Rabbi Shlomo Aviner Says Notre Dame Fire Retribution For 13th-Century Talmud Burning....

Radical rabbi says Notre Dame fire retribution for 13th-century Talmud burning

Shlomo Aviner, who moved to Israel from France in the 1960s, suggests fire that gutted iconic church may have been divine retribution for burning of Jewish manuscripts in 1242 A prominent religious-Zionist rabbi known for his extremist views suggested on Wednesday that the fire that gutted the famed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris earlier this week may have been divine retribution for the mass-burning of Talmud volumes by French Catholic priests in the city eight centuries earlier. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, the rabbi of the Beit El settlement and head of the Ateret Yerushalayim yeshiva, said that Jews should not commit arson against churches, but also that there was no duty to be saddened by the fire, which gutted the famed 12th-century cathedral. He made the comments to the religious-Zionist website Srugim as part of a question-and-answer column (Hebrew). After initially balking at the assertion that the Notre Dame fire was divine vengeance, as “we don’t know the secrets of God,” Aviner went on to say it was “possible to say so.”Source