NY Daily News; Rabbi ripped for embracing Ahmadinejad

I wonder how it all turned out...

Rabbi ripped for embracing Ahmadinejad

BY ABBY LUBY
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

It was an unbelievable image - especially for Jews.

There, on their televisions and in their papers, was a New York rabbi embracing the Iranian leader who wants Israel destroyed and calls the Holocaust a farce.

But Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, who has followers in Brooklyn and Rockland County, makes no apologies.

His outraged neighbors will protest today.

"You don't negotiate with Hitler and you don't negotiate with the president of Iran, who is out to destroy the Jews," said Carol King Berkman, who works with Holocaust survivors at Rockland's Jewish Family Service.

While Weiss, whose grandparents perished at Auschwitz, doesn't deny the Holocaust, he accuses his people of using it to justify decades of bloodshed in the Middle East.

Weiss said he and seven other rabbis from the Neturei Karta sect attended President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's huddle in Tehran last month to reach out to the Iranians.

"We tried to appease them," he told The News. "We explained how the Holocaust is used to intimidate people who want to speak against the unjust Zionist regime."

That stance only further infuriates his neighbors in Rockland's massive Hasidic community.

Malkie Zamore said she and her husband will be at today's 1p.m. protest outside Neturei headquarters in Monsey.

"We don't consider Weiss one of ours," she said. "What he did was very wrong."

Originally published on January 7, 2007