JERUSALEM, March 3: A group of Israeli rabbis is calling on families from a special Jewish caste to hand over their newborn boys for "purification", so that they can serve as future priests in a new Jewish temple, the Haaretz newspaper reported on Sunday.Rabbi Yosef Elboim said that he has been asked by the secretive "Movement for Establishing the Temple" to find future mothers from the Cohanim priestly caste, willing to give up their offspring for at least 13 years.
The boys would be raised in isolation so they could later perform a holy ritual involving the burning of a sacrificial red heifer -- considered sacred to observant Jews -- whose ashes would be used to cleanse other Jews.
"We already have one mother who has agreed to give birth to her son under these conditions but we need a whole group, at least 19 children," Elboim said. In an interview with Haaretz, Elboim said he was seeking families descended from the Cohanim, who served in the ancient Jewish temple, which was destroyed bythe Romans in 70 AD.
Orthodox Jews hope for a "divine act" to remove the 1,300-year-old Al Aqsa mosque complex -- the third holiest site in Islam -- now located on the temple ruins in Jerusalem's Old City and allow for the rebuilding of the temple.
But Elboim insisted that the movement had no current plans to destroy any Moslem sites to fulfill the dream of observant Jews.
"For the moment, we are talking about preparations. Nobody is suggesting that the mosques will be destroyed tomorrow morning," he said.
In the meanwhile, to ensure the boys" purity, rabbis would raise them without any contact with the dead, considered unclean to Orthodox Jews. A Jewish settlement near Jerusalem has reserved land where the children could be raised until they have completed purification at the age of thirteen.
"The idea is to raise a child who from the moment of birth will not touch the dead, not be under the same roof with the dead and not even be in a hospital, where most babies are born these days, butwhere the dead are also found," Rabbi Elboim said.
According to Haaretz, several residents of the unnamed settlement belong to the anti-Arab movement Kach, which was outlawed after one of its members massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers in Hebron in 1994.
According to Jewish tradition, rebuilding the said temple will hasten the coming of the messiah.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
