d willing, the problems with the religious communities will be repaired at some point, and we will see people making religious decisions based on what they are turned on to, not what they are turned off from.

But you have to draw the line somewhere. Somewhere there has to be someone saying, “if we have a star of David on our flag, and Hebrew as our language, we’ve got to have some Judaism over here.”

And if the line can’t be drawn at pornography, can it at least be drawn at pork?