There is a bakery in RBS D, a branch of the Chalat Habayit chain (great bakery, by the way) on the main strip called HaAmoraim Blvd (Sderot Haamoraim). Besides for selling bread, pitas, rogelach, burekas, and the like, Chalat Habayit, like most similar bakeries also sells coffee, sandwiches and some other light food options. They are certified as kosher by the hechsher of Rav Rubin, a well respected hechsher in the Haredi community. 

It seems the llocal extremists who make a lot of trouble around Bet Shemesh have taken a dislike to the fact that Chalat Habayit put out a few small tables for people to sit and drink their coffee or eat a danish. They claim this will destroy their neighborhood and turn the street into a midrachov, something akin to Ben Yehuda in Jerusalem.

Sderat HaAmoraim is a long street of apartment buildings with shops of all types all along the street at the street level of the buildings. Anyone going to that area to shop, or anyone local needing to do their shopping, is going to the various stores on that street, in addition to health clinics and banks. 

The fights with the extremists (who may or may not even live in that neighborhood) have gone on for the past year fairly regularly over different issues. It seems to be back now, with a step up, and neither side seems to be willing to back down.

I will note, so the readers who might nto be familiar with it, RBS D is an entirely Haredi neighborhood, but regular Haredi norms are not good enough for the extremists. This isnt about Haredim fighting the secular who might drive on Shabbos or anything like that. This is extremists fighting the residents of a Haredi, yeshivish and hassidish, neighborhood. 

So, it seems the extremists have pressured the Rubin hechsher to force the owner of the bakery to remove the tables or else lose its hechsher. How they influenced the Rubin hechsher is a curiosity because they dont eat Rubin anyway (the communities of extremists only eat Eida), so they couldnt exactly threaten them with a ban, but they somehow did and Rubin let the bakery know to remove the tables or lose the hechsher. This is not general Rubin policy, as many other restaurants elsewhere with Rubin have tables, including other branches of this bakery, so making this threat was specifically for this location because of the pressure of the thugs.

Residents will be holding a protest, of sorts, outside the bakery this evening against the thugs. At around 8pm, an anonymous donor who has sponsored several pots of cholent will have bowls of cholent distributed to protestors. They say that this is to mimic so to speak the judicial reform protest in Bnei Braq in which food was distributed because the thugs like the reform protesters dont really want solutions, just control. Even after the tables were taken in the thugs continue to make trouble. 

They complain that the municipality and the police do not do anything to solve this. Truth is, they rarely ever have. Unless police get attacked by the thugs, the police generally leave them alone and are happy to just keep them contained, letting the locals be victims.

Basically, free cholent in BS D tonight!