The Orthodox community in Kfar Yonah, located near Netanya, is still reeling from a provocative ceremony held by Reform Jews on Simchat Torah that some are comparing to a pogrom.

Rabbi Uzi Shvietze, the Rabbi of Kfar Yonah, told Arutz Sheva that a relatively small group of Reform Jews announced before the holidays that they intended to hold an “egalitarian” ceremony on Yom Kippur, and brought “a woman from Jerusalem” to conduct the ceremony for them, in a kindergarten that the mayor allowed them to use.

The Yom Kippur ceremony did not particularly bother anyone, said the rabbi, but on Simchat Torah, the day on which Jews celebrate the possession of the Torah, the group went a step further. From photographs that they published after the fact, he said, it turns out that they took a Torah scroll and unwound it completely, from Bereshit to the final verse, and “used it as a kind of 'mechitza', with men and women going up to the Torah and hugging it, touching it... some of them were half dressed or one-third dressed, maybe even one quarter, I did not check.”

"The photos reached us on the day after the holiday and we are all walking around here, crying,” the rabbi said. The act is similar to acts carried out in pogroms by anti-Semites who sought to defile the Torah, he explained. “There are terrible, terrible things,” he said.

"We will not go to war against them,” he insisted, however. “That is what they want us to do. We will do what Jews always did when non-Jews defiled the Holies of Israel. We will cry. We will hold a rally and cry and weep, and call out to G-d.”

In addition, said the rabbi, the community will seek to build a new Torah center or yeshiva in Kfar Yonah, in accordance with the Jewish principle that says darkness is chased away with light.