Now the pendulum has swung the other way: It is now the female accuser who is automatically believed.

Slate  The Hunting Ground opens like a horror movie: We meet a suite of innocents who have no idea they’re heading off to hell. This documentary about sexual assault on college campuses begins with YouTube videos of high school girls reacting with tearful joy to their acceptance letters. Lambs to the slaughter, we’re supposed to think. The film that follows portrays college as so dangerous for young women that the viewer is left with the sense that these students would have been better off posting college rejection videos and staying home.

The Hunting Ground arrives at an interesting moment in the national conversation on campus sexual assault. Press coverage and statements from government and university officials portray a problem of vast scope. The Obama administration has taken action: Schools are now under pressure from the federal government to show they take sexual assault charges seriously and mete out appropriate punishment. At the same time, a number of critics (and I’m one of them) suggest that a moral panic is clouding our ability to rationally assess the problem. A range of voices—among them journalists and law professors—has raised concerns that the systems being put in place at schools to adjudicate these cases are grossly unfair to the accused. What a perfect time for a film that addresses all this, and illuminates a way forward.

Unfortunately, The Hunting Ground is not that movie. It is a polemic that—as its title suggests—portrays young women as prey, frequently assaulted and frequently ignored by their universities and law enforcement when they try to bring charges. The movie, from director Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering, features numerous interviews with women who describe horrific experiences, and their testimony has raw, emotional power. But good policy about the lives of young people—female and male—needs to be based on prudent assessment. The film traffics in alarmist statistics and terrifying assertions, but fails to acknowledge both the recent changes in the way the government and universities approach sexual assault charges and the critiques that those changes go too far. By refusing to engage the current conversation about this issue, the film does its subjects—and us all—a disservice.

The Hunting Ground relentlessly makes the point, for example, that about 20 percent of female college students will be sexually assaulted by classmates. Diane Rosenfeld of Harvard Law School analogizes that if the parents of male students were told their sons had a “1 in 4 or 5 chance” of being a victim of a drive-by shooting at college, Mom and Dad would think twice about sending them. In a Slate piece in December on campus sexual assault, I examined some of the studies underlying this claim, which has long been cited by advocates on this issue. It turns out many of the studies rest on narrow samples or wildly extrapolated numbers. (Even New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a co-sponsor of proposed legislation on campus sexual assault who appears briefly in the film, quietly took the “1 in 5” statistic off her website in December.) Callie Marie Rennison, co-director of the Criminology and Criminal Justice Research Initiative at the University of Colorado Denver, writing in the New York Times, deplored the idea that students and parents are being bombarded with assertions of “an epidemic where one does not exist.”

Not only is sexual assault an expected part of the college experience, the filmmakers assert, once it happens victims generally discover that no officials at their schools will take action or even care. These callous, indifferent administrators coddle perpetrators and systematically cover up heinous crimes in an effort to maintain their school’s good—if false—reputation. Occidental College assistant professor of sociology and activist Danielle Dirks says, “Schools are actively and aggressively not wanting to tell the truth about what is going on on their campuses. Because the first campuses to do so will be known as the rape campuses.” (In my article I mention Dirks’ involvement in getting a male freshman expelled from Occidental after he hooked up with a female freshman while both were drunk.)

The Hunting Ground asserts that even when a victim pushes past the roadblocks and makes a formal report to administrators, it will do no good. Lawyer and activist Colby Bruno says, “The message is clear: It’s don’t proceed through these disciplinary hearings. No matter what you do, you’re not going to win.” The film follows this quote with a graphic showing a paltry number of expulsions of male students at six top schools. But let’s examine this assertion that colleges would rather leave perpetrators unpunished than acknowledge there are any. The higher education insurance group, United Educators, just released a study of 305 sexual assault claims they received from 104 member schools for the three years ending in 2013. I spoke to the organization’s director of risk research, Alyssa Keehan, who said, “The most common narrative you hear is that institutions don’t care about sexual assault. Our data suggests otherwise.” UE’s findings show that when a formal complaint is brought against a student, in 45 percent of the cases he is found responsible. When that happens, more than 80 percent of the time he is given the most severe penalty available—either expulsion or suspension. The study found in 25 percent of the cases the accused is found not responsible. In 23 percent of the cases the school did not adjudicate, not because of a cover-up, but because in the majority of these instances the accuser either asked the school not to investigate, became uncooperative, or could not identify the accused. In the remainder of cases, the accused withdrew from school. [...]

The Real Victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse Hysteria: Why rational people believe ridiculous claims

Slate   Among the atrocities that Frances and Dan Keller were supposed to have committed while running a day care center out of their Texas home: drowning and dismembering babies in front of the children; killing dogs and cats in front of the children; transporting the children to Mexico to be sexually abused by soldiers in the Mexican army; dressing as pumpkins and shooting children in the arms and legs; putting the children into a pool with sharks that ate babies; putting blood in the children’s Kool-Aid; cutting the arm or a finger off a gorilla at a local park; and exhuming bodies at a cemetery, forcing children to carry the bones.

It was frankly unbelievable—except that people, most importantly, a Texas jury, did believe the Kellers had committed at least some of these acts. In 1992, the Kellers were convicted of aggravated sexual assault on a child and each sentenced to 48 years in prison. The investigation into their supposed crimes took slightly more than a year, the trial only six days.

And now, even the Travis County district attorney agrees that the trial was unfair.

After multiple appeal efforts and 21 years in prison, the Kellers are finally free. Fran Keller, 63, was released from prison on Nov. 26 on a personal bond, just in time for Thanksgiving. Her daughter was waiting for her with a bag full of the first clothes that weren’t prison-issued that Keller had seen in years. Dan, who turned 72 in prison and now walks with a cane, was released on Dec. 5; this time, Fran was there to greet him. (The Kellers divorced while in prison yet remain close, as close as two people locked up in separate prisons for crimes they say they didn’t commit can be.) [...]

Their release may also finally mark the end to one of the strangest, widest-reaching, and most damaging moral panics in America’s history: the satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s and 1990s.

“That was literally a witch hunt,” said Keith Hampton, pro-bono lawyer for the Kellers. “We say ‘witch hunt’ in this figurative way, but that was a modern-day literal witch hunt. They really were after people who they thought were worshipping at the feet of the Dark Lord.”

So what the hell happened?

The Keller case is typical of the satanic ritual abuse panic and the dozens of cases that popped up in breathless media reports. The trouble started when Christy Chaviers, a 3-year-old girl who was an infrequent visitor to the day care during the summer of 1991, told her mother that Dan had spanked her. With coaxing from her mother and her therapist, Donna David-Campbell, whom Christy had been seeing to deal with acting-out issues, an incident of spanking turned into something much worse—Dan Keller, the little girl said, had defecated on her head and raped her with a pen. From there, the stories Christy told David-Campbell became wilder: The Kellers “had everyone take off their clothes and had a parrot that pecked them in the pee-pee,” they made her smoke a cigarette, they “came to her house with a chainsaw and cut her dog Buffy in the vagina until it bled.” David-Campbell concluded not that Christy was an imaginative child having trouble with her parents’ divorce, but that she was the victim of ritual abuse.

The case was turned over to the police. Parents of children who’d attended the preschool, however, continued to talk to one another and their children. In October, another child, also a therapy client of David-Campbell, told his parents that he’d been abused; a third child, whose mother was in contact with the parents of the other two, came forward in February 1992. By the time of the trial in November 1992, the stories included the killing of a baby tiger in a graveyard, a person being shot by people in sheriff’s uniforms and then dismembered with a chainsaw, videotaped sex with adults and other children, and the Kellers wearing white robes and lighting candles to assault them. No other children, including those children who were supposedly the targets of abuse, or their parents confirmed the accounts. When put on the witness stand, Christy, by then 5, was at first unwilling to say anything had happened at all, then did, then recanted. Friends and acquaintances of the Kellers, including their landlord, who frequently dropped by unannounced, testified that they’d never seen anything out of the ordinary at the Kellers’ day care.

Why did psychotherapists and investigators conclude that these fantastic allegations were true? Because at the time, pretty much everyone else in America did.

The panic began in earnest with the McMartin Preschool trial, an investigation that began 30 years ago. The owners of a California preschool and several teachers were accused of molesting a 2½-year-old boy; before it was over, hundreds of children, usually after lengthy sessions with coercive therapists, came forward to say that they, too, had been taken to a church to watch the beheading of a baby, then forced to drink its blood or flown by plane to random cities for sexual abuse, or countless other bizarre stories.

While that investigation and trial unfolded, other cases surfaced. Media poured attention on the claims, which made great fodder for a newly created 24-hour news cycle (CNN Headline News launched in 1982). As televangelists prayed for deliverance from Satan’s scourge, talk show “experts” claimed that every imaginable form of abuse was happening on a massive scale in America and that networks of Satanists had infiltrated schools, the police, and local government. Geraldo Rivera claimed in a televised 1987 special report that more than a million Satanists were plying their evil trade in America right at the very moment. (He has since apologized.) In 1989, Oprah Winfrey interviewed Michelle Smith and another woman who claimed to have recovered memories of being abused by a satanic cult; Sally Jesse Raphael, not to be outdone, ran two shows on the subject. In 1990, Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse, a children’s picture book featuring colored-pencil drawings of children being abused in satanic rituals, appeared in libraries and therapists’ offices. In 1992, folk singer Joan Baez released “Play Me Backwards,” a song in the voice of a victim of satanic ritual abuse who was forced to witness the sacrifice of a baby and is now recollecting her repressed memories.

“It sounds laughable,” says Debbie Nathan, an investigative reporter who co-wrote Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt about the panic and is now a director for the National Center for Reason and Justice, which took up the Kellers’ cause. But there is certainly historical precedent, going back even further than the Salem witch trials: Ancient Romans, for example, claimed that Christians ate babies; Christians later claimed that Jews used Christian babies’ blood in religious rituals.

“Children symbolize the good things about culture, the innocence and purity, the future of the culture,” says Nathan. When a culture feels under threat in some way, fear and anxiety focus on the safety of children. America was experiencing upheavals in gender roles, child-rearing practices, and social expectations, and more and more people were embracing fundamentalist religion and belief in the devil. The fear of satanic ritual abuse was perpetuated by both ends of the political spectrum. “In the right wing, you had that kind of preoccupation with Satan, and on the left, you had a lot of concern with the well-being of children, and women going back to work, and I think it was a perfect storm of fear and anxiety,” says Nathan. Most if not all of those involved believed they were acting in the best interests of the children—which meant that any healthy skepticism was interpreted as anti-child.

But extensive investigations revealed little to no truth to the satanic ritual abuse panic. The McMartin Preschool trial ended in 1990 with no convictions, even after the government threw more than $15 million at prosecuting it. In 1992, FBI agent Kenneth Lanning, in his report on satanic ritual abuse, declared that satanic ritual abuse wasn’t credible: “Hundreds of communities all over America are run by mayors, police departments, and community leaders who are practicing Satanists and who regularly murder and eat people? Not likely.” Two years later, the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, under the federal Department of Health and Human Services, released a report claiming that there was no evidence of truth in satanic ritual abuse claims. Even so, people still believed: A Redbook magazine survey conducted in 1994 found that fully 70 percent of Americans believed that satanic ritual abuse was real.

As with previous panics, the dangers may have been imaginary, but the consequences were not. The real toll of the satanic ritual abuse panic was on the children dragged into it and accused people like the Kellers, who numbered in the hundreds by the end of the decade. (In 1993, a survey by the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law found that 26 percent of prosecutors reported handling at least one case with elements of alleged ritual abuse.) [...]

Shul President Livshin and Rabbis Simmonds and Cohen write letter of support for Beth and her children

Epstein Torture Trial Does this court document mean that the U.S. Attorney is offering Rabbi Aryeh Ralbag immunity for testimony?

According to this document filed by the US Attorney, it appears that the US Attorney is going to give Rabbi Ralbag immunity in order to testify.  Otherwise, Rabbi Ralbag would, according to the document, invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

   Rabbi Aryeh Ralbag and Epstein Torture Trial

Rav Dovid Eidensohn's rebuttal of Rav Breitowitz claim that forcing a get is a mitzva

This is the reponse of by brother Rav Dovid Eidensohn to the claims made by Rav Yitzchok Breitowitz regarding the endorsement of violence in forcing a husband to give a get. It is part of a larger 17 page response

Rabbi Breitowitz arguments as well as my response are found in previous posts

Epstein-defense-of-torture/kidnapping

Statement of Rabbi Breitowitz regarding use of force

   Rabbi Breitowitz use of force is mitzva - response

U.C.L.A. Debate Over Jewish Student: The shocking rise of anti-Jewish sentiment on college campuses

NY Times LOS ANGELES — It seemed like routine business for the student council at the University of California, Los Angeles: confirming the nomination of Rachel Beyda, a second-year economics major who wants to be a lawyer someday, to the council’s Judicial Board.

Until it came time for questions.

“Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community,” Fabienne Roth, a member of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, began, looking at Ms. Beyda at the other end of the room, “how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?”

For the next 40 minutes, after Ms. Beyda was dispatched from the room, the council tangled in a debate about whether her faith and affiliation with Jewish organizations, including her sorority and Hillel, a popular student group, meant she would be biased in dealing with sensitive governance questions that come before the board, which is the campus equivalent of the Supreme Court.

The discussion, recorded in written minutes and captured on video, seemed to echo the kind of questions, prejudices and tropes — particularly about divided loyalties — that have plagued Jews across the globe for centuries, students and Jewish leaders said.

The council, in a meeting that took place on Feb. 10, voted first to reject Ms. Beyda’s nomination, with four members against her. Then, at the prodding of a faculty adviser there who pointed out that belonging to Jewish organizations was not a conflict of interest, the students revisited the question and unanimously put her on the board. [...]

Reports of anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish sentiment have been on the rise across the country in recent years, especially directed at younger Jews, researchers said. Barry A. Kosmin, a Trinity College researcher and a co-author of a study issued last month that found extensive examples of anti-Semitism directed at college students, said he had not come across anything as striking as what happened at U.C.L.A.

“It’s egregious and startling,” Mr. Kosmin said. “If they had used this with any other group — sexual, racial, any kind of identity group — they would have realized it was illegal.” [...]

Rare Footage Of The Chofetz Chaim At First Knessia Gedolah

 Update - background information - Tablet Magazine


 update Names added to the film the new version is not as sharp as the original so I have kept both versions.

Published on Feb 22, 2015

The First World Congress (Knessia Gedolah) of the World Agudath Israel the first major gathering of all the different sects of Klal Yisroel which took place in Vienna starting from Elul 3, 5683 / August 15, 1923 and which lasted for ten days.

With Names

Without Names

Family Secrets can make you sick - effects of sexual abuse on health

WNYC

In the 1980s, Dr. Vincent Felitti, now director of the California Institute of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, discovered something potentially revolutionary about the ripple effects of child sexual abuse. He discovered it while trying to solve a very different health problem: helping severely obese people lose weight.

Felitti, a specialist in preventive medicine, was trying out a new liquid diet treatment among patients at a Kaiser Permanente clinic. And it worked really well. The severely obese patients who stuck to it lost as much as 300 pounds in a year.

"Oh yeah, this was really quite extraordinary," recalls Felitti.

But then, some of the patients who'd lost the most weight quit the treatment and gained back all the weight — faster than they'd lost it. Felitti couldn't figure out why. So he started asking questions.

First, one person told him she'd been sexually abused as a kid. Then another.

"You know, I remember thinking, 'Well, my God, this is the second incest case I've seen in [then] 23 years of practice,' " Felitti says. "And so I started routinely inquiring about childhood sexual abuse, and I was really floored."

More than half of the 300 or so patients said yes, they too had been abused.

Felitti wondered if he'd discovered one of the keys to some cases of obesity and all the health problems that go along with it.

That possibility made him very curious: What if having a bad childhood could affect health in other ways?[...]

The undergraduate and the mentor: The confusing world of Title IX sex abuse and Universities deciding guilt or innocence

NY Times   On a weekend in March almost three years ago, Ellie Clougherty flew from London to Rome with Joe Lonsdale. She was a 21-year-old junior at Stanford University, and it was her first trip to Italy. Lonsdale, then 29, was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and he booked a room for them for two nights in a luxury hotel — a converted Renaissance mansion in the shadow of the Pantheon — and arranged a special excursion, with a friend of his who is an architect, to an archaeological site amid the ruins of the Golden House on Palatine Hill, overlooking the Colosseum. Under a light gray sky, they stood on plexiglass bridges and looked down at the uncovered remains of what is thought to be a fabled rotating dining room that the Emperor Nero built for extravagant banquets. Lonsdale is a Roman-history buff, and he told Clougherty about the emperors, praising their civilization and engineering feats.[...]

Clougherty and Lonsdale had been dating over the previous couple of weeks, while he was her assigned mentor for an undergraduate course at Stanford called Technology Entrepreneurship, Engineering 145. The limited-enrollment class offered a combination of academics, business skills and access to Silicon Valley that has made Stanford the most-sought-after university in the country, with the most competitive undergraduate admissions and among the highest donations. More than any other school, Stanford is the gateway to the tech world, and computer science is the most popular major. Each year, new young multimillionaires are minted, some just months after graduation.[...]

After sightseeing in Rome, Lonsdale and Clougherty were together in the hotel room they were sharing when she started dressing for evening Mass. Lonsdale came up behind her and kissed her, touching her neck and hair and telling her she was beautiful. She had told him she was a virgin. Both agree they had sex. But what actually went on between them that night, and throughout their yearlong relationship, would become highly contested. After the relationship ended, Clougherty accused Lonsdale of sexual assault. Stanford investigated whether he broke the university’s rule against “consensual sexual and romantic relationships” between students and their mentors and, later, whether he raped her. The findings from the investigations have sparked a war of allegations and interpretations, culminating last month with dueling lawsuits, filled with damaging accusations. This case, which has been picked up by the media, does not fit neatly into the narratives that have fueled an ongoing national conversation about sexual assault of students on campus. But it exposes the risks of Stanford’s open door to Silicon Valley and the pressure that universities are under to do more for students who say they’ve been raped. It also reveals the complexity of trying to determine the truth in a high-stakes case like this one.[...]

On March 1, Clougherty went to Stanford’s counseling center. She said that Lonsdale had forced her to have sex when she didn’t want to and also talked about the man who accosted her in the restaurant bathroom when she was 10. The university psychologist noted in a report that she “seems to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder from current and past trauma.” Clougherty went home to Virginia and spent days crying and rocking in a corner of her family’s living room. Clougherty embarked on therapy twice a week with Keith Saylor, a clinical psychologist who treated her eating disorder. He used prolonged-exposure therapy, a treatment developed for combat-related disorders, in which a therapist prompts a patient to describe deeply traumatic events. Later, patients listen to tapes of their sessions at home every day in an attempt to drain the memories of their power. [...]

Meanwhile on campuses throughout the country, a movement was taking shape. A growing number of students were coming forward to criticize their universities for the handling of sexual-assault cases. They had support from the government. In 2011, the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education sent a letter to every college and university in the country that receives federal funding, as almost all do, clarifying that under Title IX, the federal law passed in 1972 to prevent sex discrimination in education, colleges and universities had an obligation to prevent and respond to sexual violence and harassment. “Once a school knows or reasonably should know of possible sexual violence, it must take immediate and appropriate action to investigate or otherwise determine what occurred,” the letter from the Office of Civil Rights warned.

The government also instructed schools to adopt a new standard for determining the outcome of a sexual-harassment or violence case. At the time, many schools used the standard of “clear and convincing” evidence, meaning that the adjudicators (usually a panel of administrators or faculty) believed that it was substantially more likely than not, or roughly 75 percent likely, that the accused had committed the offense. The letter from the civil rights office demanded that schools switch to a lower standard of proof, a “preponderance” of evidence, meaning that it was more likely than not — above 50.01 percent — that the offense was committed. The office noted that preponderance is the standard that courts use to decide civil suits for sexual harassment. A few schools, including Princeton and Harvard, initially refused the new standard and then found themselves under investigation for suspected Title IX violations.[...]

In the last few months, Stanford and other schools have felt the ground shift beneath them once again. Some critics are now charging that universities are overcompensating for past mistreatment of victims. Even as they’re attacked for giving victims short shrift, schools are also being denounced for inadequately protecting the rights of the accused. In October, 28 members of the Harvard law-school faculty wrote a letter, published in The Boston Globe, deploring the procedures the university adopted to follow the mandate from the Office of Civil Rights for lacking “the most basic elements of fairness and due process” and being “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.” Around the country, about three dozen men are suing universities over findings or punishments for sexual infractions. In a short span of time, a well-intentioned effort to right a seemingly obvious wrong has fed additional claims of injustice.[...]

In November, after I contacted Lonsdale, his lawyers submitted to Stanford hundreds of pages of his email correspondence with Clougherty and her mother that they hadn’t previously provided. Stanford has not decided whether to consider this evidence, along with an eight-page sworn statement Lonsdale gave the university from an unexpected source: Clougherty’s friend Jane.

In the months after Jane helped Clougherty break up with Lonsdale, she says that she watched with increasing unease as Clougherty’s accusations mounted, from emotional abuse to rape. “In March 2014, she texted me that she considered herself a ‘sex slave’ during her relationship with Joe,” Jane wrote in her statement. “This is far, far beyond anything that she ever said about the relationship when it was happening or for a long time afterward. It also made no sense in light of her clear enthusiasm about the relationship.”[...]

In response to Clougherty’s lawsuit, Lonsdale mounted a swift counterattack, calling it “a vengeful, personal attack by a disturbed former girlfriend” in an email to friends and associates. He also said that Stanford’s investigation was “a Kafka-esque nightmare.” He linked to Clougherty’s emails, posting them on a website his team created overnight, highlighting the most affectionate and admiring passages and arguing that she was unstable. Lonsdale also sued Clougherty for defamation. (In the wake of the lawsuits, Formation 8 has been criticized in the press for not disclosing that Lonsdale was banned from Stanford.) He blamed himself only for being naïve. [...]

At the same time, the role the government has cast universities in is not a natural one. They are not the police. Yet they are asked to grapple with criminal accusations even when the events in question are receding into the past and are deeply difficult to deconstruct. And they are self-interested in a way that courts are not, with a different need: to protect their reputation.

Beis Yaakov Schools accused of taking money from teachers - threatening to fire them if they complain

Kikar HaShabbat

שכר משפיל, פגיעה בוותק: כך נעשקות גננות חרדיות

זכויות עובד? תשלום עבור שעות נוספות? שכר בזמן? הצחקתם את המנהלים הכוחניים של רשתות הגנים שמנצלים בחסות שתיקת משרדי הממשלה את העובדות בצורה שיטתית • אחת הגננות העשוקות: "אם אתלונן יפטרו אותי. עדיף לבלוע ולשתוק" • תחקיר מקיף של "כיכר השבת" חושף נתונים קשים במיוחד (חרדים)

 

לחדווה (שם בדוי, כמו שאר השמות בתחקיר. השמות המלאים שמורים במערכת), גננת מירושלים, היה די ברור שאין לה מה לעשות. המערכת חזקה ממנה, היא מודעת עד כאב לעובדה הזאת, כבר שנים. היא לא יכולה לדבר, לפצות פה. חרב הפיטורין מתנופפת בבירור מעבר לפינה, ורק המחשבה על מסכת הייסורים שתאלץ לעבור כדי להוכיח שמדובר בפיטורין לא חוקיים הוציאו ממנה כל שארית של חשק להיכנס לסחרור הזה. אז מה עושים? שותקים. היא כבר רגילה לזה.

כך פחות או יותר הן התחושות של עשרות, אם לא מאות, גננות וסייעות אחרות. חוסר האונים המשווע אל מול המערכת הדורסנית והשיטתית של רמיסת זכויות העובד הבסיסיות ביותר, כמו גם החוק במדינת ישראל, זועק לשמים. כך נשללים מהגננות החרדיות זכויותיהן הבסיסיות ביותר להן הן זכאיות על פי חוק, ועל פי כל דין. כך מושתקות הן שנה אחרי שנה, תוך שימוש ציני בידיעה כי במגזר החרדי – הכוח מצוי בידיים של אלה שנטלו אותו לעצמם.

כך בסיפורה של רחל שהגיע לידי 'כיכר השבת', גננת ברשת פתחיה לחינוך מיוחד, השקיעה במסגרת עבודתה שעות רבות בלימודי תואר B.A.  ובהגשת העבודות הנצרכות לשם קבלת התואר, מתוך ידיעה כי הדבר יקדם אותה בעבודתה עם הילדים ואף יעלה את רמת השכר שלה.

אלא שלטענתה התברר לה, כי ברשת פתחיה בה היא עובדת, אין כל כוונה לעדכן את תלוש השכר שלה כלפי מעלה, כמתבקש לאור הנתונים. רוצה להתלונן? נאמר לה, אז תתלונני. בינתיים אין העלאה. גם שאר הגמולים , מעבר לגמול על תעודת "בכיר" המגיעים לעובדי ההוראה מכוח החוק, אינם משולמים לה לטענתה.

Kikar HaShabbat

תחקיר 'עושק הגננות החרדיות' של 'כיכר השבת', עורר תגובות ופניות רבות למערכת עם סיפורים נוספים על תנאי עבודה מחפירים ועושק גננות ומורים • כעת אנו חושפים - כך נראה חוזה עבודה ברשת הגנים של בית יעקב - חרדים

הפרה שיטתית? יממה לאחר שפרסם "כיכר השבת" את התחקיר אודות מה שנראה כעושק של העובדות ברשתות הגנים החרדיות, נחשף לראשונה כיצד נראה חוזה העבודה של הגננות ברשת הגנים של בית יעקב, המנוהלת על ידי הרב יצחק גולדנקנופף. החוזה שנראה תמוה ובלתי מובן כולל בתוכו סעיפים אשר מעלים חשד כי נועדו על מנת לעקוף את חוקי המגן בישראל, שנועדו להגן על העובדים.

על פי החוזה שהגיע לידינו, העובדות ברשת הגנים חותמות על כך שהחוזה הוא זה שמחייב את הרשת בכל הנוגע לתנאי השכר, כשבחוזה נכתב כי הוא "מסגיר באופן בלעדי את תנאי העסקתה של העובדת על ידי העמותה, בהתחשב בנסיבות, בהתחייבות ובתנאי השכר המיוחדים שנקבעו בו".

כשבחוזה מודגש כי ההסכמים הקיבוציים שנעשים מפעם לפעם על ידי הרשויות והגורמים הרלוונטיים, אינם תקפים, וכי החוזה הוא זה שמחייב את הרשת.

משיחה שקיימנו עם משפטנים עולה כי לכאורה סעיף זה אינו חוקי, מכיוון שהסכם קיבוצי המאושר על ידי הגורמים הרלוונטיים מחייב את גם את העמותה, ועל פי חוקי המגן העמותה מחויבת לספק את התנאים המחייבים של כל הסכם קיבוצי רלוונטי. 

ניסוח החוזה מעלה תמיהה לגבי כוונות הרשת לגבי תנאי השכר והעבודה של הגננות, למרות שכאמור גם חתימה על חוזה שכזה אינו מתיר לעמותה שלא לעמוד בהסכמים הקיבוציים ובחוקי העבודה השונים (למשל, חוק שכר מינימום), ועובדת שתתבע את המגיע לה תזכה ככל הנראה לסעד בבתי המשפט לענייני עבודה.

Purim in Jerusalem - which day is celebrated - Rabbi Schnall

   Rabb Schnall - Purim - which day in Jerusalem? 

Click to download from YU Torah

Get refuser finally gives Get after 18 years and being imprisoned

http://www.kikar.co.il/165482.html

סרבן גט שהתיר את אישתו לאחר 18 שנה של סירוב שוחרר היום (רביעי) מבית סוהר באזור המרכז. הדיון לשחרורו התקיים בתוך כותלי בית הסוהר בשיתוף עם נציגי בית הדין הרבני שהגיעו במיוחד למרות יום תענית אסתר.

האסיר נדון ל-5 שנות מאסר בגין סירובו, מתוכם הספיק לרצות כחודשיים. במהלך תקופה זו התברר כי האסיר סובל ממחלה קשה בגינה אף אושפז לתקופה קצרה בבית החולים.

New publication publicizes dialogue between Rabbonim and Oz Vehadar Corporation

Guest Post:

Oz Vehadar on the defensive as Rabbonim question its credibility with passionate attacks

Lately בעז"ה, many are studying Torah. Groups of people who never studied before, are opening their eyes to the wealth of our Torah Shebichsav Ubaal Peh. Consequently, many publishing houses have opened and are publishing many seforim including Chumashim, Tanachim, Gemoros, and other seforim.

One publishing house, Oz Vehadar, claims it has a mission to print and REPAIR the text of the Chumashim, Tanachim, Gemoros, and other seforim. Oz Vehadar also publishes its seforim in a very appealing appearance, Those who have limited eyesight enjoy its very clear print. Oz Vehadar library has become both attractive and free of errors.

But, that is only according to their perspective. Several Rabbonim and Talmidei Chachomim have stated emphatically with their written word, that there is a serious problem with the authenticity of the many hidden CHANGES in the seforim bearing the Oz Vehadar name. They consider the OZ VEHADAR corporation dishonest and its products not usable!

Oz Vehadar has responded to some of the charges.

In a newly released kuntres bearing the name ופרשו השמלה, the letters of communication between those Talmidei Chachomim and Oz Vehadar have been painstakingly gathered. Included in the kuntres are both the questions of Talmidei Chachomim posed and the answers of Oz Vehadar.

Perusing and studying this work may enable you to get a better understanding of this issue. You may then decide about the legitimacy of the work of Oz Vehadar. Is it our Mesorah that we carried through for thousands of years? Or is it another one of those irresponsible printing presses that have caused havoc on Jewish life, as we know it?

This issue affects directly each and every religious Jewish person. the stakes are high and the room for error is almost non existent.

Time does tell us many times the truth. The question is, "do we have the time to wait??

   קונטרס ופרשו השמלה

A wife is told to serve her husband to increase intimacy and endearment - why only the wife?

We find in the Talmud (and this is also the halacha in Shulchan Aruch) that the wife is told to provide certain personal service for her husband to promote intimacy and endearment.. I have not found a comparable statement that the husband should do things for his wife to increase intimacy - why not?

Kesubos(61a): If she has four slaves -she may lounge in an easy chair. Rav Huna said that even though they said she can lounge in an easy chair but she fills his cup and makes his bed and washes his hands and feet. Furthermore Rav Huna said that all the work that a wife does for her husband she also does it when she is a niddah – except for filling his cup, making his bed and washing his hands and his feet and making his bed. Rava said this restriction for a wife who is a nida is only if she does the work in his presence but he is not there then there is no problem.

Rashi(Kesubos 61a): But she fills his cup and makes his bed – to spread the sheet something which is not strenuous – since it an act of endearment in order that she be more beloved to him. Therefore it is not comparable to the making of the bed mentioned in the Mishna which involves considerable physical effort and she can be forced to do it. She is not forced to do these works of endearment but the Sages merely suggested them as good advice as to how Jewish wives should behave. Except for pouring his cup -  when she is a Nida then all activities which draw them closer and increase endearment are to be avoided because they can lead to prohibited sexual activity.

Rambam(Hilchos Issurei Bi’ah 21:5): It is prohibited to use the personal services of a woman at all – whether she is an adult or a child whether she is a maid servant or a freed women. That is because perhaps it will cause him to have hirhur (sexual fantasies) about her. What type of personal services are we talking about? It is the washing of his face, hands, feets, making his bed in his presence, pouring his cup. That is because these personal services are to only be done by his wife. In addition one should not greet a woman at all – even through an intermediary.

Shulchan Aruch(E.H. 80:4-5): 4) And similarly every woman is to wash her husband’s face, hands and feet and pour his cup and to make his bed. (Some say that she is obligated to make all the beds in the house). And she is to stand before him and serve him doing tasks such as giving him water or a utensil or taking things from him etc. However she does not stand and serve his his father or son (However some say that is only when she is not dependent for support from her husband). 5) These works need to be done by the wife herself – even if she has many servants – she alone is required to do them. (There is a dispute regarding making beds see E.H. 80:8).