Published: 17 September 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Anti-Zionist rabbi finds himself and family embroiled in Belgian spy scandal (Times of Israel)
Moshe Aryeh Friedman may be mild-mannered, but the Antwerp rabbi certainly has a knack for publicity. An anti-Zionist activist from New York, Friedman, 47, has been accused — falsely, he has said — of denying the Holocaust during a 2006 conference organized by then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran.
He has since repeatedly riled the Jewish community of the Belgian city where he has lived with his family since 2011.
In 2013, Friedman got a judge to force a Jewish school for girls to admit two of his boys – a blow directed at a congregation that treats him like a pariah.
This year he went after another communal soft spot, telling the media that Orthodox Judaism does allow the stunning of animals before they are slaughtered (despite a rabbinical near consensus to the contrary).
But even Friedman outdid himself this summer when he landed himself and his family in the middle of an international scandal involving suspected espionage by a young Moroccan woman whom the Belgian security service recommended deporting, saying she threatens national security.
Photo: Moshe Friedman, right, talks to journalists with his wife Lea Rosenzweig outside Antwerp’s Benoth Jerusalem girls school in Belgium, Jan 7, 2018. (Cnaan Liphshiz/JTA)
