The protesters who have been gathering weekly outside Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit's Petach Tikvah home calling on him to indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged corruption are being sharply criticized after they moved on Saturday evening to the synagogue where Mendelblit worships and disrupted proceedings as Mendelblit was reciting the mourner's prayer for his recently deceased mother.
The demonstrators created such a disturbance outside the synagogue that Mendelblit was forced to stop the prayer in the middle. He left quickly, together with his wife, and went home to draw the agitators away from the synagogue in the hope of allowing the rest of the congregants to pray in peace.
Synagogue members asked the protesters to move away from the entrance to the building, where they had gathered, and when they refused, called the police.
Hanan Klepner, who witnessed the event, called it a "disgrace."
"A photographer chased after the attorney general, even before Shabbat was over, right up to the door of the synagogue. Why not let him say kaddish [the mourner's prayer]? They can protest later. A little sensitivity wouldn't hurt, be human," Klepner said.
But the protesters argued that they were within their rights as they were on a public sidewalk.
"They [the ultra-Orhtodox] took our country from us. This is religification. So we created a disturbance. So what?" one said.
Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said to the protesters: "When you prevent a Jew from saying the kaddish prayer for his mother in the name of freedom of speech, that's not democracy. That is violent, bullying behavior."
Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein tweeted that "the barbaric, bullying act we saw this Saturday evening was totally unacceptable."
Opposition Leader Isaac Herzog called the protest "lacking in humanity. Even the right to demonstrate, which in a democracy is holy, has its limits."
President Reuven Rivlin said Sunday that he was "deeply horrified by the incident yesterday evening in Petach Tikvah. It was a crude trampling of basic rules of decency."
