Conservative rabbi crusades for Anusim

Forward

Of all the rabbis ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary on May 21, few have journeys to the rabbinate quite as unlikely as Juan Mejia.

Raised as a Catholic in Colombia and educated at Christian schools, Mejia was on his way to becoming a monk when he discovered as a teenager that his family had Jewish roots. His grandfather would recall men gathering in darkened corners to place towels on their head and pray from a strange book.

After a torturous journey, which involved his rejection by the tiny Jewish community in Bogota and several years of study in Jerusalem, Mejia converted and began training for the rabbinate. Now Mejia is dedicating his rabbinate to helping Jewish descendants like himself who want to reconnect with their roots.

The plight of descendants of Conversos, those Jews forced to publicly recant their religion under threat of execution by the Inquisition but who continued to practice their religion in secret, has received more attention in recent years. Articles describing stories of Latino immigrants who discover their family’s strange rituals are Jewish in origin have appeared in both the Jewish and mainstream press.

Rabbi Rigoberto Emanuel Vinas, a Cuban-born rabbi who teaches classes in the Bronx for Anusim — as forced converts are known in Hebrew — has been featured in The New York Times.

Mejia promises to take the type of outreach Vinas has pioneered to a new level. With many Conversos shunned when they turn for help to Jewish communities in Latin America — those communities are beset by a “colonial mind-set,” Mejia said, and have contempt for the claims to Jewish ancestry by the locals — Mejia hopes to reach them over the Internet.

“I fight the Inquisatorial frame of mind,” he said. Mejia already runs a Web site that offers online instruction in Jewish topics. And with his rabbinical training now complete, he hopes to relocate with his wife, also ordained in late May at JTS, to the Southwest, where many Conversos are located.

Mejia believes that only in the United States, with its large, secure and welcoming Jewish community, can the Anusim be educated and brought back to their roots.

“The Anusim revolution,” he said, “starts here.” [...]

abuse - 2 pedophiles arrested

Haaretz [this item is in references to Har Nof]

Police remanded two men Wednesday suspected of more than 20 sexual attacks on young boys in an ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood. One of the two, a 17-year-old, is suspected of attacking an 11-year-old boy who lives in the neighborhood

The case came to light after the head of the yeshiva where the alleged victim studies told the boy's father six months ago that boy had told him an older boy had accosted him on the bus. The boy said the 17-year-old persuaded him the get off the bus with him, took him to the yeshiva where the older boy studies and molested him in the bathroom.

On the basis of the principal's allegations, the father filed a complaint with the police. On Tuesday, after the boy told his father he saw his alleged attacker on the street, the father called the police, who arrested the suspect. He confessed to nine other attacks on neighborhood boys.

Meanwhile, in the same neighborhood, a 43-year-old man was arrested and remanded Wednesday for molesting boys in recent years. Two teenage boys who complained that the man had molested them said he had attacked at least 10 boys, some of them allegedly friends of his children. [...]

Rav Sternbuch - Finding one's greatness

Rav Sternbuch Shavuos II

Rav Sternbuch & Theory of Evolution

Intermarried Rabbis (revised)

Jewish Week forwarded by RaP

[...]A few weeks ago New Voices, a Jewish student magazine, published “The Coming of the Intermarried Rabbi,” which leads with the story of a Berkeley, Calif., man denied admission to Hebrew College’s rabbinical school because his wife is Christian. Earlier this year InterfaithFamily.com raised the issue as well, with “Why I Am Not a Rabbi,” an essay about being rejected from the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College because the author’s non-Jewish husband was deemed a “problem” to be “fixed.” Both articles have been magnets for online comments, listserv discussions and blog postings, and in a few weeks the VeAhavta Collaborative, a new group of rabbis, rabbinical students and prospective rabbinical students dedicated to discussing this issue, is holding its first meeting.[...]

R' Klein - Abusers don't threaten society

Regarding my recent posting of Rav Menashe Klein's teshuva regarding child abuse, he accurately notes that the Torah requires two valid witnesses and other restrictions which make it obvious that the Torah can not deal with the plague of child abuse. He is in essence saying since we are halachic Jews - we can not violate the halacha just because we have a problem that can't be dealt with by halacha.

On the other hand Rav Eliashiv (click the link) and many other gedolim note that we are not allowed to let our society be destroyed by following the law of the Torah. There is a second mode of judicial operation called ais la'asos or migder milsa which must be invoked. This approach is clearly stated in the gemora and openly discussed by many rishonim and achronim and is codified in the Shulchan Aruch Choshen Mishpat 2. The Tzitz Eliezer has a long and learned discussion of this in 19:51.

Thus the issue is: 1) is our society threatened by child abuse? 2) who is authorized to prescribe extra legal procedures? Rav Klein clearly doesn't feel that our society is seriously threatened by abuse and he seems to feel that the rabbis who permitted extra legal procedures are a greater danger to Judaism.

Abuse - Ramat Beit Shemesh/ The System

JPost

For Zehava (not her real name), the decision to break with the stringent cultural norms of her tight-knit haredi community in Ramat Beit Shemesh and report the suspected sexual abuse of her three-year-old child to the secular authorities came quickly.

"I grew up in the community, but I have always been open and accepting of the world around me," begins the haredi-raised Zehava, as she shares the story of her battle against the town's religious leaders, who in her view turn a blind eye to the ongoing problem of sexual abuse in the semi-private haredi school system.

"We have an epidemic on our hands, and there is complete denial here that there is anything wrong," she continues. "I spoke to the rabbis and other community leaders here, but they all called me a liar and said that this kind of thing does not happen here... but it does."

Sadly, Zehava, a recent immigrant from the US, has proof of such abuse and is one of a growing number parents from Ramat Beit Shemesh becoming increasingly frustrated with their leaders' continual denial of the problem.

"Families of the victims are made to feel stupid," she says, adding that they are very often ostracized for speaking out about the problem on any level. "But I will not keep quiet; I want to do all I can to make sure that this does not happen to another child," she insists.

"I still feel guilty that I did not pay attention and continued to send my child to [kindergarten] every day," continues Zehava, describing how her child stopped talking, would not sleep at night and was often inconsolable after being continually abused by the teacher.

Only after two years of medical checks and, eventually, speech therapy did the whole story come out. Zehava took her child to the Jerusalem Center for Child Abuse, where her suspicions were confirmed.

"I know this has happened in other schools, too, because I have since met several parents who tell similar stories about their children," says Zehava, who met with other haredi parents earlier this week under the auspices of the Beit Shemesh-based community organization Lema'an Achai to brainstorm ways to tackle the issue.

"We are a lightning rod for all sorts of problems in the community here," says David Morris, founder and chairman of Lema'an Achai, which provides among its services support and guidance for haredi parents who believe their children might have been sexually abused.

Last summer, the organization set up the "Safe-Kids" hot line in conjunction with the Beit Shemesh social welfare services to provide a lifeline to local families whose children have been abused. While the service has not been inundated with calls, Morris says there have been between five and 10 concrete reports of sexual abuse in the community - and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

"If only one in 10 children actually reports what has happened to them, and then only one in 10 parents goes on to officially report what has happened to their child, and the police or social welfare services only get around to investigating one in 10 complaints, that means there are many more cases out there that we don't get to hear about," he says.[...]

Obama's vision for Middle East peace

NYTimes

During a telephone interview Tuesday with President Obama about his speech to Arabs and Muslims in Cairo on Thursday, I got to tell the president my favorite Middle East joke. It gave him a good laugh. It goes like this:

There is this very pious Jew named Goldberg who always dreamed of winning the lottery. Every Sabbath, he’d go to synagogue and pray: “God, I have been such a pious Jew all my life. What would be so bad if I won the lottery?” But the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldn’t win. Week after week, Goldberg would pray to win the lottery, but the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldn’t win. Finally, one Sabbath, Goldberg wails to the heavens and says: “God, I have been so pious for so long, what do I have to do to win the lottery?”

And the heavens parted and the voice of God came down: “Goldberg, give me a chance! Buy a ticket!”

I told the president that joke because in reading the Arab and Israeli press this week, everyone seemed to be telling him what he needed to do and say in Cairo, but nobody was indicating how they were going to step up and do something different. Everyone wants peace, but nobody wants to buy a ticket.

“We have a joke around the White House,” the president said. “We’re just going to keep on telling the truth until it stops working — and nowhere is truth-telling more important than the Middle East.”

A key part of his message, he said, will be: “Stop saying one thing behind closed doors and saying something else publicly.” He then explained: “There are a lot of Arab countries more concerned about Iran developing a nuclear weapon than the ‘threat’ from Israel, but won’t admit it.” There are a lot of Israelis, “who recognize that their current path is unsustainable, and they need to make some tough choices on settlements to achieve a two-state solution — that is in their long-term interest — but not enough folks are willing to recognize that publicly.”[...]

Draft-dodging and Tal Law

Arutz7

(IsraelNN.com) Retired IDF Major-General Elazar Stern spoke at an event rallying for the end of the Tal Law, which allows full-time yeshiva students to postpone their IDF service. Prior to his retirement earlier this week, Stern served as head of IDF manpower. The event was held in advance of a Supreme Court hearing next week regarding the law.

The issues of hareidi-religious IDF exemptions, and of draft dodging in other Israeli Jewish communities, threaten more than just IDF manpower, Stern said. Israeli society is “rotting from within,” he said."If we are no longer socially involved, that will be one of the biggest existential threats we face,” he warned. He rejected calls to make IDF service optional, saying, “Mandatory enlistment is about much more than the number of recruits.” Israel cannot afford to pay soldiers a much higher wage in order to lure young men and women to volunteer for service, he added.[...]

Conversion - Court ordered funding to Reform

JPost:

The Knesset Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs Committee held a stormy debate on Monday afternoon over whether or not the state is implementing the recent High Court of Justice ruling requiring it to fund non-Orthodox conversion programs.

The urgent hearing was held at the request of MK Shlomo Molla (Kadima).

"The court was called in to address this matter because the state gave the Orthodox institutions a monopoly on conversion. There is room in Israel for religious pluralism," said Molla. "That is why the courts passed the reins on to us."

Molla, in his opening remarks, emphasized that he did not intend to hold a halachic debate on the nature of Reform conversion, but rather to discuss the division of funds for such private conversion centers.

"It cannot be that the Israeli taxpayer is funding only one type of conversion," he said. "Religious pluralism is a foundation stone of any democratic state. The state must therefore view all of the streams of Judaism as equals and the Immigrant Absorption Ministry must carry out the High Court ruling to the letter of the law."

But it was exactly the halachic debate to which lawmakers were drawn, with MK Moshe Gafni (United Torah Judaism) infuriating representatives of the Reform Movement by terming them "haters of Israel."

"There are rules set for joining the Jewish people," said Gafni. "It is not just being here and being a citizen. Mixing these fields could bring about a national tragedy."

Shas faction chairman MK Avraham Michaeli argued that "the High Court ruling is causing waste of the government's money, because the Reform converts are not achieving the goals of conversion. Their conversions do not allow them anything in terms of marriage and divorce, and they cause confusion and divisiveness among the nation." [...]

Abuse - Female teachers as predators

Time Magazine

[...] "This isn't an 'affair,' it's abuse, and we have to shift that paradigm," says Terri Miller, president of Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation (SESAME) in Nevada. "We say, 'Bully for the boy and his conquest of the geometry teacher,' but that makes it harder for boys to vocalize their victimization." Indeed, studies by psychologists like Julie Hislop, author of the 2001 book Female Sex Offenders: What Therapists, Law Enforcement and Child Protective Services Need to Know, note that boys who are sexually abused by women often develop alcoholism, depression and their own sexual dysfunctions, including rape, as men. [...]

Halacha supercedes ethical principles /Chazon Ish

Chazon Ish(Emuna and Bitachon 3:1-2): Moral imperatives are sometimes halachic issues. In such cases the halacha decides what is prohibited and what is permitted. For example it says in Bava Basra (21b) that teachers are not protected by laws against competition. If a community has truly dedicated teachers and then teachers come from another city - the natural response is not to be happy with the original teachers. Therefore there will be interest in hiring the new teachers and the established teachers will lose their livelihood. The natural response is for the established teachers to hate the new teachers and because of this hatred to try and find and to speak about defects and problems in the new teachers. It will degenerate to a point where the original teachers will make up slander and try to arouse mercy from the residents of the community against the cruel newcomers. This will result in disputes and controversy and at times revenge when they see an opportunity. All of this activity of the former teachers would appear to be justified and free of sin – if in fact the halacha was in agreement with them that they had the right to restrain the new teachers. It would be justifiable if the new teachers were sinners and had violated the halacha of the Torah. Thus the defense against the new teachers – based on moral principles – would not involve prohibited disputes or lashon harah or gratuitous hatred. Consequently it would seem that this is a fight for justice. But in fact the halacha has clearly decided that the governing principle is that jealousy of teachers leads to greater wisdom. This principle overrules the welfare of the individual teachers. Thus the newcomers are actually correct according to the halacha and those who fight against them are spilling innocent blood. The hatred of the original teachers against the newcomers in fact is violating the Torah principle of not hating one’s brother in your heart. When the old teachers speak badly about the new teachers they are violating the prohibition of lashon harah. When the old teachers rally the community to their side they are violating the principle of “not being like Korach.” When they take revenge against the new teachers they are violating the Torah principle of not taking revenge. When Bava Basra (21b) says that the old teachers cannot prevent the hiring of the new ones – many ethical principles are affected. 2) It is one of the obligations of the ethical person to try and establish in his heart this great principle. In every case where people harm each other, it is necessary to establish according to the halacha who is the aggressor and who is the victim. Focus entirely on the ethical consideration create a sensitivity and love for the victim and bitter anger to the aggressor. However there is great danger when this ethical consideration ignores the halacha which gives just the opposite understanding. In the eyes of halacha the pursuer becomes the pursued and the pursued becomes the pursuer. The only true understanding is that of halacha which has been transmitted to us by our Sages.

Divorce & Chareidi women

Haaretz

She left an encouraging meeting with the matchmaker and waited patiently for her daughters, aged 7 and 6, to finish their art therapy workshop. Aliza (not her real name) is a 27, ultra-Orthodox, and she is sharp, self-confident, with a ready smile. She received her get, or Jewish bill of divorce, a year ago, but she separated years before from the man she had married young and is raising their daughters alone. Like all the women interviewed for this article, she brings her children to the Em Habanim center several times a week, mostly in the afternoon. She recently participated in a series of psychodrama sessions "to increase consciousness in preparation for remarriage," and will soon complete real estate agent training, in preparation for a second, more lucrative career.

On one recent morning her daughter cried all the way to preschool. Aliza overheard the teachers telling each other that there is nothing to be done, that's how it is with girls whose parents are divorced. "Sometimes I feel as fragile as an egg, and yet I must soldier on, be strong, be the mom and the dad," says Aliza. "Shabbat is the hardest. Even though I have a warm family and friends and today there is much more openness toward divorce in Haredi society, nothing can make you get used to the feeling of loneliness on Shabbat."

For Aliza and more than 300 other Haredi women who belong to Em Habanim, the nonprofit organization is more than a recreational center. Some of the families here spend Shabbatot and holidays together under its auspices, and the women operate a social group that continues long past the center's hours and includes Internet forums for divorced Haredi women.

"Coming here is a joy. It doesn't solve my problems, and doesn't increase my child support payments. The main thing here is dealing with things together, and the fact that the staff put their hearts and souls into it. It's a heavy load; it grows much lighter together," Aliza says. During a hallway chat, one of the staffers unthinkingly uttered the phrase "broken home," and it was clear he was referring to family, any family, post-divorce. In Haredi society, and also outside it, this term is still part of learned explanations as to why a boy from a "broken home" will not be admitted to a sought-after educational institution, or why another boy is not excelling in school, and why both are likely, in a few years, to marry women who likewise came from "broken homes." [...]