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Israel’s Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef over the weekend excoriated non-Orthodox Jewish movements, namely Reform and Conservative Judaism, and accused them of “uprooting the Torah,” the Israel National News (INN) media house reported on Sunday.
“There’s no difference between the Reform and the Conservative, they are both the same thing,” Rabbi Yosef told his flock Saturday evening during his weekly lesson, according to INN.
“They both desecrate the Sabbath, they both uproot our Torah, a new religion.”
Orthodox spiritual leaders have long taken issue with liberal Jewish movements — which seek to adapt a Jewish lifestyle to modern times, often distancing themselves from some traditional Halachic teachings and Rabbinical authority.
The schism between Orthodoxy and liberal movements is so profound that Orthodox rabbis refuse to recognize non-Orthodox conversions and marriages, and often question the “Jewishness” of members of such movements.
Rabbi Yosef further continued his tirade by juxtaposing secular Orthodox-leaning Jews with liberal Jews.
“[A] secular can be brought back to the ways God, he knows he’s secular, he knows he’s not right, there are many chozrim b'teshuvah, thank God,” he said according to INN, using a Hebrew term describing Jewish people of non-observant background who adopt a more stringent Orthodox lifestyle.
“Have you ever seen a reform amend their ways? I haven’t, there aren’t any, they feel they’re right, they have their own religion, they have a new religion. Everything that resembles the Reform, do not agree to it,” he added and told the crowd that he had asked Shmuel Rabinovitch, rabbi of the Western Wall and the Holy Sites of Israel, to not allow non-Orthodox movements to hold Hanukkah candle-lighting at Judaism’s holiest site.