Controversial rabbi Yosef Mizrachi, who once suggested that Jews helped to bring about the Holocaust by “assimilating”, has blamed Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis for his not coming to the UK for a speaking tour.
Rabbi Mizrachi attributed “the one who runs the war against me” as the reason he did not fly last week amid reports the Home Office would bar him from entering the country.
Speaking about the Chief Rabbi, he said he was “the person that in my opinion is the number one most wicked person in the whole world. Even to call him reform is an insult to the reform people.”
The US-based rabbi was reported to be facing a Home Office ban from entering Britain over his statements, including a claim that the French would be taken over by Muslims and “either be butchered or they will have to run out of France because the Arabs have many, many children and they grow very fast, plus immigration coming in non-stop”.
Rabbi Mizrachi was due to fly here from New York but told the JC last week he chose not board his flight because of the “risk” of being “questioned [on] my opinions when I arrive to the airport”.
In a YouTube video uploaded on Wednesday, he called the Chief Rabbi a “cancer” and a “gay-lover” who will “bring a Holocaust on England’s Jews”.
Rabbi Mizrachi, who has 200,000 followers on social media, said it was the fault of “wicked liberals” in the UK that he could not visit.
He accused Rabbi Mirvis of being “the one calling every place I was scheduled to speak – schools, shuls – to threaten them.”
In the two hour video rant, Rabbi Mizrachi also claimed Rabbi Mirvis and senior Sephardi rabbi Joseph Dweck were “the two friends, gay lovers, who do everything they can to promote homosexuality and destroy the Jewish nation from inside, destroy the Jewish community in England… he’s going to bring a Holocaust on the Jews in England”.
Rabbi Mizrachi was scheduled to speak at a number of venues in London and Manchester, including the Beth Hamedrash Knesset Yehezkel shul in Golders Green, led by the outspoken Rabbi Aharon Bassous.
Rabbi Mizrachi has also said that autism and Down’s syndrome are punishments for the sins of a past life, and that “only” a million Jews perished in the Shoah because “80 per cent of the Jewish people were assimilated and intermarried with non-Jews”.
He also took issue with Rabbi Mirvis expressing support for the England’s football team. Rabbi Mizrachi called them “a bunch of goyim,” and said Rabbi Mirvis was a “clown.”
The Chief Rabbi has not responded to the remarks.
