What do different authorities think of Yad L’achim?

Yad L’achim put up posters showing different Israelis people in the media being unkind to Messianic Jews.

Whats the thoughts of different organizations on Yad L’achim though?

US Department of State

International Religious Freedom Report 2009 Report October 26, 2009

The Messianic Jewish and Jehovah’s Witnesses communities, among others, accused groups such as Yad L’Achim and Lev L’Achim, and Jewish religious organizations opposed to missionary activity, of harassing and occasionally assaulting their members. According to Yad L’Achim’s annual report for 2008, quoted in the newspaper Yom L’Yom, the organization “saved 174 souls from the clutches of the mission” during the year. The organization’s semi-clandestine Counter-Missionary Department, headed by Rabbi Alex Artovski, also claimed to have dozens of informants and infiltrators in the Government and in Christian or Messianic Jewish congregations, enabling the organization to force the closure of 18 religious meeting places and expel 12 “top-ranking” missionaries from the country during 2008. According to JIJ attorneys and representatives of affected religious communities, Yad L’Achim succeeded in such activities by pressuring landlords, employers and Interior Ministry officials to assist its campaign against groups it deemed “dangerous cults.”

Despite harassment, the number of Messianic Jews and evangelical Christians has grown in recent years through both immigration and conversion. During the reporting period, however, increased press reporting and complaints from religious freedom activists indicated a corresponding increase in Yad L’achim and associated activism, and a growing wider backlash against the presence of evangelical Christian or Messianic Jewish congregations and missionaries living in Jewish communities. Exacerbating these tensions was the widespread but false belief that proselytizing is illegal in the country.

http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2009/127349.htm

The ADL – Anti defamation league

ADL Condemns Leaflet Forbidding Renting Apartments to Arabs

Jerusalem, October 30, 2006 …  The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) strongly condemned a call signed by Ashdod rabbis forbidding Jews from renting apartments to Arabs or foreign workers. The call was made in a leaflet distributed by the organization Yad l’Achim and signed by well-known rabbis in the city.

ADL’s Israel office issued the following statement:

We deplore such bigotry in the strongest terms. Such discriminatory appeals are a terrible offense against Jewish teaching and a stain on the name of the Jewish people. Such conduct toward Jews anywhere in the world would not be tolerated and such conduct toward non-Jews must also not be tolerated in the Jewish state.

The call to residents of the city to discriminate against Arabs and foreign workers is not only incompatible with Israeli democratic law and we call upon the authorities to investigate this so-called ultra-Orthodox organization.

This is not the first time that Yad l’Achim has issued racist statements. In the past they have intimidated and harassed members of Jehovah’s Witnesses and others. The ADL in Israel urges the authorities to call the Rabbis of Ashdod who signed off on this appeal to order accordingly.

http://www.adl.org/PresRele/IslME_62/4918_52.htm

Jerusalem Post

From interview:-

“Rabbi Shalom Dov Lifschitz, told me: “When we find out about a missionary, we’ll publicize his identity on posters, newspaper ads, by word of mouth. We don’t even have to phone up his place of work – a lot of Jewish employers don’t want to be involved with missionaries… So seeing an ad in the newspaper is enough for [the employer] to fire him. But not all employers will do this.”

http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=132602

Poster on the right typical of Yad L’achim activities exposing name and addresses of people they decide to harrass, here there is no name of who published it.   This one circulated around the Ashdod area in October/November 2012.