A MONTH before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, an extremist rabbi and a few loyal followers gathered outside the prime minister's house and placed a mystical curse upon him.
The Pulsa Denura - Aramaic for "lashes of fire" - was invoked because of Mr Rabin's "heretical" anti Jewish policies, and specifically his agreements to cede land for peace with the Palestinians. It called on "the angels of destruction" to "take a sword to this wicked man". On November 4th, last year, just within the 30 day period stipulated by the curse, Yigal Amir shot the prime minister dead.
Now the threat to invoke the Pulsa Denura is being levelled at a new target - Judge Aharon Barak (60), president of the Supreme Court, the ultimate bastion of democracy in a country increasingly torn between secular and religious values. Responding to news that the judge has been given round the clock protection, a caller to Jerusalem police on Saturday night warned: "As soon as the guard around Barak is removed, he will be eliminated."
The threats follow a concerted campaign against Justice Barak in the ultra Orthodox press, read in ghettoised neighbourhoods such as Jerusalem's Meah She'arim or Tel Aviv's Bnei Barak, where the population consists almost entirely of black garbed zealots, bound to the most literal interpretation of Jewish religious law.
The Supreme Court recently decided not to order the Sabbath closure to cars of Bar Ilan Street - a Jerusalem thoroughfare bordered on both sides by ultra-Orthodox homes. It has refused to authorise religious based Knesset legislation on such issues as banning the import of non kosher meat. And it has gradually sought to whittle away the Orthodox rabbinate's monopoly on all matters relating to Jewish birth, marriage, divorce and death.
Even though Justice Barak only became Supreme Court president a year ago, he is being portrayed in the ultra Orthodox press as the very embodiment of secular Israel - and thus the enemy of devoutly religious Jews. A recent editorial in the Hashavua newspaper, headlined "The Target Barak", described him as "the driving force behind a sophisticated campaign against Jewish life in Israel".
The extremists stepped up their attacks this weekend two other Supreme Court justices received death threats, as did Israel's two state employed chief rabbis - for having defended the Supreme Court and the rule of law.
Mr Avraham Ravitz, an ultra Orthodox deputy who blamed leftists for deliberately exaggerating the affair, claimed that as most ultra Orthodox men did not serve in the army, the community had little access to guns and the notion of an ultra Orthodox assassin was thus extremely remote.
But then again, 10 months ago, nobody conceived that an Orthodox Jew would murder the prime minister.