Dayan: give up life before sex education

VTHE FORMER head of the Manchester Beth Din has said members of the strictly Orthodox community should rather “give up one’s life” than comply with the government’s demands on religious and sex education.

Dayan Gavriel Krausz has urged the community to stand “firm as a rock” in the face of “the terrible decree”.

Earlier this year MPs approved the new RSE policy, which comes into effect in September 2020.

It says children should have been taught about the existence of samesex relations before the end of secondary school.

A notice highlighting statements made by Dayan Krausz to a recent protest meeting is being circulated to Charedi schools.

In bold letters, it states: “We are obliged to give up one’s life rather than comply, as our ancestors did throughout the generations.”

Even if schools are closed and people who defy the law are imprisoned, “one is not allowed to give in one iota,” he said.

He said: “[If] we capitulate and give in, we can chas vashalom [“Heaven forbid”] say goodbye to the next generation”.

Meanwhile a state-aided Charedi girls’ high school in Salford, Beis Yaakov, was told that it must teach pupils about same-sex relationships in an Ofsted report published last week. However, it was rated as a school which “requires improvement” rather than given the lowest “inadequate” grade.

Another strictly Orthodox girls’ school, Beis Trana in Stamford Hill, which is independent and teaches pupils from three to 16, satisfied equality requirements, according to Ofsted — although the report did not go into detail about precisely what was taught.

But the Beis Trana report is believed to have led to strong comments reportedly made at the weekend by a leader of the Satmar community, the largest Chasidic group in Stamford Hill

According to a post on a Charedi website in Hebrew, Rabbi Boruch Nathan Halberstam told his community over the weekend — without naming the school — that an Ofsted report had stated that “a local Charedi institution were complying with their demands”, which he said caused a terrible Chillul Hashem (descecration of the Divine Name).

He was quoted as saying that the government was issuing decrees to “uproot our faith and to teach obscenities in the schools”.

The only response was “to remain as strong as a rock without agreeing to any compromises”.

In words similar to those of Dayan Krausz, he was said to have declared: “Throughout the ages our forefathers gave up their lives with abnormal deaths and being executed by burning so as not to deviate one iota from our faith”.