Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, a candidate for Sephardi chief rabbi,
was due to be summoned Wednesday by Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein for a
hearing, following a request by MK Eitan Cabel (Labor) earlier this week that
the rabbi be disqualified from running due to “racist” comments he’d made about
Arab citizens of Israel.
“Rabbi Eliyahu has consistently exploited his public
position to incite against a minority in Israel that makes up a fifth of the
population, using every available platform to spew racist, dogmatic
statements,” said Cabel on Sunday.
Eliyahu, currently the chief rabbi of the city of Safed, has
generated controversy over the past few years for a variety of statements and
rulings, including one ruling that forbade the rental or sale of Jewish-owned
property in the city to Arabs.
“A Jew should not flee from Arabs. A Jew should make the
Arabs flee.
There is a silent war going on here for land”; “most of the
violence in Israeli society stems from the Arabs”; and “the Arabs have a
different code, and violent norms that have become an ideology” — these were
among the statements Eliyahu made in a 2010 interview with the Maariv daily.
Justice Minister Tzipi Livni announced Tuesday that she
would examine the option of disciplinary action against Eliyahu.
“A chief rabbi represents not just the rabbinate, but Israel
itself as a country. Therefore, [his] rulings and statements that support
nationalistic discrimination and have racist undertones are harmful to the
already sensitive fabric [of Israeli society] and threaten to deepen the split
between us and Israel’s Arab citizens,” said Livni.
In 2011, Weinstein called for a criminal investigation into
Eliyahu’s comments, but by 2012, the Justice Ministry, then headed by Yaakov
Neeman, closed all proceedings, citing lack of evidence.
Eliyahu is the son of former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai
Eliyahu, who served from 1983 to 1993.
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