UNITED KINGDOM
Independent
Editorial
Ultra-Orthodox Jews in north London are raising £1m to fight legal cases to try to stop children leaving the community when their parents divorce, as we reported today. The fundraising drive in the Charedi community aims to try to “rescue” children in custody cases when one parent wants to leave the community and its strict culture of refusing to engage with wider society.
At the level of abstract principle, there is nothing wrong with this. In a free society – even one ironically regarded by the Charedi as “evil” – people are free to raise money to help fight court cases in defence of causes they support. Supporters of the 130,000 Labour Party members of less than six months’ standing were entitled, for example, to crowdfund the costs of their unsuccessful case to overturn the decision of the party’s National Executive to exclude them from voting in the leadership election.
There is no doubt, too, that the Charedi community feels that its culture is threatened by the prevailing norms of British society. It may be a paradox, but its members feel that they are entitled to use whatever methods they can under the law of the land to defend what they call their “pure and holy” children from corruption by the irreligious outside world.
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