Nonsense and Common Sense

Rabbi Yosef Kelner

In footage broadcast by Hadashot news on Tuesday, Rabbi Yosef Kelner was seen disparaging women with careers as “gorillas” to yeshiva students at the West Bank settlement of Eli…
 “Women have a limited capacity for spirituality. They can reach a medium level of spirituality,” Kelner said in a class on marriage and family that was filmed last summer.

“There’s no such thing as spiritual women. It’s just not true,” he said. “It’s not a failure on women’s part, it’s just that nobody is expecting them to reach certain heights spiritually.”

 “They are weak-minded. They just babble, that’s it. Women’s babble,” Kelner told students.

Women, he said, were naturally intuitive, but modern culture had “turned them into nothing.

“They are destroying women until there won’t be any women left. They are all so confused.”

He went on to assert that women were less intelligent than men, and pointed to the fact that there were more male Nobel laureates than female ones.

“Just because they send them en masse to universities they’re suddenly all great geniuses? No!”

He added: “Yes, there are some CEOs here and there, ‘girlillas.'” 

IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot

"There is integration (of women), but it needs to be to a certain extent," Eisenkot stated during a security briefing to government ministers, stressing that at the moment he doesn’t see the integration of women into infantry brigades such as Golani, Givati, Paratroopers or Nahal.

"People tried to accuse me of feminism, but I'm not a chauvinist or a feminist,” he stated, adding that the comments made by some on co-ed service come from “ignorance and agendas promoted by interest groups."

Eisenkot stated that the IDF has only one agenda and that is to be strong and victorious in times of war. As such, he stated, the IDF will continue to offer combat positions to women.