Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Who Visited North Korea Says Don’t Follow Him
A jet-setting Orthodox rabbi who spent five days in North Korea described hiding his religion as a terrifying experience, Insider reported.
Meir Alfasi is a rabbi, photographer and former photojournalist from Israel who has traveled to 80 countries wearing the traditional Lubavich black hat and bekishe, a long black coat.
“I travel with the uniform of a religious person, a Jewish person, because maybe someone will see me and ask a question, then I could tell them more about Judaism,” he told Insider.
It was bound to be a different experience in North Korea, where any non-state-sanctioned religious activities can lead to “executions, torture, beatings, and arrests” or other forms of “severe punishment, including imprisonment in political prison camps,” according to a 2017 report from the U.S. State Department.
Alfasi said he is the first Chabad rabbi to visit the communist country. He wore his traditional clothes, but he did not speak about Judaism and hid a prayer book, tallit and tefillin — the latter of which was inspected at the airport.
“I was scared because if they open it they’ll see the religious parchment and it would be very dangerous,” Alfasi said of the tefillin.
He soon realized he was being watched, but he prayed anyway.
Alfasi told Insider that he doesn’t recommend others go to North Korea: “It’s not so worth it because it’s dangerous.”
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO