Preserving the Memory and the Teaching of Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

by Michael Hoffman | Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

"Bank-paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs." (Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, Monticello, June 24, 1813).

"I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." (Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, Monticello, May 28, 1816).

“Neither he (Benito Mussolini) nor T.J. (Thomas Jefferson) was interested in, nor bamboozled by money.” (Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 64).

This Saturday, Oct. 30 will mark the 125th annniversary of the birth of poet/philosopher Ezra Pound in the frontier town of Hailey, in what was then the “Idaho territory” of the United States.

To honor his memory and perpetuate his campaign for justice in economics and against the authority of money in government and society, Independent History and Research is reprinting his classic text, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, which has been out of print for forty years.

Pound’s union of Jefferson, the small government populist, with Mussolini the Fascist, will certainly strike the reader as the oddest of conjunctions. Prof. Alec Marsh decodes the paradox:

“...Pound's critique of capitalism...is purely Populist, certainly not Fascist. Pound was against militarism...and had little interest in youth cults, mass spectacles or mystic Italian nationalism, which he seems to have accepted simply as the Italian way of doing things. What fundamentally interested Pound in Italian Fascism was the possibility it offered for what Emilio Gentile has called 'the conquest of modernity.' That is, Pound admired the attempt by Mussolini to overcome and control the impersonal economic forces unleashed by modernization. Volitionist economics is an attempt to formulate a practical program for those who have the will to master the forces of modernity — a will that Mussolini had in abundance....It seems clear that the man, not the party, interests Pound. And Pound is interested because he thinks that Mussolini might enact the economic reforms necessary to restore social justice...” (Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson).

If one knows anything of the history of western civilization’s struggle against usury, from the ancient Greeks to the medieval Catholics, from William Shakespeare to C.H. Douglas, a glaring contradiction will be found not in a conjunction of an American and an Italian revolutionary, but in the appropriation of Jefferson by Glenn Beck, the Fox TV disciple of the greed-is-good Khazar-capitalist, Ayn Rand.

Beck has plenty of friends in Pound’s native state. In Idaho we have a tabloid called the Capitalist Papers which is where the Tea Party and well-intentioned patriots like Phil Hart advertise and are afforded a forum.

Raul Labrador, Idaho’s “conservative” Republican candidate for Congress, is a shill for the corporate transfer of America’s wealth to China. His campaign is against “Obamacare” and government spending (except for spending on the national police state and overseas neocon empire). Nancy Pelosi is his cuss word; Ben Bernanke gets a pass.

Jefferson and/or Mussolini is not a book we intend to distribute to Idaho ignoramuses and expect that they will have a “Eurkea!” moment after reading it. It’s not a book for the completely ignorant. Pound was old school. He dealt in what the Scholastics called “First principles.” His thought patterns and arguments are lush with profundity, paradox and poetry.

Pound was not a snob, however. Like Jefferson, he was a man of the people despite an I.Q. that was off the charts. He cared intensely for the welfare of the poor and the workers. He was big on common sense and intuition and he would cherish a vision of an Idaho mountaineer in 2010 trying to parse his prose by a wood-fired stove.

We’re not promoting Jefferson and/or Mussolini as one of those supposed “blockbuster eye-opener books!” which is guaranteed to generate instant enlightenment in the reader. Since when is education anything other than a lifetime project?

Pound’s book should be in the library of every person who aspires to be learned -- we do advance that thesis and trust that it is not hyperbole.

There is no substitute for true education. One can obtain the appearance of learning by sitting at the feet of Glenn Beck and his chalkboard. Image and appearance are what modern America is all about. Mountebanks like Beck invoke the America of the past as a front for their support for anti-American usury banking and Israeli hot and cold foreign wars; the latter now being waged against Iran, where sanctions are beginning to destabilize the economy of a nation rooted in opposition to usury, and which is a threat to no one except those who believe they have a license to murder Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

From out of this nightmare arises the writer who gave us the Pisan Cantos, the intellectual who wrote the ABC of Reading, and the courageous campaigner for economic justice who penned Jefferson and/or Mussolini.

Reading Pound’s book is a journey into a great mind. We make no warranties concerning the degree to which it will “change your life” or “wake up your neighbors.” The extent to which this book can exalt your spirit and stimulate your mind depends on the extent of your own personal character and ennoblement.

Let’s face it, most of us are not spending our days making our way through the 100 Classic Books of Western Thought. Most of us spend our reading time on newspapers and the Internet. We haven’t read Aristotle or Augustine, Chaucer or Dickens, or if we did it was ages ago, in a stuffy classroom with a mediocre teacher, and from a motivation to pass a course rather than lift up our heart and mind.

Pound’s little volume fills a two-fold void. First, it starts us on our peregrination back to the tried and true paths and founts of our civilization which the Glenn Becks of our world have suppressed. Second, it serves as a sign of contradiction to the literati of America and Europe as they meet over the next days and weeks to celebrate the 125th birthday of a domesticated Ezra Pound, shorn of his lion’s mane. They want to forget that there was a reason he was locked up for twelve years by the U.S. government and it has to do, then as now, with the life-and-death struggle with the Money Power, the evil which underlies every other evil (Matthew 6:24; 1 Timothy 6:10).

Alas, in this economy, our own publishing enterprise is no longer what it once was, as buyers and donors drop by the wayside. Therefore, we are no longer able to order a thousand copies of a book at a time, with the resulting advantageous economy of scale that such quantity purchases afford. In our straitened circumstances, wherein we are fighting to stave off bankruptcy, we have engaged the services of the print-on-demand publishing trade. By this means we finance the printing of books based on the advance orders we receive from individual readers. If you choose to order, please allow up to four weeks for delivery. Overseas please allow up to five weeks (figuring an average of an extra week for air mail).

JEFFERSON AND/OR MUSSOLINI (quality paperback; 138 pages), $17.95 plus postage and packing. Please do not send just $17.95 or your order will be returned. You must also pay for shipping (see below).

You can order by credit card at this link

Or you can pay with a US check or US Money order, as follows:

U.S. customers send $21.00 postpaid.

Canadians send US$26.00 postpaid. Foreign/Overseas send US $28.00.

Order from: Independent History and Research, Box 849, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83816 USA.

Happy Birthday Ezra!

May we never forget the price you paid for telling the truth about money!

***

Archbishop Bustros under siege for speaking the truth about Judaism

by Michael Hoffman

On Oct. 23, at the Roman Catholic synod on the Middle East in Rome, Cyril Salim Bustros, the Lebanon-born, Melkite Archbishop of Our Lady of the Annunciation in Newton, Massachusetts, made completely traditional Christian statements about Judaics and Judaism that are thoroughly consonant with the historic truths of apostolic Christianity prior to the rise of “Judeo-Christianity” and the subsequent infiltration of rabbinic ideology inside the Church.

In the current environment of near universal apostasy, Archbishop Bustros’ basic reaffirmation of fundamental New Testament teaching on Jews and Judaism has ignited the familiar firestorm of hysterical anathema and hyperbole from 1. The Israeli Foreign Minister. 2. The Chief Israeli Rabbi. 3. The ADL. 4. The Simon Wiesenthal rabbis. 5. The Israeli ambassador to the Vatican, along with a host of crypto-rabbis masquerading as “Christian” professors, pundits and periti.

Why are the truths articulated by Archbishop Bustros so explosive? Because we have for so long dwelled amid the suffocating bipartisan bonhomie of Judeo-Churchianity that when the authentic Gospel is actually preached as St. Peter and St. Paul preached it, it becomes a source of howling outrage to the New Sanhedrin, who have grown accustomed to an almost complete betrayal of Jesus Christ by “Christian” leaders.

In age when nothing is pushed harder than “equality,” we see that the declaration of equality by Archbishop Bustros that, “the Biblical promise that the Land of Israel is for Jews, as the Chosen People, was abolished by the presence of Christ... There is no longer a favored people, a chosen people; all men and women of every country have become the chosen people by virtue of believing on Jesus Christ” --wounds the modern Pharisees in their inner being, predicated as that being is in racial pride and arrogance.

A statement of Gospel fact becomes a species of evil hate speech among those whose ears are accustomed to hearing only soothing platitudes from Fundamentalist Protestant preachers and modern popes. Gospel truth is regarded by Judaism and Zionism as “a libel against the Jewish People” (Israeli Deputy Minister Danny Ayalon, Oct. 24) and an “anti-Semitic" theological position (Jerusalem Post editorial, Oct. 25).

Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, dean and founder, and associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center respectively, stated that the Catholic leader’s declaration is a “political stunt, wrapped in theological garb...(which) insults every Jew..." (How it is that these two rabbis polled every “Jew” on earth and then presumed to speak for them is not disclosed).

In a telephone interview with Catholic News Service Oct. 25, the Israeli ambassador to the Vatican called Bishop Bustros' comments "outrageous" and said, "the Vatican should take a clear distance from them because it will give every Jew a reason to be suspicious of rapprochement with the Catholic Church."

“In a letter to Cardinal-elect Kurt Koch, the newly-appointed president of the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, ADL national director Abe Foxman wrote: ‘By stating that God’s covenantal promise of land to the Jewish people ‘was nullified by Christ’ and that ‘there is no longer a chosen people,’ Bustros is effectively stating that Judaism should no longer exist.” (Jerusalem Post, Oct. 26, 2010).

Memo to Abe Foxman: Exactly! Christ came to replace Pharisaic Judaism, the demonic incarnation of self-worship by which the Jewish elders had subverted the Hebrew Covenant. Here was Good News from the Messiah of Israel, that all men could be saved through Him,  no longer having to observe either the ceremonial law or the much larger corpus of man-made rabbinic halacha that would soon be committed to writing in the Mishnah.

Since the 1960s, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has conspired with the rabbis to overthrow the mission of Israel’s Messiah and embrace, in the language of Machiavellian doublespeak, a two-way route to God: saved by Christ and saved by race. Gentiles can be saved by Christ, on that the Vatican concurs, but “Jews” can be saved on the basis of their alleged descent from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Of course if contemporary Judaics are saved by their supposed genetic descent from the Patriarchs, then it must be concluded that Jesus Christ came only for the gentiles, which is a ludicrous falsification. In the first part of His ministry Jesus proclaimed the very opposite -- that He came only unto the lost sheep of the House of Israel (Matthew 15:24).

Jesus sought first to free the Jewish slaves of sin, and after them, all people, if they would have the grace and good will to surrender unto their Messiah. Instead, many chose to stubbornly cling to the black cloud of Babylonian superstition, eventually codified in the Talmud, that is known as Judaism. True disciples of Christ rightly ask Abe Foxman and every pompous thought cop, why a religion of Babylonian paganism deceitfully posing as a Biblical creed, need exist at all? The notion that “Jews” are exempt from conversion to Christ based on their claims to unique racial descent is a demonic lie (Matthew 3:9).

The “hate” is mostly on the side of the Zionist racists who imagine that race is the mandate whereby they may rule Palestine. The modern West rejects racism in every other nation and ideology, why do they submit to it when the rabbis rule by means of it?

The most arrogant and outlandish of all the Zionist liars who attacked Archbishop Bustros was the Israeli Chief Rabbi:

“Israel’s Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger said, “The priest doesn't have to teach us about interpreting the Bible. We don’t teach them how to interpret the New Testament,’ Rabbi Metzger told European Jewish Press Monday (Oct. 25) in Berlin where he is attending a conference of the European Council of Jewish Communities (ECJC).”

Notice with what contempt Chief Rabbi Metzger refers to Bustros, merely as “the priest,” not as archbishop. He then proceeds to say that a Christian is not to teach Judaics about the Bible. Why not? Jesus did. Christians are commanded to do as Jesus did.

The chief rabbi of counterfeit-Israel has no jurisdiction over what Christians may teach concerning the Bible, which Judaism destroys by rendering it subordinate to the anthropomorphic Talmud. Judaism undoubtedly falsifies and denigrates the authority of the Bible (see http://talmudical.blogspot.com/).

Chief Rabbi Metzger’s most risible statement comes next: “We don’t teach them how to interpret the New Testament.”

But of course you do. The Talmud teaches that Jesus worshipped a brick, led Israel into idolatry and that He deserved to be killed. Orthodox Judaism teaches that the New Testament should be burned. The Rambam (the esteemed Rabbi Moses Maimonides) taught that Christians should be killed, when possible.

Judaic academics, such as Amy Jill Levine, Professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt University and the author of “The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus,” leads a movement that seeks to portray Jesus as a rabbi who colluded with the Pharisees and taught according to rabbinic methods of epistemology and pedagogy.

Pamela Eisenbaum, professor of Biblical studies and Christian origins at Colorado’s Iliff School of Theology teaches that the Apostle Paul was not a Christian. Daniel Boyarin, professor of Talmud at the University of California at Berkeley, seconds this hogwash. He states, “Pamela Eisenbaum's (book) ‘Paul Was Not a Christian,’ is a clear and effective presentation and extension of the view... that Paul remained fully identified with Judaism and the Torah throughout his life.”

Talmudists do indeed endeavor to “teach” Christians about the New Testament. Surprise, surprise, the Israeli Chief Rabbi is a liar.

Now let’s see whether or not Archbishop Bustros is made to recant the truth and thereby absolve himself of the capital crime of insulting the Master Race and perpetuating the most damnable sin of the cosmos, “antisemitism.”

Hoffman is the author of "Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit."

URGENT -- THESE COLUMNS CANNOT CONTINUE WITHOUT DONATIONS FROM READERS.

We thank S.R. in England, Paul and Nancy in Europe, Ed and Janel in the U.S. and Bill B. in Pennsylvania for their assistance.

WE NEED TO HEAR FROM THE THOUSANDS OF OTHERS WHO BENEFIT FROM THESE COLUMNS -- OR THIS SERVICE WILL END. IT TAKES MONEY TO ENGAGE IN CONTRARIAN JOURNALISM - A SIGN OF CONTRADICTION TO THE WORLD AND A SOURCE OF EDUCATION TO THE PEOPLE. 

Donate by Paypal (paypal.com) to: rarebooks14@mac.com

By check or money order to: 

Independent History and Research, Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816

***

Joseph Sobran libeled as a Nazi by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg

Neocon Liar Jeffrey “Dr. Goebbels" Goldberg Dishonors the Memory of Joseph Sobran

by Michael Hoffman | www. RevisionistHistory.org | Oct. 13, 2010

Jeffrey Goldberg is the Israeli agent who is currently national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine. He helped engineer America’s invasion of Iraq based on the propagation of Goldberg’s well-publicized lie, published in the March, 2002 issue of The New Yorker and broadcast on NPR’s "All Things Considered” in February, 2003, that Saddam Hussein was an ally of the alleged 9/11 terror group, Al Qaeda. Now Goldberg is lying again. In a column published Oct. 12 on the website of The Atlantic magazine, Goldberg indicts the eminent Catholic historian and philosopher Joseph Sobran as a “Nazi.” This craven and despicable defamation had to wait until Sobran was dead and could no longer sue for libel.

It seems that Goldberg, his pal Greenberg, and a network of apologists for Israeli war crimes, had their ox gored when the New York Times published an obituary for Mr. Sobran which did not stigmatize him with the obligatory “Holocaust denier” Newspeak, preferring to describe him with the more moderate term, “Holocaust skeptic.”

This minor deviation from the approved script unleashed the hounds of Holocaust halachic correctness, in this case on the Times and on the memory of the deceased. Exploiting the Newspeak mechanisms of the imposed word “Holocaust,” the following fallacy has been advanced by Mr. Goldberg: "Imagine an obituary of a public figure who had denied that World War I had taken place. Or that fifty percent of the Civil War battles we know to have occurred did not, in fact, occur, and that there had been no slavery in the antebellum South.”

Sorry, Mr. Goldberg, but Mr. Sobran never “denied" World War II, or any battle therein; or that the persecution and murder of Judaics had actually occurred. He questioned the extent of the latter; a useful and worthy scientific inquiry which inquisitors like you can’t handle. This writer was present at Sobran’s speech in Irvine, California on June 22, 2002, when he asked, "Why on earth is it 'anti-Jewish' to conclude from the evidence that the standard numbers of Jews murdered are inaccurate, or that the Hitler regime, bad as it was in many ways, was not, in fact, intent on racial extermination? Surely these are controversial conclusions; but if so, let the controversy rage..."

It was Zionism’s de facto propaganda machine which, in the late 1960s, began referring to Adolf Hitler’s crackdown on Judaics as a “Holocaust,” and in this context the neologism was imposed as the standard against which all skeptics are now forever measured and judged.

But this measurement is on a scale devised by bigoted Orwellian thought police like Deborah Lipstadt. It is not a reflection of precision historiography, but of hysteria and megalomania. If Sobran flunks  Zionism’s rigged test of what makes a man a non-Nazi, it is only because the whole argument is as stage-managed as Goldberg’s own denial of the Israeli holocaust against the Palestinians and Lebanese.

I have yet to see a  New York Times obituary for a prominent Israeli apologist in which the deceased was described either as a “denier” of or a “skeptic” toward the fact of Israeli mass murder in Deir Yassin in 1948, Beirut in August of 1982 or Gaza in December of 2008 and January of 2009. Denying Israeli slaughter doesn’t have a special name or category and does not register as an offense against morals in the establishment media of the West.

Goldberg and his network exhibit the familiar totalitarian, Talmudic mentality: they desire to micro-manage every detail of how we perceive Joseph Sobran and how his memory is presented. If the portrayal is not sufficiently debased, they will proceed to dishonor the dead man themselves, in the name of that irresistible shibboleth, fighting Nazism. Their own Nazi-Zionism cannot be an issue, of course; any more than Jeffrey “Dr. Goebbels” Goldberg has been held accountable for his Big Lie about Saddam and Al Qaeda, which helped frog-march America into war with Iraq. He is still a well paid, high profile journalist on the national scene.

Goldberg can lie us into a calamitous war and still lecture us on the supposed venality of Sobran, who lost his position as senior editor of National Review magazine because he would not lie.

Jeff, you’re not fit to shine Joe’s shoes, much less weigh him in the balance of your twisted, dictatorial version of history, to which all must conform or forfeit their reputation.

Hoffman edits Revisionist History newsletter. He writes from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

The Death of a ‘Holocaust Skeptic’

By Jeffrey Goldberg | The Atlantic | Oct. 12, 2010

The death of Joseph Sobran,  far-right columnist more-or-less associated with The National Review, even though the late William F. Buckley found his anti-Semitism semi-intolerable, was marked by an obituary in the Times by William Grimes, who wrote the following strange sentences about his subject:

Mr. Sobran's isolationist views on American foreign policy and Israel became increasingly extreme. He took a skeptical line on the Holocaust and said the Sept. 11 terror attacks were a result of American foreign policy in the Middle East, which he believed that a Jewish lobby directed. Not surprisingly, he spent much of his time defending himself against charges of anti-Semitism.

"Nobody has ever accused me of the slightest personal indecency to a Jew," he said in a speech delivered at a 2002 conference of the Institute for Historical Review. "My chief offense, it appears, has been to insist that the state of Israel has been a costly and treacherous 'ally' to the United States. As of last Sept. 11, I should think that is undeniable. But I have yet to receive a single apology for having been correct." 

Friend-of-Goldblog David Greenberg, the historian, wrote to the public editor of the Times, asking, just exactly, what it means to take "a skeptical line" on the Holocaust? And why would the Times mention the "Institute for Historical Review" without mentioning that it is the country's premier Holocaust denial outfit? Here is the response he received, complete with his name misspelled:

Mr. Greenburg:

Thank you for writing us.

I reached out to Bill McDonald, editor of the obituary pages, reached out to William Grimes, the writer on the piece.  His response is provided below:

**
"I cannot see how describing someone as taking a skeptical line on the Holocaust can be interpreted as anything other than indefensible. He was not a Holocaust denier, precisely, but what he called a Holocaust agnostic. At any rate, both of the reader's suppositions are correct. First,  he did wonder if Hitler had pursued  a policy of genocide. Supposition two also applies, he did not deny that many Jews died, but suspected that the number was exaggerated. Space--the guy had about 300 words' worth of survivors--did not really permit me to go into the details, but the Sobran quote surely gives the flavor."
**

I hope this helps clarify things for you.  It seems that The Times would have liked the opportunity to say more about this, but unfortunately space constraints made it difficult for them to include the whole thing in detail.

Once again, I appreciate you writing and bringing this to our attention.  It is greatly appreciated.

Best,
Joseph Burgess
Office of the Public Editor
The New York Times

A fairly fatuous reply. Imagine an obituary of a public figure who had denied that World War I had taken place. Or that fifty percent of the Civil War battles we know to have occurred did not, in fact, occur, and that there had been no slavery in the antebellum South. Would the Times describe this person as a  "Civil War skeptic"? Or would it have described him as delusional?

A much better response to this obituary came from Jeet Heer:

The fact is, Sobran did more than "take a skeptical line of the Holocaust." Sobran, to be blunt, became a Nazi fellow-traveler. Most readers of the Times won't know what the Institute for Historical Review is. The name is certainly benign enough. It is in fact an organization devoted to Holocaust denial and other forms of Nazi apologetics. (At a recent talk Mark Weber, director of the Institute, argued that had England made peace with Nazi Germany the result would have been "an Axis-dominated Pax Europa ... [which] would have been prosperous, socially progressive, politically stable, and technologically advanced, with an extensive, continent-wide transportation and communications network, conscientious environmental policies, and a comprehensive healthcare system. At the same time, the continent would have remained ethnically and culturally European. Large scall immigration of non-Europeans would have been unthinkable.")

Leaving aside the issue of Holocaust denial, anyone who takes the time to read Sobran's writing will immediately notice that he shared many of the ideas of the European far right from the early 20th century, in particular the belief that Jews are an alien, nearly monolithic and subversive force whose main goal is to destroy Western Civilization. I usually avoid emotive language but there really was a Nazi thread in Sobran's thinking (combined of course with many other arguably related threads like his defense of the Confederacy, his anti-feminism, and his belief in all sorts of conspiracy theories).

***

Baba Sali Rabbi: Women Will Burn in Hell for Wearing Fake Wigs

UPDATED FEBRUARY 3, 2020

Renowned Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira Declared that Judaic Women Will Burn in Hell for Wearing Fake Wigs

by Michael Hoffman | www.RevisionistHistory.org

I am often mocked for stating that Talmudism is a form of anti-Judaic hatred. 

This is a big laugh to my detractors.

The mockers seem to have conveniently forgotten, however, that Jesus Christ's mission was to free Jews from the type of covert Jew-hate and micro-management which is what Phariseeism and its successor, Orthodox Judaism and its holiest book (the Babylonian Talmud), surely constitute.

The devil has arranged for Judaic people to suffer grievously with

enormous legalistic burdens, pathological anxiety and Babylonian

superstition imposed upon them by rabbis known as "halachic

adjudicators." These "holy sages" contradict and overthrow the Bible.

In our upside-down world, Christians such as this writer are styled

“anti-Semitic" for seeking the freedom and happiness of Judaics, while Talmudic rabbis and their Catholic and Protestant co-conspirators pose as defenders of Judaics—by keeping them in thrall to insane, oppressive, pagan superstitions. 

Consider the ruling of the influential late Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira, who declared that Judaic women will burn in hell for wearing fake wigs! 

This ruling was reaffirmed by the revered Orthodox Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. (See the report below).

To seek the liberation of Judaics is a lonely vocation when

Christ-betraying Churchianity and the media have a vested

interest in portraying liberators as oppressors, and the real oppressors as "defenders of the 'Jews."

(Hoffman is the author of Judaism Discovered: A Study of the

Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and

Deceit).

Rabbi Yosef comes out against wig-wearing

Shas spiritual leader calls for stiffened stance against Ger Hasidic women's head coverings.

 'Religious authorities have ruled they are forbidden. Baba Sali said those who wear wigs will be burned in world to come'

by Ari Galahar | Ynet News (Zionist website)

During his weekly Saturday night lesson, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef...the Shas spiritual leader, addressed the large number of religious women who wear wigs as a form of head covering, particularly among the women of Ger Hasidism.  "A woman wears a wig. Why? There are Ger Hasids who are lenient as if Ger Hasidism is the entire world. This is not true. The religious arbiters wrote explicitly that this is forbidden, that this is grave," said Rabbi Yosef.

To back up his statements, the rabbi quoted a series of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic halachic adjudicators that forbid "fake wigs," such as the Vilna Gaon and Hatam Sofer.

"These great halachic adjudicators – are they not worthy before the so-and-so you consult? Be warned. You must go with a hat or kerchief (on your head). This will be examined during the 10 days of repentance (between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur). During the 10 days of repentance, behave nicely," he said.

In order to demonstrate the severity of the matter, the rabbi told of a man who went with his wife to see Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira, also known as the Baba Sali, in order to ask for a blessing: 

"He asked him why is she wearing a fake wig? He answered that is the custom. 

"(The Baba Sali said to the woman), Listen, when you arrive in the world to come, they will burn you. They will start burning from the wig, and then they will burn you."

Rabbi Yosef called his listeners to be more stringent during the ten days of repentance with matters they are lenient on during the year, such as glatt meat and head coverings for married women.

***