A JERUSALEM judge yesterday released to house arrest an ultra-Orthodox woman accused of starving her child in an affair that has sparked three days of violent street clashes in Israel’s capital.
It was hoped the woman’s release would calm the atmosphere. However, tension remained high and police were braced for renewed violence.
On Thursday night 18 police officers were injured and 50 protesters arrested as mounted police charged the protesters, using water cannons to disperse them. The protesters burned litter bins, vandalised traffic lights and pelted the police with stones.
Senior police officers warned that the situation was spiralling out of control, and likened the riots to the Palestinian intifada.
Hospital officials and social workers suspected abuse when the woman at the centre of the protests brought her three-year-old son, who weighed only 7kg, for treatment. The mother of five was arrested after hospital cameras caught her disconnecting vital tubes attached to her son. She will undergo psychiatric tests on Sunday, and has been diagnosed as suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which a person deliberately makes another sick.
But extreme elements in the ultra-Orthodox community reacted with anger to the woman’s arrest, accusing the authorities of pursuing a “blood libel” against their community.
Violent protests erupted around the demand for the woman to be released and thousands of the ultra-Orthodox community, dressed in traditional black hats and long black coats, took to the streets.
The ultra-Orthodox world is a very closed society. Many are anti-Zionist, refusing to recognise Israel as a Jewish state and shunning intervention from municipal welfare departments and the social services. Members prefer to take problems to rabbinical sages and resent “outside” intervention.
The ultra-Orthodox make up a third of Jerusalem’s population, but they failed to rally around a single candidate in municipal elections last year, allowing secular candidate Nir Barkat to be elected as the city’s mayor in a major upset. Tension was already high in the capital over recent weeks after the mayor ordered the opening of a car park on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath, in a move the ultra-Orthodox claimed violated the delicate status quo.
In response to the violence the Jerusalem municipality suspended all services to ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods, but the sanctions failed to stop the riots.
Shmuel Pappenheim, a spokesman for the protesters, told Israel Army Radio: “We don’t have weapons, we don’t have tanks, we don’t have policemen or jails, but we are sending in our army to save a family, to save a Jewish mother who is raising five children with love and warmth.”
Jerusalem District police commander, Aharon Franco, charged that rabbis were not doing enough to stop the violence. “I have not heard an outcry by rabbis or religious dignitaries calling for an end to the riots,” he said.
President Shimon Peres initiated contacts with the various parties in an effort to end the violence.