Jerusalem’s Sephardic chief rabbi on Tuesday lashed out at Reform Jews, saying they were worse than Holocaust deniers for defying Orthodox Jewish law on gender separation and insisting on the right to mixed-gender prayer at the Western Wall in the city. …

“They’re trying to throw dust in the eyes [of the public] and say that the Orthodox extremist Jews invented [the separation of sexes],” Shlomo Amar, a former Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, said. “It’s like Holocaust deniers, it’s the same thing. They shout about Holocaust deniers in Iran, [but] they deny more than Holocaust deniers.” …

In an interview Wednesday morning on Israel Radio, Amar would not take back his comments calling members of liberal Jewish denominations worse than Holocaust deniers, insisting that the point he wanted to make was that Jewish law on gender separation was so clear and fundamental that denying it was like denying that the earth was round, that the Jewish Temple once stood on the Temple Mount, or that Shabbat exists.