Editor – Joel Katz
DovLinzer, an Orthodox rabbi, is the dean of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical Schoolin the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
This is
part of a larger battle being waged in Israel between the ultra-Orthodox and
the rest of Israeli society over women’s place in society, over their very
right to have a visible presence and to participate in the public sphere.
Tzipi
Livni addressed the WIZO delegates, telling them Israel did not have to pick
between Jewish law, or the halacha, and state laws.
“There is a clash between those who derive authority from the torah and halacha and the rabbis and another group to whom the source of authority is the law and judges,” she said.
“I don’t think you have to choose between the Jewish values and democratic values of Israel.
That’s not the choice. We have to act so that both sides live in harmony so that it is possible.”
When I
called my state socialized-medicine provider a few weeks ago to make a doctor’s
appointment, I was told to come in modest dress, because the clinic is located
in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood.
Uncomfortable
with the mandate, I made the appointment to see the same doctor somewhere else,
although I will have to travel farther to get there.
It is
winter here, so wearing a big, long coat would not have been a major
inconvenience. But on principle, I will not be party to this blatant—and
rapidly spreading—violation of my civil rights.
Shlomo Fuchs, who
allegedly called a female soldier “a whore” on a bus he was traveling on in
December, has been released from house arrest.
However, he remains banned from
using public transport, as stipulated by the Jerusalem District Court after he
was first arrested.
www.ynetnews.com
January 18, 2012
At the police's
consent, the judge canceled all other restrictions imposed on Fuchs, including
house arrest.
The question, then, is
what we citizens can do about this escalating situation. Looking into my
smiling daughter’s face, I am resolved to take the following steps:
1. We must be active
in our schools, whether Mamlachti (state) or Dati Mamlachti (state-religious),
to ensure that our daughters and sons receive a top notch Jewish education
taught in an engaging way.
2. If we want our
daughters to be full members of the Jewish community, then we should affiliate
ourselves with those synagogues and institutions that relate to women as full
members and not as spectators.
3. On the political level,
as voters, we must make it clear to the parties with which we affiliate or
choose to vote for that religious freedom and the inclusion of women are not
negotiable.
The
exclusion of women is taking on a new form in the ultra-Orthodox city of Modiin
Illit: Extreme haredi elements posted signs in one of the city's business
centers last week, calling on men and women to use separate elevators.
More than 200 women
threw off symbolic black head coverings on Tuesday afternoon to protest
discrimination against women in public, during a “flashmob” that took place in
downtown Jerusalem.
How Israel has one of the most easily manipulated
medias in the world and is once again paying a heavy price for media-generated
hysteria.
While we exposed them to the complexities of
the land, we also watched as they each developed their own sense of Ahavat
Yisrael – their love of Israel.
… But this love is tarnished when women are
needlessly discriminated against. Especially when it is by those who claim to
be living Torah while they are actually subverting it.
Robin Garbose has been directing theater,
network television and film for nearly 28 years.
Can Haredi culture go overboard in its quest
for modesty?
When women are denied a voice or when
intimidation is used to hinder critical thinking, there is a problem. And
assaulting women, either physically or verbally, in the guise of enforcing
tzniut is unconscionable.
As Adina Bar Shalom, daughter of Rabbi Ovadia
Yosef, recently asserted, "The exclusion of women from the public domain
violates Torah. Halakha treats women with the utmost respect."
The point is not whether my friend bears
unfounded grudges towards the haredi community for the treatment of its women;
rather it is about her seeming lack of concern for other groups of women in
Israeli society who suffer from humiliations far more disturbing than traveling
on a segregated bus.
...The reason is deeper and is one that the
haredim would never admit to: There is a reason for concern.
While no less
strict haredim in New York or London work and provide for their families, in
Israel’s haredi strongholds women are the breadwinners who provide for the
family.
...these men feel a
need to emphasize, time and again, that they are the center of their
surroundings, thereby having to stress the inferiority of women and excluding
them.
The myth
must be dispelled. Religious extremism is not taking hold in Israel. It is
being squelched. In a world where fanaticism and fundamentalism are so rampant,
the citizens of Israel are putting on a clinic regarding the only way to stem
the tide of the ever-spreading reach of such ideologies: staring it in the eye
and calling it what it is: bad, evil, unspiritual, ungodly, and intolerable.
http://makomisrael.org
January 20, 2012
For
several weeks now there has been an ongoing furor about the place of women and
religion in Israel: Orthodox soldiers walked out of a ceremony involving
singing women. Mehadrin bus lines force women to sit at the back of the bus.
Women are
removed from advertisement hoardings in Jerusalem. A Haredi sect in Bet Shemesh
uses unacceptable means to try to stop girls going to school in their area.
In an
attempt to clear our heads, we are trying to work out what are the underlying
fundamental questions at play? What, if anything, do these different incidents
have in common?
Beginning
this week, there has been a sharp break between the Eda and the police.
Moderate elements within the sect are coming out secretly against the radicals,
out of ideology but also because they fear the violent branding will affect the
Badatz kashrut authorization that provides a living for hundreds of Eda families.
The police are emerging as the winners in the
struggles. The Gur Hasidut, which is embroiled with the Sicarii in a
real-estate war in the Batei Warsaw neighborhood of Jerusalem, is nurturing its
relations with the top police commanders.
On Monday, just two weeks after a big demonstration sparked
by an incident in which an ultra-Orthodox man spat at a local 8-year-old girl
dressed "immodestly," another student at Beit Shemesh's Orot state
religious school was targeted by Haredi teens on the short walk home from
school.
Many in
Beit Shemesh told me how proud they are of their community. They point to
excellent schools, the beautiful countryside, good jobs and friendly mixed
neighborhoods of haredi, secular and modern Orthodox Jews.
They urged
me to help tell the story of the “other Beit Shemesh”, the part of the
community that is not in the news.
Non-haredi
members of the community reminded me repeatedly that the extremists do not
reflect the vast majority of haredim in the community who oppose the harassment
and violence. They tell a more nuanced story.
The exclusion of women phenomenon, which has
stirred a row in Israel, has been occupying the country's ultra-Orthodox media
in recent weeks as well.
The writer is the author of a variety of works on
the relationship between Judaism and the natural sciences. His website is www.zootorah.com and he also maintains a popular blog, www.rationalistjudaism.com.
Haredi society has achieved astounding accomplishments
in building up a society of commitment to Torah study and religious observance.
But it is now undergoing a period of unprecedented internal and external
turmoil.
...More than ever, there is an opportunity, and a
need, to integrate haredi society into Israel. But there are forces in haredi
society that are strongly opposed to such integration, and many haredim
maintain a healthy dose of suspicion vis-a-vis the non-haredi world.
While the Hareidi extremism has correctly been criticized for
its unfair attitudes and treatment of women, I believe the Hareidi position is
equally insulting and unfair to men.
...Our goal as thinking halakhic Jews is to be clear on our responsibility
to be holy, and to treat ourselves and others as fellow human beings--not as
sexual objects.
As we live as modest and respectful human beings, we enhance
our own dignity and the dignity we show to others. This is not an
inconsiderable accomplishment.
See also: Jpost.com version
“By the time you are up to 10% of the population
of whom 70% of the male part of the population doesn’t work, you are getting to
a macro-economic issue,” Stanley Fischer, governor of the Bank of Israel, said
at a briefing. “This is not sustainable. We can’t have an ever increasing
proportion of the population continuing to not go to work.”
“A haredi town would not be self sustaining.
Nobody would pay taxes. Nobody works. Well, hey, this is where [they] are
taking the entire country. Do that math. This is a problem,” Dan Ben-David, a
Tel Aviv University economist who heads the Taub Center for Social Political
Studies, told The Media Line.
Justice Minister Ne'eman:
"In times when the Torah is being denigrated by a few minority groups who turn their backs on the Jewish people's prime tasks, this hesder yeshiva is a symbol of how to combine Torah with public responsibility and sharing the burden and not just isolation and taking budgets."
The real
threat to Israeli society comes not from the acts of Haredi extremists but from
the distorted relationship of the Haredi community to the state.
Haredim
not only exclude themselves from the responsibilities of Israeli citizenship
but demand that the mainstream subsidize their separatism.
Thanks to
Israel’s dysfunctional coalition system, Haredi parties have been able to
extract wholesale draft deferments for their young men and vast subsidies for
their institutions.
Benny
Morris is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
So Israeli
Jewish society continues to advance, paradoxically, in two contrary directions:
The majority is moving toward a more open, secular, Western lifestyle and
polity; and the (growing) minority is moving backward, toward a medieval,
obscurantist life, attentive to what are perceived as God's wishes and
commands.
“Most of the Ultra-Orthodox community is completely sane,” Yehuda Meshi-Zahav said in an interview at his Jerusalem office. “These people recognize that Israel is made up of different sectors that all belong here. But there are still extremists. They have too much influence on the community.”
Meshi-Zahav said the leaders of the Haredi
community need to speak out against Ultra-Orthodox extremism.
www.pri.org January 16, 2012
Idit Karni, a mother of four, in Jerusalem,
thinks it's easy to overlook the extreme complexity of the debate that is going
on in Israel. Karni has been leading a campaign to bring women to the front of
the public consciousness.
"We don't agree that the different advertising firms will choose to exclude 50 percent of the population just because, for economic reasons, it makes more sense to exclude them from advertisements in places with higher populations of ultra-Orthodox," said Karni.
Four of the six men
arrested on Sunday on suspicion of having committed financial offenses in their
management of a charity were released from prison on Thursday under limited
conditions.
Bnei Brak's Rabbi
Moshe Yehuda Leib Landa has warned that turning on faucets in some multi-story
apartment buildings leads to the desecration of Shabbat.
The rabbi issued a halachic ruling explaining
that the using the tap directly turns on an electrical water pumping system –
an offense which, according to the Torah, can be punished by stoning.
... the
crazies in Ramat Beit Shemesh cite the Torah as the justification for their
actions, and claim to act as they do to uphold Torah values.
In that
situation, is it so far-fetched to argue that those who believe that their
actions represent a ziyuf (falsification) of Torah values should say so?
That
doesn't mean apologizing for them – one can only apologize where one bears some
kind of responsibility. But it does mean decrying the distortion of Torah.
There is a
double challenge here: the mainstream ultra-Orthodox leadership, if they can be
found, must start putting their house in order.
The
minority is running roughshod not only over the country as a whole, but
primarily over the haredi community itself.
So is it still
possible to restore the relationship between these two camps, the religious and
the secular, which at this time appear to be so remote from each other?
Well,
we would settle for living side by side while showing tolerance and
understanding to the other side. There is no other choice.
The law
that perpetuates discrimination in favor of the ultra-Orthodox community at the
expense of secular people - known as the Tal Law after retired Supreme Court
Justice Zvi Tal - has justified its opponents' fears and proved wrong its
supporters' pretensions.
...Israeli
society, the military and - no less - the ultra-Orthodox community need shaking
up. This must start with the shelving of the Tal Law.
Girls of Ethiopian,
American, French, Russian, Moroccan and Mexican descent all study in the same
classroom. This takes place in the Beit Yaakov ultra-Orthodox school in the
community of Tel Zion, where one must not even mention the concept of racial
discrimination.
Rabbi
Mordechai Elon conceded Sunday that he might have indeed kissed and hugged two
of his students - both of them minors - but denied doing so for sexual
pleasure, but rather as a way to console and encourage the students.
Elon, who was a leader
in the national-religious community and former dean of Yeshivat Hakotel in
Jerusalem, was charged in October with inappropriately touching, kissing and
stroking a 17-year old student in 2003 after a friend of his, who had also been
a student of Elon’s, was killed in a car accident.
Elon
said he does not remember meeting A., who was not one of Elon's students, but
who had allegedly sought the rabbi out at a time of personal distress at the
suggestion of a friend.
Elon said, however, that it was possible that there had
been physical contact with A., but that this would have been to comfort him,
and not for any sexual gratification.
The government is bringing just 110 Ethiopian
Jews into the country per month, 90 fewer than the agreed figure, despite
recognizing that the official reason for the reduced intake no longer exists.
The 58 kessoch who arrived in Israel in those early days
maintained their leadership role in the Ethiopian Jewish community, and in 1992
successfully lobbied the Israeli government to grant them salaries and status
similar to those of government rabbis.
But as the aging clergy began ordaining
a new generation of kessoch over the past decade, and those new leaders also
wanted recognition, Israel's rabbinate objected.
After public demonstrations and a brief hunger strike, the newly
ordained kessoch struck a bittersweet deal last month with Israel's ministry of
religious services.
The ministry would finally implement a 2010 government
resolution to recognize 13 of them and give them state salaries. But Israel's
state rabbis made it very clear to the new kessoch: They would be the last.
www.ynetnews.com
January 16, 2012
The KCAC is a
multi-partisan caucus comprised of seventeen Knesset members. Established in
2004 by the late Dr. Yuri Shtern, it is today chaired by MK Rotem.
According to the Jan. 6 report, the Christian
growth rate of 0.9 percent lags behind the Jewish rate of 1.7 percent and the
2.7 percent growth rate among Muslims. Christian Arabs have a growth rate of 1
percent, while the rate among non-Arab Christians is 0.7 percent.
About 154,000 Christians live in Israel,
representing about 2 percent of the population, according to the bureau.
Editor – Joel Katz
All
rights reserved.
