Jerusalem – Israeli Education Minister Rafi Peretz, who angered critics by comparing assimilation to the Holocaust and endorsing “therapy” for gays, failed to shake hands with a female teenager at the International Physics Olympiad.
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Peretz on Sunday gave a medal to the girl, Nguyễn Khánh Linh, without shaking her hand. Then he gave medals to three other boys and shook their hands, Mako reported.
Many Orthodox observant people refrain from any contact with members of the opposite sex for religious reasons.
Peretz, a rabbi from the United Right party, didn’t refrain from shaking the girl’s hand, a spokesperson told Mako. He “wasn’t aware of the rules of the ceremony. She was the first to come on stage and he wasn’t sure what the protocol was,” the spokesperson said.
Peretz said in a television interview earlier this month that he supports gay conversion therapy and that he has used the practice to help homosexual youth.
Duting a Cabinet meeting on July 1, Peretz, who was appointed to the position last month, also called intermarriage a “Second Holocaust.”
Both remarks triggered a storm of condemnations in Israel and abroad, including by people supportive of Peretz’s government.
Gadi Taub, an influential right-wing columnist and writer, On Monday called for Peretz to step down.
“You’re extreme, even to many right-wingers, even to some deep right-wingers, and not only on gays. An extremist (of any side) shouldn’t be education minister,” Taub wrote to Peretz on Facebook.
if it was a muslim theyd cry diversity
The girl was probably better off. His hands were dirtier than his dirty mind.
Good for him! But why hide behind the excuse that he wasn’t aware of the rules of the ceremony? Let him (or his spokesperson) come out and say straight: he is aware of the rules of Torah, and followed them.
good for him for observing Jewish law at the expense of the roasting by the liberal anti religious press……
He does not look healthy.
Whats this education minister education?
Yeshiva, no college.