Beitar Illit: Acid Spilled on 14-Year Old? June 5, 2008

A new disturbing word has apparently entered at least a few Yiddish speakers’ vernacular: טאליבאניסט’ן (talibanisten — accent on the next-to-last syllable), “the Taliban”, to describe the new radical, violent charedizealots who have no problems terrorizing and injuring and maiming women in the most audacious of places.

Please, someone, someone tell me when it has finally gone too far.

YNet brings the lamentable story of that which should have never taken place:

A 14-year-old girl from Beitar Illite was taken to the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem after an unknown person spilled acid on her face, legs and stomach, causing light burn wounds.

The act has been attributed to a representative of the so-called ‘modesty guard’ in this town where religious and secular residents are increasingly at bitter odds.

Right there. The leader line — and I rarely praise Neta Sela, whose charedi “exposé” articles can often border on anti-haredi prejudice — says it all. A 14-year-old girl was rushed off to a hospital in the closest major city because someone spilled acid on her face. The graphic on the Ynet article — of the girl with chemically burned, wrinkled eyelids — even if it is a stock photo, is most disturbing. One can only imagine the trauma this girl is enduring, and the most skilled plastic surgeon’s most precise laser can not make the slightest impact on the deep psychological scars this girl must have.

MDA received the call just before midnight on Wednesday and paramedic Dror Eini who arrived on the scene to treat the girl also managed to calm her down enough so she could explain what had happened. Eini told Ynet that “the modesty guards have been threatening her for quite some time.” According to the paramedic the focus of the threats has largely been the victim’s 18-year-old sister and some suspect the attacker mistook the younger girl’s identity for that of her older sister’s.

Eini said the teenager was in a difficult emotional state: “She cried the whole way to the hospital, partly because she was in pain but mostly because she was terrified.” According to Eini at the time of her attack the girl had been wearing loose-fitting long pants and a short-sleeved shirt.

“If she would have been wearing the same thing in Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv, she would not have stuck out in any way,” he added.

An ultra-Orthodox teen from Beitar Illite who is in contact with the girl’s family spoke with her sister who described the incident. According to the boy, the attacker stopped the girl and first asked her for directions. Then, after confirming her surname, he spilled a bottle of acid on her.

I don’t know what else I can say. This actually makes the Meah Shearim spate of bleach-throwing incidents almost pale in comparison — whereas, in Meah Shearim, women were only physically injured as an unintended upshot of the attempts to ruin what were perceived as immodest clothes, here, a 14-year-old girl had acid spilled in her face. Naomi Regan, who was beaten on a mehadrin bus in Jerusalem in a chillul Hashem of cosmic proportions, was an adult — who could at least attempt to fight back — at the time of her brutal attack. This was a 14-year-old girl who had acid spilled in her face solely because of her last name.

Of course, and rightfully so, people in the charedi world, both in America and Israel, are calling for this man to be found and punished.

Punished? Were there the means to do so, I think he should be deported. The mindset — the values — that would propel one, in the name of modesty, to throw acid in a teenage girl’s face are as distinctly un-Jewish as that of any missionary or white supremacist. And if not this attacker, then whoever it was that put it in his mind to do such a thing. If this is how the Beitar Illit modesty patrol is operating, it is time for a Rabbinical Court — and if not a beit din, then the police — to completely revamp it.

This can not be allowed to continue for even another moment — because, remember, this attacker wasn’t targeting her.

He was looking for her sister.

And now one can only wonder what will happen to her if this organization seeks reprisal for this first attacker’s (G-d willing) imminent arrest, or if nothing happens, and the attacker goes out with another bottle of acid to “ask for directions” again.