Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined numerous right-wing politicians Thursday emphatically decrying an ostensible violent incident at a public prayer service in Tel Aviv. At the same time, both parties involved in the incident said there had been no violence at all.
A widely circulated video had shown a man bumping into Rabbi Leo Dee at the service as he quickly walked away from the scene. Dee’s wife and two daughters were murdered by Palestinian terrorists earlier this year. The clip raised a storm on social media, where many users — mostly government supporters — as well as members of the coalition, denounced the act as an appalling example of violence against Jewish worship.
Dee and the man who ran into him, Michael Sfard, soon offered a wholly different version of events, with the former insisting there had been no violence and the latter saying he was merely clumsily attempting to escape a nearby confrontation.
The incident underscored the power of images to fuel narratives in the current highly conflicted and volatile national atmosphere — even when those images are taken out of context.
Dee took part in a service for the Sukkot holiday at Dizengoff Square, together with a few dozen worshipers. He had said he would do so to protest the recent disruption of prayers there on Yom Kippur: That incident saw clashes between worshipers and secular activists over organizers’ insistence on placing a divider between the sexes, as required by Jewish Orthodox law, and a refusal by the municipality and secularist protesters to accept what they saw as gender-based discrimination on public grounds.
Thursday’s prayer/protest again drew some confrontations as municipal employees dismantled a divider that worshipers had placed, and several protesters used loudspeakers to chant slogans against religious coercion.
That was when Sfard, a human rights lawyer and left-wing activist, was filmed running into Dee, launching national outrage over the supposed attack on the bereaved rabbi.
התיעוד בו נראה ליאו די, שאשתו ושתי בנותיו נרצחו בפיגוע הירי בבקעה נדחף על ידי מפגין בכיכר דיזנגוף, רק בגלל שהעז להתפלל ולהחזיק ארבעת המינים ברחובה של עיר הוא מזעזע ומטריד. אני מגנה את זה בכל תוקף. הנחתי את המשטרה לפעול באופן נחוש נגד אותם פורעים בדיוק כמו שעצרו את היורקים אתמול… pic.twitter.com/zLpD2q9jZa
— איתמר בן גביר (@itamarbengvir) October 5, 2023
But Dee quickly downplayed any notion of violence in media interviews.
“There was no violence, there was a lovely and respectable service,” he told Ynet. “Maybe 5-10 people were disruptive and made noise but it was fine, they didn’t bother me.”
“We prayed happily and respectfully,” he told Walla. “There were many people who came to support us. [The few protesters] just shouted.”
“The police called and asked whether I wanted to press charges. I said I didn’t. I hardly noticed it,” he told Channel 13. “There was no shoving and no spitting.”
The rabbi’s clarifications did little to stem the tide of condemnations, with many right-wing politicians sharing the clip of the run-in with Sfard on social media and denouncing it as “an attack.”
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir also said Dee was shoved because he was holding the Four Species and tweeted that the incident was “shocking and disturbing.”
Ultranationalist Ben Gvir, who oversees the police, said he had ordered the force to act “decisively against those rioters” and compared the incident to that of Orthodox Jews who were filmed spitting at Christians in the Old City of Jeruslaem.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir attends a cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem on September 10, 2023. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
MK Boaz Bismuth called Sfard an “animal.”
Right-wing advocacy group Im Tirzu called Sfard “a left-wing extremist, a man who made a career out of accusing Israel of crimes against humanity.”
And Netanyahu assailed “a member of the protest movement” who “pushed Rabbi Leo Dee… just because he was wearing a tallit and holding the four species in the heart of Tel Aviv. There is no limit to the hatred and madness. Shame on you!”
Hours later Sfard responded on X, formerly Twitter, saying the incident had been blown entirely out of proportion.
“Wow, how an incident of absolutely nothing can be turned into an accusation of attacking a terror victim,” he wrote.
Rabbi Leo Dee, whose two daughters and wife were murdered in a terror attack, holds a Torah scroll during a public prayer service at Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv, on October 5, 2023. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
Sfard said he’d happened onto the scene and noted the presence of a divider between the sexes. “An argument began with one of the women in the women’s section, and the man leading the prayer (I didn’t know who he was) came and stood between us. He stood extremely close to me and nearly touched me… At that moment I understood things could heat up and that I had to extricate myself. What is seen in the edited clip is my (clumsy) attempt to escape the situation and get out of there.”
The latest incident of unrest over religious worship came in the midst of weeks of tension over gender-segregated public prayers in Tel Aviv that featured heated, unprecedented confrontations and underlined a social divide polarizing Israeli society.
Opponents of segregated prayer in public say it’s a political act meant to uphold a conservative worldview that they say oppresses women. They note that those wishing to pray in a gender-divided area have hundreds of synagogues available in Tel Aviv.
The protests against the prayers have been tied to the broader demonstrations against the government’s judicial overhaul, with secular Israelis bristling against the perceived steady creep of religious coercion into public life.
The Yom Kippur clash drew responses from both sides of the political field with Netanyahu at the time accusing the secular protesters of “rioting against Jews.”
Netanyahu’s coalition is comprised of right-wing, religious and ultra-nationalist parties. Many of the government’s critics claim it is advancing legislation that benefits religious Jews and forces their values on secular Jews and non-Jews.
