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Contributor
Two complaints of incitement have been filed to the police against Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Shlomo Amar for comments he has made calling men and women from the LGBT community “a cult of abomination,” and stating that they are liable to the death penalty according to Jewish law.
Amar’s comments created a fierce political backlash from members of Knesset and the Jerusalem City Council who helped get the rabbi, who was Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel from 2003 to 2013, elected to his current post. In the interview, Amar said that he related to Reform Jews through the prism of the biblical injunction to “turn away from the tents of evil people.”
Asked about his attitude toward the LGBT community, the rabbi said, “This is a cult of abomination, this is clear. This is an abomination. The Torah requires a death sentence for this. This is in the first row of the most severe transgressions.”
Amar also rejected the notion that someone may have a homosexual inclination, calling it “nonsense” and arguing instead that “there are desires and a person can overcome it if he wants, like all other desires.”
More from the Times Of Israel:
Protesters hung a gay pride rainbow flag overnight Saturday on the offices of the Jerusalem Chief Rabbinate to protest offensive comments made by the capital’s top Sephardic rabbi about the homosexual community.
The six-banded color flag was strung up at the entrance to the office of Rabbi Shlomo Amar, who drew anger after last week calling homosexuality an “abomination” in an interview with an Israeli daily. The same rainbow colors were drawn, apparently in chalk, across the entrance way to the steps of the building on Hahavatzelet Street.
Police were called to investigate the adornments at the building and said they would question members of the left-wing Meretz party’s Hebrew University branch, Hebrew media reported. In a tweet, the Meretz party said members of its Hebrew University branch had “decorated” the entrance of Amar’s office.
Amar said he declined to attend a memorial service for teenager Shira Banki, who was stabbed to death by an ultra-Orthodox zealot during 2015’s Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem, after her family refused to read aloud a condemnation of homosexuality he included in a condolence missive he sent to them. Amar recalled he told the parents of murdered Shira Banki that “if you want to exalt her soul to the heavens, to repent from your evil ways.”
