The following is a contextual translation of the statement of 250 rabbis regarding LGBT marches and surrogacy of same-gender couples which recently attracted media attention in Israel, and was the topic of our recent press release. Because no English translation was available, and assorted passages were translated using inflammatory language which distorted the meaning of the statement in context, we provide this translation here.
Public Statement
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We, the undersigned, come to support the Rabbi of Jerusalem, the esteemed scholar Rabbi Aryeh Stern shlit”a (may he have a life of long and good days)…
… who spoke with strength and simplicity the eternal truths of our holy Torah and of normal humanity — beliefs with which the healthy majority of the State of Israel identifies, those who are shocked by the provocations and deviations of organizations supporting what our Torah calls “abomination,” those who make brazen parades through the Land of Israel, and went still further, to arrange and conduct these “abomination parades” on the day of the 9th of Av, a day of national mourning for the destruction of our Holy Temples, which were destroyed for the sins of sexual immorality and needless hatred, among others.
This aggressive terror, accompanied by daily media brainwashing to indoctrinate hearts to accept the idea that there is some sort of “family” [in this type of relationship], to destroy the very concept of family, and to turn willful deviants into heroes — it will not succeed, and neither will the attempt to silence the mouths of rabbis and sane people, to characterize them as delusional and extremists.
Rabbi Aryeh Stern shlit”a came out in defense of the children of Israel, who will be miserable if they are not placed in normative families!
We strengthen the hands of the Rabbi of Jerusalem, who expressed a simple truth and cried out the cry of the voiceless children, to preserve them from an unhappy life, and to give them the basic right to live in natural, normative families in order to grow into mentally healthy, normal adults.
Rabbi Chaim Steiner, Dean of Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav
Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Emeritus of Kiryat Arba
Rabbi Tzvi Yisrael Tau, Dean of Yeshivat Har HaMor
… and over 250 co-signatories