blog | If you marry a Jew, the State will come and get you

…or rather, get your Jewish partner.  Check out this ad, and then scroll down for the real thing – a mixed dates patrol unit:

Translation: “50 percent of young Diaspora Jews assimilate (=intermarry), and get lost. Do you know a young Jewish person abroad? Call the Journey project, and together we will work to strengthen his Jewish identity, so that we don’t lose them.”

But while the Zionist Agency is talking the talk, Petah Tikva municipality is walking the walk – the patrol walk. The city hall there is establishing a patrol unit to break up Arab-Jewish dates. What follows is a translation of the relevant excerpt from a local Yediot Ahronot paper. “Minority men” is a depressingly transparent euphemism for Arabs, and I tried to preserve the stale and clumsy language of the original:

Municipality will locate girls going out with men from minorities

The youth department of the Petah Tikva municipality set up today a special team to assist young girls in the habit of mingling with men from minorities | Einav Yossef-Zada, Ynet 14.09.09

A special team in the youth department of the Petah Tikva municipality will locate [Jewish – DR] girls in the habit of meeting with men from minorities and will assist them. The decision comes after a relationship was discovered between a girl from the city and minority men from Jaljulya who murdered Arik Karp last month on a Tel Aviv beach.

“The problem of minority men is well-known,” said the chief of the youth department, Moshe Spektor. “Our attempts to deal with this problem are real and sincere. The municipality is making an effort to examine the matter in cooperation with the police.”

Noam Sheizaf elaborates on the same subject here. Protest groups against the ad and the sentiment it embodies are here and here. Petah Tikva public complaints e-mail is here, and mayor Yitzhak Ohayon can be reached here or by phone – +972.3.9052248 (03.9052248 from within Israel). Be polite, and if any exchange results, tell me how it goes.

Update: There’s now an op-ed of mine at the Guardian about the ad and Israeli prejudice against Diaspora Jews. Also, the Jerusalem Post apparently covered the story a few days later and interviewed some of those involved. It’s quite sympathetic to the initiative, and tries to blur the nationalist motivation for the move.