‘We were brainwashed’

Hezki Baruch

Women for the Wall founder Leah Aharoni says EU working with left-wing groups to destroy Israeli religious community from within.

Leah Aharoni, one of the founders of Women for the Wall, a religious organization which opposes the Women of the Wall group which stages provocations at the Western Wall every month, spoke to Arutz Sheva about the New Israel Fund’s attempts to influence religious organizations in Israel.

Last week, several leading religious Zionist rabbis – Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, Rabbi Dov Lior and Rabbi Shlomo Aviner – caledl on religious Zionist organizations not to accept funds from the New Israel Fund (NIF).

The video was produced by the “Hotam” organization as part of a campaign against religious organizations funded by the NIF. The campaign’s leaders claim that the NIF has set itself the goal of changing Israeli society from within by penetrating religious Zionist organizations.

“Twenty-five years ago, I was a young, 20-something-year-old woman, and I got an opportunity to join a program to learn more about democracy and leadership,” Aharoni said. “We got together, about 30 young women, all of us from the religious community, and we got a 500 shekel monthly scholarship that we got in cash in an envelope. And every week we would have a meeting with another thought leader. But what happened was the thought leaders all had the same thoughts. They were all left-wing and pretty radical.”

She said that the meetings took place with people from Israel and Europe who called the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria “evil” and alleged oppression of religious Jewish women.

“After a few weeks we figured out what was going on, and we asked where the money was coming from. Where was that money in cash coming from? And we didn’t get an answer.

“After two years, it came out that the sponsor was the European Union, and the idea was to brainwash a small but high-quality group of men and women in the religious community and have them spread these ideas inside the community,” she said.

“This is the method that the New Israel fund and the European Union have used in the religious and haredi communities ever since. What’s the idea? They find young, idealistic people who have important issues that they would like to advance in the community. They give them training. They give them funding. And then they make them part of this ecosystem. And this group of young, religious, idealistic leaders are now becoming a Trojan Horse who are now advancing leftist,liberal, and sometimes anti-religious values inside the religious community.

“This is the method the New Israel Fund is using to bring down the religious community, to bring down the Jewish identity of Israel, and to ultimately turn Israel into a nation of all its citizens.

Yemen Music of the Yemenite Jews – The Spielberg Jewish Film Archive

Hebrew University of Jerusalem