A conference of the Daat Emet organization, held Monday at the Yabor Center in the Weitzman neighborhood of Herzliya, was met by violence on the part dozens of Charedi and religious who came to protest the organization's anti-Charedi message. The Daat Emet organization has set as its goals the struggle for a democratic secular state and the fight against the danger they see to the state from the Charedi society. As part of its program the organization distributes in Charedi neighborhoods pamphlets calling for a break with religion and organizes conferences throughout the country open to secular and Charedi alike. Members of the organization include Guy Gorman, son of the Herzliya mayor. At the start of the conference a number of Charedi sat in the hall and tried to disrupt the conference. When they were asked to leave a skirmish broke out between some of the Charedi and organization members, and the conference could only continue after police were called.
For the two hours the conference took, some 20 police officers guarded the Yabor Center all from the dozens of protestors who tried to enter. Eitan Sloniki, one of the conference organizers, was not surprised by the violent turn of events. "We're already used to it. Everywhere we go we meet this kind of violent reaction. We left the conference with a police escort to our cars, but I've stopped paying attention to that." The problems Daat Emet faced in Herzliya started last weekend. Early Saturday morning unknown parties vandalized posters which the organization paid the Herzliya municipality to put up, and a police complaint was lodged. On Monday, scant hours before the conference was scheduled to start, the manager of the Yabor Center hall, Erez Weinberg, called Sloniki and informed him that the conference was cancelled. "Weinberg said that the municipality's Inspection Division wanted to cancel the event because the organization publicized it with posters that led to environmental pollution. It sounded strange to us because we had paid for those posters. It seems he was afraid of violent events in his hall." Only after organizational pressure on the municipality, including phone calls to the mayor from her son Guy, a member of the organization, was the conference permitted. Erez Weinberg refused to respond to calls from Tzomet HaSharon, and the Herzliya municipality responded "The decision to cancel the conference was a personal decision on the part of the hall manager. As soon as the mayor found out about it, she explicitly ordered that the conference go on. In Herzliya no one, of any part of the spectrum, is shut up."
From Tzomet HaSharon July 12, 2002