Editor – Joel Katz
Will the State of
Israel be forced to pay for missing core studies? Dozens of former
ultra-Orthodox men and women are seeking to sue the State for damages they
allegedly suffered by not studying basic subjects like math or English in the
schools they were educated in.
According to the
plaintiffs, ever since leaving the religious world they have spent many years
and a lot of money in order to catch up on the crucial material – and should
therefore be compensated.
The lawsuit was
initiated by the Maavar association, which usually works to bridge between former
religious people and their families.
This is going to be fascinating to watch. How
will the state respond to a lawsuit holding it responsible for an educational
approach, chosen by the plaintiffs’ parents, which it opposes but hasn’t, until
now, had the confidence to fight?
And if these ex-Haredim succeed, what’s to
stop still-observant Haredim who say their earnings power has suffered from
suing, too?
An ad published this
week by Maccabi Health Services called on members of all health maintenance
organizations in the city of Ashdod to take part in a blood donation initiative
– but only if they are men.
The ad showed a
smiling ultra-Orthodox man and called on HMO members to donate blood as part of
"men's blood donation in cooperation with Maccabi Health Services."
Faces of young girls
presenting Purim costumes have been blurred in ads published in Beit Shemesh's
ultra-Orthodox newspapers, leading to a consumer boycott against the toy store
chain marketing the costumes.
The first to protest
the incident was Hadassa Margolese, the mother of eight-year-old Naama who was
humiliated by religious zealots on her way to school.
“The circulars are actually printed in [the
Haredi neighborhood] of Ramat Beit Shemesh,” Margolese told The Sisterhood.
“But they were put in my mailbox in my neighborhood in a part of the city which
is not Haredi.
The store itself is downtown where non-Orthodox
and Modern Orthodox people shop. The store and the company needed to be told
that we don’t believe in blurring female faces and anyone who wants to put
their advertisements in our mailboxes in our neighborhood with blurred faces
would lose our business.”
So the questions remain:
Why is female sexuality and empowerment so deeply
threatening to the conservative religious cultures?
What would happen to those
cultures if women were free to make their own sexual choices, and exercise
their own personal power? Would free, healthy, sexual, productive women bring
down a society or dramatically strengthen it?
Natalie Mashiach and Hadassah Margolis, recent
victims of extremist ultra- Orthodox violence and intimidation in Beit Shemesh,
drove in a small convoy with other activists to the Prime Minister’s Office in
Jerusalem on Sunday to call on the government to tackle the extremist
tendencies of sections of the haredi community in their city.
“Can someone in the government wake up and please
do something?” Mashiach asked, addressing the press outside the Prime
Minister’s Office.
“We residents are held captive, but we’re not
going to give up on our city. Together – secular, traditional, national-
religious and moderate haredim – we will not flee. We will fight for our homes
and we will fight for our city.”
Israel must not let women’s rights be trampled
Israel
has always been a grand experiment. As the Jewish homeland, it embraces the
expansive Jewish universe, from ultra-secular to deeply religious, including a
large minority of non-Jewish citizens. That diversity is part of Israel’s
strength.
Yet
Israel watchers have long wondered: Can a Jewish state also exist as a thriving
democracy with equal rights for all? Unless the government unreservedly upholds
women’s rights and cracks down on those who would make Israel a medieval
theocracy, we may not like the ultimate answer to that question.
Rabbi
Aaron Leibowitz is Dean of HaOhel Institutions in Jerusalem, now launching a
new venture, Threshold.
If we
are to be fair, it is clear that the assault of Western values and culture on
the ultra-Orthodox lifestyle is formidable; it is only natural that they should
be afraid.
But to
me it is clear that while they think of themselves as the ones who fear God, it
is fear of the world that most defines the haredi path. Could not an authentic
and deep faith in God's hand in the world provide them with a more confident
sense of balance, and allow them to draw closer to the “Ledge”?
Israeli
feminist Anat Hoffman coming to Bay Area for nine talks
“Americans have been
trained to care about Israel’s security and think of it in terms of Israel
being surrounded by millions of enemies,” Anat Hoffman said in a phone
interview in advance of her 11-day California visit, which hits the Bay Area on
Tuesday, Feb. 7.
“But security is not just
measured by soldiers on the border. It’s also measured by an 8-year-old girl’s
ability to go to school without being bullied.”
The US State Department is concerned over recent
violence exhibited by extremists in Israel's haredi community and has published
a travel recommendation for tourists.
"Most roads into ultra-orthodox Jewish
neighborhoods are blocked off on Friday nights, Saturdays, and Jewish holidays.
Assaults on secular visitors, either for being in cars or for being 'immodestly
dressed' have occurred in these neighborhoods," the consulate said.
To
ensure that there be absolutely no doubt that most of the subsidized housing
should go to the ultra-Orthodox, Atias stipulated that 30 percent of the
apartments must go to families with two children and 45 percent to families
with three children or more.
Atias'
criteria make a mockery of social justice. Because social justice means a
positive correlation between what you give to the state and what you get from
it. But on the housing issue, the less you give, the more you'll get.
Earlier Monday, the Israel Land administration
unanimously approved the proposed regulations, which grant priority housing to
those who have served in the army but do not favor households where both
partners work.
The parties blasted Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu's government for "violating the middle class' basic right for …
affordable housing."
They
continue to laugh in our faces. From today, it’s not just Minister of Housing
Ariel Atias who has fixed it so that the criteria for affordable housing will
be in accordance with his peculiar outlook on life, but also, and it’s
official, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Finance Yuval
Steinitz.
They
joined in Atias’s clever and cunning exercise, diverted public attention to the
strengthening of the criteria giving preference to those who have served in the
army, and ignored the matter of exhausting earning capacity.
[D]id you know that when you purchase many
popular kosher food items, you may be financially supporting that violence?
...Most of us do not want our money to be used to
pay the stipends of men who stone Israeli police, vandalize Israeli buses, spit
on “immodest” little girls and attack “immodest” women.
One way to ensure it won’t be is to stop buying
products that carry the Badatz Yerushalayim and CRC kosher seals. Another is to
raise Satmar’s involvement in Edah HaCharedis with American politicians who
help Satmar organizations receive government funding.
www.ynetnews.com
February 3, 2012
ZAKA Chairman and Founder Yehuda Meshi-Zahav has
lashed out against the recent wave of ultra-Orthodox violence in the strongest
possible terms, comparing their actions to those of terrorists.
In an unparalleled assault
against those behind the recent violence, Meshi-Zahav asserted, “This has been
going on for too long, these so-called haredi hooligans have wreaked havoc
through harassment and violence. It doesn’t really matter how they justify the
actions, often they are just bored and find excuses later.
"Whatever the
reason, they cannot be allowed to go on like this, at the expense of innocent
men, women and children, whose only crime is being in the wrong place at the
wrong time.”
The silence
of the majority of our leaders has allowed a tiny fringe group of extremists to
hijack the media into thinking they represent the entire haredi Orthodox
community in Israel.
This
terrible generalization could not be further from the truth and is insulting to
those of us who have worked for so many years to bridge the gaps of
understanding with all sectors of Israeli society.
Bank of
Israel Governor Stanley Fischer:
"Among the Arabs, population growth has moderated a little, but among the Haredim it's the opposite. I hold the Haredi community in the highest esteem, but I have to say that continuing growth by a population segment that doesn't work can't go on forever. It has to stop."
Governor of the Bank of Israel Prof. Stanley Fischer's unusually
sharp attack on the low participation in the workforce by haredim
(ultra-orthodox) at the Herzliya Conference yesterday may have been prompted by
hard questions asked by the head of the IMF Mission to Israel, Peter Doyle,
senior government officials told "Globes" today.
The sources said that Doyle, during his numerous meetings with
Bank of Israel, Ministry of Finance, and other government officials, expressed
his concerns over the low participation in Israel's workforce, and the
extraordinarily low participation by haredi men was .
A new JIIS
study is examining the gamut of issues related to integrating educated haredis
into the workforce. And what the researchers have found so far is fascinating.
Indeed,
the project so far has identified a series of barriers that at present make haredi
integration into the labor force harder than that for the general population –
social barriers of both the haredis and potential employers, barriers related
to the type and quality of training given to the ultra-orthodox, barriers
regarding availability of work, and so on.
www.haaretz.com
February 5, 2012
A new
bill advanced by Meretz MK Zehava Gal-On aims to provide financial aid to
youths leaving the religious world, similar to that given to new immigrants upon
their arrival in Israel.
Eli
Bitaan: “It’s the state that deprived me of an education given to any other
person my age. The state gave up on my education as a Haredi out of political
motivations and never gave me an equal opportunity.”
“I don’t feel we’ve won yet, I feel we’re on our
way to solving the problem,” said Margolese. “My daughter feels safe at school
now, so that’s a good thing.”
“But we want to feel safe on the streets on Beit
Shemesh and Ramat Beit Shemesh. We want to feel like we can go anywhere,
dressed however we’re dressed, and not be attacked,” she added.
“This is a microcosm of the whole country,” said
Coleman. “The country shouldn’t give in because they are worried about people
rioting, and we won’t give up until people can walk safely.”
Natalie Mashiah, the
woman who was assaulted by haredi extremists in Beit Shemesh last week, is
demanding some answers.
Aharonovitch and
Shaham met Mashiah during a tour of Beit Shemesh. "I want to know why
there isn’t enough manpower," she said.
"When I called
the police two terrified officers came. I pointed to my assailants and the
officers told me not to worry and that by midnight all 15 attackers would be
arrested. If we had enough officers who weren't so terrified maybe things would
look differently."
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef:
I am writing with regard to what has been recently occurring in our land, that, to our dismay, various entities are attempting to disgrace the Torah of Israel through actions that ought not be done, thereby causing a public desecration of the Divine Name, giving no thought to the results of their actions.
They have gone so far as to humiliate and embarrass people in public, to insult, curse and slur, and the rabbis are not approving of this behavior. I therefore decided that this is not a time to remain silent, and I am unable to mince words.
MK Yisrael Eichler (United Torah Judaism) accused
the media on Monday of turning the Israeli public against the ultra-Orthodox
sector by publishing "anti-Semitic talkbacks and incitement."
Speaking before the Knesset plenum, Eichler
likened the media's conduct to that of the Weimar Republic, referring to the
early Nazi regime in Germany.
Police arrested four
men in the ultra-Orthodox Mea She'arim neighborhood in Jerusalem who threw
stones at inspectors from the Tax Authority on Wednesday morning.
Haredi
families buy up apartments vacated by secular residents, a glatt kosher supermarket
opens, and other apartments are turned into synagogues. It's Jerusalem's Gilo
Aleph neighborhood, another area in the capital going ultra-Orthodox.
Jerusalem City Council member Rachel Azaria
says the attempt to separate ultra-Orthodox and secular people has failed.
"The Haredi people who come to Gilo want
to live in a mixed neighborhood, they want to live in a place where a man can
sit beside his wife on the bus," she says. "So instead of separating
we must define common living rules in which nobody disturbs the other in the
public sphere."
This is
a story of an alleged rape in Mea She'arim, Jerusalem, 100 years ago. "The
whole country was in an uproar," wrote S.Y. Agnon, "saying this is
Jerusalem and these are its Hasids."
A new
study that focuses on the private and public lifestyle of Gur Hasidim lifts the
veil further on sanctity in the sect.
"Sanctity
is the ideology of the art of drawing apart," says Dr. Nava Wasserman, whose
study of private and public life among Gur Hasidism was the subject of her
doctoral dissertation (which she wrote under the guidance of Prof. Kimmy
Caplan, at Bar-Ilan University).
Her
study is a rare achievement, in that sanctity is an oral tradition, and among
Gur Hasidim, it is passed on only via private instruction. She describes the
sanctity society through the eyes of women and men who are for the most part
from the hard core of the sect.
The ultra-Orthodox and
religious communities have denied for years that such a problem exists in their
midst. Today, some of rabbis take part in the fight against violence and
understand that this is something they need to be dealing with. But still, the
path to freedom for an abused Orthodox woman is filled with obstacles and
heartache.
In addition to the
shelter, there is a hotline that receives no less than 100 calls a month from
ultra-Orthodox women, worried friends, neighbors and social services
nationwide.
A new mehadrin,
super-kosher kashrut authority was launched this week from Safed, targeting the
national-religious community.
The more discerning
members of the crocheted kippa-wearing public will be now able to purchase
fresh poultry slaughtered under the auspices of the Badatz Orot Eliyahu
authority.
Badatz Orot Eliyahu is
the brainchild of Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safed, and Rabbi Ezra
Sheinberg, dean of the Orot Ha’ari yeshiva in Safed.
The writer is an
author and translator from Modi’in. His recent retrospective about Rabbi Moshe
Feinstein, entitled “Halacha for Americans,” appeared on Jewish Ideas Daily.
In the case of Haagen
Dazs, the rabbinate has changed a policy of benign neglect that allowed
individual consumers to make their own choices about kashrut standards.
Of course, one can
live without Haagen Dazs ice
cream. Nevertheless, it is deeply insulting to have the country’s official
kosher-certification body cast aspersions on longstanding and halachically
accepted practices.
Simhayof
recovered quickly after the initial shock (he is a trained politician, after
all) and launched what he calls “the beginning of the end of Barkat’s days on
the city council.”
What did
he mean by that? Simhayof says that first of all, he will personally see to it
that for the rest of the mayor’s term on the council, Barkat’s life will be
miserable.
But more
importantly, from now on Simhayof will be leading the camp that is actively
seeking a candidate to challenge Barkat in the 2014 mayoral elections.
“We
already have names, and none of them are haredi – we already learned that
lesson [with former Uri Lupolianski],” he explains. “But they are very good
people, and I swore to myself that Barkat will not be the next mayor if that is
the last thing I do in local politics.”
As Shas
gets ready to welcome back a former minister jailed for corruption, party
chairman Eli Yishai looks like he may be gearing up to become its next martyr.
In a
recent issue of the Shas journal Yom L'yom, Yishai wrote about the upcoming release
of former minister Shlomo Benizri, whose is due to be freed in April.
The
Israel Prisons Service parole board decided Monday to reduce the sentence of
former minister Shlomo Benizri, a member of the Shas party who was recently
sentenced to four years in prison for bribery and other offenses.
www.jpost.com
February 3, 2012
Kiryat Arba's Chief Rabbi Dov Lior compared US
President Barak Obama to Haman - an enemy of the Jews in the Book of Esther-
during a conference in the West Bank this week, Army Radio reported Friday.
He also labeled the Obama a "kushi" of
the West, a derogatory term used to describe people of African descent.
The most surprising part of the story about Rav
Aharon Bina’s alleged emotional abuse of his students at Netiv Aryeh comes from
the reactions: It is astounding to see how many people apparently knew this has
been going on but continue to sing his praises. This entire episode raises some
difficult questions about what is really going on in the yeshiva world.
...When I think about the ongoing dysfunction in
the Orthodox community today, a community that is so bizarrely obsessed with
obedience, conformity, and the absence of the female presence, it all starts to
make sense. This is a community that has come to value submission to authority,
that places these warped values on a pedestal, and makes deviation from the
crowd all but impossible.
In a landmark decision, the Jerusalem
Magistrate’s Court ruled last week that police can forbid Jewish worshipers
from blowing the shofar at the Kotel Hakatan, a small part of the Western Wall
that is considered the closest point to the inner sanctuary of the Temple
Mount.
Small groups can bring Torahs and gather for
prayer events in coordination with police and the Western Wall Heritage Fund.
However, no ritual objects can be installed permanently at the site, such as
chairs, a cabinet to hold prayer books or a Torah ark.
Small groups can bring
Torahs and gather for prayer events in coordination with police and the Western
Wall Heritage Fund. However, no ritual objects can be installed permanently at
the site, such as chairs, a cabinet to hold prayer books or a Torah ark.
www.ynetnews.com
February 5, 2012
Seventy-one olim from
Ethiopia arrived in Israel on Thursday accompanied by lay leaders from the
Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA).
The UJA-Federation
generously donates over $3 million annually to Ethiopian aliyah and absorption in
Israel, as well as medical and educational services for those still in
Ethiopia. At the moment, there are more than 6,000 Ethiopian Jews (Falash Mura)
seeking to make aliyah to Israel.
Responding to recent calls by young
Ethiopian-Israeli activists for overseas Jews to push the government to tackle
widespread discrimination against the immigrant community, a senior American
Jewish leader told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that it was not the
place of the Diaspora to intervene on a political level in Israel’s social
problems.
The relationship between American Jewry and
Israel is very delicate,” said John Ruskay, executive vice president and CEO of
the UJA-Federation of New York. He was in Israel last week after spending four
days in Ethiopia visiting Jews waiting there to immigrate.
This week,
I accompanied 82 Falas Mora as they made their journey from Ethiopia home to
Israel — bearing witness to the fulfillment of a promise made long ago. I was
joined by 19 of our leaders, including UJA-Federation board chair Alisa
Doctoroff and campaign chair Marcia Riklis, on a mission organized by the
Jewish Federations of North America.
We spent
two days in Northern Ethiopia learning about the life of the Falas Mora,
visiting the synagogues, cemeteries, and schools they had erected to sustain
their Jewish commitment even though their ancestors had converted to
Christianity.
In a
synagogue in Gondar, we joined hundreds adorned in tallitim and tefillin for
morning prayers that concluded with “Am Yisrael Chai” and “Od Avinu Chai” sung
with a poignancy and passion that none of us will soon forget.
Armenian residents of Jerusalem's Old City are
protesting a municipal decision to designate a parking lot in the area solely
for Jews, although part of it stands on land belonging to the Armenian
Patriarchate.
After 18 years of
tough negotiations, the Catholic Church agreed to waive its demand to receive
sovereignty over the Cenacle (the location of the "Last Supper") on
Jerusalem's Mount Zion.
In return, Israel agreed to consider giving the Church
access to the place and even consider a leasing option.
It was also agreed
that the Vatican would start paying a reduced property tax for its assets in
Israel. Over the years, Israel suffered losses of tens of millions of shekels
due to the Vatican's failure to pay property tax.
Giulio
Meotti is a journalist with Il Foglio.
Israel should no be
bowing to the Vatican, as the Jewish State is admirably committed to protecting
the holy sites of all religions and guaranteeing the right of worship for all
faiths.
However, instead of saying “keep your hands off Jerusalem, it’s not for
sale,” the Israeli government accepted the Vatican’s ransom request.
Archbishop of Canterbury
Dr. Rowan Williams met with Chief Rabbis Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar on
Thursday during a week-long personal pilgrimage to Israel and the West Bank.
When Pope Benedict XVI announced that New York
Archbishop Timothy Dolan was to be elevated to cardinal on Feb. 18, many people
expected the popular archbishop of New York to cancel a Holy Land retreat he
had planned to lead.
But Cardinal-designate Dolan, who heads the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops, wouldn’t hear of it.
He didn’t want to disappoint either the 50 New
York-area priests who were scheduled to accompany him or the Holy Land
Christians who had long anticipated their visit.
Throngs of American Christians flock to
Israel's storied capital every year. But Jacob Newberry, who grew up in a
conservative, Baptist home in a small Mississippi town, is on a decidedly
different kind of pilgrimage.
Now "pretty firmly atheist,"
28-year-old Newberry has been living in Jerusalem since September and
documenting the experiences of people with similar religious backgrounds who
are in Israel on some form of spiritual journey.
Editor – Joel Katz
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