Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 23, 2020

THE closure of synagogues during the pandemic lockdown in Israel is Gods way of punishing Jews for using their cell phones during prayer.

So says Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, above, the most senior non-hassidic, ultra-Orthodox rabbi in the world.

The rabbi, 92, made the claim in a letter to the daily ultra-Orthodox Yated Neeman. In it he suggested that Jews have been banished from synagogues by a god pissed off with people chattering on their phones instead of praying. He wrote:

For our many sins it has been many weeks since we were banished from our synagogues and study halls, like a servant who came to pour wine for his master and the master poured the jug on his face.

It appears that this is a sign from Heaven for the sin in which the sanctity of synagogues has been cheapened by having cell phones open and speaking on them while people are praying, and this is great disrespect for prayer and the sanctity of synagogues, and is in total opposition to Jewish law.

Kanievsky said that synagogue administrators should therefore completely ban people from praying in synagogue while their phones are turned on, and said that they should warn worshippers about this issue.

Kanievsky said that administrators in Israel and around the world should provide cupboards or other storage facilities outside of the prayer hall for worshippers to deposit their cell phones.

The ultra-Orthodox community has been hit particularly hard by COVID-19, with a high number of infections and deaths relative to their proportion of the population.

Kanievsky and Edelstein were both reluctant to shut synagogues, schools and yeshivas at the beginning of the governments lock down regulations, although Edelstein came on board with the directives sightly sooner than Kanievsky and became very strict about adhering to the social-distancing guidelines.

The difference between the positions of the two rabbis on the public-health crisis were underlined when Kanievsky sent a letter for publication to Yated Neeman in mid-April saying educational institutions should reopen immediately. Edelstein instructed the newspaper not to publish it.

See the rest here:

God unleashed COVID-19 because he hates phone use in synagogues - Patheos

Category: Synagogue
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