Ultra-orthodox rabbi blames gays for anti-Semitic massacre

This 30 October 2018 video from the USA says about itself:

🇺🇸 ‘Leave Pittsburgh’: Protesters greet Trump after synagogue attack | Al Jazeera English

The US president has paid tribute to the 11 people killed in a shooting attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Donald Trump visited the scene – as the first funerals were held for victims targeted by a right-wing extremist on Saturday.

But there’ve been protests against the visit with calls for Trump to denounce white nationalism. Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi reports from Pittsburgh.

From Jewish daily The Forward in the USA:

Orthodox Rabbi Blames Pittsburgh Shooting On Gay Parents’ Bris

November 4, 2018

By Aiden Pink

A prominent Orthodox rabbi said the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre was caused by the circumcision ceremony of a gay couple’s son that he believed took place on that day.

“This is a brit milah [ceremony] in a Conservative [in Jewish religion, a moderately reformist tendency] shul [synagogue] and the two men adopted the boy and did the brit milah, and you wonder why there was a massacre?” asked Rabbi Mordechai Aderet during a taped sermon last Sunday, which has been viewed more than 11,000 times on Facebook.

“I’m not sorry for this disaster”, he added. “You attend a brit milah of two men?”

The widely-spread story that the massacre took place during a brit milah, let alone the brit milah of a gay couple’s son, is not true, according to Pittsburgh Jewish community members.

Aderet also said that Jews should not attend vigils for the victims, who were killed at the Tree of Life synagogue, affiliated with the Conservative movement.

“Somebody came over to me and told me today that he got an email that people should go gather someplace here in town to give the Shema for those 11 people who got killed”, Aderet said. “And I still said, I heard it’s a Conservative shul, I heard people drove on Shabbat, and I don’t think people should join these things.”

He also opposed people saying Psalms, or Tehillim, for the dead, as is customary in Jewish tradition.

“This is not Tehillim, this is spitting in Hashem’s [God’s] face. And you like it or you don’t like it, that’s the emet [truth],” he said, adding, “Those people do not let Moshiach [the Messiah] come. If you don’t go on the straight… thing, Hashem won’t bring the Moshiach.”

He connected the Pittsburgh incident to the 2016 massacre of 49 people at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, for which Aderet said he also opposed saying Psalms. He called the Pulse victims “sinners” and “trash.”

Aderet previously made news in 2010 when, according to the New York Jewish Week, he stormed in uninvited to a Jewish child’s first birthday party and screamed at those in attendance for engaging in mixed dancing. He allegedly said that those who remained at the party would be cursed with “illness, bankruptcy and tragedy for eternity”, according to a document signed by witnesses.

Our columnist argues that white supremacy can’t be untangled from anti-Semitism.