A prominent rabbi and Jewish leader who made headlines last week when he called for the arming of Jews in Europe is now taking to American airwaves to clarify his proposal and to defend the plan from critics.
Rabbi Menachem Margolin is the director general of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe and the European Jewish Association, which is the largest federation of Jewish organizations and communities in Europe.
On Sunday, Mardolin went on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on New York’s AM 970 The Answer, to declare his proposal has been widely “misinterpreted” by critics and misreported by international news media.
“In some media outlets in Europe, they said that I called for every Jew to carry a gun in Europe, which is exactly the opposite of what I said,” Margolin stated.
Margolin clarified his proclamation, first reportedly made in a letter to EU ministers sent last week, according to Newsweek.
Margolin told Klein: “We all agree that it is the responsibility of the government to protect the lives of the citizens. So it is clear that it is the obligation of each European government to make sure that each Jewish institution will be secured.
“So our first demand is that the European governments will understand that each Jewish institution, such as kindergarten(s), schools, kosher stores, supermarkets, restaurants, museums, synagogues, everything must be protected by the police or the army.”
He said his weapons proposal only applied to “a country (that) is … unable to ensure that its security will be able to protect the Jewish institutions for the long term.”
In such a scenario, Margolin explained, “then what we ask is that each Jewish community will choose a few people that their responsibility will be to protect the institutions and these people will be armed with a gun.”
The prominent rabbi’s proposal generated immediate backlash, including from some voices in the European Jewish community.
Danny Rich, a senior rabbi and chief executive of Liberal Judaism, told European media the purported measure was a “dangerous overreaction” that risked fueling social division.
Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard called the armed response “utterly ludicrous.”
“I simply cannot conceive of a single person that would concur with this however great or perceived the threat,” he stated.
“Deploying armed police at synagogues has been seen in recent weeks and is the right public response. But the idea of arming people is utterly ludicrous.”
However, Margolin told Klein those critics were reacting to the “false” reports that he called for the arming of all European Jews.
Added Margolin: “I think this is one of the beauties of the Jewish people that each one has another opinion. I think we have known it for thousands of years the Jewish people are like everybody. [They] have all of these different opinions. Even the Talmud is full of arguments and conflicts and different ideas between rabbis. So I am not surprised to see others who did not really like this proposal.”
