Information from Neturi Karta broke Chareidi fraud ring

YNET

[...] "The investigation shows that dozens of organizations were founded and transferred fake names to the Education Ministry in order to illegally receive funds," a police official said.

The police began to covertly monitor the illegal activity a few months ago, when members of the Neturei Karta sect found out their names were being used to receive stipends from the State, and informed law enforcement officials. [...]

Students in Chareidi schools pray for supreme court to allow segregated buses

YNET

    

הבוקר: ילדי החרדים מתפללים למען קווי המהדרין

במוסדות החינוך החרדיים הקדישו זמן מיוחד לתפילה למען הצלחה בדיון בבג"ץ בעניין ההפרדה באוטובוסים. דובר ועדת הרבנים שפרסמה מודעה המבקשת את התפילה: "פסיקה נגד הקווים תגרום לקיפוח הציבור החרדי"

Rav Eliashiv strongly condemns those who defraud the Israeli government

YNET

    

הרב אלישיב: דין רודף למעורבים בפרשת ההונאה

בהתבטאות נדירה בחריפותה יצא מנהיג הזרם הליטאי נגד המעורבים בפרשת הונאת המיליונים בכוללים. למרות השימוש במושג ההלכתי החמור, אין הכוונה להתיר את דמם של העצורים

מנהיג הציבור החרדי-ליטאי, הרב יוסף שלום אלישיב, התבטא הערב (יום א') בחריפות נגד העצורים בפרשת ההונאה בכוללים באזור ירושלים, ואמר כי אם החשדות נגדם נכונים – חל עליהם דין רודף.

 הוא הסביר כי העצורים החרדים גרמו במעשיהם לחילול השם, שעלול להתנקם ביהדות החרדית בארץ ובעולם - ויש להתייחס אליהם בחומרה.

Dr. Asher Lipner in Child & Domestic Abuse Volume I

p 135

Impact of sexual abuse on victims’ feelings about religion

It has been reported by rabbis and organization directors that specialize in working with the teens-at-risk population as well as researchers, that sexual abuse has been identified as a leading cause of the “off the derech” syndrome.  I have heard estimates from several rabbis of between 50 to 80 percent of at risk teens in the Orthodox community have been sexually traumatized.
 
A child’s development of a relationship with G-d is influenced directly and indirectly through both conscious and unconscious feelings about his or her relationship with adult caregivers, aespecially parents.   When a child has been abused or neglected by an adult or authority figure who is trusted, his or her ability to have faith in all authority figures can be shaken, including with the ultimate Authority of G-d.  When a rabbi or religious teacher is the one who abuses, it may feel like G-d himself sanctioned the sexual trauma.

Often there are feelings of anger, resentment and suspicion regarding anything religious.  Furthermore, as we will describe further on, religious teachings have often been used by the community to neglect and abandon victims of abuse.  Whether it is the resistance and refusal to confront the abuser (which would protect the victims) due to concerns of “lashon harah” “mesirah,” or “mevayesh b’rabim,” or unrealistic standards of proof, like requiring two kosher witnesses, etc., or failure to provide children with information about sexuality with which to protect themselves due to “modesty,” or the denial of the prevalence of the problem in the Jewish community due to concerns of “Chillul Hashem,” the survivors of abuse often feel that Orthodox society is set up to hurt them and to perpetuate the abuse of children. [...]

American fantasy:Peace in Middle East

NYTimes

...The answer has a number of levels, but the most important is this: The United States believes that if it can end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its fraught relationship with the Muslim world will greatly improve, thereby allowing America to accomplish much that is currently eluding it in places like Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, not to mention easing its role as the prime guarantor of Israel’s own security.  ...

Many Israelis dismiss this as a form of magical thinking.

“Let’s play a mind game,” suggested Mark Heller, a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. “Let’s assume that you’ve resolved the conflict or that Israel has disappeared or that Israel and the United States are now enemies. Will the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq suddenly start making love? Will the Sunnis, Shiites and Christians in Lebanon get together? Will it end the oppression of Christians in Egypt? Will it raise the status of women or put an end to the use of violence as a political weapon in the Muslim world? It’s a total illusion.” [...]

New post-divorce family model:The unblended family

NYTimes

BEGIN with one formerly married couple and an amicable divorce. (Don’t snort, it happens.) Add children, maybe two or three. Give each former spouse a new partner. Perhaps the new partners have children, too. Add them. Oh, and the new partners’ exes. Factor in an equitable (say, nearly 50-50) physical custody arrangement for all the parties.

What do you have? For many couples, it’s a complex data set in search of an equally complex algorithm to tame it. Do they move in together, mixing developing teenagers like snarling cats in a bag? Or are they risk-averse, maintaining separate households and seeing one another on the odd weekend?

Or perhaps they are fortunate enough to establish some sort of contiguous living arrangement, like the members of the Curtis-Hetfield-Petrini household, who have as irresistible a scenario as anyone could devise. [...]

Brains are different today:Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction

NYTimes

 On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?

By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.

He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework. [...]

Government legalizes molesting - for sake of security

NYTimes

n the three weeks since the Transportation Security Administration began more aggressive pat-downs of passengers at airport security checkpoints, traveler complaints have poured in.

Some offer graphic accounts of genital contact, others tell of agents gawking or making inappropriate comments, and many express a general sense of powerlessness and humiliation. In general passengers are saying they are surprised by the intimacy of a physical search usually reserved for police encounters. [...]

Rubashkin Affair:The Wheels of Justice

Five Towns Jewish Times Rabbi Yair Hoffman

Ahmed Ghailani, transferred from Guantanamo Bay, was convicted this week of conspiracy to blow up government buildings in the al-Qaida attacks on two U.S. embassies in 1998.  He was acquitted on more than 280 other charges, primarily because much of the available evidence was not allowed to be presented. He will receive a sentence of 20 years in jail.

Sholom Rubashkin is now serving a 27 year sentence given to him by Judge Linda Reade for crimes associated with his running a kosher meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa.

There is such a thing as justice and there is such a thing as law.  At times the two concepts meet.  At times they do not. [...]

Dr. Asher Lipner in Child & Domestic Abuse Volume I

page 143

Importance of disclosing abuse

While there are understandable reasons for the withholding of disclosure of abuse, it usually exacerbates the difficulty of the trauma both because silence can allow the abuse to occur repeatedly, and because it does not allow for the emotional wounds to heal.  

Loneliness, abandonment and neglect are feelings that a victim of abuse often has about others in his or her environment who did not intervene to rescue them from their abuse.  Children are often more angry at the non offending parent for not protecting them then at the one who actually perpetrated the abuse.  Partially, this is because they expect more from the “healthier parent” and partially because it feels and sometimes is safer for them to focus their angry and hurt feelings at the parent who is more likely to care and to react positively and not punish them.  Victims of rabbinic abuse or abuse by a teacher, often have more anger at the organization for protecting and enabling their molester and abandoning the protection of the students.

This reaction is not uncommon in other survivors of interpersonal violence as well.  An off duty policeman who was savagely assaulted by a gang on a subway and suffered permanent neurological damage, told me that in his nightmares and flashbacks the only thing he remembers seeing at the time of the attack are the twenty or so people who were watching and did not come to his assistance.  Many Holocaust survivors report feeling more distressed by the apparent lack of concern about them by the whole world than by almost any other aspect of their trauma.  This is why in clinical work it is important to view all sexual abuse as involving three parties: the abuser, the abused and the bystander.    Trauma in general has come to be viewed by psychologists as a phenomenon that cannot be fully described and understood in and of itself, but needs to be seen as an experience that takes place in a social context that both creates the environment in which it occurs as well as the environment in which the survivor continues to live. [...]

Epilepsy’s Big, Fat Miracle: Food as medicine

NYTimes

Once every three or four months my son, Sam, grabs a cookie or a piece of candy and, wide-eyed, holds it inches from his mouth, ready to devour it. He knows he's not allowed to eat these things, but like any 9-year-old, he hopes that somehow, this once, my wife, Evelyn, or I will make an exception.

We never make exceptions when it comes to Sam and food, though, which means that when temptation takes hold of Sam and he is denied, things can get pretty hairy. Confronted with a gingerbread house at a friend's party last December, he went scorched earth, grabbing parts of the structure and smashing it to bits. Reason rarely works. Usually one of us has to pry the food out of his hands. Sometimes he ends up in tears. [...]

Dispute Over Dead Sea Scrolls Leads to a Jail Sentence

NYTimes

A man convicted of impersonating a New York University scholar in a debate over the Dead Sea Scrolls was sentenced on Thursday to six months in jail and five years’ probation.

The man, Raphael Haim Golb, was taken from a courtroom in State Supreme Court in Manhattan in handcuffs, after which one of his lawyers headed to the appellate division to ask that he be allowed to remain free pending appeal.[...]

One who makes a sincere mistaken interpretations of Torah - is not a heretic

Radvaz (4:187): A reason for not punishing preachers who distort the meaning of verses or medrashim is that their mistaken interpretations are the result of their faulty study of the texts. They are no worse than those who err concerning one of the fundamental principles of faith because of their misunderstanding of texts and yet are not considered heretics. For example, we find that the great man Hillel II erred in one of the principles of faith when he said Moshiach was not coming because of the events in the time of Chezkiyahu. Nevertheless, this error did not make him a heretic — G﷓d forbid. If he had been a heretic, how could the Talmud quote him? It is clear that since his improper statement was the result of sincere study, it was considered as inadvertent and thus he was not a heretic.

Should Sex Abuse Justify a Vigilante Attack?

Time Magazine

It is a dark story with an even darker twist: William Lynch, 44, was arrested last month for going into a northern California nursing home, luring an elderly priest into the lobby and beating him bloody. Lynch insists that when he was 7 years old the priest, Jerold Lindner, 65, had sexually molested him.

After Lynch was arrested, the blogosphere lit up with messages of support — and protests that he was being charged for a beating that many regarded as well-deserved payback. When Lynch was arraigned in a courtroom in San Jose, Calif., last week on suspicion of assault, his backers marched with signs attacking the Catholic Church's handling of sexual abuse in its ranks and proclaiming "Free Willy."

Lynch has vowed to fight the assault charge against him and to make Lindner — who has denied abusing him or anyone else — the issue. "Somebody needs to be a face for this abuse, and I'm prepared to put myself on the line," he told the Associated Press. [...]