A few months ago, the Tel Aviv municipality asked the Ma’ale Eliyahu yeshiva that’s been located outside Ichilov Hospital since 1996, to agree to vacate its premises and move to a comparable facility nearby. The yeshiva agreed. At some point, the fascistic left in the city got wind of the planned move and embarked on a crusade against letting another “messianic” yeshiva set root in their liberal city.
On May 10, the liberal forces called for a demonstration on behalf of the “Headquarters of the Struggle Against the Messianists,” and revealed: “The residents of north Tell Aviv near the State Circle were horrified to discover recently that a plan to erect a huge building on the pastoral Klee Street, for the far-right yeshiva Ma’ale Eliyahu, is facing final approval by the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality, and is expected to increase the yeshiva four times from its current location on Henrietta Szold Street and will allow it to house 700 students who will bring their families with them to expand the religious settlement in the big city.”
One digression, if I may: Israel Beiteinu Chairman Avigdor Liberman, a fanatical enemy of the Haredi sector, is behind the current widespread use of the term “messianists” as a slur against right-wing national religious Jews. Liberman lives in the settlement of Nokdim in the liberated territories, and his wife, Ella, is a traditional Jew (their daughter Michal did Teshuva), and yet, he dubs opponents like Bezalel Smotrich “messianists,” suggesting there’s something wrong, or crazy, or evil in the fact that Jews yearn for the coming of the Messiah, and are involved in hastening his arrival. I suppose this began with the tumult in Lubavitch in the mid-1990s when that movement was torn between the “messianists” and the “anti-messianists.”
Also: it’s a bit ironic, if not outright grotesque, that secular Israelis who made a pact with the PLO devil out of their yearning for peace, and later expelled thousands of Jews from their homes believing this would surely usher in peace, and even today are dancing in the streets with the flags of the terrorists who murder their brothers and sisters every day, because this can’t but bring peace – accuse the national religious of messianism.
The Ma’ale Eliyahu yeshiva in Tel Aviv has around 230 students, all of them young men before or after military service and veterans who settled down near the yeshiva. Many Ma’ale Eliyahu graduates have fought and some died in Israel’s operations in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. I would venture there are more IDF veterans among the Ma’ale Eliyahu alumni than among the 30 demonstrators who showed up to demand the yeshiva’s expulsion.
The Tel Aviv municipality announced on Sunday that it is reneging on the agreement reached between it and the Ma’ale Eliyahu yeshiva, and will not fulfill its obligation to endow the yeshiva with a synagogue on Klee Street for the yeshiva, even though the municipality had already evacuated parts of the yeshiva.
According to the agreement reached between the parties, the municipality undertook to vacate the Bar Kochva synagogue that was on the premises of the yeshiva and an adjacent room, and in exchange, the yeshiva was promised a construction permit to convert the synagogue building on Klee Street into its new location.
The Bar Kochva Synagogue was evacuated last summer in keeping with the agreement, and part of its premises was sectioned off from the Yeshiva. About two months ago, the Municipal Planning and Construction Committee gave its complete approval for the construction work on Klee Street, then, in the past two weeks, a tiny but noisy group of left-wing protesters in cahoots with Tel Aviv Municipality officials looking to run in the coming municipal elections in October this year, weaponized the deal.
“ירקו על אישה דתייה כי חבשה ‘סמרטוטים’ לראשה, צעקו על נשים שלנו שגרות פה 15 שנה ‘לכו מפה'”. יאיר גנץ, מנכ”ל ישיבת “מעלה אליהו”, על ההפגנות של תושבים חילונים בתל אביב נגד הישיבה#עצם_העניין עם @KalmanLiebskind pic.twitter.com/97wlK4d03R
— כאן חדשות (@kann_news) May 17, 2023
The Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality announced in response: “After discussions and listening to all the relevant parties, the mayor this morning (Monday) ordered the local planning committee to re-examine the plan to move the Ma’ale Eliyahu yeshiva to a building on Klee Street, and to propose additional alternatives.”
Ma’ale Eliyahu is learning the ancient lesson learned by millions of Native Americans in the 19th century: Don’t trust the Great White Father – he lies.
