In 2014, the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington ended a 19-year-old partnership program with Beit Shemesh.
By OMRI NAHMIASAliza Bloch, Beit Shemesh religious-Zionist mayoral-candidate, October 2018(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
WASHINGTON - Beit Shemesh Mayor Aliza Bloch recently paid a three-day visit to Washington in a cooperation effort between the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington and the Israeli city. It followed years of disconnect.Bloch met with Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and several Jewish community leaders from the Washington, DC, area.In 2014, the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington ended a 19-year-old partnership program with Beit Shemesh. A year earlier, Jewish Federation leaders had been offended by remarks by Bloch’s predecessor, Moshe Abutbul. “There are no gays in my city, thank G-d,” he had told Channel 10, calling gays a “health problem” that needs to be “taken care of.” “We are outraged by your comments recently on Channel 10 in which you said there are no homosexuals in ‘your holy and pure’ city,” leaders of the Washington Jewish community wrote in a letter in 2013, condemning Abutbul’s remarks.However, Ron Halber, executive director of the JCRC, told The Jerusalem Post the decision of the Jewish Federation to change its relationship with Beit Shemesh had nothing to do with politics at the time; rather, it was changing its funding formula, reflecting how it wanted to allocate money in Israel.“But there was a time when the relationship between the Washington Jewish community and Beit Shemesh was causing a lot of anger internally in the Jewish community, when there was a lot of conflict between the haredim and other segments of the population, and a lot of Washington-area Jewry was upset at the lack of pluralism in the city,” he told the Post. “When you have a superb symbol like Aliza Bloch, who talks about how she’s trying to create a city where all different segments of Israeli society can coexist, and not only coexist but thrive, that sends a very strong message for Washington Jewry... It’s not a shock that she was received very well... Everybody, from the mayor to every different segment of the Jewish community, thinks she was received beautifully. It was very much a breath of fresh air,” Halber said.In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Bloch said: “My goal in this visit was to bring the voice of Beit Shemesh to Washington and to reestablish [the] old relationship, because I believe that the story of the city is not about me. It is about us as the Israeli society asking ourselves where we are headed... It was a painful disconnection for many years.” “When the people in Beit Shemesh elected me, they made a decision to live in a city that respects everyone,” she said. “My message to the community here is one of inclusiveness... I want to strengthen these relations and to tell both the people in Beit Shemesh and the people in the community here: That’s the way to build a future. If we keep engaging with exclusiveness, we have no chance.”Bloch said building a relationship between Washington Jewry and the Beit Shemesh community “is not a single event. It’s a process. I think that we are on the right track, and now our job is to maintain it. I feel like we made a big step forward.”
