New York Jewish Week — It isn’t hard to find members of Neturei Karta, the anti-Zionist activist Orthodox group, in New York City.

They show up, habitually, at both anti- and pro-Israel rallies, either as protesters or counter-protesters. And they reliably wear the same outfits — traditional Haredi Orthodox dress combined with pro-Palestinian symbols and signs declaring that authentic Judaism rejects Zionism.

On Friday, the group appeared somewhere new: the social media pages of Humans of New York.

“People no longer accept this as being self-defense,” the attached quote says, presumably referring to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. “Killing masses of little children, people don’t accept it anymore. During the holocaust [sic] our grandparents would have been delighted if people in the free world had stood up for them. But today if you stand up for the Palestinian people – who desperately need and deserve the voices of righteous people around the world – you will be labeled as a self-hating Jew. Or if you are not Jewish, you will be labeled as anti-Semitic.”

HONY is a wildly popular social media project founded in 2010 by photographer and writer Brandon Stanton that typically shares photo portraits of everyday New Yorkers, plus a brief, anonymous first-person vignette. It has nearly 30 million followers between Facebook and Instagram (more than three times the city’s population), and has gained widespread media coverage for the way it spotlights — or, well, humanizes — the struggles and triumphs of a diverse cast of the city’s denizens, many of whom live on the margins.

The Neturei Karta post departed from that model in a couple of ways.

Rather than post a portrait of a single New Yorker, it shared a photo of the group, with at least 10 men or boys visible in the photo, including one who is facing the camera.........

© The Times of Israel