Rabbi Schecter Interview in Ami Magazine - with added comments

   Rabbi Shechter Interview with comments by guest post

A pediatrician shows you how to calm a crying baby

Dr. Thomas Szasz - psychiatry and mental illness

Tamar's Use of Secular Evaluations for Halacha

   Tamar Use of Secular Evals for Halacha (5 Files Merged) by Ploni

Tamar Epstein's Heter: Should a special beis din be created to rule on its validity or should the focus be on investigating the rabbinic corruption and incompetence revealed in this case?

Guest Post

With regard to the proposed new beis din, it appears to me to be of extremely limited value for them to just determine whether or not the annulment was valid - although that is something that should be done.  The annulment is a total joke and everyone knows that.

It seems to me that what is needed is an investigation of so-called "rabbonim" who had a role in this matter over the last seven years, not just the psak.  It should include an investigation of what process they went through in making the psak and the other similarly reprehensible actions taken over the years, and what fact-finding if any was done by which "rabbonim" that would justify these actions.  It appears to me that there must be some type of reckoning as to whether it is appropriate for these individuals to have any leadership role as a posek, rav, or other type of communal leader.

This matter is not a matter of innocent mistakes, or people cutting a few corners.It appears to me that this involved the grossest possible incompetence at best, and more likely outright, knowing and  purposeful deceit, if not pure bribery and corruption. This behavior went on for years and years, including the most vile character assassination, not to mention a beating and attempted kidnapping that endangered the life of a child, which clearly constitutes a capital crime under Federal law.

This activity has created a massive chillul hashem and made a total mockery of Orthodox Judaism.  Given that the "rabbonim" deliberately made this matter into a huge public spectacle (such as articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, and demonstrations at the United States Congress), they had to have known that this "annulment" would become very public. 

So while it is true and important to show that the annulment was not valid and the resulting children would be mamzerim - but there is a much greater question that needs to be address. The larger question is about the apparent massive incompetence and corruption at the highest levels of so-called Orthodox leadership in the United States. Included in this is the silence of other's in leadership positions and why they ignored what everyone knows is true?   Failure to hold those rabbis who were involved in corrupting the halachic proces will just guarantee that similar or even worse episodes will happen in the future. Therefore this an opportunity for the Jewish community to do some long overdue housecleaning and rededication to halacha and truth.

R Shalom Kaminetsky: Architect of Tamar's heter - is guest speaker at melave malkah

Tamar Epstein's Heter: Rav Shmuel Feurst joined Rav Nota Greenblatt in giving the "heter"

It has long been suspected that Rav Feurst of Chicago was a significant factor in the "heter". Rav Greenblatt wrote in his letter that after hearing the "facts" of Aharon Friedman's serious and incurable "mental illness" he was willing "to join other rabbis" in giving a heter for Tamar to remarry without a Get. The question has been who are the other rabbis or did Rav Greenblatt give a heter by himself because no one else wanted to agree to R Shalom Kaminetskys request for a heter of mekach ta'os?

I have gotten a direct answer to the question from a well qualified source. He stated categorically that Rav Feurst had agreed with the heter but he added that there are others. Rav Feurst is a well regarded posek and also a talmid of Rav Moshe Feinstein. Thus we are not talking about Rav Greenblatt having an off day and following  the Daas Torah of Rav Shmuel Kaminetsky. We see that there are poskim - who clearly should know better - who agreed to this "heter" without bothering to check the facts as presented by R Shalom Kaminetsky and did not bother to hear the other side. Thus the corruption in the system is significantly worse than if the entire responsibility was on Rav Nota Greenblatt. It is also astounding that a posek of Rav Feurst's stature would not acknowledge that he was a major player in the "heter" or even acknowledge that he was involved.

I have also heard reports that this isn't the first time that Rav Feurst has declared that a Get wasn't needed because of "mekach ta'os". Someone mentioned that he has done it at least 15 times. At the present time I do not know whether this report is correct and whether the conditions specified by Rav Moshe Feinstein were met in the other cases. However there is no question that in Tamar Epstein's case Rav Moshe Feinstein would not have accepted the false data and the false conclusions.

It is time for Rav Greenblatt and Rav Feurst to either defend their psak or retract it. As Rav Greenblatt has noted, a secret psak by anonymous poskim is not to be taken seriously.

Tamar Epstein Heter: New letter from Hisachdus HaRabbonim

Rav Nota Greenblatt: Problem of relying on others for the facts that determine psak

Dear Rabbi Eidensohn,

There is a tragic situation I have been trying to do something about for several years. Perhaps your recent endeavors can help.

In January 2014 I spoke to Rabbi N. Greenblatt of Memphis, TN who confirmed the Halachos of Orech Chaim, siman 366  require that if anyone is prevented from access from the food component of the community eruv, the eruv is invalid. There are several people in Las Vegas that the Young Israel does not allow on the property, most notably a widow (http://cleanupyoungisrael.blogspot.com/)! It appears that Rabbi Greenblatt's son Rabbi Yaakov Greenblatt, who participated in construction of the eruv, was not informed of the situation in the area the eruv was to encompass. 

When I called Rabbi Greenblatt in Memphis it was very clear he knows the Halacha of eruv that the Kollel failed to fulfill. He said he was going to check into it. When I called him back he said that he had been assured by the "Bnei Torah of the Kollel" that everything is all right. He didn't know about the widow, he didn't know what happened to Rabbi Peltz (http://cleanupyoungisrael.blogspot.com/2012/01/leaders-of-young-israel-of-las-vegas.html) and he has no idea how Rabbi Edgar Gross, z'tl was threatened if he dare try to enter the shul (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByDyf3w55PRPdWNuaDdOcnhVbjQ/edit?usp=sharing).

 

Rabbi Greenblatt simply put his trust with "the Kollel", a kollel that disregarded a seruv on the excommunicated leader of the shul, that everything is all right so to him the eruv erected by his son is ok.

Any way you can help with this situation would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Asher Kaufman

 

asher_kaufman@outlook.com

Fax number, 763-322-2342

If anyone wants to speak with me they can either email or fax their number to me and I will call them back.

Rav Nota Greenblatt featured at conference about Gittin - teaching about sensitivty to the individuals involved

Jewish Link    [This article is genuine]

Most of the active mesadrei gittin (get administrators) in the United States gathered in Manhattan last week for a day-long conference. It was a fantastic event. We had the privilege and opportunity to hear from leading halachic authorities such as Rav Nota Greenblatt, Rav Hershel Schachter, Rav Mordechai Willig and Rav Mendel Senderovic (listed in order of age). The focus was on addressing the manifold halachic challenges involved in gittin administration, such as securing the cooperation of recalcitrant men and women.....

One vignette stands out, though, in my mind as most memorable and insightful. Rav Nota Greenblatt, the country’s senior get administrator who has been administering gittin since 1952(!), related how he dealt with a particular challenge he encountered in a midwestern city. The woman insisted that she should hand the get to her husband instead of the Torah-mandated procedure of the husband handing the wife the get. She argued that since it was he who misbehaved during the marriage and not she (a fact that went unchallenged by the husband) then she should be the one to deliver the get.

This poses a serious challenge since a get delivered in such a manner is unquestionably halachically invalid, yet the woman was unwilling to cooperate in the traditional procedure. Rav Greenblatt patiently sat down with the woman and told the following story. His wife’s first delivery was an extraordinarily difficult one, with labor taking over thirty hours (!). When coming for the delivery of the next child, the Greenblatts (who reside in Memphis) hired the finest OB-GYN in the state of Tennessee. Rav Greenblatt told the wife that he asked the doctor if this time he could deliver the baby considering the difficulty of the prior delivery (by this time, the wife was already laughing). Rav Greenblatt noted that it is not fair for the husband to sit by on the side while his wife does the labor. It would seem far more equitable if the wife delivers the first child, the husband delivers the second and they flip a coin to decide who delivers the third.

Rav Greenblatt explained that God has ordained that it is the woman who delivers the children, notwithstanding our sense of fairness. So, too, Rav Greenblatt explained, if it were up to him, the husband should deliver the get to his wife if she misbehaved and vice versa if he acted poorly. However, God revealed at Mount Sinai a specific procedure in which the get is to be delivered under all circumstances. Laughing heartily and appreciating the insight, the wife then readily consented to receive the get in the halachically prescribed manner. What a fine example of sensitively bridging culture gaps with humor and wit! ....

Tamar Epstein's Heter: Is R Nota Greenblatt or R Shalom Kaminetsky going to inform Tamar that she needs to separate from her new husband?

Considerable progress in dealing with the phony heter has been made. In fact it is no longer a question of how many people support the heter. The answer is absolutely no one!

At this point - even Rabbi Greenblatt is fully aware that the heter that he gave is invalid. He blames R Shalom Kaminetsky for putting him in a very unpleasant situation where not only the Rabbanut wants to disqualify his future Gittin - but there is such talk also here in America.

Even without publishing his teshuva - enough people have read it to be aware that it is nonsense and was based on his blindly accepting everything that the Kaminetsky's told him. Even he is aware that the facts are false and that he permitted Tamar to be in an adulterous relationship.

The present question is who has the obligation to inform Tamar that her new marriage is invalid? Is it Rabbi Greenblatt who provided the heter to remarry and in fact was the mesader kedishin or is it Rabbi Shalom Kaminetsky who manipulated Rabbi Greenblatt - through his father  - into giving the heter and marrying Tamar and Adam.

Perhaps it should be the gedolim of the Agudah who stood silently by and voiced no objection even after it was clear that a horrible perversion of Torah had happened at the highest levels? Maybe it should be Rav Herschel Schechter who publicly announced that the word of Rav Shmuel Kaminetsky in Tamar's quest for a divorce should not be questioned? There are clearly other candidates.

In short, we have a situation where Tamar Epstein is living in sin because of unquestioned obedience to the doctrine of Daas Torah of Gedolim. Who is going to tell her that the Emperor has no clothes and that she has been horribly betrayed? Each minute that she stays together with Adam, there are rabbis who will be paying the price for their hesitancy.

Tamar Epstein's Heter reaches the press- "Former ‘chained’ woman remarries in Memphis"

Washington Jewish Week

A former Silver Spring woman who was a central figure in the ongoing efforts to reform how the Orthodox community deals with men who refuse to grant their wives a Jewish divorce has remarried.

Tamar Epstein married Adam Paul Fleischer on Sept. 24, in a ceremony in Memphis, Tenn....

Because they are still married in the eyes of Jewish law until they receive a get, such women are known as “chained” women, or agunot in Hebrew. With several religious authorities viewing a husband’s refusal to grant the document as tantamount to spousal abuse, Friedman had been banned from communal activities in several locales, including in the Washington area, pending the Silver Spring man’s granting of a get....

The process by which Epstein was allowed to remarry has come under scrutiny, according to several sources. At issue is whether her marriage to Friedman was satisfactorily annulled....

Several people told Washington Jewish Week that Tamar was told she was a free woman by a Philadelphia rabbi who declared that Friedman had severe mental issues that existed prior to the couple’s marriage, including paranoia and obsessive compulsive disorder, and that had she known of these conditions, she would not have married him. Therefore, halachically she could move on with her life, the rabbi declared....

Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch, vice president of the Rabbinical Court in Israel, wrote a blog post in protest of Epstein’s remarriage.

A decision by some rabbis that the Epstein-Friedman marriage was over even though Epstein “had lived with her first husband for an extended period of time and she had borne a daughter from him,” is not the way it works, he said.

“I saw the [ruling] that ‘freed’ her. I hate to say this, but the [ruling] is total nonsense. Taking the approach of this [ruling], it is possible to destroy the whole framework of halachic marriage,” he wrote. “Such an approach is destructive to Judaism and uproots the basic laws governing Jewish marriage.”

According to Sternbuch, Epstein is still married to Friedman “in every respect.”...

[Rabbi] Kranz, who believes Epstein must receive a Jewish divorce before she can go on with her life, called the matter “a tragedy, a really big tragedy.”

Why aren't Rabbi Jeremy Stern and ORA protesting the false heter that has resulted in Tamar committing adultery?

Over the years we have had many discussions of the problem of women who want to leave their marriages but their husband refuses to give them a Get for various reasons. While we have some significant disagreements in the realm of halacha, I acknowledge there has always been one person - Rabbi Jeremy Stern and his organization ORA - that has consistently taken the side of the woman. He has sincerely devoted much effort to try and help anyone who claims to be an aguna. He has organized public demonstrations of hundreds of people to try and help a wife obtain her Get. He is very knowledgeable about the use of the media and how to create maximum pressure on the husband and his family to produce a Get. The common denominator in all those that he tries to help is that they are all women. They are viewed by Rabbi Stern and his halachic advisor Rav Herschel Schecter  as being victims of the husband, apathy of the public or rabbis who lack their commonsense human sensitivity to suffering.

In short, I am sure if I called up Rabbi Stern at 3 a.m. and told him there was a woman who needed help – he would immediate start working on finding a solution.

So why haven't we heard from him, ORA or Rav Herschel Schecter regarding the false heter that Tamar received? Why haven't they organized public demonstrations against Rav Greenblatt or the Kaminetskys? Why doesn't the fact that Tamar is now committing adultery as the result of rabbinic incompetence cause them to be outraged? Isn't Tamar also a suffering victim? Aren't they bothered by the major corruption of the halachic  process that has taken place. Why don't they heed the call of Rav Sternbuch and other rabbis to protest the disgrace to the Torah?

It can't be that they don't know about it. It can't be that they are unaware of the elementary halachic errors used to justify the "heter". Even more obvious is that they can not be unaware that the  psychological "evidence" used to justify the "heter" is total nonsense.

Perhaps they claim they are working behind the scenes to rectify the error? Or perhaps that they are worried for the loss of emunas chachomim because big rabbis made a terrible error? Perhaps they think the case should be covered up to prevent a chilul haShem of Titanic proportion? Highly unlikely.

Or perhaps they are afraid to publicize that the advice that rabbis give to women sometimes is wrong. Perhaps they don't want to acknowledge that not every strategy that seems to help women get out of a marriage is correct.

It seems that they are paralyzed because the protest against the heter is a protest against their categorical feminist focus and they simply can't do it. If this "heter" is wrong – people might starting thinking other heterim are also wrong.

Rabbi Stern - please prove me wrong. Please stand up and protest Tamar's plight.

ANOTHER GIGANTIC NAIL IN THE COFFIN OF TAMAR’S FAKE היתר:

Guest post by Ploni

Allow me to point out another serious problem with Tamar’s היתר. I believe that this problem points to the total lack of responsibility involved in attempting to use the רופא מומחה as a so called "עדות" that AF is a חולי רוח שמפריע לנשואים, as stated in Rabbi Greenblatt’s recent letter.

Quoting from the specialty guidelines for both psychologists and Psychiatrists, it turns out that WHEN FURNISHING WRITTEN OR ORAL EXPERT OPINION IN REGARD TO AN INDIVIDUAL WHO HAS NOT BEEN PERSONALLY EXAMINED, A FORENSIC MENTAL HEALTH PRACTITIONER (MHP) IS REQUIRED TO DISCLOSE “LIMITATIONS ON THE RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY OF THEIR PROFESSIONAL PRODUCTS” (Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychologists, §VI[H], 1991) and / or “CLEARLY INDICATE THAT THERE WAS NO PERSONAL EXAMINATION AND THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THEREBY LIMITED” (Ethical Guidelines for the Practice of Forensic Psychiatry, §IV, 1987).

Got that? In cases like that of AF, the mental health practitioner has a legal obligation to disclose that both the reliability and the validity of his “product”, namely his evaluation, is of “limited” value!

A well-known fact in this case is that Tamar’s Friends and Family (TFF) are relying on a secular DSM diagnosis to prove AF’s purported mental illness. We are not privy to the personal communications between MHP and TFF. Perhaps the MHP DID disclose to TTF the “limitations on the reliability and validity of their professional products”. Unlikely, but possible.

We are however EXTREMELY CERTAIN that TFF did most definitely NOT notify any of the Rabbonim about this lack in validity and reliability. What makes us so sure? NO Rov with even one iota of ירא שמים – including both Rabbi Kaminetsky and Rabbi Greenblatt – would ever be מתיר אשת איש, had they known from the get-go that said evaluation is of questionable worth. To the contrary, TFF made EVERY EFFORT to prove that the evaluation IS valid and reliable. Rabbi Greenblatt’s letter pretty much says the same thing.

What we see here is לפענ"ד mind boggling. A היתר based on secular “science”, while that very “science” states unequivocally that it lacks validity and reliability! שומו שמים!!!

Who is responsible for this obvious lapse in judgement???? Did none of the מתירים have the אחריות to ascertain the validity and reliability of the diagnosis? Is this what סוד ה' ליראיו has come to???

This monumental חילול ה' could easily have been avoided, had we only had people with both יראת שמים and working KNOWLEDGE OF SECULAR LAW pertaining to mental health diagnosis and treatment.

This knowledge gap needs to be fixed quickly.

The issues at stake are not just relevant to this particular fiasco with Tamar. They are much, much more wide-ranging. Outdated secular theories of mental health at loggerheads with Torah values have made serious inroads into our communities in areas like Marriage counseling/שלו' בית, parenting/education/חינוך … The list is long. Ironically, more recent theories with strong backing from those at very pinnacle of their respective scientific fields are MORE CONGRUENT with Torah thinking - yet they are all but ignored.

Let us band together to turn this terrible חילול ה' into a tremendous קידוש ה', by dedicating the time and resources necessary to really get a “handle” on these complex issues.