Moaz [Mondrowitz's lawyer]: In addition to the electronic bracelet, there is Meir Zilberstein, the main rabbi of the Ger hasidim in Jerusalem. In tow with him is Yaakov Kaminsky, [Rabbi Zilberstein's nephew and a lawyer]. Rabbi Zilberstein will commit to taking responsibility for this respondent for the duration of our dealing with this issue. Rav Zilberstein is a major gadol, recognized in his community, and is the respondent's rabbi. Together with his being supervised 24 hours and an electronic bracelet, is this not sufficient as an alternative to incarceration? We are almost three decades after these allegations. Also, even when he knew they were looking for him in '86 he basically consulted with his attorney for the duration and did not ever attempt to disappear. So, therefore I am saying that even though he knew he was wanted, he has proven by his actions that he didn't disappear for 20 years. I would refer to the points I just made. Even Kaminisky will be willing to watch the respondent for 24 hours a day.
Kaminsky [Rabbi Zilberstein's nephew and a lawyer]: I am ready. I am sure. I have family and I am still willing to do this. I am prepared for the supervision to be at my house. I have small children. I understand what is written in this case. I also know about what they found on his computer. My small kids will not be home. This is my decision. I am ready.
Maoz: I also have a financial guarantee of 100,000. The family is very modest. They are also prepared to give 250,000 shekels.
Kaminsky: I will move into my parents' apartment with [Mondrowitz].
[The question is where will he stay]
Kaminsky: I will move into wherever he is. [The distance from Kaminsky's parents' house is five minutes. He has three children, 4, 11 and 16.] [Rabbi] Zilberstein is the spiritual adviser for over 2400 households in Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh. He is the highest [Ger hasidic] spiritual leader. Because of the reputation of the rabbi, nobody is going to damage his reputation. He will also sign.
The State's attorney (Hershkowitz): We oppose any kind of alternative to incarceration. We are speaking here of somebody charged with serious crimes of a sexual nature. Against children. We are also talking about crimes he committed in his house. In our opinion house arrest is not appropriate. An alternative to incarceration is based on the trustworthiness of the respondent himself. The respondent has demonstrated throughout the years the ability to flee justice. He is not deserving of an more opportunities to flee from justice and extradition to the United States. It is not only an issue of whether we have confidence in the guarantors because, like the judge noted, one of them is the father of small children in the area where the respondent lives. According to the detention service, the respondent was helped by the community. According to evidence submitted, the defendant was advised by rabbis to flee to Israel. Strictly speaking, even the bail amount was ridiculously low in respect to the serious offenses described in this case.
In our opinion the alternative to incarceration is not sufficient. We are requesting his incarceration until the extradition hearing.
Moaz: They are coming back with these strong words. In the 80's he appeared for every court date. To come and say after 20 years that he would be considered a flight risk, this is not right. He went out in public for 20 years and he never ran away. The risk or danger was there, but he still did not run away. After we've heard what the court had to say we are prepared to bring the rabbi (Zilberstein) in as a guarantor. The respondent will live with the rabbi in his house. If we need additional supervision, we can also bring Kaminsky. I understand the State's stand, and their arguments.
The State's other attorney: We believe that he will disappear. The community and his family are complicit in why he didn't run away. He was being protected here and knows he has refuge here. This concern is alive and well.
The Judge: The respondent's attorney is requesting that he be released to Rabbi Zilberstein and additionally, as a guarantor, Yaakov Kaminsky. The incarceration service has requested a continuance of the proceding until January 9 at 10:30.…
Here is the entire Hebrew document as a PDF file. If you can translate it for us, please do. Leave your translation as a comment in the comments section of this post. Thanks!
…The WISC
[Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children]is composed of ten subtests, each of which measures a different aspect
of I.Q. Flynn points out that scores in some of the categories—those
measuring general knowledge, say, or vocabulary or the ability to do
basic arithmetic—have risen only modestly over time. The big gains on
the WISC are largely in the category
known as “similarities,” where you get questions such as “In what way
are ‘dogs’ and ‘rabbits’ alike?” Today, we tend to give what, for the
purposes of I.Q. tests, is the right answer: dogs and rabbits are both
mammals. A nineteenth-century American would have said that “you use
dogs to hunt rabbits.”
“If the everyday world is your cognitive
home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the
hypothetical from their concrete referents,” Flynn writes. Our
great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would
have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the
twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to
sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In
Flynn’s phrase, we have now had to put on “scientific spectacles,”
which enable us to make sense of the WISC
questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose
substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the
Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more
cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other
words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.
This is a critical distinction. When the children of Southern
Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past
century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies
and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and
Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q.
tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much
concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian
stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants
into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to
Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk
turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of
certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion.
“Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the
psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of
the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s,
if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a
turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their
assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?”…
He goes on to show that the differences in IQ scores between blacks and whites reflects the lower level of cognitive stimulation black children often get, in large part because black children are more likely to grow up in single parent homes than white children, and because of urban inner city culture. The difference is not genetic, it is cultural, and it can be fixed – in part with better schools and with government social welfare programs that do not encourage out of wedlock births.
It's worth it to take the time to read the entire piece, especially because Commentary Magazine (disgracefully, I believe) spent a lot of energy promoting Charles Murray's and Richard Hernstein's The Bell Curve, and hasn't had the decency to retract despite the evidence proving those two men wrong.
If reading isn't your thing, you can hear a podcast interview with Gladwell by clicking here.
UPDATED and REPOSTED from 12-27-07: The Government of Israel appears to be admitting that haredi rabbis in the mid-1980s told Avrohom Mondrowitz to flee indictment in the US for the safety of Israel. Modrowitz did so and lived openly, freely and safely in Israel for more than 20 years.
Mondrowitz is to remain in jail until his next hearing, set to be
held on January 9, 2008. The entire court document is now posted as a
PDF file below. If you can translate, please do so and leave as a
comment to this post. Thanks!
Briefly, it seems Rabbi Meir Zilberstein, who is the head of the Ger
Hasidim in Jerusalem, has offered to vouch for Mondrowitz and serve as
a form of a guarantor, as has Mondrowitz's wife and children.
This proves Ger is officially backing Mondrowitz, because no such
action could or would be taken by Rabbi Zilberstein without the direct
approval of the Gerrer Rebbe himself.
The offer to guarantee Mondrowitz's court appearances is also of
little value. I do not believe the court can hold Rabbi Zilberstein
responsible for Mondrowitz's flight from justice if he should again
flee. Further, the price in dollars to be paid in lost bail is minor to
a family as wealthy as the Mondrowitz family and to Ger itself, which
is exceedingly wealthy. The Gerrer Rebbe is one of the richest men in
Israel.
If Mondrowitz is released on bail, expect him to flee justice. He'll
probably be shielded by Ger in a development town where Ger has a
presence. After a few months, he'll go from there to Jordon or Egypt
using a non-Israeli passport. From there, he'll go elsewhere, perhaps
to the FSU or even to a city in Western Europe, where he'll stay until
he's hunted down – if he's hunted.
The government's official response in court to Mondrowitz's request
for bail by Hershkowitz, the Government's attorney, is, roughly, as
follows:
We oppose any kind of alternative to incarceration. We
are speaking here of somebody charged with serious crimes of a sexual
nature, against children. We are also talking about crimes he committed
in his house. In our opinion house arrest is not appropriate. An
alternative to incarceration is based on the trustworthiness of the
respondent himself. The respondent has demonstrated throughout the
years the ability to flee justice. He is not deserving of an more
opportunities to flee from justice and extradition to the United
States. It is not only an issue of whether we have confidence in the
guarantors because, like the judge noted, one of them is the father of
small children in the places in the area where the respondent lives.
According to the detention service, the respondent was helped by the
community. According to a previous investigation, it was discovered his flight to Israel was by the advice of the rabbis.
Strictly speaking, even the bail amount was low in respect to the
serious offenses described in this case. In our opinion the alternative
to incarceration is not sufficient. We are requesting his incarceration
until the extradition hearing.
The Government
of Israel has officially admitted that rabbis told Mondrowitz to flee
to Israel in the mid 1980s where he would be safe from American justice.
UPDATE 12-28-07 11:30 AM: Here is the entire document as a PDF file. Sorry for the delay.
Also, comments to the first post were lost. Please leave them again here. Sorry!
UPDATE 2, 12-28-07 3:00 PM:
The Forward has this quote from July of 2006 which speaks clearly to the rabbis intentions in this case, as I then reported:
…One member of Hynes’s Jewish council, Rabbi Herbert Bomzer, said he
does not remember Mondrowitz’s extradition being discussed by the
council. Bomzer did say that he knew Mondrowitz when the younger man
was a counselor at Yeshiva University’s high school, and that
Mondrowitz had been “loved” by the students.
When
asked if he would now support extradition proceedings, Bomzer,
president of the rabbinical board of Flatbush, said: “If he has managed
to get to Israel and is protected by the law there — then leave it
alone.”…
The entire Forward piece is here in PDF format, as well.
By the way, this means, I think, that the rabbis who told Mondrowitz to flee broke New York and US Law and are accessories after the fact to Mondrowitz's crimes. Will they be prosecuted? They should be.
As you read this, remember Rabbi Avi Shafran works for Agudath Israel of America, and some of the most damning alleged incidents of rabbi-on-boy sexual abuse took place at their boys camp and under their watch. Also remember bloggers exposed this abuse. Further, Agudath Israel of America has opposed steps to end rabbi-on-child sexual abuse, including a proposed New York State law mandating background checks for all employees of religious schools.
There was a time, not terribly long ago, when disturbed individuals
bent on broadcasting angry fantasies had only soapboxes in public parks
from which to rant. And respectable people knew, if only from the
ranters’ appearance, to keep well out of spittle’s range.
Today, though, the very means of mass communication that enables so
much worthy information to reach such large numbers of people at the
speed of light – the Internet – has also been harnessed to spread
madness, hatred, lies and (not a word to be used lightly but here
entirely appropriate) evil. And so, close on the heels of the
swindlers and pornographers who have colonized so much of cyberspace,
have come the gaggle of electronic soapboxes known as weblogs, or blogs.
The writer of a recent article [here in PDF, sent last week by a reader who got it from Hirhurim, I believe] in the Agudath Israel monthly The
Jewish Observer expressed chagrin at discovering the nature of many
Jewish blogs. Often anonymous as well as obnoxious, some of those
personal opinion-diaries, he found, display utter disregard for
essential Torah ideals like the requirement to shun lashon hora and
hotzo’as shem ra; to show honor for Torah and respect for Torah
scholars. I would have added basic fairness to the list. And truth.…
Responsible bloggers don’t deserve to be lumped together with the
louts and understandably chafe at having their entire enterprise tarred
with the sins of individuals. Unfortunately, though, those individuals
and their sins comprise the bulk of the blogosphere. Those who
counsel avoidance of blogs are no different from those who advise
against frequenting dark, crime-ridden neighborhoods. There may be
bargains to be had in such locales, maybe even a good library or
pizzeria. But they are scuzzy places to spend time in.
The Internet in general is, pace the popular arbiters of societal
propriety, not a healthy place to hang out in. That is why our Gedolim
have frowned upon its use altogether for any but essential purposes
like livelihood. They feel that the windows it opens to every corner
of the wider world allow in not only some sunlight but much pollution
of the most pernicious sort.
But even if business or other life exigencies require individuals to
utilize the Internet, there are dark corners of the Web that are filled
with venomous spiders, that pose extraordinary risks and should be
avoided at practically all costs. The blogosphere is a particular
infested corner.…
This is time for zero tolerance, both of rabbi-on-child sexual abuse and of the rabbis who cover for it.
Rabbi Shafran is one of those rabbis, consistently showing far more concern for the honor of rabbis and Torah than he does for the innocent children raped by his rabbinic colleagues.
Rabbi Shafran should not be employed anywhere in public Jewish life. Sadly, the same is true for the rabbis who employ him, and who have made blogs and the Internet a greater evil than the rabbis who rape and abuse defenseless children.
Here's an English-language translation of the Ma'ariv article, courtesy of Schmorgel (Borgel):
A beit din for conversions has refused to convert a messianist adherent
of Chabad. Apparently, the rabbinical judges found no fault in his
religious comportment, however, they rejected him on account of
problems in his beliefs in fundamentals of Jewish faith, as he comes
from a yeshiva in which it is believed that the Lubavitcher rebbe, who
passed away in 1994, is still alive and is the King Messiah.
The person in question is a young man in his 20s who immigrated to
Israel from Russia more than 10 years ago, and recently has been
learning in a meshichist Chabad yeshiva.
According to the young man, his maternal grandmother was indeed
Jewish, nevertheless, he went to learn in an institute for conversion
to Judaism, completed his studies there successfully, and was brought
before a beit din for conversion.
People involved in the conversion proceedings who were involved in
his tutelage severely attacked the composition of the beit din's
judges, and claimed that the matter has caused a severe crisis in the
young man's class.
"This is simply a disaster. He is the first from the class who has
made it to the level of converting. The other students said 'If they
aren’t converting him, then who will they convert?' If they don’t agree
to convert a real yeshiva bocher like him, what will Svetlana the shop
clerk think, who sits alongside him in class?!' How can we say that we
encourage conversions? Why did the dayyanim even bring up the subject
of the Rebbe and Moshiach with him?" Another one [translator's
comment—I guess one of the teachers] added…
"There are dayyanim who are bored and they want a topic for a speech or
an essay—'The Status of the ger who came from Chabad' And all on the
back of this poor guy."
In the conversion institute they said, the beit din was composed of
rabbinical judges from the Religious Zionist stream, and they conferred
with four rabbis, two of whom who are among the most prominent the
Religious Zionist movement, and those two told them that they should
not convert the young man. The two others, who had a more haredi
orientation, decreed that they should convert the young man.
"An atypical situation has arisen, where, in this instance,
Religious Zionist dayyanim are more stringent than haredi dayyanim" one
of the people from the Conversion Institute accused…and "now that they
have conferred with their rabbis, they want to entangle Rabbi Amar with
Chabad." This last comment refers to the fact that the case is supposed
to come to the Chief Sepharadi Rabbi Shlomo Amar's desk in order for
him to cast the deciding vote in the matter.
Ma'ariv reports: בית דין רבני לגיור סירב לגייר חבדניק משיחיסט
בית דין רבני סירב לגייר בחור שעלה מרוסיה, ולמד לאחרונה בישיבה חב"דית משיחיסטית. הבחור נפסל ככל הנראה, בשל בעיות באמונתו בעיקרי היהדות, שכן הוא מאמין כי הרבי מלובביץ' חי וכי הוא המלך המשיח
דפדף ביהדות אבישי בן חיים 26/12/2007 12:37
בית דין רבני לגיור סירב לגייר חב"דניק משיחיסט. ככל הנראה הדיינים לא מצאו פגם בהתנהלותו הדתית, אך פסלו אותו בשל בעיות באמונתו בעיקרי היהדות, שכן הוא מגיע מישיבה שבה מאמינים כי הרבי מלובביץ' שהלך לעולמו בשנת 1994 עדיין חי והוא המלך המשיח.
מדובר בבחור בשנות העשרים לחייו שעלה לארץ מרוסיה לפני למעלה מעשר שנים, ובתקופה האחרונה לומד בישיבה חב"דית משיחיסטית.
לטענת הבחור סבתו מצד אמו בכלל הייתה יהודייה ובכל זאת הוא הלך ללמוד במכון לגיור, סיים את לימודיו בהצלחה והועלה לדיון בפני בית הדין לגיור.
גורמים במערכת הגיור שהיו קשורים להליך לימודיו תקפו בחריפות את הרכב הדיינים וטענו כי הדבר גרם למשבר קשה בכיתת הלימוד שבה הוא למד.
"זה היה פשוט חורבן. הוא הראשון מהכיתה שעלה לשלב הגיור. התלמידים אמרו ש'אם אותו לא גיירו אז את מי כן יגיירו?' אם בחור ישיבה לא מסכימים לגייר מה צריכה לחשוב סווטלנה הזבנית שיושבת איתו בכיתה? איך נגיד שאנחנו מעודדים גיורים. בשביל מה בכלל הדיינים נכנסו איתו לנושא הרבי מלובביץ' והמשיח?" אמר אחד מהם והוסיף: "יש דיינים שמשעמם להם והם רוצים נושא להרצאה או למאמר: 'מעמדו של הגר שבא מחב"ד'. הכל על גבו של המסכן הזה".
במערך הגיור אמרו כי מדובר בהרכב דיינים ציוני דתי וכי הם התייעצו עם ארבעה רבנים, ששניים מהם מהבולטים ברבני הציונות הדתית אמרו להם כי אין לגייר את הבחור ושני האחרים בעלי אוריינטציה חרדית יותר פסקו כי אפשר לגייר אותו.
"יוצא מצב א-נורמלי שדווקא רבנים ציונים דתיים יותר מחמירים מדיינים חרדים" תקף אותם אחד מאנשי מערך הגיור והוסיף כי "עכשיו אחרי שהם התייעצו עם הרבנים שלהם הם באים לסבך את הרב עמאר עם חב"ד". זאת מכיוון שהתיק אמור להגיע לשולחנו של הרב הספרדי הראשי הרב שלמה עמאר בכדי שיכריע בעניין.
As always, if you can translate, please do so and leave the translation as a comment to this post. Thanks!
[Hat Tip: Daniel.]
UPDATE – English-language translation courtesy of Schmorgel (Borgel) here.
The long-running fight between Congregation Lubavitch (i.e., the huge minyan that prays in the main synagogue in Chabad World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY and the gabbais who represent them) on one hand and Agudas Chassidei Chabad (Aguch; Rabbis Krinsly, Shemtov, Kotlarsky, etc.) has temporarily ended.
According to VosIzNeais, Judge Ira Harkavy today awarded the building and the synagogue to Aguch. The gabbais are expected to appeal.
Ha'aretz and Channel 10 are reporting that two Orthodox sisters were expelled from their high school four months ago. Why? Because two years ago, these girls pressed charges against a rabbi who sexually abused them. The rabbi was convicted. The school expelled the girls then, but they were reinstated by a court order. This summer, the principal again expelled them.
Since being expelled, the sisters have been unable to find another religious school to enroll them.
The principal refuses to say why the girls were expelled, although the sisters claim the principal said they were "unsuited" for the school, claiming the older girl was "seen with a boy on Yom Kippur," a charge the girl denies.
From the girls' dress, I would think the school system involved is part of the National Religious school system.
Translation of this Ha'aretz article courtesy of RebelJew. [This appears to be a sidebar from this earlier story.]
To keep the secret
Rabbi Y, who was abused by Mondrowitz himself, thinks that one should not expose child abuse in public
Rav Y, 39 years old, reports on the negative consequences of
children in treatment, voluntarily, for Haredi children who suffer the
type of abuse that he did. His contact with Mondrowitz began when he
was about 12. He was a neighbor, living on the same street, and he was
friends with his (Mondrowitz's) children. "One day, When I came to his
house, I wanted to play with his kids but found that they were not
home. Mondrowitz was there, and he invited me into his office, and he
give me money and all kinds of nice gifts. I never took anything from
him, and he put his hands where it was inappropriate. After that, I did
not want to go there anymore, but he spoke to my father why I did not
come over to play with his kids anymore. So my father sent me there,
and he did the same thing again. I felt that something was wrong, but I
could not tell my father. So I went there, and again he was alone. I
seem (to recall) that his family was away on vacation, I do not
remember why or how, but I remained with him to sleep over, and I
recall that in the middle of the night, I awoke, and he was touching me
again. Perhaps, he had given me something so I would continue sleeping.
In the morning I got up and went home."
After several times, he stopped going there, and he never told
anyone. "Mondrowitz kept contact with my father, requesting that he
send me to play with his kids, but I never went again and I stopped
playing with his kids altogether. To this day, no one knew anything,
not my parents, not my wife, not my kids, but when they started telling
about Mondrowitz, I told Amy Neustein that I could believe every word.
Y, personally, did not dream at night about murder, but knew others
that would. "I heard that there were many Italians, that were (treated)
similar(ly) when they were children, that wanted to kill him." He says,
Y, himself a Rabbi, is against publicly exposing atrocities committed
by Rabbis, not to protect them, but to protect the children. "To open
up to the police and the courts in the US, this is a long multi-year
process, and meanwhile the exposure destroys the boy or girl who is an
abuse victim even more. Mondrowitz is not forced to come to court,
because now, all them are already grown."
Are children in the Haredi community more exposed to abuse? Y tells
that 15 years ago, he knew of a pedophile in New Jersey who heard that
the Haredi group were tolerant toward pedophiles. He bought an
apartment in Brooklyn, grew a beard and payos, and began abusing
children. When they caught him and detained him, Y activated his
contacts with the police. "I spoke with many chevra who had contacts
with the police, and when they brought him to jail, the police shouted
out loud, so all the other prisoners would hear, that he was a
pedophile and that they would be allowed to do anything to him. After 5
days in jail, he confessed everything. I had contacts with the Brooklyn
prosecutor, and I influenced him to work out a deal. The deal
stipulated that he cannot live in the city, but only an isolated area.
He sold his apartment in Brooklyn, for virtually nothing, and he left
there for some rural area. I did not want it to go to trial, so that
the children he abused would not have to testify against him."
You helped to cover it up?? [Presumably this is the reporter's question.]
"Only so that the children should not have to go through it again.
But I advocate fighting from within. With us, if a child tells that
someone did something like this, we throw him out of school. They do
not want that the school should get a bad reputation. But I advocate
removing the stigma from children who are abused. The fault belongs to
the schools and yeshivos. It is there, that they need to ..." [The article is truncated.]
הרב י', שנפגע על ידי מונדרוביץ בעצמו, סבור שאין לחשוף התעללות בילדים בפומבי
הרב
י', בן 39, מנתב את האנרגיות השליליות מהילדות לטיפול, בהתנדבות, בילדים
חרדים שעברו התעללות מינית כמוהו. הקשר שלו עם מונדרוביץ התחיל בערך בגיל
12. הוא היה שכן שלו, גר באותו רחוב והיה חבר של הבנים שלו. "יום אחד,
כשבאתי אליו הביתה, רציתי לשחק עם הבנים שלו, התברר שהם לא בבית.
מונדרוביץ היה שם והזמין אותי למשרד שלו והתחיל לתת לי כסף וכל מיני מתנות
יקרות. אני אף פעם לא לקחתי ממנו כלום, והוא שם את הידיים שלו איפה שלא
צריך. אחרי הפעם הזאת אני לא רציתי לבוא לשם יותר, אבל הוא דיבר עם אבא
שלי ושאל למה אני לא בא יותר לשחק עם הילדים שלו, ואבא שלי שלח אותי אליו
והוא שוב עשה אותו דבר. הרגשתי שמשהו לא בסדר, אבל לא יכולתי להגיד לאבא
שלי, אז הלכתי לשם ושוב הוא היה לבד. נדמה לי שהמשפחה שלו היתה בחופש, אני
לא זוכר למה ואיך אבל נשארתי אצלו לישון וזוכר שבאמצע הלילה התעוררתי ואז
הוא שוב נגע בי. אולי הוא נתן לי משהו שאמשיך לישון. בבוקר קמתי והלכתי
הביתה".
אחרי כמה פעמים הפסיק ללכת לשם ואף פעם לא סיפר דבר לאף
אחד. "מונדרוביץ המשיך להתקשר לאבא שלי, ביקש שישלח אותי לשחק עם הילדים
שלו, אבל אני לא הלכתי לשם אף פעם יותר וגם עם הילדים שלו הפסקתי לשחק. עד
היום איש לא יודע על כך דבר. לא הורי, לא אשתי ולא הילדים שלי, אבל
כשהתחילו לספר על מונדרוביץ, אמרתי לאיימי נוישטיין שאני יכול להאמין לכל
מלה".
י' באופן אישי לא חולם בלילות על רצח אבל מכיר אחרים שכן.
"שמעתי שיש הרבה איטלקים, כאלה שהיו אז ילדים, שרוצים להרוג אותו", הוא
אומר. י', בעצמו רב, מתנגד לחשיפת מעשי הזוועה של הרבנים בפומבי, לא כדי
להגן עליהם אלא כדי להגן על הילדים. "לפנות למשטרה ולבית המשפט בארצות
הברית זה סיפור ארוך של שנים ובינתיים החשיפה הורסת את הילד או הילדה שהיו
קורבנות התעללות עוד יותר. את מונדרוביץ לא אכפת לי להביא למשפט כי היום
כולם כבר מבוגרים".
האם ילדים בקהילה החרדית חשופים יותר
להתעללות? י' מספר כי לפני 15 שנים הכיר פדופיל מניו ג'רזי ששמע שהחברה
החרדית סובלנית כלפי פדופילים. הוא קנה דירה בברוקלין, גידל זקן ופאות
והתחיל לפגוע בילדים. כשתפסו ועצרו אותו, הפעיל י' את קשריו במשטרה.
"דיברתי עם כמה חבר'ה שהיו להם קשרים עם שוטרים וכשהביאו אותו לבית המעצר,
השוטרים אמרו בקול רם, שכל העצירים האחרים ישמעו, שהוא פדופיל ושמותר
לעשות לו הכל. אחרי חמישה ימים בבית המעצר הוא הסכים להכל. היו לי אז
קשרים עם התובע בברוקלין והשפעתי עליו שתהיה עסקת טיעון. העסקה קבעה שאסור
לו יותר לגור בעיר אלא רק במקום מבודד. הוא מכר את הדירה שלו בברוקלין,
בכלום כסף, ועבר משם לאזור כפרי. אני לא רציתי שיהיה משפט כדי שילדים שהוא
פגע בהם לא יצטרכו להעיד נגדו".
נתת יד להסתרה.
"רק כדי
שהילדים לא ייפגעו עוד יותר. אבל אני בעד להילחם בזה מבפנים. אצלנו אם ילד
יגיד שעשו לו משהו כזה, יזרקו אותו מבית הספר, לא רוצים שייצא שם רע לבית
הספר. ואני בעד להוריד את הסטיגמה מהילדים שהתעללו בהם. האשמים הם בתי ספר
והישיבות. שם צריך לעשות את
Still, the idea of holding any event with Kinky Jews bothers me.
If Heeb truly wants to be a voice for younger unaffiliated Jews it must understand that Kinky Jews is not a group to, ahem, partner with.
It's a free country and whatever people choose to do with their sexuality – as long as that choice does not injure others – is fine with me. But Heeb must understand its choice to shock was made over the choice to be responsible.
It is that irresponsibility, not Heeb's accomplishments, that will stick in the minds of many who see that flyer.
This means Hillel directors who were open to Heeb and hosted Heeb events may now withdraw support, as may JCCs and other Jewish venues that have tried to be welcoming to Heeb.
Heeb seems intent on drawing its circle ever smaller.
As I noted last night, Rabbi Harry Maryles published an homage to his friend Rabbi Morris Esformes. Esformes owns nursing homes and health care facilities, some of which were dangerously substandard, resulting in deaths of elderly non-Jewish residents. Rabbi Esformes and his partners also paid a fine of $15 million dollars as a penalty for health care fraud.
Harry is nothing if not shameless.
First, he closed comments (which he anyway moderates) to that post because readers had the audacity to point out Rabbi Esformes's moral failings. (Please see the update on this post.)
At the same time, Harry continues to rail against the Spinka Rebbe, who at this date has paid no $15 million fine and has not been convicted of any crime. While there is much evidence against the rebbe, to be sure, that evidence is at this point weaker than the evidence against Rabbi Morris Esformes.
Harry misses this completely.
Today, rather than posting on the parsha or on some matter of Israeli politics, Harry posted again about the Spinka Rebbe, raking him (deservedly, to be sure) over the coals. But no word about his dear friend, Rabbi Morris Esformes, whose nursing homes killed at least four elderly, defenseless residents and whose health care facilities defrauded the government out of millions of dollars.
Double standard?
Of course it is. The only real question left is whether Rabbi Harry Maryles is honest enough to admit it.
Rabbi Harry Maryles's latest post in PDF, for archival purposes:
To those who follow Schick's writings, this is not surprising. Schick has spent much of his adult life covering for haredim.
When Hella Winston's book Unchosen was published, Schick wrote a libelous review. I called him and challenged him to produce facts. He never did, at one point claiming illness as an excuse.
Schick libeled Winston on the pages of the New York Jewish Week, in an unlabeled advertisement meant to look like a news report or in-house column. The Jewish Week's Associate Publisher Rich Waloff told me the line designating Schick's 'columns' as advertising had "somehow" "inadvertently" "dropped out" months before. But Waloff did not understand why the Jewish Week had to answer any questions about its policies, and he refused to name the sponsor of Schick's ads or to apologize to anyone for the lack of labeling.
Gary Rosenblatt, the Jewish Week's Editor and Publisher, dismissively told a source that he would not answer questions from "bloggers" about Schick – or anything else, for that matter. It was not long after this that Rosenblatt was forced to admit he had covered up his friend Rabbi Mordechai Gafni's sex abuse for years. Who forced that admission? Bloggers.
On the 10th anniversary of the passing of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Jewish Week ran a story under the byline of Associate Editor Jonathan Mark. Crown Heights was festooned with large yellow banners, flags and bumper stickers naming the late Rebbe the messiah. The main synagogue in 770 Eastern Parkway, Chabad's international headquarters, was draped with these. Mark's article minimized this messianism, mentioning it only in passing when referring to the main synagogue in Chabad's international headquarters as the basement synagogue. The other synagogue upstairs had no such banners. What Mark failed to tell his readers is the basement synagogue is huge, capable of housing thousands for prayer, and the "upstairs synagogue" is the size of a small bedroom, able to (legally) hold perhaps two dozen men.
When I published my critique of his work, Mark emailed me and told me that he did not write the line about the basement synagogue. It was inserted into his story, Mark claimed, along with other edits by a person unknown to him.
Assuming Mark is telling the truth, who could do this to the Associate Editor of a publication? The graphic designer? The printer? An intern? Perhaps.
More likely it was done by or at the request of someone higher up in the Jewish Week than Jonathan Mark. That would mean either Rich Waloff or Gary Rosenblatt did the deed. My money is on Rosenblatt.
For years, Schick's paid advertisements have been published in the Jewish Week, presented as if he were a columnist working for the Jewish Week rather than an advertiser on its pages. Sometimes these ads have carried a very small, indistinct disclaimer; sometimes they have not. When they have in the last two years, it is because of unwanted attention from bloggers and the very real potential of a libel suit, not due to any self-policing on Rosenblatt's part. It should go without saying that Schick did not have the honesty to insert that disclaimer himself.
I bring this up now because Schick's latest attack is based on his attack against Winston two years ago (Download Schick.pdf), and against the now-released study done by Michelle Friedman on sex abuse in Orthodoxy.
Schick's original attack against Winston claimed Winston had promoted her book as a book on sex abuse in Orthodoxy. Schick also claimed New York Magazine's Robert Kolker had made the same claim from the book. In fact, neither assertion was true.
Schick also claimed Winston's dissertation advisor "told me that the original manuscript was far more hate-filled than what appeared in print." That advisor is William Helmreich, now Professor of Sociology & Judaic Studies at City University Graduate Center and City College of New York and Director of the City College Conflict Resolution Center. Helmreich told me then that he never made that statement or any similar statement to Schick. Further, Helmreich confirmed that he had not seen any of Winston's book until a few days before it went to press. He praised that manuscript highly. Winston's editor at Beacon told me that no changes were made in the manuscript and that nothing was done during the writing process to tone down the work.
In other words, again, what Schick claimed is not true.
What is true is that Winston had just published a widely read and well reviewed book on Jews who leave haredism and Kolker had just published a widely read and well received article on Rabbi Yehuda Kolko's 40 year career of rabbi-on-boy sexual abuse and the haredi rabbis who covered it up. Both works make haredism look bad, not because of bias, but because both expose previously hidden problems that soil ultra-Orthodoxy's image.
Now Schick has revisited this because Michelle Friedman's paper is finally through the long peer review process and is now published (Download ajp_articlefinal.pdf). Winston had cited a pre-publication summary of Friedman's article in her book, and Schick attacked Winston for doing so. Schick claimed that many of the study participants were ba'al teshuvas and therefore these women brought their sex abuse stories in from the outside. Without them, Schick claimed, sex abuse in haredism would be incidental.
Schick is making this claim again now that the study is released. But what Schick does not tell his readers is that it is even more likely the study under represents the number of abused women in Orthodoxy rather than the opposite. For various reasons having to do with the willingness to report along with access to counseling and anonymous medical care, those women who chose to report are arguably the tip of the iceberg, not the iceberg itself.
No one can draw comprehensive conclusions from a study like this. Friedman herself does not do so. Neither do her coauthors or the study itself. Neither does Winston. To the extent that such generalities were drawn, they were drawn by media unfamiliar with the methodological process involved, not by Friedman the others.
In her book, Winston in fact writes:
While it is unclear whether or not such abuse exists to a greater degree in these communities than it does in the general population, some have theorized that Jewish communities' historical antipathy toward informers has likely played some role in keeping such abuse quiet, when it occurs.
Honesty, it seems, is not a Schick family character trait.
But there is a another point Schick misses. The Friedman study does not survey women who have left utra-Orthodoxy. Anecdotal evidence shows a high level of sexual abuse of these former haredi women when they were still inside haredism. Would inclusion of these women and removal of all BTs change the study results? Perhaps it would. Perhaps it would show that sex abuse is rampant in haredi society. Anecdotal evidence would point that way, but we can't be sure until a study like this is done.
The point is, the knife Schick wields cuts both ways, and Marvin Schick is too dishonest to admit it.
I could go on about Marvin Schick's deficiencies. But the issue really is not Marvin Schick alone, anymore than the issue of a bull rampaging in a marketplace is this issue of the bull alone. Just as the bull left his confinement because of willful or accidental neglect of its owner, so too Schick continues because of the willful neglect of the Jewish Week and others who publish him.
Gary Rosenblatt has a responsibility to report the truth. Indeed, the Jewish Week’s website puts it this way:
"Our first loyalty is to the truth."
In that vein, readers of the Jewish Week are entitled to know who pays for Schick's 'columns.' Could it be that a Jewish organization uses money raised to educate Jewish children for this purpose? Is it a private donor? Is this donor getting a tax deduction for this? Does this "project" show up on an organization's IRS 990 form or is it hidden?
Another negligent party here is the Greater New York Jewish Federation, which buys Jewish Week subscriptions for tens of thousands of Jews, in effect owning the paper without actually owning it. While it is difficult to make the legal claim that the New York Federation is liable here, the moral claim seems clear.
Women and children are sexually abused in haredi society, just as women are abused in non-Orthodox society and non-Jewish society. If such sexual abuse is more frequent in haredi society (which I admittedly believe) or less frequent (as Schick claims) is not the issue. Zero tolerance for such sexual abuse is the issue.
Everyone involved here should be trying to stop this abuse, to wipe it out.
Instead, haredim like Marvin Schick downplay the abuse and fight legitimate efforts to curtail it because those efforts involve publicity which damages the haredi community's standing. That damage to the haredi reputation is clearly more important to Marvin Schick and his cohort than the very real, painful and often permanent damage done to the bodies, minds and souls of innocent haredi women and children.
Rabbi Harry Maryles has written an homage to his dear friend Rabbi Morris Esformes. Rabbi Esformes is a large and frequent donor to charity, and supports many Orthodox Jewish causes worldwide, but especially in Chicago. Esformes lived for many years there, and was a principal of the Ida Crown Academy, Chicago's premier Orthodox Jewish day school. Rabbi Esformes received his rabbinic ordination, Harry notes, from Rabbi Ahron Soleveitchik.
Rabbi Morris Esformes is a despicable man, a nursing home robber baron whose homes have killed and endangered patients while Rabbi Esformes made off with money that should have been used for patient care and safety.
I have written about Rabbi Esformes several times over the years. A simple Google search turns up enough information to tell Rabbi Maryles what his dear friend Rabbi Esformes really does to make his money. But Harry did not do that Google search.
Residents in Rabbi Esformes homes died of heat stroke. Temperatures inside were found to be extraordinarily hot, in one case, the state found temperatures of at least 94º Fahrenheit. Rabbi Esformes housed unregistered sex offenders in his regular patient population and took no precautions to protect those vulnerable adults.
…Tammy Leonard, spokeswoman for the state health department, said
while many facilities have deficiencies, Emerald Park's history is
unique.
"We do have many facilities that don't have deficiencies," Leonard
said. "Even those who do, don't have as many and at the severity that
this facility has had. The history of this facility is unique, and that
is the reason why we are taking these extraordinary measures. They have
an egregious compliance history."
The state stepped up actions against Emerald Park because of its April 22 survey and past history.
"It had nothing to do with any outside pressure," Leonard said.
She said the state's main objective is residents' safety.
"If we see a situation where residents are imperiled, it is our job to fix it," Leonard said.
Lawyers for Emerald Park Health Care Center have until this
afternoon to respond to the state health official's request that the
Evergreen Park nursing home be placed in receivership and eventually
closed.…
Rabbi Harry Mayles knows none of this. And he does not care. The same is true for hundreds of Orthodox rabbis worldwide, haredi and Modern Orthodox, who take money or benefit from Rabbi Morris Esformes.
Here's my question. Rabbi Esformes's took actions that killed elderly people. Did he intend to kill them? I don't think so. Still, they suffered and died as a result.
How can Jews take money from and honor a man whose actions killed innocents?
Yet they do. Orthodox rabbi after rabbi after rabbi line up to receive money from Rabbi Esformes. His name is placed on yeshiva and synagogue buildings worldwide.
These synagogues and yeshivas are built with the very lives of those elderly people, non-Jews, who wrongfully suffered and died under Rabbi Esformes substandard care.
Jews should have zero tolerance for this type of thing, but we do not. Like Harry Maryles, Jews are willfully blind to the truth of where the money that supports their Torah learning and institutions comes from.
When God calls in His accounts, I don't think he's going to look at all the Torah Harry Maryles learned in Orthodox institutions paid for by the blood of innocents and be happy. Instead, God will ask a simple series of questions – "When the weakest among you, the poor, sick elderly, were tortured and killed, you were silent. Why? You took money and praised the man who caused those wrongful deaths. Why? Is the blood of my creation meaningless to you?
You have no excuse, Harry, and neither do your fellow Orthodox rabbis. Say no to the money and take down your praise.
Here's Harry's piece in PDF for archival purposes:
UPDATE – A few minutes after posting this FailedMessiah readers left comments on Harry's blog proving Esformes is dirty. Harry edited or deleted those comments and then closed the comments to that post entirely. Here's what happened:
It's been reported that temperatures in
facilities owned by Esformes are as high as 94 degrees F. I'm not a
doctor, but I don't think that is a good way to make granny
comfortable. Still and all, it may not matter, his facilities are
filled with goyim.
It's been reported that temperatures in facilities owned by Esformes are as high as 94 degrees F.
As I said. The more succesful one becomes the more of a target one is.
Rabbi Esformes has never been convicted or even indicted for any crimes
of any kind. Not even finacial let alone mistreatment of patients.
That one of his many homes was once 'caught' with e temperature setting
that was too high can easily have been a one time event that was
mishadled by an employee... or a mal functioning heating system... or
any number of explanations. The same is true with any other such
accusations.
It's a pity that some people feel they have to knock him down with
false information, half truths, rumor, and inuendo. If he were guilty
of all the things his enemies have accused him of over the years, he
would have been arrested, tried and convcted many times over. Never
happened.
But that doesn't stop some unscrupulous bloggers from bringing up every
news story they ever read where alegactions about all kinds of
nefarious deeds and wrong doings were reported, usually based on
information by disgrunteled employees or realtives of patients out to
make a buck through a law suit.
Harry Maryles |
Homepage |
12.22.07 - 9:54 pm | #
He sure was convicted
I went to that url (which has been deleted) and saw the so called
conviction. The penalty was a fine. In an industry that is so
over-regulated, that is as common as taking out the garbage. He has
never been indicted or convicted of any criminal beahvior on any
accusations that were made against him. He's wealthy target. He is
going to be accused by people who ean to sue him. They usuyally need
criminal convictions to base their suits on.
I'm certainly not going to allow you or anyone else to besmirch the
good name of Rabbi Esformes by allowing urls like the one you cited
that will unfairly embarrass him.
You wnat mudslinging? go find it somehwere else.
The comment section on this thread is now closed
Harry Maryles |
12.22.07 - 10:20 pm | #
Rabbi Harry Maryles is a fraud. He is no more interested in the truth than he is in breaking his leg. Morrie's money is dirty, Harry, and so is the Torah it supports, stained and dripping with the blood of defenseless elderly people killed by his negligence and his thievery. That's your Torah, Harry, tattered and dripping in blood. Hope your God likes it.
Here is the entire comment thread from Harry's blog in PDF:
Here is the entire Federal indictment against the Spinka Rebbe and six others for tax fraud and money laundering, sent in PDF format courtesy of a FailedMessiah.com reader:
Meanwhile, VosIzneais, the Satmar news blog, is reporting the rebbe's bail bail has been set at $2 million dollars and his gabbai's at $1.5 million. Both are considered flight risks and will have to wear electronic monitoring bracelets, and will have to surrender their passports.
Many of you already know Naftali Tzvi Weisz, the Spinka Rebbe of Borough Park was arrested earlier today along with his gabbai and a few others on federal money laundering charges. The holy rebbe raised funds from wealthy donors and kicked back large chunks of their donations – as high as 95% in at least one case – enabling these 'ba'alei tzedaka' to cheat the government out of tens of thousands millions of dollars in taxes. The scam laundered money in LA's diamond district and by using Israeli banks with American branches.
This is the same type of scam allegedly run by the head of Chabad-Lubavitch in Israel, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Ahranow, and it is the same type of scam allegedly run by several other haredi rabbis and charities in the US and abroad.
I'd guess other haredi charities in Borough Park, Williamsburg, Crown Heights, Monsey, Spring Valley, Kiryas Joel and Lakewood could be busted on similar charges. The same for Bnei Brak and Jerusalem.
…In some cases, the contributions were returned as cash payments
through what the government called “an underground money transfer
network” involving businesses in and around Los Angeles’s jewelry
district, the government said.
Three men in California were
charged with taking part in the money transfer network: Yaacov Zeivald,
43, a professional scribe from Valley Village, Calif.; Yosef N. Naiman,
55, a tour company owner from Los Angeles; and Alan Friedman, 43, a
businessman, also from Los Angeles. A fourth man, Moshe A. Lazar, 60, a
diamond dealer, was charged in the scheme as well and was believed to
be in Israel, the government said.
The contributions were repaid by a sophisticated series of wire
transfers from businesses controlled by the Spinka sect to secret
accounts in Israel, the government said. The accounts were established
with the help of an official at the Israeli bank, Joseph Roth, 66, of
Tel Aviv, who was arrested in Los Angeles, and a Tel Aviv lawyer, Jacob
Kantor, 71, who remained at large in Israel, the government said.
According
to the indictment, Mr. Roth helped the contributors get loans from a
Los Angeles branch of the bank so their money would be available to
them in the United States. The contributors could also hire officials
of the Spinka sect to repatriate their money for them, albeit for a
fee, the government said.
Earlier this year, the indictment
said, Rabbi Weisz and Mr. Zigelman determined they had taken in some
$8.7 million in contributions solicited by Mr. Zigelman alone. Of that,
they held on to almost $750,000, the indictment said.…
Five Spinka charitable organizations in Brooklyn — identified in the
indictment as Yeshiva Imrei Yosef, Yeshivath Spinka, the Central
Rabbinical Seminary, Machne Sva Rotzohn and Mesivta Imrei Yosef Spinka
— were named as defendants in the case.
You may have problems leaving comments. If you get a warning that your comment was flagged as spam, send me an email (failed dot messiah at comcast dot net) so I can – hopefully – find the comment and retrieve it for you.
TypePad installed a new spam filter a few months ago. In my experience, it worked poorly, letting obvious spam post with alarming frequency. (My favorite? Comments from Dr. Horny with urls like www.hotandhorny[name a sex act, perhaps carried out with an animal].com and comments like "I luv hot AnaL". You have to be one inept spam filter to miss comments like that.)
Recently, TypePad beefed up the spam filter.
Result?
The spam filter on steroids now snares your comments – and mine, as well – without regard to how many previous comments you left or if the "offending" IP address belongs to the blog owner himself. Worse yet, TypePad does not notify blog owners when this happens – we have to check our newly created spam folders. In practice, I would have to do this every half hour, 24/6, to deal with this problem, and that's not gonna happen.
Hopefully, this bug will be fixed today or tomorrow. In the meantime, if you get a spam warning and your comment does not post, send me an email. I'll do my best to find your lost comment and post it. Just realize I'm not online 24/6, and it may take a few minutes – or even a few hours – for me to deal with it.
shmuel, PishPosh, Lev, Netanya, Tibi, myself and several others had comments blocked yesterday by this insane spam filter.
My father is from the region of Satmar. He is now 82 and still remembers R' Yoilish bribing the regional governor to ban B'nei Akivah.
Many of the local Rebbeim went with their people to the camps and comforted them, supported them, until the very end.
[Rabbi Yoel] Teitelbaum [the Satmar Rebbe] was spirited off to Switzerland by the very Zionists he so despised.
After 46 years of, unfortunately, having dealings with the Satmar community my general impression has been that they are often ignorant, hateful and despise other Jews tremendously. Those that are more tolerant and decent among them are often forced to keep their views closeted so they don't suffer derision and loss of livelihood.
The one thing they sure can't be compared to is: Amish.
Dan Levin of the New York Times has an update on the Satmar couple in Kiryas Joel who were threatened and harassed because the 25-year-old wife wore, gasp!, denim skirts and stockings without seams. Their cars were vandalized and they were each threatened. No one would cooperate with police and now, four months after the incidents, the case has been closed.
This is far from unusual:
…Hella Winston, the author of “Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic
Rebels,” said that it was not uncommon for women who defy their
strictly codified role in such communities to become targets.
Ms. Winston, an assistant professor of sociology at Queens College,
said that because these sects can not legally discipline
nonconformists, they must resort to public shaming. “Their power is in
fear and intimidation,” she said, though “blacklisting children from
schools can at times cross the line into threats and violence.”…
Who enforces these "modesty" rules?
…Occasionally someone defies the social mores — whether it is a young
man frequenting bars in the nearby village of Monroe or a woman
dressing inappropriately or flirting. That is when the “vaad hatznius,”
the rabbinically appointed modesty committee that enforces the
village’s rules of behavior and appearance, intervenes.
“If we
find they have a TV or a married woman won’t wear a wig, we will invite
them to speak with us and try to convince them it’s unacceptable, or
next year we will not accept their children into the school system,”
said David Ekstein, the vice president of the village’s leading
congregation, Yetev Lev, and one of eight men who make up the
committee, hand-picked by Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, the town’s spiritual
leader.
Mr. Ekstein, 62, the president of an insurance company,
said that the committee was widely respected for its role in protecting
the community, especially children. “There has to be some kind of
watchdog,” he said. “But do we have any real power? We’re not a
government.”…
What you just read is an admission of illegal activity. No town can enforce "modesty" rules of this type, rules that really are religious strictures. If Kiryas Joel were a private enclave or a commune, it could enforce these rules. But Kiray Joel is a town, a town that incorporated and formed in order to receive state and federal funds. To receive those funds, Kiryas Jooel must obey the law.
The federal government and the State of New York have an obligation to enforce the law, including the civil rights laws Kiryas Joel violates every day.
Rabbi Aaron Titelbaum and his thugs belong in jail. The sooner this happens the better.
Dozens of men's mikvaot (ritual baths) across the nation are a potential health hazard due to poor accessibility, United Hatzalah of Israel, the haredi rapid-response first aid organization, has warned
"If, God forbid, there is a major crisis in a mikve, such as a gas explosion, poisoned water or a collapsed roof, I don't want to think of the consequences," Hatzalah spokesman Yerach Toker said on Wednesday.
Hatzalah volunteers, he said, had routinely run into serious obstacles that slow down first aid crews when responding to emergencies that take place inside men's mikvaot.
The most common emergencies are heart attacks, drownings and slipping accidents, Toker said. Also, the steamy, humid environment occasionally causes dizziness and even a temporary loss of consciousness.
Hatzalah crews complain that after arriving on the scene they are often delayed many minutes at the entrance to the mikve by barriers that prevent non-members from getting inside. The most common obstacles are pay-activated or card-activated turnstiles and doors.
"Just a few weeks ago a Hatzalah crew was called to evacuate a man from a mikve who complained of chest pains," Toker said. "But the volunteers were held up close to half an hour. Fearing that he had suffered a heart attack, the man was prevented from walking. But since the only available exit was via a turnstile, it was impossible to remove the man.
"An emergency door was blocked by a closet filled with towels and clothes. But even after the things blocking the door were moved, it was impossible to open the locked door. It took another 10 minutes until someone with a key showed up."
Rabbi Menachem Blumenthal, head of the Jerusalem Religious Council's mikvaot division, who is responsible for 27 men's mikvaot, said the problems facing first aid organizations were not new.
"We are aware of the difficulties in getting in and out of mikvaot that are governed by electronic turnstiles," he said. "But an adequate solution is provided as long as there is a caretaker with a key to the emergency door on the premises during opening hours."…
The problems noted above are caused by lax Israeli health and fire codes along with haredi dismissal of secular law and haredi refusal to apply dina d'malchuta dina when the secular laws involved are even slightly inconvenient to follow. Similar problems are common in haredi communities outside Israel as well, like Kiryas Joel, where widespread ignoring of building and fire codes puts residents and firefighters at serious risk.
Also note the Post managed to write the story without mentioning the greatest health hazard in men's mikvas – child sexual abuse.
I ran across this short Hanukka Davar HaTorah from Mir's rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, on YouTube. It's not easy to understand because Rabbi Finkel has Parkinson's Disease, and his speech is effected. He speaks faintly and haltingly as a result.
Rabbi Finkel also speaks with a Chicago accent. He was born there, I believe, but his mother Sarah is from Saint Paul, Minnesota. She grew up on 13th Street. My father, o.h., grew up on 14th Street. My father's older sisters were contemporaries and friends of Sarah in their preteen years.
Sarah Rosenblum was one of the few of her generation to remain Orthodox. I can count the others on the fingers of one hand, with fingers left over. No one in my father's family remained Orthodox, although his oldest sister kept a kosher home.
Sarah's father was a shochet and the family davened at the Russian, or Red, shul on 13th Street. My father's family davened at the Litvish, or White, shul on 14th. Solly and Maxie Weisberg lived down the block from Sarah's family. (More about both, who I knew well, later.) So did my friend Marv Edelstein, who told me Friday he ran a kosher chicken business from the time he was seven years old. The family had barns behind the house where Marv raised chickens. He hired a shochet – Meltzer, not Nosson Tzvi's grandfather – to shecht the chickens and Marv delivered them to homes in the neighborhood.
I grew up with Sarah's nephews. Their father, Sarah's youngest brother, was a contemporary of my father. Years ago, Victor was sitting next to me a shul meeting, a meeting where the rabbi was campaigning for a huge expansion of the shul's building. Victor, stunned at the scope and cost of the expansion, whispered to me, "Scotty, who does he think is going to pay for this?" Without pausing I replied, "You, Victor." Victor's hands clasped his chest and he let out a loud startled gasp. Heads turned. "You shouldn't joke like that," Victor hissed. "I'm not joking," was my reply. I left for Israel and a year of yeshiva shortly after that meeting. After first trying Kfar Chabad (for less than 24 hours – another story for another time), I settled in at Aish HaTorah. Eventually, Nosson Tzvi's brother Gedaliah was a teacher of mine there, but it would only be later, after I returned to Minnesota and Gedaliah came to visit his Uncle Victor and his cousins, that we both realized the connection. And, yes, Nosson Tzvi's Uncle Victor did pay for a large chunk of the shul's expansion.
My father's grandfather had his own shteibel for a few years on the far edge of that area of Saint Paul. But the Jewish community developed closer to downtown and eventually the little shtiebel closed. My great-grandfather became the shammash of both the 13th and 14th Street shuls but still lived almost a mile away. On rainy Shabbat evenings a priest from the Catholic church, impressed with my great-grandfather's religious dedication, used to walk him home under an open umbrella, afraid he would otherwise become ill from the rain and cold. My great-great grandfather also had, for a time, an informal after public school heder of sorts where he taught a few students the rudiments of Biblical Hebrew and basic davening, halakha and leining.This ended when Saint Paul's rabbis opened a formal Talumud Torah in about 1913.
So who else remained strictly Orthodox? Sarah Rosenblum Finkel did it by moving to Chicago, as did one of Marv Edelstein's relatives. The founder and gabbi of the only Orthodox shul in Saint Paul, Isaac Symes, was another. Then there was David Katz, a Navy boxing champion in WW2, shell-shocked and seriously damaged by the War. Dave worked as a milkman and then as a shipping clerk. When Sons of Jacob, the big Orthodox synagogue in Saint Paul, voted to join the Conservative Movement in the late 1970s, Dave was one of the few members to leave – perhaps the only member to leave, if the stories I heard in shul are true. He served as the shul's livery service, picking up several older members and, sometimes, a car-less college student for the minyan every morning and most evenings.
The last Orthodox rabbi of Sons of Jacob was Moishe Lichtman. Moishe, I later learned, grew up in Brooklyn. His grandfather was very close to the Satmar Rebbe, Yoel Teitlebaum. Moishe, who was an illui of sorts, used to sit on Reb Yoilish's lap during the Third Sabbath meal. Manis Friedman, a man without smicha, once dismissed Moishe Lichtman as a "BT" and "not a real rabbi." Moishe at 13 could have easily out-learned Manis at any age. Sons of Jacob became Beth Jacob. Its first and so far only Rabbi is Morris Allen of Hechsher Tzedek fame.
The other person to remain Orthodox was Nachman Liefschultz, a rag picker. His father had been a hasid of the Orsha Rebbe, a grandson of the Tzemach Tzedek, the third Lubavitcher Rebbe. Rabbi Feller, the head Chabad shaliach here, took Russian "chief rabbi" Berel Lazar's father to Nachman's nursing home so Rabbi Lazar could see a "chossid from the Rebbe Rashab," not realizing Nachman's family were Orsha hasidim.
Nachman was mentally slow. It took him ten minutes or longer to write a check at the grocery store. Yet he still functioned as a hazzan and knew a lot of Torah, mostly agadata, by heart. His siblings all belonged to Conservative synagogues. In his 90s, blind and cancer-ridden, Nachman used to daven by heart in his nursing home bed. I was privileged to raise money and buy Nachman his last pair of tefillin, arba kanfot, and the mezzuzah for his nursing home door.
So why so few Orthodox Jews from those generations?
I don't know for sure. What I do know is the following:
There were several significant scholars and dozens of haredi rabbis in Saint Paul from the early 1900s until just after WW2.
I have never heard anything nice said about any of them, even the hasidishe rabbis of Saint Paul's West Side river flats..
The town's chief rabbi, a Litvak, Rabbi Hurwitz, was known as the Roite Rav, not because he had red hair or a red shul but because he was so often red with anger. I have asked dozens of people about him over the years and never heard anything even remotely redeeming about his personality or behavior except from Marv Edelstein's brother-in-law, who was a MO rabbi for a time in Chicago. He spoke about Rabbi Hurwitz's "gadlus" in learning. None of Rabbi Hurwitz's children remained Orthodox. Rabbi Hurwitz was the rabbi of the 14th Street shul and the 13th Street shul, as well. As such, he had ample opportunity to abuse and persecute my great-grandfather. True to his nature, Rabbi Hurwitz passed on few of these opportunities. A few months before my great-grandfather died, after a particularly disgusting example of Rabbi Hurwitz's abuse, Hurwitz had a change of heart – spurred, in part, by the reaction of others who were disgusted with the chief rabbi's behavior. He apologized to my great-grandfather for the years of abuse and the mistreatment of his children and grandchildren. (Yes, the chief rabbi was petty enough to take out his anger on the children and grandchildren of his employees.)
The rabbis fought among themselves, were seen as petty, and were little involved in the real lives of their congregations.
The rabbis were Eastern European shtetlach rebbes trying to lead congregations in a western enlightened democracy. They had neither the language skills or the temper to minister to Americans, and they had disdain for those who could.
Orthodoxy lost the war with modernity because it behaved like Saint Paul's early rabbis. Rather than learning its lesson, much of Orthodoxy has instead repeated those errors, banning books and banning rabbis, finding heretics under every tallis and shtender, bickering and fighting, regressing, rather than progressing.
Demographic trends indicate Orthodoxy should become the dominant American Judaism by mid-century, but it won't be because it has attracted so many ba'alei teshuva or retained so many of its born members – the data says Orthodoxy has done none of this. Orthodoxy will dominate only because few others want to participate in a Judaism so fouled by petty-minded rivalries and short-sighted antics, or in what they perceive to be the irrelevancy of all Jewish streams and organizations. Jews are leaving the virtual shtetl in droves and newcomers – BTs and converts – do not come close to making up the loss. Orthodoxy may end up the last man standing but it won't be because it knocked anyone out of the ring – it will be because most people, even many Orthodox Jews, do not care enough to compete.
The farther away from Orthodoxy one goes, the farther away from the shtetlkeit and taboos one is is. This means it is far easier for a non-Orthodox Jew to leave Judaism. Often they do this without even noticing and without their friends and family noticing, as well.
This does not mean Orthodoxy is full of happy, contented members – far from it. It means it is full of members who are unhappy, who are trapped within Orthodoxy by taboo and draconian barriers. (What do I mean by draconian barriers? Just ask a Footsteps kid what it's like to lose your entire family, all your friends, your job, your home and all your social support in one day, and have that happen when you cannot read or write coherently in the English language and do not have a high school degree.)
In pre-Destruction Palestine, there was a fight between the school of Hillel the Elder and the school of Shammai. While we say today that we follow Hillel, what we really follow is Hillel's school after it had already lost many important battles to Shammai. As the Jerusalem Talmud (Shabbat 1:4) makes clear, Shammai was dirty fighter who broke rules and used violence to get his way. Much of our anti-gentile legislation comes from him and was 'adopted' only because Shammai resorted to violence against the school of Hillel to get his way.
But the real divide in those days was between Jews like Philo – who commanded a far lager following than did the rabbis – and assimilationist elements in the Jewish elite. Which side retained more Jews? Philo, by far.
We would all probably be followers of Philo if not for two quirks of history. The first was the Destruction, which wiped out the sacrificial cult and at the same time forced several generations of rabbis to get along and play fair. This created a synthesis of the Shammai and Hillel schools. (And this may have happened because many more Shammai followers died in the revolt against Rome. Why? Because Shammai's virulent hatred of all things gentile led them to believe the revolt was a good thing.) So the cultic opposition to rabbinic Judaism was destroyed at the same time rabbinic Judaism was forced to unify.
The second quirk of history was the Diaspora revolt in 117 CE against Rome, fueled by increasing Roman persecution. The revolt failed and dozens of Jewish communities across the Mediterranean disappeared as a result. Lacking both the Jerusalem Temple as a focal point and a developed unified system to unite them, the communities that survived the revolt were weak and broken. Most faded away. Some remained, eventually adopting rabbinic Judaism during the standardization campaign waged by Babylonian rabbis after the completion of the Babylonian Talmud 400 or more years later.
Babylonian Jews did not participate in either revolt or in the revolt led by Bar Kohba in the 130s CE. They also lived under non-Roman and non-Greek rule, and did not face the challenges of science and philosophy faced by the Jews of Palestine and the Hellenist diaspora. Instead, Babylonian Judaism thrived on the folk superstitions and primitive theologies of the region. While the Greeks had deduced the existence of molecules and atoms, Babylonians 'divined' the future by casting and 'reading' chicken bones. Our Judaism is primarily a derivative of Babylonian Judaism.
Perhaps that is why Judaism as we know it thrives in closed societies but flounders in open ones, and why the most blatant pagan superstitions find a welcoming home in Jewish mysticism, hasidism and kabbala.
Where are Babylonian Jews today? Many became Muslim, often converting by choice, not by the sword, before the year 1100. Babylonian Judaism could not handle the intellectual and scientific challenges brought by Islam, just as it later would fail to handle the challenges of modernity, enlightenment and science in the west.
Given the chance, Jews opt for openness, knowledge and progress. The challenge for Jewish leaders is to constantly reinvent Judaism so that it can meet the challenges posed.
The ghetto never wins. It may temporarily keep Jews trapped inside Judaism, but eventually ghetto walls fall and Jews leave in droves, just like they left before, just like they are leaving today.
…Rabbi Reuven Bulka, who has worked for years as an advocate for organ donation and was recently named chairman of the board of the Trillium Gift of Life Network, says people oppose organ donation, even within the Jewish faith. But he says they haven't thought the issue through.
"Many lay people say, 'We've grown up with the idea that when you are buried, you have to be buried whole.'
"So I say, 'Didn't you also grow up with the idea that saving life is the all-encompassing and overarching Jewish value that supplants every other value? Are you telling me that the obligation to bury a person whole is so sacred that it trumps saving a life?'"
Rabbi Bulka says that the obligation of burying the body with all its parts was valid before the 20th century. But it was trumped by modern medicine and the obligation to save life, and not idly stand by while the blood of your neighbour is being spilled.
A person who has a diseased kidney removed is not offending God because he is only buried with one kidney, notes the rabbi.
"It's an emotional thing and it's hard to dent because it keeps on coming up. It's frustrating," says Rabbi Bulka. "When are we going to get to the point where people get it, because it's so obvious."…
This "obvious" life saving, this so-called "overarching Jewish value" to save life, is missed by the vast majority of haredi rabbis who, in a typical haredi manner forbid their followers from donating organs but, at the same time, allow their followers to receive organs, largely because the organs are usually harvested from non-Jews.
Haredim consume this precious resource but rarely, if ever, contribute to it.
If a non-Jewish group refused to donate organs but haredim did donate, and if Jews were the majority of these organ donors and the members of that non-Jewish group demanded donated organs for their own use, bumping Jews further down recipient lists and assuredly killing some of them as a result, haredim would be the first to demand this non-Jewish group not receive organs.
It is a testament to the kindness of Americans and non-Haredi Israeli Jews that haredim are given organ transplants at all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
<sarcasm>Note:
But, of course, as our holy gedolim teach, Eisav hates Ya'akov, goyyim hate Jews. So it won't be long before goyyim stop this kindness and push all Jews off the recipient lists. The same will happen in Israel where, as we all know, secular Israelis are no different from goyyim because they have thrown off the yoke of our Holy Torah, the same Holy Torah that forbids haredim from donating organs in the first place.
And what of Rabbi Bulka? Isn't he frum? No, children, Rabbi Bulka is "modern." Modern rabbis are not frum. And, as we all know, there is no difference between Modern Orthodox and Conservative or even Reform, God forbid – they're all pretty much goyyim anyway.</end sarcasm>
The above note was added as a kindness to save ed, Edd, Meyer, Archie Bunker, and so many others the trouble of posting the same information as serious, non-sarcastic comments in the comments section below.
Ynet reports on a new Israeli public opinion poll commissioned by Ynet and Gesher, and carried out by the Mutagim organization:
…When asked "would you let your child
marry an Ethiopian?" 63% answered they would gladly welcome the
marriage while 19% said "absolutely not." Another 6% said they would be
saddened but would not object.
Religious segmentation points at a
different attitude: 61% of ultra-Orthodox respondents said they would
vehemently object such a marriage. Only 25% would welcome an Ethiopian
in-law.
That 25% of haredim would "welcome" an Ethiopian as a son- or daughter-in-law means that a large section of haredim surveyed view Ethiopian Jews as full Jews. This either means a disproportionate number of haredim interviewed are Sefardim or the question was understood by all to mean that the Ethiopian Jews in question were fully Jewish, either through conversion or through rabbinic affirmation.
Either way, haredim are far more bigoted than average, as the rest of the results clearly show:
The second question examined the degree of familiarity respondents
have with community members: 32% admitted they do not have any
Ethiopian friends and that they do not know any Ethiopians with whom
they could build friendships. 20% do know Ethiopians but have no
Ethiopian friends and 34% said they or their children have such a
friend.
Once again a religious segmentation points at a different trend in
the ultra-Orthodox community: 72% don't have Ethiopian friend.
Does the segregation in some of Petah Tikva schools reflect parents'
wishes? 63% claim they have no problem sending their children to
schools where 40% of the students are Ethiopians. On the other hand,
14% said they "would never" send their children to such institutions.
50% of ultra-Orthodox respondents said they would not send their children to such a school.
Gesher director-general Shoshi Becker said that the findings are
worrying and require immediate action: "It is difficult to understand
how people who practice Judaism as a way of life choose to steer clear
of Ethiopian immigrants.
Becker added that a Jewish-democratic society should view acceptance
of the other as a challenge and a mission and convey a clear message to
future generations: "This is our job as a society, a community and as
individuals."
Haredim are the most racist and bigoted subset of Jews in Israel. Anecdotal evidence points to the same result for haredim worldwide. In the infamous words of a Chabad shaliach, spoken to me in 1983 Hadar Hatorah's summer program for college students, "Why are you waisting your time helping helping schvartes?"
For every Rabbi Moshe Feinstein or Rabbi Ovadia Yosef there were – and still are – hundreds of rabbis like this one, like his mentor, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and like the racists and bigots of Borough Park, Williamsburg, Kiryas Joel, Monsey, Manchester, Antwerp and beyond.
Haredism survives by creating ghettos and by demonizing the Other. It is at its core a racist and bigoted. Haredism cannot change because to change would mean to end haredism – you can't suddenly start being friendly and welcoming to the Other you demonize and still maintain ghetto walls.
Historically the ghetto was imposed on Jews from the outside. We were forced to live isolated lives because the dominant, usually Christian, rulering class did not want their "pure" populace mixing with "impure" Jews.
How sad and how ironic it is that "fervently religious" Jews, haredim, have made this non-Jewish racism and bigotry their own.
These are pictures taken recently of the Beit Avraham community and synagogue in Addis Ababa. These people claim to be the equivalent of marranos but don't want make aliya until they are self supporting.
…I
cannot understand why members of our community are not willing to
report the criminals who are selling drugs to our kids directly to the
police. This is, in my opinion, a misplaced application of the concept
of mesirah. Ten years ago, I asked our leading gedolim if I should pass along information to the police regarding drug pushers. I received a unanimous p’sak that drug dealers have the full status of a rodef (one
who poses life-threatening dangers to others), and that I have not only
the right but also the obligation to do everything in my power to have
them arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. In my
opinion, there is no substantive difference between a drug pusher and a
child molester. Let the system work and let’s finally start protecting
our children before there are any more shattered lives and suicides.
I
think it is a terribly sad statement that an individual who sold
non-kosher food in my hometown of Monsey ran for his life the moment
the story broke and was not seen since, while a fiend who molested both
Jewish and non-Jewish children in Boro Park is living comfortably in
Jerusalem while evading extradition. I am most certainly not promoting
or condoning vigilante violence. But it would be a positive step
forward when child molesters in our community need to ask for police
protection for fear of being harmed by righteously indignant people.
Incredibly, in that case, only the non-Jewish parents pressed charges. Here is the text from a “Nightline” segment on the subject: “The
only victims who cooperated with the investigation were Italian. They
were neighborhood boys who trusted the rabbi because he bought them
gifts, like bicycles. Not a single Orthodox Jewish boy or his parents would talk to the police
(Emphasis added). The statements of four Italian boys aged 11- 16, were
the basis for the indictment against Avrohom Mondrowitz. He was facing
eight counts of sexual abuse in the first degree, endangering the
welfare of a child, and five counts ofsodomy in the first degree.”
I ask, “Are Jewish children less sacred and worthy of protection than non-Jewish children?”
Who wrote this? Perhaps the only sane person left in Agudath Israel of America, Rabbi Yakov Horowitz. When? January 27, 2007. Where? The Jewish Press, which, I'm told, to its credit published his entire column unedited. Now if Rabbi Horowitz's colleagues would only listen…
Haredim this week forced YES cable to pull this brilliant ad promoting HDTV because, hareim whined, the ad is "bigoted" against haredim. The ad shows dancing haredim protesting HDTV and calling HDTV a "toeva," and abomination.
Of course, any reader of israel's newspapers have multiple examples of haredim protesting (usually violently) against any of a number of different "abominations."
The YES ad was not bigoted – it was spot on correct.
But what are haredim like in their own media and publications when they do not like something or someone?
A caricature depicting the Egged Bus Cooperative as a restaurant waiter serving pork to a haredi customer smacks of anti-Semitism, an Egged spokesman said on Sunday.
Egged officials say the haredi community went too far with this caricature equating the bus company with a waiter serving pork to a haredi diner, who says, "excuse me! I ordered a kosher meal."
"If such a caricature were published in a Jewish community in the Diaspora, it would be denounced immediately as virulently anti-Semitic," said Aryeh Frankel, a haredi PR man from the Gal Advertising firm who represents Egged.
But a resident of Givat Shaul and one of the activists responsible for the publication of the pamphlet who preferred to remain anonymous defended the cartoon.
"For us, the situation in many parts of Jerusalem is as if Egged were forcing us to eat something un-kosher," said the man, who added that the caricature was approved by the rabbis.
The caricature appears on a pamphlet published recently by "The Council For Kosher Transportation - Har Nof, Givat Shaul" that blames Egged for being insensitive to haredi customers' religious strictures which require strict separation of men and women on buses.
Most of the pamphlet's eight pages are devoted to quotes from speeches given by prominent rabbis of Har Nof and Givat Shaul…
[Frankel noted] "Egged has 34 'designated' bus lines that
segregate men and women in accordance with the religious sensitivities
of the haredi populace. Just last week we launched a new line from
Kiryat Sanz, Netanya to Jerusalem. But on inner-city lines that also
serve the general [secular] public we cannot set up designated lines.
Instead, we added a line - 15a - which services Har Nof and Givat Shaul
in addition to the regular 11 and 15 buses."
Frankel added that by its very nature, mass transportation was
crowded during rush hour and there was nothing that could be done to
change that fact. "That's the way it is in the New York subway, in the
Paris Metro and in the British Underground," he noted.
A sometime correspondent wrote last night to make sure I saw this piece written by Danny Adino Ababa, an Ethiopian Jewish journalist living in Israel. Ababa argues the Falsh Mura are not Jews:
…It would be a crude lie to claim that the
Ethiopians who currently wait at transit camps are Jewish. Chief Rabbi
Amar’s ruling that those are kosher Jews is unconvincing. Suddenly, the
chief rabbis have become experts on Ethiopian Jewry? In the eyes of the
Ashkenazi rabbinical establishment I am not even a true Jew yet, and I
cannot even get married here.
We cannot claim that someone who was completely Christian for
600 years is suddenly a Jew. Many Ethiopian Jews know this is a lie,
but bringing them to Israel is perceived as a way of boosting and
strengthening the Ethiopian community.…
Of course, the Falash Mura are Ethiopian Jews whose ancestors were forced to convert to Christianity about 100 years ago. Ababa is, at the very least, guilty of overstatement – or is he?
Anshel Pfeffer has a report in today's Ha'aretz on the government's decision to stop Falash Mura aliya:
The Interior Ministry will close down its operation in Ethiopia in another two weeks, after signing the last aliyah permit for Falash Mura who are eligible to immigrate to Israel.
According to the ministry, some 1,500 eligible Falash Mura are still in Ethiopia, and all are expected to arrive here by next June. But Ethiopian immigrant associations claim that there are at least 8,500 others who are eligible to immigrate under the government's criteria.
The Falash Mura are Ethiopians of Jewish descent whose ancestors converted to Christianity. They are not Jewish according to Jewish law, but in 1999, under pressure from local Ethiopian immigrant groups and American Jewish organizations, the government agreed to bring them to Israel. They are currently arriving at a rate of about 300 per month.
In late 2006, however, the government decided to bring the remaining Falash Mura here and wind up its operation in Ethiopia within a year.
According to the government's immigration criteria, which are based on a halakhic ruling by Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, a Falash Mura must be able to prove their maternal ancestral line is Jewish for seven generations back, have a first-degree relative who is already in Israel and promise to undergo a pro forma conversion upon arrival. Over the last year, the Interior Ministry has refused immigration permits to some 3,000 applicants.…
Pfeffer goes on to report allegations of bribery by Falash Mura who pay Falsh Mura currently in Israel to claim them as "first-degree relatives," and other shenanigans. And he repeats the claim that American groups are blind to this deception and insinuates American groups have caused this crisis.
What neither Pfeffer or Ababa do is explain the history of the rescue of Ethiopian Jews. If they did this, those American groups pushing for aliya of Falash Mura would look a whole lot better.
Why? Because the Israeli government and Jewish Agency have a long, dirty track record of lies. They scuttled rescue operations and killed Jews – and I do not write these words lightly.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, commonly known as the Joint, raised money in 1982 for ambulances to help Ethiopian Jews. When I saw that claim, made as part of a national Federation fundraising brochure, I challenged my local Federation to prove it, pointing out that Ethiopian Jews lived primarily in villages and that Ethiopia did not have a modern road system. The ambulances pictured could never have made it to or from those villages.
To its credit, the local Federation checked, and found that I was correct. The Joint admitted the ambulances were based in Addis Ababa and served Christians who lived in the capitol as part of the Joint's nonsectarian program in Ethiopia. The local Federation pulled that national brochure and issued an apology. The Council of Jewish Federations and the Joint itself continued to raise money under false pretenses. And neither group funded relief or rescue in any serious way.
But the Federations eventually learned. After years of swallowing Israeli lies whole, and after their Israeli ordered fundraising during Operation Moses was leaked to the media by the Israeli government and by Federation leaders, resulting in the end of the rescue and the deaths of thousands of Ethiopian Jews, a new generation of leaders took power. These younger leaders, more experienced, with greater confidence and not in the thrall of Israeli politicians, called Israel on its lies and forced change.
The only American Jewish organization today that completely supports the Israeli government's restrictive position on Falash Mura aliya is the Joint. The Joint to this day has never admitted the wrongs it did in the early 1980s.
That said, it seems there are very real abuses of the aliya process. My correspondent was in Addis Ababa a few months ago and saw many Falash Mura Ethiopians whose leaders claim to be Jews but many community members were wearing crosses, allegedly because of persecution from non-Jews. These people claim to be, in effect, marranos. This new group's link to Ethiopian Jews is in fact much more distant than the Falash Mura that Israel's Sefardic chief rabbi Shlomo Amar considers Jews. This new group has the following philosophy: Jewish Identity. Parnassah. Aliya. In other words, first be Jewish. Then earn money and support one's self. Only then make aliya.
Rabbi Amar has not yet ruled on this new group and NACOEJ, the American organization that runs programs and sometimes transit camps for Falash Mura in Addis and Gondar has not publicly dealt with this issue.
The bottom line is that Israeli lies and malfeasance stretching back at least thirty years makes it very difficult for American Jewish groups to trust Israeli assertions about the Falash Mura. So too racisit and bigoted statements from Israeli leaders, like the current Interior minister, and the ongoing problems of discrimination faced by Ethiopian Jews in Israel at the hands of politicians, employers, educators and rabbis alike.
Israel's racism and lies created this problem. The Falash Mura and their pretenders are simply exploiting what these others have sown.
A chief rabbi of Russia came out in support of Vladimir Putin as prime minister.
Rabbi Berel Lazar of the Chabad-led Federation of Jewish Communities
of Russia called the possibility a “great present” in an interview with
the Interfax news service.
Anointed presidential successor Dmitry Medvedev went on state
television Tuesday to ask Putin to head his government following
elections in March.
“When president, Vladimir Putin has showed that he is equal to any
task,” Lazar told Interfax. “If Putin considers the scenario offered by
Dmitry Medvedev realistic, it will surely be a great present if the
government is headed by the most efficient statesmen in Russia.”
Lazar's remarks stand in contrast to a statement he made Monday about
the role of religion in politics. Following an endorsement of Medvedev
by Putin that virtually guaranteed him the presidency, Lazar told
Interfax that it is not "the matter of religious figures to agitate for
any candidate."
Lazar is an embarrassment to Chabad and to Jews.
What motivates this man? Is it simply hunger for power? Or is it something, some scandalous bit of information, Putin has on Lazar or, perhaps, on Chabad or the late rebbe himself?
I think Lazar's lap dog mentality began with the former but has been cemented with the latter.
What does Putin have on Chabad?
I don't know. But I suspect one day, perhaps much sooner than Berel Lazar wants, we'll all find out.
Michael Lesher, attorney for several victims of Avrohom Mondrowitz, and Amy Neustein, an activist on behalf of those victims for many years, have a letter in the Jewish Press. Other activist who have worked long and hard on the Mondrowitz case are upset with this section of the Lesher-Neusten letter:
…You
are also correct in deploring the fact that Mondrowitz “was indicted in
1984 only in connection with the charges made by the parents of
non-Jewish children.”
But
to blame the Jewish victims’ parents for their “apparent disinclination
to come forward” is not really fair. Those parents did not act of their
own accord. Our extensive information indicates that there were rabbis
who were aware of at least dozens of Orthodox Jewish Mondrowitz victims
when the official charges were being assembled. Rather than helping the
victims’ families to seek justice against the man whose alleged crimes
had so devastated a community, these rabbis either took no action or
actively discouraged the families from taking part in the law
enforcement process against Mondrowitz. When he fled to Israel, they
again counseled silence, leaving the victims and their advocates to
pursue the case without any support from their spiritual leaders.…
The argument is that Lesher and Neustein let parents off the hook too easily. Sure rabbis were terrible but, in the end, rabbis were only successful in covering for Mondrowitz (and Kolko and so many others) because parents let rabbis be successful. If parents had simply gone to police, Mondrowitz would have been stopped years ago, and many children would have been saved a life of torment caused by Mondrowitz's sexual abuse.
In Lesher's defense, he does represent victims. Criticizing these victims' parents may not be the wisest move for Lesher to make.
Still, the criticism here is spot on in the sense that parents must be made to understand the proper way to resolve a sexual assault against their prepubescent son or daughter is not to run to rabbis seeking redress. The beit din system is not equipped to deal with this type of criminal assault, and the results of relying on rabbis are, well, far less than stellar – just ask any of the boys, now men, Avrohom Mondrowitz anally raped in Brooklyn while haredi rabbis diddled.
A parent's first instinct should be to protect their child – it should not be to protect their rabbis' reputations or their other children's marriage prospects.
For anything to change, this lesson must be learned. For it to be learned, those haredi parents who instead choose to remain silent, to acquiesce to rabbis' inappropriate demands, and to abandon their children to the haredi omerta must be made to pay a price. That price must include some public censure.
It is never okay to allow a child rapist to escape justice, even if by doing so you spare your rabbis embarrassment, your schools lawsuits, and your other children shidduch troubles.
I've written this before but it is worth repeating. Would you allow a murderer to walk free and murder again if by doing so your children got better shidduchim (marriage partners)?
Certainly, there is no moral or halakhic question here. Jewish law mandates that you stop that murderer. A child abuser is not much different from a murderer. He destroys the lives of children, robs them of joy and happiness, and haunts them for their entire lives.
Yet these parents did just that. They allowed Mondrowitz and Kolko and others to rape their way through Brooklyn and justified this by the idea that they needed to protect their other children, not from the child rapists, mind you, but from less choice shidducim.
Yes, leading haredi rabbis made terrible decisions. They broke the law, they protected child rapists in order to save themselves and their institutions from legal jeopardy. They sold their souls to the devil, so to speak, and condemned other people's children to a lifetime of unimaginable suffering.
These rabbis need to be outed, publicly shamed, sued civilly and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
But none of this excuses a parent who sacrifices her child – and other people's children, as well – on the altar of a "good" family name and a better shidduch.
That this point has to be made by anyone, let alone a blogger, is perhaps the greatest indictment of the haredi world there will ever be.
Yes Cable has pulled the funniest ad in recent memory because haredim found it offensive. Sometimes the truth hurts. There is nothing offensive in that ad, nothing false or misleading.
Haredim oppose TV. They call it a "toevah." They regularly hold mass street protests against perceived Shabbat violations and other "desecrations."
The only difference between real life and the commercial is that, in real life the haredim do not sing and dance their protests – they hurl rocks at cars and buses, riot, burn garbage, vandalize property, attack "unbelievers," and commit other acts of violence.
Israel needs more ads like this one, not fewer. Embed this on your own blog as a form of protest. (Click the menu button for the html code.)
The New Yorker, of all places, has a brief profile of Aish HaTorah-New York City and its outreach program geared to wealthy executives who donate large sums of money to Aish – "(average: ten thousand dollars)". In this very brief piece, the Aish rabbi manages to mislead (okay, lie to) his student once and mislead the reporter once. First, the lie to the student:
“Maybe we can talk a little bit about Hanukkah,” [Rabbi Stuart] Shiff said.
“O.K.,” the executive said. “Seven candles?”
“Eight! We light eight candles to commemorate a miracle. What’s the miracle we’re commemorating?”
“I don’t know.”
“They found oil in a temple that was desecrated by the Syrian-Greek
army,” Shiff began. He got as far as the eight days, and the executive
interrupted. “Where did they get the idea in the first place? That’s my
question—who wrote the book?”
“The Maccabees,” Shiff said. “It’s history.”
“Yeah,” the executive said. “History I can buy.”
Of course, the only books written by the Maccabbees or their supporters are 1 and 2 Maccabees and neither mention any "miracle of oil." No Jewish source even hints at such a "miracle" until hundreds of years later, and those sources are all rabbinic, not Hasmonean. (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5.)
Now the lie to the reporter:
“We go everywhere,” Shiff said on the train. “We go to J. P. Morgan,
Bear, Bloomberg, Goldman—and everybody is so different. It’s not about
conforming to anything. That last guy, I think sometimes he thinks he’s
not living up to my expectations of him. But I don’t have any
expectations. My whole job is helping him to stay connected. We like
questions.”
If Mr. Wealthy Executive were Mr. Poor Working Stiff Aish would have far more "expectations" of him. Why? Because, Mr. Wealthy Executive's money buys him a lot of leeway. Anyone who has spent significant time at Aish in Jerusalem knows that the amount of time spent of students varies with evidence of money and evidence of buying into the program. If you do not have evidence of money and if you have very real, challenging questions about the Aish presentation of Judaism, you won't last long at Aish. Conversely, that same student, full of probing questions and not buying the Aish spin, will last far longer if he or his family are wealthy. Aish actively weeds out nonconformists at all levels of their program. Anyone deemd to be "not Aish material" is quickly pushed out. This process is relentless and heartless.
Aish is built on deception. Rabbi Noach Weinberg has spent more than 40 years developing ways to "get" kids, to deceive them, to manipulate them, to trick them into observance. There is an oft repeated rumor about Rabbi Weinberg. He and his wife have lived separate lives for many years, in adjoining apartments. They are divorced in all but name. Both hush up the separation to protect Aish and its womens' school, EYHAT. I've heard this from EYHAT students, from Aish students, from former BTs and from current "outreach professionals."
Rabbi Wienberg is a fraud, a charlatan, a snake oil salesman out to snatch the souls of your friends and your children. But don't worry. Even if he can't get your soul, he'll take your money – guaranteed.
Wednesday, December 12 is the scheduled court date for Avrohom Mondrowitz. To be decided is if Mondrowitz will remain incarcerated, if he will be given house arrest or if he will be released entirely. The extradition itself will be decided on at a later date, and that date itself has been delayed because during the past few days Mondrowitz replaced his longtime attorney. The new attorney requires time to get up to speed on the case, and the court is likely to grant that time. Israeli sources tell me Mondrowitz may be extradited three months from now. But they also tell me he may be extradited three years from now – either is equally likely, as is the possibility he will never be extradited.
What does all this mean?
If you want to clean up the rabbi-on-boy sexual abuse and other related problems that plague haredi society, you need to help keep the pressure on. That means coming forward if you are a victim of Mondrowitz or other rabbi pedophiles or if you have information regarding the ongoing coverup of this sexual abuse.
If you're not a victim but still want to make a difference, please make your voice heard. Write letters and leave blog comments. And urge your friends and neighbors to act. Try to band together and form parents organizations. Then use those organizations to demand mandatory background checks for all religious school employees and other measures meant to stop child sexual abuse.
The time to act is now, while a window of opportunity is still open. Work fast, because your friends at Agudah are working very hard to slam that window shut. Time is truly slipping away.
UOJ just sent me an email. Here's the gist of it. No comments can be posted on his blog except from his computer. Even UOJ can't post from other computers. And his email is acting up, as well.
Has the UnOrthodox Jew been hacked? He's not sure and neither am I. But, at this point, both of us are operating under the assumption that UOJ has in fact been hacked.
If you're having trouble leaving comments on UOJ's blog, you can leave them here in this post as a temporary measure. But please try to follow the comment rules for this blog as posted in the sidebar of this page. Thanks!
One of the (apparently many) alleged child sex abusers in Baltimore's Orthodox community has been arrested by police. Phil Jacobs of the Baltimore Jewish Times reports:
Yisroel Shapiro has been arrested and charged with two counts of
sexual offense in the third degree, sexual offense in the fourth degree
and battery.
An arrest warrant was carried out by Baltimore City Police
Department detectives at the request of the City State’s Attorney’s
office.…
Mr. Shapiro, the son of the late Rabbi Ephraim Shapiro, himself the
center of a Jewish Times investigation of alleged sexual molestation…
Mr. Shapiro had hinted to one of his victims that he had been abused as
a “young child” himself, and that he had received therapy.
In terms of his alleged crimes, Mr. Shapiro said to the victim, “I
can tell you I was not fully aware that I was doing something wrong.”
By some counts there are a dozen or more pedophiles just like Yisroel Shapiro in Baltimore's Orthodox community (or once in it). Many are rabbis.
…One of the sheva mitzvot incumbent upon ALL peoples (according to Judaism) is to set up a justice system. So as Jews, we preach to others that this is what they are obliged to do and Lubavitchers in particular have from time to time been involved in "outreach" to non-Jews, based on the sheva mitzvot. Then, when the government of our host country (the one we CHOOSE to live in, even when we have the choice to move to a Jewish country) acts righteously and fulfills that commandment by setting up a proper justice system that even its leaders are subject to, instead of encouraging them by upholding the system and its values, we, or some of our brethren, think nothing of undermining that justice system and holding it in contempt…
Stephen Gabriel Rosenberg, a great-grandson of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, is a fellow at the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. Rosenberg deals with the "miracle of oil" and the differing versions of events in 1 and 2 Maccabees this way:
… THERE IS no reason to doubt the First [Maccabees] or the Second [Second] version of the
Hasmonean Revolt. [The first] is written from the point of view of the
countryside, from Modi'in, and [the second] from the capital, from Jerusalem.
One mentions Mattiyahu defying the Seleucid officer, and one the
machinations of the high priests Jason and Menelaus. Neither version
mentions the miracle of the oil.
According to First Maccabees the eight days of Hanukka were to
consecrate the new altar, such a ceremony taking eight days as in the
time of Moses, of Solomon, of Hezekiah and Ezra.
According to Second Maccabees, the eight days were in
commemoration of the Festival of Tabernacles, that the Hasmoneans had
been unable to celebrate properly in Tishrei, while they were still
fighting and living in caves like animals.
So what about the story of the miracle of the oil? We see that
it assumes that the high priest was a person of impeccable integrity.
Second Maccabees tells us quite clearly that this man was Menelaus, a
rogue of the first water.
This information was never given us by our traditional teachers
and we must assume that the Talmudists did not know the Second Book of
Maccabees. It could either be that they never knew it or that they
ignored it as it was written in Greek.
On the other hand the First Book, with the story of Mattiyahu
they knew. This is not unexpected, for we know that Josephus Flavius,
the Jewish historian of the first century, was in a similar position.
He knew First Maccabees, which he copies extensively for the Hasmonean
battles, but it seems he did not know the different versions in the
Second Book.
It is therefore quite possible that the rabbis had only First
Maccabees to go on, they knew of Mattiyahu but not of Menelaus. They
did not know that the High Priest at the time the Hasmoneans forced
their way into the Temple was Menelaus, who was guilty of bribery,
stealing the Temple gold, and murdering the former high priest Honia.
If they had known that, would they have seen the seal of the high
priest as a guarantee of purity, would they have seen a miracle in a
cruse of oil sealed by such a high priest?
In other words, to believe in the "miracle of oil" as propagated by the rabbis of the Talmudic period, one would have to either dismiss 2 Maccabees or accept the idea that Menelaus – a murderer, thief and charlatan, a man who plundered the Temple and sold its golden vessels – would be trusted with regard to the purity of oil.
Further, Rosenberg makes a very valid point. If 1 and 2 Maccabees are viewed as originating in different locations – 1 in the small countryside villages and 2 in cosmopolitan Jerusalem – it puts the entire Mattityahu Maccabee legend in its proper perspective. Much the way oral histories, folk tales and urban legends vary in sophistication based on geographic area of origin, so do 1 and 2 Maccabees.
That leaves 2 Maccabees as the most authoritative source on the Hasmonean revolt.
And that, along with much other evidence, including evidence from 1 Maccabees, leaves the "miracle of oil" decidedly in the realm of Elvis sightings and the like.
Should this dampen your Hanukka spirit?
No, of course not. Celebrate the military victory and remember the eight days have real meaning – both as a late Sukkot festival that fateful year and as a rededication ceremony for the Temple.
Neither has anything to do with rabbis, and that is just fine with me.
…Why, if oil sufficient for one day was discovered
in Jerusalem's Holy Temple when the Maccabees reclaimed it from
Seleucid control, is Hanukka eight days long?
True,
that is how long the candles burned, allowing the priests to prepare
new, uncontaminated oil. But was not one of those eight days simply the
day for which the found oil sufficed, and thus not itself a miracle-day
worthy of commemoration? Suggests Rabbi Feinstein: Seven of Hanukka's
days commemorate the miracle that, in the time of the Maccabees, the
candelabrum's flames burned without oil. The eighth commemorates the
miracle of the fact that oil burns at all.…
Of course, the answer to that famous question, a question codified by Rabbi Yosef Karo almost 500 years ago, is not Rabbi Shafran's answer or Rabbi Feinstein's.
Hanukka is eight days long because the Hasmonean's meant for it to be a make-up holiday for Sukkot. (Part 1; Part 2.) They expected to retake the Temple in time for the Sukkot festivities but failed to do so. So they made and eight day holiday, mirroring the eight days of Sukkot, just over two months after the Sukkot ended. Then, in the following years, that eight day holiday, eventually known as Hanukka, was used to celebrate the Maccabees's military victory. There was no "miracle of oil."
Later, rabbis – who did not participate in the Maccabees's revolt and did not play a significant role in the state, invented the "miracle of oil" as a way to de-Maccabee the holiday.
History is not a haredi strong suit. Indeed, it is that willful ignorance that keeps the haredi world going.
UPDATE: You can see another version of the commercial here, complete with a closeup of the faux "pashkvil" (wall poster) against HD TV. [Hat Tip: DovBear.]
As first noted on UOJ's blog, Dov Hikind is looking for victims of Avrohom Momdrowitz willing to go on air with Dov on his radio show. Dov Hikind promises to respect victims need for anonymity and confidentiality. Please contact:Charnie at the office of Assemblyman Dov Hikind at 718-853-9616.
Ynet reports a National Religious day school in Petach Tikva segregated four Ethiopian girls from the rest of the student body because the Ethiopian children were not "religious enough." Yenet reports the school went so far as to give the Ethiopian girls cab fare home so they would not mix with white students and put the four in a separate classroom at the end of a hall. One teacher was assigned to teach the Ethiopian girls all subjects, while the rest of the student body had specialized teachers for every subject. Israel's Education Ministry condemned the school. So far, the rabbi in charge of the school has not apologized.
New Voices profiles a Satmar hasid, "Sam," who left Williamsburg at age 19 and, after much hard work and a lot of help from Footsteps, is now a college student in the New York City area. Here's a bit about cheder and yeshiva education in Satmar:
…Corporal punishment at school was expected and tolerated by the
community. Students were commonly hit with belts for violations as
minute as losing one's place in the text while it was being read aloud.
Sam recalls brutal treatment from his teachers, whom he grew to fear
and despise. He still bears the scar from a pen jabbed into his hand as
punishment for being late to class when he was four years old.
Sam says that he is no longer bitter or angry toward anyone in his old
community. He tells me a story of a family member who was abused by the
teachers and resents them greatly for it, yet sends his children to the
same school, dooming them to the same experience. Sam says that by
leaving, he is challenging this cycle of abuse. He doesn't hate the
teachers who tormented him and who he feels pushed him to abandon his
way of life and his religion. “They were hit, too” Sam says. “They
don’t know anything else.”…
How did "Sam" find Footsteps? He read about it in Hella Winston's book Unchosen. How did he read that book when he was never taught in school to read or write in the English language? Sam taught himself English by buying secular newspapers and secretly reading them on the roof of his apartment building. At first, it took him a week to read one paragraph.
Schools like "Sam" attended should not be (and probably are not) legal in New York State. But, because of the political influence of Satmar, gained for the most part through block voting, Satmar is left alone to produce thousands of high school graduates that cannot read English on a third grade level and who cannot write an English language sentence. These students are illiterate in science, math, algebra, geometry, physics, civics, history, and literature. Because of this, they are trapped in Satmar's self-imposed ghetto. Only a very courageous few like "Sam" find a way to get out. We should help them.
Joe Regenstein, a professor of food science at
Cornell University, advises Jewish groups and the meat industry on
issues of animal welfare. He is part of a two-person negotiating team
that is working to develop guidelines for humane practices amenable to
the two dozen or so fervently Orthodox rabbis who are responsible for
the glatt kosher industry.
A year ago, he says, the two sides reached consensus.
"They agreed to put it in writing," he says. "I am still waiting for that document."
That's no surprise to those of us who follow the kosher meat industry and the rabbis who supervise it. I told Regenstein then and in the year before that the rabbis would not come through.
What can we do about it?
Well, we could choose to eat humanely produced kosher meat, but this is a hard to find commodity and those producing it are not always, shall we say, truly interested in humane slaughter:
Rachel Wiesenfeld, who owns [Wise Organic Pastures] with her
husband and son, says that as far as she's concerned, all kosher
slaughter is humane. But when Whole Foods offered to carry their
chickens if they were certified by Steritech, a company that verifies
humane food production methods, the Wiesenfelds quickly agreed.
"Everyone was into this humane, humane, humane, so we went along with it as well," she says.
I'm truly sorry to say this but, as things now stand, your only true option if you care about humane slaughter and humane growing of chickens, cattle and other kosher food animals is to go veg. That shouldn't be the case. Sadly, however, it is.
The Forward has two opinion pieces on the future of the Center for Jewish History in NYC. In brief:
In 2000, five Jewish historical institutions — the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, American Sephardi Federation and American Jewish Historical Society — partnered to form the Center for Jewish History. Faced with financial difficulties almost since its inception, the consortium was approached this past September by New York University with an offer to merge the center and NYU’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies into what would be the largest institution for Judaic research outside of Israel. The proposal has sparked a robust debate on the future of the center and its invaluable archives; featured here are the views of two leading actors in the drama unfolding on 16th Street in Manhattan.
The two pieces take opposing views. The first is from Lawrence Schiffman, chair of NYU's Skirball Center for Hebrew and Judaic Studies. The second is from noted historian Elisheva Carlebach of Queens College and CUNY's Graduate Center.
As you read these pieces note the following – only one of the two scholars actually quotes from NYU's takeover proposal. That is Carlebach, who uses it, correctly, it seems, to argue against NYU's takeover. She points out this is really a real estate deal that would grant NYU some of the most valuable property in lower Manhattan with little if any obligation to maintain the center's mission. In fact, most of the center's archives would be moved to an off-site warehouse under NYU's plan and the public's access to materials curtailed.
For his part, Lawrence Schiffman sticks to generalities and avoids the details of his own plan, in effect arguing his case deceitfully. This is nothing new for Lawrence Schiffman, the man behind the NYU 'academic' conference on the life of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a conference that conveniently left off the agenda critics of the Rebbe and Chabad. And Lawrence Schiffman is also a bigot.
I hope the Jewish community has the wherewithal to resist NYU's offer, even if it lacks the ability to recognize the failings of the offer's main proponent.
I've long been puzzled by rabbinic references to foods that do not seem on the surface to be accurate. What do I mean? For example, lentils, which rabbis of old considered a suitable food to serve a mourner because they are "round."
But lentils are not round. Quite the contrary, they are almost flat with an oval shape, and have been from time immemorial. Look at this bit of lentil triva:
The optical lens is so named after the lentil (Latin: lens), whose shape it resembles.[1] The same applies also to Greek language, where the word φακός means lens and φακή means lentil. In the Persian language, a lens is referred to as adasi where adas means lentil. In Hebrew, a lens is known as adasha (plural adashot) and adash (plural adashim) means lentil. In Turkish, mercek means lens and mercimek means lentil. In French the word lentille is used to mean either lens or lentil. In Serbian, word sočivo and in Croatian leća, means both lentil and lens.
So what gives? Were rabbis simply playing fast and loose with reality in order to darshan Ya'akov's red (lentil) stew as the mourning meal for his family on his grandfather Avraham's passing, and thereby make Eisav look bad?
Maybe not.
Last week I had Indian food that had been imported from India rather than locally prepared. The lentils were round, almost like large peas. This is an unusual strain of lentil, now found mostly in India. Perhaps there was a time when these lentils were also found in Israel. Whether that time was concurrent with Ya'akov and Eisav or concurrent with Rabbi Yochanan and Yossi HaGlili is another matter, as is the possibility these round lentils were found in Babylonia during the time of Ravina and Rav Ashi but never in Israel during the past 5000 years.
This has implications for halacha because of the common measurements used in Jewish law – the size of a lentil and half a lentil. Why? Because the Indian round lentils are larger than our lentils by as much as two times.
So what is the real history of the lentil as it applies to Jewish law and thought? This, as we say, needs looking into. Perhaps some of you can do that and report back what you find.
Failed messiah was established and run in 2004 by Mr. Shmarya (Scott)Rosenberg. The site was acquired by Diversified Holdings, Feb 2016. .We thank Mr. Rosenberg for his efforts on behalf of the Jewish Community.
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