A Rabbi’s War on ‘Boogie-Woogie’

Rabbi Dov Lior, chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba and Hebron. Image by Wiki Commons

By Noam Ben-Zeev August 23, 2010

Crossposted from Haaretz

Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba and Hebron, head of the rabbinical committee in the territories and a power broker in the halls of government, is this country’s real prime minister, writer Sefi Rachlevsky said in an op-ed in Haaretz’s Hebrew edition last week.

Some of Lior’s doctrines, which made headlines in the wake of his refusal to be interrogated by police in an incitement case, were revealed in Rachlevsky’s piece: permission to spill Arab blood, praise for the murderer Baruch Goldstein and spiritual support for extreme right-wing Jewish terrorists. In addition, Lior is suspected of involvement in the rabbinical condemnation of Yitzhak Rabin before the prime minister was assassinated in 1995. A check of the Hebrew website Arutz Meir (www.meirtv.co.il), which offers some 11,000 recorded lectures on Jewish topics, reveals that, somewhat surprisingly, the fundamentalist rabbi also has firm opinions on something else: music.

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