Tel Aviv – New Org to Educate Charedi Community on Animal Rights

Tel Aviv – Ezra Zohar has tended to all kinds of animals since he was a child – cats, dogs, scorpions, spiders, everything he could bring home with him. Even today, at 43, he is proud to have a pet rabbit.

“I had a really special collection of animals. I traveled a lot in Israel in the desert and I found them there,” he said. “My mother was really tolerant about it.”

This tolerance for animals – and their rights – is something that Zohar would like all of Israel’s communities to be aware of and support, and to accomplish this goal he has teamed up with a haredi community activist, Yehuda Shein of Beit Shemesh, to co-found a haredi animal rights advocacy group called Compassion, whose Hebrew letters are also an acronym for “haredi recruits for animals.”

Compassion had its official launch event with representatives from the organization distributing information on Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv.

The organization will serve to spread knowledge about the cruelties endured by animals as well as general environmental issues, according to the team.

“What we want is just to increase people’s awareness of animal suffering,” Zohar said. “We believe that we can create change, bring people to see what they don’t see.”

“Already today there are publications in the international media that display this topic with pictures of haredim wearing the streimel,” he said, emphasizing, however, that “no one will kill any animal just for its tail,” which is all that is required for a streimel.

“What is necessary is to bring their attention to what happens in this area because they do not have a iota of an idea about what goes on in this merciless industry,” Shein said.

“I’m not asking people to be vegetarians,” added Zohar, who is a vegetarian himself, and referred to certain methods of meat production as an example of cruelty to animals.

“I am only trying to show them the facts of how meat is manufactured. Maybe they will choose to eat less meat, or to buy organic meat.

“I don’t have the right to tell someone to be vegetarian. It is our right according to the Bible to eat meat.”

As far as the issue of the streimel goes, both Zohar and Shein said that the organization does not plan to involve itself in this topic whatsoever.

“The reason we are not involved in the issue of streimels is because as noted, no one will kill an animal only for its tail. The streimel industry is only a tiny branch of the giant fur industry.

“We think there is a lot of work to be done with the haredim,” he said. “This is our advantage – we have the same mentality as them and they don’t consider us outsiders, so we can do work with them that non-religious organizations cannot do. “But we don’t want to stop there. We want to do work with the non-religious people too.”

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