Atheists seeking the benefits of religion

A Jewish hockey player - whose family suffered from Nazis - plays for Germany -

New York Times

A hockey jersey hung in each player’s locker. It bore Germany’s national colors, black trimmed in red and gold. The front was emblazoned with an eagle above the word Deutschland. This would be Evan Kaufmann’s first time wearing the jersey. He removed it from the hanger and turned it around to see his family name spelled in capital letters. 

He would recall feeling a tingle of excitement. He felt something else, too, emotions that crisscrossed like the laces of his skates. He was proud to wear the jersey but also solemn about what history had done to the name on the back. His great-grandfather starved to death by the Nazis. His great-grandmother herded to extermination on a train to Auschwitz. His grandfather shuttled between ghettos and concentration camps, surviving somehow, finding a displaced sister after the war, pushing her from a hospital in a wheelbarrow after her lower left leg was amputated because of frostbite. 

On Feb. 10, Kaufmann finished dressing and skated onto the ice at a tournament in Belarus. With his initial shift, he became one of the few Jews to represent Germany in elite international sports since World War II, the first in ice hockey since the 1930s and perhaps the most visible to have had family members murdered in the Holocaust, according to sports historians and Jewish officials.

A Palestinian’s trial & military justice - is there an alternative?

NYTimes

A year ago, Islam Dar Ayyoub was a sociable ninth grader and a good student, according to his father, Saleh, a Palestinian laborer in this small village near Ramallah. 

Then, one night in January 2011, about 20 Israeli soldiers surrounded the dilapidated Dar Ayyoub home and pounded vigorously on the door. Islam, who was 14 at the time, said he thought they had come for his older brother. Instead, they had come for him. He was blindfolded, handcuffed and whisked away in a jeep. 

From that moment, Islam’s childhood was over. Catapulted into the Israeli military justice system, an arm of Israel’s 44-year-old occupation of the West Bank, Islam became embroiled in a legal process as challenging and perplexing as the world in which he has grown up. The young man was interrogated and pressed to inform on his relatives, neighbors and friends.[...]

Alleged Australian child molesters David Kramer & Zev Sero - now in America

Forward

A child sex abuse scandal in Australia’s Jewish community has spilled into America, as a pending extradition, arrests in Australia and a slew of cover-up allegations put that community’s response to molestation under scrutiny.

Australian police are seeking to extradite convicted child molester David Kramer, currently in jail in Farmington, Mo., on suspicion of having abused children at a Chabad school in Melbourne during the 1990s. [...]

Waks, 35, who has been the catalyst for revelations about the Melbourne abuse scandal, told the Forward he was molested by Velvel Serebryanski, son of a prominent Chabad rabbi, at two Melbourne synagogues during the late 1980s.

Serebryanski, who goes by the name Zev Sero in New York, did not deny the allegations when a Forward reporter asked him about them at his Brooklyn home. [...]

Psychiatry debates whether the pain of loss is really depression

Los Angles Times

The pain of losing a loved one can be a searing, gut-wrenching hurt and a long-lasting blow to a person's mood, concentration and ability to function. But is grief the same as depression?

That's a lively debate right now, as the psychiatric profession considers a key change in the forthcoming rewrite of its diagnostic "Bible." That proposed modification -- one of many -- would allow mental health providers to label the psychic pain of bereavement a mood disorder and act quickly to treat it, in some cases, with medication. With the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual's fifth edition set for completion by the end of this year, the editors of the British journal The Lancet have come out in strong opposition to the new language, calling grief a natural and healthy response to loss, not a pathological state.

"Grief is not an illness. It is more usefully thought of as part of being human, and a normal response to the death of a loved one," writes the editor of The Lancet. "Most people who experience the death of someone  they love do not need treatment by a psychiatrist or indeed by any doctor. For those who are grieving, doctors would do better to offer time, compassion, remembrance, and empathy, than pills."

Companies find that regular down time from internet increases productivity

Time

Some employers, however, are now attempting to flip the “off” switch. Companies from Atos, the French information technology services giant, to Deutsche Telekom to Google have recently adopted measures that force workers toward a better work-life balance, with scheduled breaks from the Internet and constant connectivity. Just last month, Volkswagen, Europe’s biggest automaker, pledged to deactivate emails on German staff BlackBerries during non-office hours. In a bid to combat employee burnout, staff at Volkswagen will be limited to only receiving emails on their devices from half an hour before they start work until half an hour after they leave for the day, and will be in blackout mode the rest of the time.

“Employers are recognizing that it is helpful for employees to have boundaries,” says Stewart Friedman, a Wharton practice professor of management. “The challenges of distraction in the digital world are massive…. The big issue is attention. In this digital age — which has really only just begun — we are starting the process of learning how to create useful boundaries that allow us to pay attention to the things that matter, when they matter.”

These new policies signal that while corporations care about the psychological well-being of their workers, they are not totally altruistic. Evidence suggests that regular downtime leads to greater productivity. And although our addiction to digital devices is powerful — there is a reason, after all, that the BlackBerry is known as a “crackberry” — and we need some help breaking bad habits, it is not completely the responsibility of employers.

Queens public school teacher charged with sexually abusing boys

New York Times

 A computer teacher with a history of inappropriately touching children was arrested Thursday on charges of sexually abusing two boys at a Queens elementary school, the authorities said.

A spokeswoman for the Queens district attorney said the teacher, Wilbert Cortez, 49, touched the genitals and the buttocks of an 8-year-old and a 9-year-old over their clothes in his classroom at Public School 174 in Rego Park on at least two occasions during the 2010-11 school year. [...]

Los Angeles public schools failed to deal properly with child abuse

New York Times

The arrest of a public school teacher here early this month came with plenty of vivid details, thanks to hundreds of photographs that the police say show the teacher covering the eyes and mouths of children with tape and allowing cockroaches to crawl over faces. 

Those accusations alone were enough to prompt outrage. But more came: Another teacher at the same school was arrested on charges of sexually abusing children. Then came news reports that two aides at the school had been fired after being accused of abuse, and that one had been sentenced to 15 years in prison. 

Within days, other allegations surfaced at schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District: A high school music teacher was removed after being accused of showering with students; a third-grade teacher was being investigated for more than a dozen accusations of sexual abuse; an elementary school janitor was arrested and accused of lewd acts against a child. And on Wednesday, a high school softball coach and special education teacher was arrested on charges of sending inappropriate messages to children over the Internet.[...]

'Unorthodox' Author’s Claim Of Murder Cover-up Rebutted

Jewish Week

With allegations of communal cover-ups involving child sexual abuse dogging the haredi community over the past several years, it may not be much of a stretch for some readers to believe a gruesome story that appears in a new memoir about growing up in, and leaving, the Satmar community.

The story, recounted by Deborah Feldman in “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots” (Simon and Schuster), involves the alleged mutilation and murder of a boy by his own father — supposedly for masturbating — and the subsequent cover-up of the crime by Hatzolah, the community’s volunteer ambulance service.

The only problem, however, is that based on information obtained by The Jewish Week, the seems not be true.[...]

For Punishment of Elder’s Misdeeds, Afghan Girl Pays the Price

NYTimes

ASADABAD, Kunar Province — Shakila, 8 at the time, was drifting off to sleep when a group of men carrying AK-47s barged in through the door. She recalls them complaining, as they dragged her off into the darkness, about how their family had been dishonored and about how they had not been paid.

It turns out that Shakila, who was abducted along with her cousin as part of a traditional Afghan form of justice known as “baad,” was the payment. 

Although baad (also known as baadi) is illegal under Afghan and, most religious scholars say, Islamic law, the taking of girls as payment for misdeeds committed by their elders still appears to be flourishing. Shakila, because one of her uncles had run away with the wife of a district strongman, was taken and held for about a year. It was the district leader, furious at the dishonor that had been done to him, who sent his men to abduct her.

Rav M. Feinstein: For Moshe seeing not more real than hearing - Contradiction?

Igros Moshe(Y.D. 1:223): You bring from Sefer HaIkkarim (4:15) that the reason that Moshe did  not break the Tablets immediately when G‑d told him that the Jews had made the Golden Calf was because seeing is more powerfully real than knowledge. In my humble opinion, G‑d forbid to say that when Moshe heard about the Golden Calf that it was less significant to him than when he saw it himself - even in terms of emotional response. A possible explanation of why he broke the Tablets only after seeing the Golden Calf, because G‑d did not tell him about their enthusiastic dancing and therefore he thought it would be enough if they saw him - to completely repent immediately. However when he saw their enthusiastic dancing he realized that they would not so readily repent and therefore he broke the Tablets. You can also say that that he waited to break them so that the Jewish people could see him break the Tablets and realize the great loss they had caused because of the sin of the Golden Calf. This is stated explicitly in Devorim (9:14), “I broke the Tablets before their eyes.” This implies that he deliberately did it before their eyes. In addition it says later more explicitly in Devarim (34:12), “Before the eyes of all Israel.” Rashi explains this verse to mean that he intended to break the Tablets before their eyes. If so he had don possibility of breaking it when he first heard from G‑d about the Calf before he descended from  the mountain. He was thus forced to wait until he descended so they could all see that he was breaking the Tablets. In contrast regarding hearing something from another person it is definitely true that seeing is more powerful in eliciting emotions and there is no need to bring a proof to something so obvious.

Igros Moshe(O.C. 3:50): I replied to you many years ago and my reply was printed in my Igros Moshe (1:223) that G‑d forbid to say about Moshe that what he saw with his own eyes was much more real than what he heard from G‑d and that is the reason that he only broke the Tablets after he saw the Golden Calf with his own eyes. Now you write to me that the Akeidas Yitzchok also shares the view of the Sefer HaIkkarim. I in fact looked into the Sefer HaIkkarim and I saw that in fact he agrees with my view that there is no difference between hearing information from G‑d to seeing it oneself. He brings a medrash that the reason that Moshe didn’t break the Tablets previously was in order to inform the Jews that it is prohibited to act on knowledge – even absolutely certain knowledge until it is directly witnessed… The Akeidas Yitzchok himself wanted to say that Moshe wanted to break the Tablets in front of the Jews in order to magnify the message to increase their discomfort at sinning. This is a strong reason and I my explanation anticipates this as I wrote previously.

In contrast in Darash Moshe (Yisro):  

French court acknowledges fraud of iconic al-Dura killing

YNet

The French Supreme Court on Wednesday acquitted an Israeli doctor accused of slandering a Palestinian man who claimed he was injured by the IDF during the second intifada.

The Palestinian man, Jamal al-Dura, and his 12-year-old son Muhammad, became the symbol of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, when the two were caught in a fire exchange in the Netzarim Junction. The boy was killed in the incident, triggering a blame game: The Palestinians accused Israel for Muhammad's death, while Israeli officials claimed he was hit by Palestinian fire.