Stanley Levitt pleads guilty to child abuse

Boston Herald   A Philadelphia rabbi accused of preying on young boys in the 1970s — assaulting them in the hospital and in sleepovers at his former Brighton home — today pleaded guilty to multiple counts of sexual assault, ending the case just as it was about to go to trial.

Stanley Levitt, 66, faces up to 40 years in prison when a judge sentences him tomorrow on four counts of indecent assault and battery on a child, according to the Suffolk County district attorney’s office. Prosecutors say they will seek prison time.

A trial for the former Brookline religious teacher was scheduled to start today.

According to authorities, all three of Levitt’s victims were sixth-grade students in 1975 and 1976 at a Jewish day school, where he taught in the mid-1970s. Two originally came forward with accusations that led to set of 2009 indictments, while the third came forward later, telling police Levitt assaulted him during a sleepover when the rabbi told him to take a shower before bed.

Tamar Epstein's feelings about Aharon: Court records

 I have seen the court records which the following was excerpted
 =========================
Another Guest Post

When Tamar abducted the child she had with Aharon from Silver Spring to Pennsylvania, she left behind in the apartment notes on her marriage to Aharon.  Tamar acknowledged that she wrote these notes both in the Baltimore Beis Din and in civil court.

The following are excerpts from those notes:

Why I love/like Aharon/what I respect:

respect: shmiras halashon

loyalty - I can trust will always be at my side when crises

makpid on kashrus and davening

idealistic - can also be tiresome/absurd

loving/sweet/ affectionate/gentle to me

lets me spend money - equal share

sometimes helpful

open/honest/real to me

doesn't pressure me to go back to work

appreciates me - taking care of baby etc.

=================

Perhaps this is at least part of the reason the Baltimore Beis Din, to which the parties brought the matter, and which held several hearings in the case with the participation of both parties did not rule that a get should be given.

There are no grounds for kfia (coercion against Aharon to give a get). This is not even a valid claim of ma'os alai. How could anyone believe that a get given in this case under pressure of a kidnapping and beating (or even ORA's demonstrations) would have any validity?

30 suspected pedophiles arrested in sting operation

YNet  According to the police, more than 30 suspects have been arrested as part of the investigation, headed by the National Fraud Unit, and described as the first and largest of its kind to ever take place in the country. 

The majority of the suspects have no criminal record; and include students, civil servants, a defense establishment official, a former police officer and an agronomist – to name a few.

According to the police, they range in age from 20-57 and reside all over Israel. "We can't put our finger on anything specific and say 'this is the profile,''" a source privy to the investigation said.

The investigation was launched in April, after the police were able to recruit an "expert witness" – a pedophile who was arrested and agreed to collaborate with the police.

The suspect provided investigators with certain behavioral codes common in Israel's online pedophilia community, thus enabling them to construct a virtual profile of a 12-year-old girl.

Fear of cutting down fruit trees

NYTimes In certain Orthodox Jewish communities, from Borough Park to Monsey, N.Y., rabbis say, there is a strong aversion to chopping down fruit trees, which results from some combination of biblical verses, Jewish law and mystical documents that prohibit destroying them wantonly. In New York City, where space is tight and the option to build out in another direction generally does not exist, that means friendly neighborhood foliage can present an especially hard challenge.

“It’s an extraordinary reminder of the kind of spiritual consciousness people need to be able to sustain, particularly in urban settings,” said Rabbi Saul J. Berman, an associate professor of Jewish studies at Yeshiva University. “You see this tree and the way it’s being guarded, and suddenly you realize there’s something going on here besides just human needs.”

This broader consideration, however, does not always come cheaply, as Mr. Wieder can attest to, or easily. 

Others have wrapped more than just a staircase around a tree in the name of keeping it alive — like, for example, an entire building. 

At Shloimy’s Bake Shoppe on 12th Avenue in Brooklyn, where flaky perfection can be found in the form of hand-rolled rugelach, there is a glass enclosure toward the back, right behind a giant oven and stacks of baking trays. Inside this glass box, which is open to the sky, is a berry tree. 

“When we bought this place, we thought we would build all the way back, and then it became summer,” said Joe Leiberman, whose family owns the bakery. “We saw it was a fruit tree, and we changed all the plans.” 

Interpretations may vary, but several rabbis, including Rabbi Berman, Rabbi Mayer Schiller and Rabbi Gavriel Zinner, who has written more than two dozen books on Jewish law and tradition, say this practice emerged from a passage in Deuteronomy: Even in wartime, one should not chop down your enemies’ fruit trees. There are also Talmudic sources, some said. And a mystical document called the Will of Rabbi Yehudah HaChosid, which dates back nearly 1,000 years and tends to hold more sway in Hasidic communities, took it further. 

“He very cryptically asserted that it’s really dangerous to cut down a fruit-bearing tree because you’re tampering with God’s property,” Rabbi Berman said. “And if you want to tamper with God’s property, be cautious.”

Rabbinic court permits "divorcee" to marry Cohen

Ynet   Jewish law states unequivocally that a Cohen cannot marry a divorced woman, but there are exceptions. The Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court last week ruled that it would approve the divorce of two people who married in a civil service in the US – but that the divorce would not interfere with the woman's marriage to a Cohen.

Israeli law determines that the act of divorce between two people must go through the Rabbinical Court. The couple married in January 2006 in a ceremony with a Christian judge, in the presence of the bride, the groom, and one of the bride's friends. 

Both sides and their relatives testified that they were told the marriage was for the purpose of getting the woman a work visa in the US. The couple lived together for four months.  

Now the couple sought to end their marriage and define themselves as divorcees – without the husband giving her a 'Get' (Jewish divorce document). The woman testified that she has been in a relationship with a Cohen for over a year and that she wishes to marry him according to Jewish tradition. The husband also stated that if he were to marry in the future he would choose to marry according to Jewish tradition.

In light of the circumstances, the court decided to respond to the couple's request. The Dayanim ruled that the woman's request to marry a Cohen meant that she was in the halachic state of 'Shaat Dachak' (time of distress) where it is possible to facilitate their request and enact a divorce without a 'Get.'

Feeling Hopeless, a Tisha B'Av Writing

I just received the following letter with an attachment which I am publishing here.

Guest Post: I have been following your blog for quite some time now, and I feel really grateful for all the postive work you are doing. I was wondering if you would be ok with posting the attached letter that I wrote this Tisha B'Av on your blog.  Many thanks. 

Feeling Hopeless, a Tisha B'Av Writing

Mishpacha strongly advocates alternative medicine

There is a bizarre debate going on in Mishpacha magazine regarding one of their columnists who is a strong advocate of alternative medicines and a strong critic of conventional medicine. This is even more bizarre considering an excellent article published in Mishpacha by Debbie Shapiro in 2010 regarding a person who nearly died from an alternative "cure" that disregarded conventional medicine. The columnist defends himself by stating that he is just presenting information and it is up to the reader to decide how to use it. I find that rather a poor excuse especially when the columnist is presented as a rabbi in a magazine which emphasizes rabbinical authority in all areas of life. Here are the recent exchanges of letters which were published in the Hebrew Mishpacha.

Mishpacha July 2012 Alternative Medicine Debate

Aleppo Codex - who stole it? II

NY Times  The story of what happened next — how the codex came to Israel and where the missing pages might have gone — is a murky and often contradictory one, told by many self-serving or unreliable narrators. In his book, “The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible,” published in May by Algonquin Books, the Canadian-Israeli journalist Matti Friedman presents a compelling and thoroughly researched account of the story, some of which served as the catalyst for additional reporting here. [...]

“The official version of the story, the one I knew at the outset, states that the Aleppo Codex was given willingly to the State of Israel,” Friedman told me. “But that never happened. It was taken. The state authorities believed they were representatives of the entire Jewish people and that they were thus the book’s rightful owners, and also, perhaps, that they could care for it better. But those considerations don’t change the mechanics of the true story — government officials engineered a sophisticated, international maneuver in which the codex was seized from the Jews of Aleppo, and then arranged a remarkably successful cover-up of the fascinating and unpleasant details of the affair.” [...]

During the course of the work, which took six years, Maggen, the head of the museum’s paper-conservation lab, discovered something of major significance: Until then, the story that had been officially told was that the missing pages were destroyed in the blaze at the Aleppo synagogue, a theory supported by the purple signs of charring that existed on the edges of the rescued pages. But Maggen found that the purple markings were not caused by fire at all, but rather by a mold that discolored the pages. If these pages weren’t damaged by fire, then how could the others have been destroyed?[...]

In an interview shown in 1993 on Israel national TV, Moussaieff recalled: “They put the suitcase on the bed, opened it, opened a silky paper that was covering it. All of a sudden, my eyes popped out. I saw between 70 and 100 parchment pages lying on top of each other, inscribed with black ink that because of time had reddened slightly. In large letters, about double the size of a Torah scroll’s letters, with vowels. The handwriting was a little like a dancing handwriting. . . . I have no doubt that what I saw was part of the Aleppo Codex.”

The two argued over the price, and Moussaieff finally offered to buy only part of the manuscript, to which Schneebalg replied that it was all or nothing. In retrospect, Moussaieff would admit that he made a huge mistake. As he told a reporter from an Israeli newspaper in 1993: “I was greedy. I tried to make a lower offer, thinking perhaps they would agree to take less. The price they were asking wasn’t sky-high, but I tried to bargain with them. That’s how I lost the codex. Another buyer paid $100,000 more than I was ready to pay. . . . It’s with an ultra-Orthodox Jew in London. I have no intention of revealing his name.”

Mother flees to protect her child from female "husband"

The biological mother in a lesbian relationships decides to repent and leaves her partner to whom she is legally married to in Vermont. The partner demands visitation rights - and the mother flees the country with her daughter to save her from her immoral partner.

NYTimes  Lisa Miller and Janet Jenkins met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Falls Church, Va., in 1997. In later interviews, with supporters and her lawyers, Ms. Miller described growing up with a mentally unstable mother and dealing with her own problems of pill addictions, food disorders and self-mutilation. After a failed marriage and a suicide attempt, she said, she began seeing women.

Ms. Jenkins, when they met, had recently ended a long-term relationship with a woman.

“It was a normal courtship, and we fell in love,” Ms. Jenkins recalled. “We wanted to have a family and spend the rest of our lives together.” 

They became pioneers of sorts: in 2000, soon after Vermont became the first state to offer civil unions, they traveled there to seal the relationship, adopting the joint surname Miller-Jenkins. 

When Ms. Miller decided to get pregnant through in vitro fertilization, they picked a donor with Ms. Jenkins’s green eyes. Isabella Ruth Miller-Jenkins was born in Virginia on April 16, 2002. Ms. Jenkins cut the umbilical cord as her own mother, Ruth, stood in the room. 

Preferring to raise a family in a state that endorsed same-sex relationships, the couple moved to southern Vermont. They bought a two-story house within walking distance of a grade school in Fair Haven, a small town known for Victorian houses and summer music on the village green. 

Ms. Miller later said in interviews that even before the move, she was rediscovering Christianity and questioning her lesbianism. During her difficult pregnancy with Isabella, “I promised God that if he would save my baby, I would leave the homosexual lifestyle,” she said in notes she left for one of her lawyers, Rena M. Lindevaldsen, associate dean of the Liberty University Law School. Ms. Lindevaldsen describes the notes in “Only One Mommy,” New Revolution Publishers, her 2011 book on Ms. Miller and what she calls the threat of “the homosexual lifestyle.”

Polygamy - a Mormon family with 3 wives

Time Magazine  Polygamy is one of the few practices that still evoke genuine disgust in people. It’s a watchword for ignorance, sexual depredation, oppression of women and weird, culty outfits. But spurred on by the same-sex marriage debate and more-sympathetic portrayals of polygamists and polyamorists in our larger culture, some plural families are coming out of the shadows and beginning to advocate for their way of life.

One of these families, the Dargers, independent fundamentalist Mormons, invited me into their home to check out how they live. I report about it in the Aug. 6 issue of TIME, which subscribers can read here. The Dargers are a model non-monogamous family. They’re attractive, they dress well, and they labor mightily to provide for their 23 kids.

This helps because their setup is pretty weird: Joe, the patriarch, is married to three women, two of whom are identical twin sisters. He married one of those sisters (Vicki) and another woman (Alina) at the same time, after dating them at the same time, all at the women’s consent. It gets weirder. Val, the other twin, was married to another polygamous guy and had five kids with him before she fled. Vicki and Alina told Joe that he should marry her too, they say. So he did.

But for a deeply unconventional family, they look pretty normal. (Watch a video about their life here.) They live together in a cheerfully messy house outside Salt Lake City, with three master bedrooms, boatloads of items bought in bulk and eye-watering amounts of laundry.

Pilegesh: Sh.Aruch E.H. 26:1 - Summary of Views

The basic question is whether pilegesh represents an alternative form of marriage based on equality rather than subordination - which has minimum responsibility and benefits but is also readily ended without the problem of Aguna  or whether it constitutes a relationship based primarily on lust and irresponsibility and thus is harmful to society, family and the individual. In the following posting I plan to summaries the different views as found in Otzer haPoskim.

Shulchan Aruch (E.H. 26:1): A woman is not considered an eishes ish (married woman) except by means of kiddushin in which she is properly sanctified. However if their relation is just fornication - not for the sake of kiddushin – she is not considered a married woman at all. Even if they have sexual relations for the purpose of marriage – which they agree to privately between them – she is not considered his wife even if he designates her to be exclusively for him. In fact not only is she not considered his wife but we force him to remove her from his house. Rema:  That is because a woman in such a relationship will be embarrassed to go to mikveh and consequently they will have sexual relations when she is a niddah (Tur). However if she is designated for an exclusive relationship with him and she goes to mikve there are those that say that is the pilegesh mentioned in the Torah  (Ravad). And some say (Rambam, Rosh  and Tur)  that such a relationship is punished by lashes because it violates the prohibition of kadesha (prostitute) Devarim (23:18).

 Does a pilegesh have kiddushin or not? If there is no kiddushin does that mean that a get is not required? Kesubos 51 states that a pilegesh has no kiddushin and has no kesuba. This question ultimately is whether a pilegesh is an eishes ish or not.  If she is not an eishes eish then does that mean she is a kadesha or zona?

The Otzer haPoskim simon 26 divdes the halachic views into a number of groups

1) Pilgesh is prohibited because we have a positive command to have kiddushin

2) Pilegesh is prohibited because she is not an eishes ish which can only be produced through kiddushin and therefore she is considered a prostitute

3) Pilegesh is only permitted for a king - and there is no kiddushin or kesuba - for an ordinary person she is considered a prostitute.

4) Pilegesh is prohibited by rabbinic decree

5) Pilegesh is permitted

6) Pilegesh is permitted by the Torah but it is morally destructive and therefore it is prohibited.

7) Pilgesh is permitted by the Torah but it constitutes an additional wife which is prohibited by Rabbeinu Gershom

8) Pilegesh is in fact permitted but has not been done for many years - but in situations of need it can be permitted.

In addition there is a major dispute as to whether kiddushin and a Get is required. Furthermore there are some such as Tosfos (Gittin 6a) which imply that the problem with pilegesh is maris ayin (rather than eishis ish) because people think she is an eishes ish. Therefore it is the minhag not to take her back if she has an affair with other men and similarly that she is given a get if she wants to quit the relationship.

 [to be continued]

Molester Andrew Goodman now faces possible life sentence

NYDaily News  A convicted child molester who got off with a measly two-year sentence from a Brooklyn judge was slapped with federal charges Wednesday that could put him away for the rest of his life.

When Andrew Goodman was sentenced in state Supreme Court last month on 48 counts of sexually abusing two young brothers, the creep professed his love for one of the victims, who was present in the courtroom.

But Goodman now faces a damning complaint charging him with the interstate transportation of a minor for the purpose of sexual assault.

Goodman, 27, is accused of traveling with the then-15-year-old victim in February 2010 to Atlantic City where he raped and sodomized the boy in a hotel room. If convicted, Goodman faces a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison and a maximum of life .

Chareidim flock to museum exhibit about Chassidim

JPost   The traditional way that hassidic men wear their coat is with the right side closed over the left side. This is because the right symbolizes mercy and the left symbolizes judgment, and they want their clothing to be an expression of the wish that God’s mercy will triumph over all.

This is just one of the tidbits from the Israel Museum’s exhibit on hassidic Judaism called “A World Apart Next Door: Glimpses into the Life of Hassidic Jews.” Surprisingly, though, the most enthusiastic visitors to the exhibit are not the secular public but haredim (ultra-Orthodox).

Despite the fact that the museum is open on Shabbat, haredim from all sects, both hassidic and non-hassidic, have come to the museum in record numbers since the exhibit opened on June 19. It runs until December 1.

Exhibit curator Ester Muschawsky-Schnapper, a 30- year veteran of the museum, believes haredim are drawn to the exhibit for two reasons. First, because their communities are fairly isolated even within haredi neighborhoods, and there’s the natural curiosity to see how other ultra- Orthodox sects celebrate their traditions. The second reason haredim are drawn to the exhibit is to understand how the outside world views their community.

Channel 10's report: Chareidim working on sly

YNet Tens of thousands of haredim are focused on studying the Torah in order to defend Israel, which is why they are exempt from military service under the Tal Law – but what is actually happening on the haredi street?

Israel's Channel 10 filmed an investigative report that shows how the military service deferral is exploited for profit at the State's expense.

When one yeshiva student candidate was asked if he had a problem with pay slips he responded that he did, because of the army. He then says that he was previously employed under the table. When asked how he was paid he explained that the pay slip went to someone else and eventually he received cash.

If it became known to the authorities that the student worked, he would not only have to pay income tax, but would also lose out on benefits worth thousands of shekels.