Jerusalem is not Sodom

The residents of Meah Shearim and Geula are for the most part, God fearing and peaceful people. They find ways to make money because they have to eat, but what they value most is learning torah and celebrating the good and the holy. They know how important it is to help the poor and misfortunate, and a lot of their time and efforts are in that direction. They are modest people, and this makes them a bit unusual. From time to time, tourists come through their neighborhood just to have a look at them, because of their being so unusual. Sometimes whole groups of people come marching through their neighborhood with cameras at ready, wanting to document these unusual people, and this bothers them, and they politely ask the visitors not to do this on signs posted in their neighborhood. They also ask women and girls walking through their neighborhood to dress modestly and not expose their intimate parts.

 

In the summer of 2006, which is actually the year 5767 since the creation of the world, they became aware of a plan by homosexuals and other degenerates to have a parade in the holy city of Jerusalem, which was to be called the 'Pride Parade'. Pride itself, is considered by these people a human frailty which is supposed to be overcome and not be celebrated. A person of pride is almost synonymous with sinner. And so, out of a distaste for the name of the parade they called it the "abomination parade". They asked the mayor of Jerusalem to put a stop to this parade, and he tried to. But the courts upheld the right of these deviates to parade, even though the leaders of the three great monotheistic religions joined in a public request to disallow such activity, saying that it was a sacrilege and against the morality of the bible.

Seeing that the law could not help them, nor political leaders, the mood in the orthodox Jewish community became desperate. The rabbis and community leaders posted public protests on the community bulletins, and called upon the people to protest in any way they knew how. For this parade reminded them of an incident two thousand years ago, when a Roman prince insisted on sacrificing a pig in the holy temple. Like that vile act, this immoral parade seemed to them a provocation against God, a symbolic act of contempt towards morality. The residents of these neighborhoods came out at night, and erected blockades, so that no one could enter their neighborhood. And when the police tried to remove these blockades, the citizenry started burning their garbage bins, and throwing objects at the police. A car was burnt, and the streets were filled with waste paper. For days, people walked through garbage, distraught with thoughts of the sacrilege. And posters on the walls and on the bulletin boards asked them to dress in sack cloth and ashes.

Here are a few pictures from this time of unhappiness in Jerusalem.

In the end, the police decided to keep the Pride Parade within the confines of the University in Jerusalem, and fortunately, the fears of violence were not realized.