Dueling ad on fish worms - Please explain this contradictory two part Yated ad

On June 7, 2011 the Hamodia published two ads concerning fish worms - one by those who prohibit fish because of the worms and  one by those who don't. Yated published only the ad that prohibited. However a closer look at the ad which appeared on page 41 - from those who prohibit fish with worms - seems to indicate that it is not one ad but rather it reflects two  disparate views . Furthermore the  two parts of the same ad in fact contradict each other.

I would appreciate feedback as to how these ads are to be understood The statement at the top of the page, with Rav Eliashiv shlita's, signature, seems to saying that the fish are forbidden. But the bottom part says only that some fish are only of concern. Furthermore I have also been told by experts in the field that the list in the second part is based on very haphazard and subjective data and that in fact no systematic scientific study has been done. (For example they didn't examine 100 cans of salmon and determine the frequency with which worms appeared.) I would greatly appreciate clarification of exactly what means were used to determined whether a particular type of fish is infected or is clean. I would also like to know how the two parts of the ad can be reconciled. Are they saying the fish are definitely prohibited (part 1) or is the prohibition because of a sofek (part 2)?

The Doctor Who Performed on Rav Elyashiv

5tjt

He is one of America’s top doctors and was voted so in 2007 by a group of peers.  Dr. Daniel Clair is Chairman of the Department of Vascular Surgery and a Vascular Surgeon practicing at Cleveland Clinic's main campus.  He is also the surgeon who successfully operated on the Gadol HaDor Rav Sholom Moshe Elyashiv this past Sunday.

Dr. Clair specializes in carotid artery surgery and thoraco-abdominal aortic repair and reconstruction. This was a surgery that he had performed on Rav Elyashiv seven years ago, and one that he required once again.  Both times Dr. Clair flew to Eretz Yisroel, himself, his team and his equipment.  Prior to this surgery which took place at Hadassa Hospital in Jerusalem (at 1:30 PM New York City time), Dr. Clair had asked for a blessing from Rav Elyashiv for a successful surgery.  Rav Ekyashiv gave a bracha that he should be a successful shliach. [....]

Simcha Safety: Olomeinu's summer safety points for kids regarding protecting their bodies

Bracha Goetz provides safety advice against molesters for kids in a
mainstream Chareidi publication

Stoning a dog: False slow-news libel reaches ends of the earth

Rotter.net

  תמונות: עלילת הדם של בחדרי חרדים עושה גלים בכל העולם 
 
    הסיפור השקרי לחלוטין על בית דין שהורה לסקול כלב שהתחיל באתר בחדרי חרדים ועבר ל-Ynet באנגלית - עושה גלים בעולם הערבי, בעולם המערבי ואפילו בהודו. הסיפור הופץ מ-Ynet לניוזויירים הגדולים בעולם - AP ו-AFP ומשם ל-BBC ולשבועון TIME הנחשב. התגובות רובן ככולן אנטישמיות מובהקות.

I’m O.K., You’re a Psychopath

NYTimes

[...] If you aren't sure whether you are a psychopath, Ronson can help. He lists all the items on the standard diagnostic checklist, developed by the psychologist Robert Hare. You can score yourself on traits like "glibness/superficial charm," "lack of remorse or guilt," "promiscuous sexual behavior" and 17 other traits. As one psychologist tells Ronson, if you are bothered at the thought of scoring high, then don't worry. You're not a psychopath.

One of the traits on the checklist is "callous/lack of empathy." This is the focus of another new book, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Basic Books, $25.99), by Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge psychologist best known for his research on autism. Baron-Cohen begins by telling how, at the age of 7, he learned that the Nazis turned Jews into lampshades and bars of soap, and he goes on to provide other examples of human savagery. To explain such atrocities, he offers an ambitious theory grounded in the concept of empathy, which he defines as "our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion." For Baron-Cohen, evil is nothing more than "empathy erosion." [....]

I think there's a better approach, one that involves breaking empathy into two parts, understanding and feeling, as Baron-Cohen himself does elsewhere in his book. Individuals with autism are unable to understand the mental lives of other people. Psychopaths, by contrast, get into others' heads just fine; they are seducers, manipulators, con men . . . and often worse. (Ronson tells how one psychopath — "good-looking, neatly dressed," with "a bit of a twinkle in his eye" — encountered a troubled teenager and decided to provoke the kid into attacking his family with a baseball bat, killing one person.) The problem with psychopaths lies in their lack of compassion, their willingness to destroy lives out of self-interest, malice or even boredom. [....]

Chareidi women's response to wife abuse

Kikar Shabbat

יותר ויותר נשים חרדיות המתמודדות עם אלימות קשה, בוחרות לעשות לה סוף. שושי הלר יצאה בעקבות הנשים האמיצות והארגונים שמעניקים להן בית-חם. האם אפשר לזהות כבר במפגשי השידוכים נטייה לאלימות? מהן התכונות שחשוב לברר על הבחור, בנוסף למה שבודקים בדרך כלל? מיהם הגורמים שאליהם תפנה אישה חרדית הנתונה תחת אלימות?

Sexual identity: Gay advocate suddenly discovers he is straight

NYTimes

[....] It was a good question. Had part of me come to “save” my old friend from the clutches of the Christian right? Though I don’t doubt that sexual attraction can evolve, I was skeptical of Michael’s claim of heterosexuality — and I rejected his argument that “homosexuality prevents us from finding our true self within.” Besides, I had a hard time believing that Michael’s “true self” was a fundamentalist Christian who writes derogatorily about being gay. But whatever aspirations I had about persuading Michael to join the ranks of ex-ex-gays, they were no match for his eagerness to save me.

“God loves you more than any dude will ever love you,” he told me at the cafe. “Don’t put your faith in some man, some flesh. That’s what we do when we’re stuck in the gay identity, when we’re stuck in that cave. We go from guy to guy, looking for someone to love us and make us feel O.K., but God is so much better than all the other masters out there.”

Michael, who is 36, now often refers to gay life as a kind of cave — or cage. In an open letter to Ricky Martin, published on WorldNetDaily after Martin came out, he wrote, “Homosexuality is a cage in which you are trapped in an endless cycle of constantly wanting more — sexually — that you can never actually receive, constantly full of emptiness, trying to justify your twisted actions by politics and ‘feel good’ language.”

Had Michael been secretly unhappy as a gay man, and was he now projecting that onto all gay-identified people? I broached the question later that night at his small off-campus apartment, where we sat in his barren kitchen eating Oreo cookies. “Well, you can’t see how dark it is in a cave when you’re in it,” he said. “But, no, at the time I didn’t consider myself unhappy.” [....]

Gentle chinuch - with horses

NYTimes

When the soulful cowboy philosopher Buck Brannaman talks, people — and horses — listen. The aw-shucks star and one of the two-legged attractions in the documentary “Buck,” Mr. Brannaman is a former trick rope performer who, after a childhood of pain, became something of a shaman and an inspiration for the novel and movie “The Horse Whisperer.” He doesn’t just talk to the animals; he also transforms snorting, bucking horses into companions who follow his lead without a tether and even join him in a graceful meadow duet. [....]

If there’s nothing essentially remarkable about Buck Brannaman’s bad childhood, there is something exceptional about how he transcended it. After knocking around in his early 20s, he had his mind blown while watching a clinic with Ray Hunt and his teacher, Tom Dorrance, modern pioneers in a gentle training method — a philosophy, really — that’s called, perhaps paradoxically (as PETA might insist), natural horsemanship. Smitten by what he saw, Mr. Brannaman embraced these methods, became a disciple of the men and of Mr. Dorrance’s brother, Bill, and went on to spread the word. It’s a measure of the passion this approach inspires that in the book “The Greatest Horse Stories Ever Told,” one observer rhapsodizes: “Tom Dorrance is Yoda, Ray Hunt is Obi-Wan Kenobi and Buck Brannaman is Luke Skywalker!”

Having a gay orientation & religious identity: Living the Good Lie

NYTimes

Denis Flanigan isn’t hiding anything. A 42-year-old psychotherapist in Houston, he has a straightforward manner that meshes nicely with his no-nonsense buzz cut and neatly clipped goatee. Unlike many mental-health professionals, Flanigan puts personal items on display in his office, including a photo of his partner, who is attractive, and male. For his patients’ amusement he has on hand an S-and-M Barbie as well as a Tickle Me Freud doll. (“It’s so, so . . . wrong,” Flanigan told me, in a tone that signaled he believed it was exactly right.) Flanigan’s no-secrets policy extends to his Web site, where he writes that he “has frequently been asked to speak on the gay and lesbian experience and mental health, transgender concerns and body-modification issues.” A member of the American Psychological Association, Flanigan has also served as Mr. Prime Choice Texas, winning a contest “designed for men 40 years or older who represent the masculine aesthetic embraced by the leather/Levi/uniform/fetish community.” In his own words, he identifies as a “militant homosexual.”

So it comes as a bit of a surprise to learn that when potential clients come to Flanigan’s office to discuss their sexual orientation — in particular whether they should reveal their homosexuality to friends, family or employers — his first response is to ask, in a neutral tone, “Why do you want to do that?” Flanigan has a 20-year history of gay activism behind him, so you might expect that his primary goal would be to help gay clients discover and cultivate their most authentic selves. As Jonathan Ned Katz wrote in “Gay American History” in 1976, “Therapists who do not help their homosexual patients to fully explore the possibility of homosexuality as a legitimate option have not helped to expand those individuals’ freedom.” [...]

In New Square where the arson attack occurred, the rebbe's word is law

New Jersey Jewish Standard

For years, this leafy chasidic village about an hour north of New York City has been a shtetl-like haven where residents could live their strictly Orthodox lifestyle far from the temptations and bustle of the nation’s largest city.

Out of view of all but very few, life in this community of some 7,000 Skverer chasidim has revolved around its spiritual leader, the Skverer rebbe, David Twersky.

In the wake of a recent arson attack that left a dissident New Square resident in the hospital with third-degree burns over more than half his body — and thrust this community into the harsh glare of media and police investigators — the question is whether the centrality of the rebbe to community life has created an atmosphere of dangerous coercion.

“We cannot encourage theocratic rule,” said Michael Sussman, the civil rights attorney representing the burn victim, Aron Rottenberg. “Yet by tolerating these communities, we’re doing that.” [....]

Schools: Conflict over the nature of homework

NYTimes


After Donna Cushlanis’s son kept bursting into tears midway through his second-grade math problems, which one night took over an hour, she told him not to do all of his homework.

“How many times do you have to add seven plus two?” Ms. Cushlanis, 46, said. “I have no problem with doing homework, but that put us both over the edge. I got to the point that this is enough.”

Ms. Cushlanis, a secretary for the Galloway school district, complained to her boss, Annette C. Giaquinto, the superintendent. It turned out that the district, which serves 3,500 kindergarten through eighth-grade students, was already re-evaluating its homework practices. The school board will vote this summer on a proposal to limit weeknight homework to 10 minutes for each year of school — 20 minutes for second graders, and so forth — and ban assignments on weekends, holidays and school vacations. [...]

Bizarre collaboration with the Zionists to save the pashkevils

Haaretz

Yoel Krois decided in recent months to take a temporary break from the holy wars he ordinarily wages as the unofficial "sheriff" of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea She'arim, in Jerusalem. The battles against men and women walking together on Mea She'arim's sidewalks, against bus company Egged, against the Gay Pride Parade and against the Haredi politicians who sit in the infidels' Knesset - all of these can evidently wait, because Krois, a member of the extremist religious faction Eda Haredit, has a burning mission that keeps him glued to his storage room for days and nights: uploading his personal archive of 20,000 pashkevils, or street posters, to the digital collection of the National Library of Israel.

The cooperation between the radical anti-Zionist activist and the national-academic institution is hardly self-evident, nor is the fact that the pashkevil - the medium of communication that has shaped the face of streets in Jerusalem for more than a century - will take its place in the national library's collection, at an investment of NIS 100,000. On top of this, the individual who served as middleman between Krois and the library is considered a bitter enemy of the Eda: Shuka Dorfman, the director of the Israel Antiquities Authority. [...]

Why the rabbis are hated

YNET

Reports that the salary of city rabbis will be raised to up to NIS 29,000 (roughly $8,500) per month prompted thousands of angry reactions. Several rabbis were genuinely wondering about the source of what they characterized as the “hatred” towards them. After all, they serve the public faithfully.
 
Hence, I will attempt here to present the arguments against the Rabbinate as reflected by the responses to the recent pay raise.

Firstly, the Rabbinate has become the “military wing” of the haredi community. Through it, the haredim abuse the rest of the population. Through the Rabbinate they force Israel’s citizens to get married, divorce, convert and set their clocks the haredi way. And as we know, depriving human beings of freedom provokes fury. Hence, one needs great chutzpa to force people to behave in ways they don’t wish to adopt.[...]

 

Jewish Agency to decide on Orthodox conversions for aliya

JPost

The Interior Ministry has decided that the Jewish Agency will act as the arbitrator for Jewish communities abroad for recognizing Orthodox converts wishing to make aliya, while leaving the Chief Rabbinate as a potential consultant for the “isolated cases” in which questions regarding the converting rabbis arise.

In recent months, there has been a growing phenomenon of aliya requests by Orthodox converts from North America being rejected by the Interior Ministry. According to law, a person who undergoes a conversion in a recognized Jewish community abroad is eligible for aliya.

Despite a High Court decision several years ago, the Interior Ministry didn’t formulate an official policy on how to recognize a Jewish community, and operated on the basis of an internal memo drafted by its legal department in 2008, which determined that the ministry should consult with the head of the relevant religious community in Israel. [...]