Friday, June 7, 2019
Thursday, June 6, 2019
I ATTENDED AN ORTHODOX ANTI-VACCINE RALLY. HERE’S WHAT I SAW.
https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/I-attended-an-Orthodox-anti-vaccine-rally-Heres-what-I-saw-591726
The rabbi might have been talking about the 200 people gathered in the basement of a haredi Orthodox wedding hall in Brooklyn to hear about the dangers of vaccines.
While the scientific consensus supports vaccination and regards it as a historic boon to public health, the crowd and the emcee, Rabbi Hillel Handler, do not put much stock in that science. In Handler’s version of reality, doctors, rabbis and politicians are all hoodwinked by a massive conspiracy orchestrated by drug companies and the Centers for Disease Control to make money off of vaccines.
Handler and the other speakers charged the CDC and its purported stooges with hiding the dangers of vaccines and destroying evidence that they are harmful. They cited no credible evidence.
“This is all being orchestrated by the drug companies, which are very close to the CDC,” Handler told the crowd in a gender-segregated room at a catering hall in the Midwood neighborhood. “The doctors all march in lockstep with the CDC. The doctors don’t think they’re marching in lockstep. They don’t understand that the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, is a totally corrupt swamp. … They are criminals.”
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
Fewer than 150 attend vaccine education program in NY ultra-Orthodox community
https://www.timesofisrael.com/fewer-than-150-attend-vaccine-education-program-in-ny-ultra-orthodox-community/
Fewer than 150 women turned out for a vaccine education program in Monsey, New York, less than a month after the same hall was filled with many hundreds of men and women for an anti-vaccine symposium.
The women’s-only event in Monsey, a Rockland County town with a large ultra-Orthodox population, was hosted by a coalition of pro-vaccine Orthodox Jewish groups on Monday night, the local newspaper, the Journal News, reported.
It was for women only so that they would be comfortable asking questions, pro-vaccine activist Shoshana Bernstein told the newspaper. She also called women the “gatekeepers of health in the family.”
Noa Pothoven dies after struggles with sexual assault, depression, and anorexia
https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/04/noa-pothoven-raped-girl-17-dies-by-legal-euthanasia-in-the-netherlands
A Dutch teenager who has detailed her struggles with sexual assault, depression, and anorexia has died, according to media reports.
Noa Pothoven made a "sad last post" to social media last week in which she announced she would "die within 10 days".
The 17-year-old wrote about her problems in her award-winning biography "Winning or Learning".
She wrote in her book that she was first assaulted at the age of 11 and raped by two men when she was just 14-years-old, facts she hid from her parents because she was ashamed.
In her last post on Instagram, the young girl wrote that she had stopped eating and drinking and that her suffering was "unbearable".
She wrote that her decision was "final" and that she had not been alive for a while.
"I breathe but no longer live," she wrote.
Pothoven wrote on Instagram last week that after many "conversations and reviews it had been decided".
Tuesday, June 4, 2019
Fox News has normalized a lie about the origins of the Russia investigation
As America awaits special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report, Fox News has gotten in the habit of pushing a false talking point about the origins of his investigation — that it began after Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in 2016 alerted the FBI to the Steele dossier, an unverified intelligence document that contains a number of claims, some of them far-fetched, about the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia.
“Keep in mind that all of this seemed to have started with this dossier that was essentially an oppo research paper funded by the Democrats, after the Republicans originally started it — dirt on Donald Trump,” Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy said on Friday.
But it’s also in the news because Trump is putting it there. He’s making it a central part of his bizarre, one-sided feud with the late John McCain — in which Trump has slammed him for the role he played in alerting the FBI to the dossier.
“They gave it to John McCain, who gave it to the FBI for very evil purposes. That’s not good,” Trump told Fox Business in an interview that aired Friday morning. “I’m not a fan.”
Last Sunday, Trump tweeted that McCain “sent the Fake Dossier to the FBI and Media hoping to have it printed BEFORE the Election.”
Changing Concepts of the Ultra-Orthodox Body Rabbi Avigdor Miller as a Test Case
https://www.academia.edu/8412222/_In_English_Changing_Concepts_of_the_Ultra-Orthodox_Body_Rabbi_Avigdor_Miller_as_a_Test_Case
This article opened with the assertion that Lithuanian Jewish Ultra-Orthodox thought internalized, indirectly, secular values, translating them into the language of the Jewish believer's life of Halakha. The fact that the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community is, in the West, a tiny minority surrounded by secular majorities made the inroads of what they consider to be secular ideas into Ultra-Orthodox thought almost inevitable.
59
Having said this, we note that such value-encounters, far from being fruitless, give rise to a unique cross-pollination. They bring to the surface issues that Ultra-Orthodox thinkers do not always find easy to grapple with, while creating uniquely acceptable translations of hitherto strange values.I have considered in this article how values perceived by Ultra-Orthodox Jews as secular, relating to experiences of the body, were incorporated into the thinking of Rabbi Miller. Rabbi Miller gradually internalizes the secular affirmation of the human body and of life in this world. Further, his description of the Jewish person rejects the very dichotomy between mind and body so basic to his own Ultra-Orthodox context, and bears more resemblance to secular-Western images of the body. For Miller, the worship of God must originate in a human person's natural experience of spontaneous self-awareness within the world, with special attention to sensory (physical) perceptions and to feelings
.
Only from these beginnings can a person of faith move forward to the knowledge of the divine, and finally to the creation of religious experience.In forging his innovative theology, Rabbi Miller was constrained to come to terms both with subliminal secular influences and with classical ideas from the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish tradition that nourished him and within which he lived out his vocation as teacher. The fertile encounter of the Lithuanian Jewish Musar movement with values from outside its borders led Rabbi Miller to create a radical and personal theological translation of classical Jewish concepts, opening the way for a new form of Lithuanian traditional thought.
Changing Concepts of the Ultra-Orthodox Body: Rabbi Avigdor Miller as a Test Case
Yakir Englander, Religious Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60201, USA. E-mail:yakir1212englander@gmail.com. Profound thanks to my doctoral work mentors, Dr. Avinoam Rosenak and Dr. Orit Kamir, and to Dr. Henry Ralph Carse, who carefully read and responded, and translated this article from the Hebrew. The research was made possible under the generous auspices of a Fulbright-Rabin scholarship
In this article, I examine the entry of values perceived to be secular into Ultra-Orthodox Jewish thought. These values are introduced in an unconscious manner, and thus may be traced only in light of the subsequent changes that occur in Ultra-Orthodox thinking itself. I examine this subject through the work of Rabbi Avigdor Miller on the concept of the body.Rabbi Miller, one of the twentieth century's most important spiritual mentors in the United States, was chosen because of the perceptible change in his thinking in the latter half of his teaching career, when we find external (i.e., secular)
values playing an increasingly central role. This led Rabbi Miller to alternative readings of classical Jewish concepts, and even to a call for significant changes in the manner of living a worthy Jewish life
CONCLUSION
This article opened with the assertion that Lithuanian Jewish Ultra-Orthodox thought internalized, indirectly, secular values, translating them into the language of the Jewish believer's life of Halakha. The fact that the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community is, in the West, a tiny minority surrounded by secular majorities made the inroads of what they consider to be secular ideas into Ultra-Orthodox thought almost inevitable.
59
Having said this, we note that such value-encounters, far from being fruitless, give rise to a unique cross-pollination. They bring to the surface issues that Ultra-Orthodox thinkers do not always find easy to grapple with, while creating uniquely acceptable translations of hitherto strange values.I have considered in this article how values perceived by Ultra-Orthodox Jews as secular, relating to experiences of the body, were incorporated into the thinking of Rabbi Miller. Rabbi Miller gradually internalizes the secular affirmation of the human body and of life in this world. Further, his description of the Jewish person rejects the very dichotomy between mind and body so basic to his own Ultra-Orthodox context, and bears more resemblance to secular-Western images of the body. For Miller, the worship of God must originate in a human person's natural experience of spontaneous self-awareness within the world, with special attention to sensory (physical) perceptions and to feelings
.
Only from these beginnings can a person of faith move forward to the knowledge of the divine, and finally to the creation of religious experience.In forging his innovative theology, Rabbi Miller was constrained to come to terms both with subliminal secular influences and with classical ideas from the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish tradition that nourished him and within which he lived out his vocation as teacher. The fertile encounter of the Lithuanian Jewish Musar movement with values from outside its borders led Rabbi Miller to create a radical and personal theological translation of classical Jewish concepts, opening the way for a new form of Lithuanian traditional thought.
Life insurance for married yeshiva students
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/264143
Just prior to leaving office, former Education Minister Naftali Bennett (New Right) signed an ordinance approving a life insurance plan for married yeshiva students.
The ordinance, pushed forward by Shas MK Yitzhak Cohen, was fiercely opposed by UTJ MK Moshe Gafni, who also heads the Knesset's Finance Committee.
Under the new initiative, a sum of 500,000 NIS ($138,390) will be paid to the widow and orphans of married yeshiva students, over a period of fifteen years.
"Every married yeshiva student will pay a minimal sum of 20-30 NIS ($5.54-8.30) each month, and if it becomes necessary, his widow and children will receive a monthly stipend of 5,000 NIS ($1,384) each month for a period of 15 years," Cohen explained when first pushing the plan forward. He noted that he had the backing of haredi rabbis.
Gafni, for his part, had claimed the insurance harms the yeshivas' budgets.
"Today they're taking part of the budget for important insurance, tomorrow they'll take part of the yeshivas' budget for a hundred other issues. We cannot allow the yeshivas' budget to be harmed, and any initiative, no matter how important, needs to come from a separate additional budget, without harming the yeshivas' budgets," he said then.
Monday, June 3, 2019
ULTRA-ORTHODOX MOVING TO PERIPHERY, PRESAGING INCREASED SOCIETAL TENSION
.jpost
Given the rapid increase in the haredi population due to its high birth rate, the National Economic Council has estimated that between 170,000 to 200,000 housing units will be needed for the haredi sector over the next twenty years.
Traditionally, the majority of the haredi community has been largely concentrated in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, but as housing prices there have risen dramatically with the rapid growth of the haredi population and subsequent increase in demand, there has been an increasing trend to move out of those centers.
Beit Shemesh in the Jerusalem district and Elad in the Central District, as well as as Ashdod and Petaj Tikav, along with the homogenous haredi cities of Modiin Illit and Beitar Illit in the West Bank, became new destinations for haredi families to settle in over the last two decades.
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