Forward In an apartment in the Austrian capital, Beth Alexander is
deleting hundreds of photos of her 5-year-old twin boys from Facebook.
In one picture, Benjamin and Samuel are laughing as
they hold a toy. In another they are waiting to be served lunch in their
native Vienna.
The ordinary snapshots are the kind uploaded by
countless mothers all over the world. Yet Alexander, a British-born
modern Orthodox mother in her 30s, is barred from displaying them by
order of an Austrian court, which in November ruled in favor of her
ex-husband’s motion claiming the photos violated the twins’ privacy.
“Removing these pictures is painful to me,” Alexander
told JTA this month in an interview via Skype. “They allow my family
back in Britain to sort of keep in touch with the boys and they show
that despite all that has been said about me, I’m a good mother and the
children are happy when they are with me.”
The injunction is the latest in a series of legal
setbacks that have left Alexander with restricted access to her boys and
declared barely fit to be a mother – rulings that have led to mounting
international criticism and claims of a colossal miscarriage of justice.
Leaders of the British and Austrian Jewish
communities have spoken out about what they consider to be a highly
unusual case that has unfairly limited Alexander’s maternal rights. Her
case even made it to the floor of the British Parliament, where
lawmakers last year described it as a Kafkaesque situation that has
wrongly maligned Alexander as mentally ill and an unfit mother.
“I have no reason to assume that Alexander is in any
way incapable of being a mother,” Schlomo Hofmeister, a prominent
Viennese rabbi who knows the Schlesinger case well, told JTA. Hofmeister
said it was tragic that the children were deprived of equal access to
their mother and called on both parents to “find a time-sharing
arrangement in the interest of these children, who are suffering.” [...]
Hey! What's going on here? The Austrian courts won't let Beth Alexander put pics of her twins on Facebook? But that's a totally normal thing for proud parents, grandparents and other relations all over the world to do. If the court has banned this excellent way for this young woman to show people what a loving, creative mother she is, then likely the court is collaborating with the wrong people so this evidence just vanishes from everyone's screens! The very act of banning the photos that obviously mean so much to the mother and her family so far away from those kids tells us that something is radically wrong! If this mother were tormenting her children and someone posted shots of that, the photos could be very useful in a court. But it seems that here someone is trying to have all evidence that the mother is a good one REMOVED FROM OUR COLLECTIVE MEMORIES!!!
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