Satmar Plan Anti-Zionist Rally At Brooklyn’s Barclays Center
Barclays Center Image by Getty Images
By Josh Nathan-Kazis June 6, 2017
The Satmar Hasidic group is planning an anti-Zionist rally on Sunday at the Barclays Center, the massive arena in the heart of Brooklyn that’s home to the Brooklyn Nets.
The rally, organized by a Satmar-dominated rabbinical group called the Central Rabbinical Congress, will protest an Israeli law, passed in 2014, that limits exemptions from military conscription for ultra-Orthodox Jews.
The Satmar Hasidic group is theologically anti-Zionist. Its leaders called a similar protest in 2013. It’s unclear whether both factions of the split Satmar court will participate in the Barclays rally, or just the Brooklyn-based followers of Rabbi Zalman Leib Teitelbaum.
The rally comes amid ongoing riots and unrest in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in Jerusalem, where some groups have adopted violent protest in opposition to the draft law.
Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at nathankazis@forward.com or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
