TIMES OF ISRAEL – A prominent religious-Zionist rabbi known for his extremist views suggested on Wednesday that the fire that gutted the famed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris earlier this week may have been divine retribution for the mass-burning of Talmud volumes by French Catholic priests in the city eight centuries earlier.
Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, the rabbi of the Beit El settlement and head of the Ateret Yerushalayim yeshiva, said that Jews should not commit arson against churches, but also that there was no duty to be saddened by the fire, which gutted the famed 12th-century cathedral.