Haredi rabbi slams Israel for lagging behind ‘even Nazis’ on separating genders

A prominent rabbi speaking at the launch of the United Torah Judaism election campaign has compared Israel unfavorably to Nazi Germany over the Jewish state’s failure to recognize the importance of separating men and women in daily life.

Speaking at the event in the well-known Lederman Synagogue in Bnei Brak, Rabbi Aviezer Filtz, a prominent figure in UTJ and head of the religious seminary Yeshivat Toshia in the southern community of Tifrah, delivers a fiery speech on the importance of separate-gender seating on public buses.

“Start to organize, to ride separately,” he urged his listeners, then explained that the principle is so fundamental that even the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust held to the policy.

“Even the Nazis, may their names be erased, understood that there has to be separate housing for women and men, and here [in Israel] it’s forbidden!”

Forcing men and women to sit separately on Israeli public buses is illegal, but Haredi towns maintain private bus routes within and between major Haredi communities in which men sit at the front and women in the back.