Wednesday, June 12, 2019

Troubled Dutch teen was not euthanised: minister

times of india


The Hague: A Dutch teenager traumatised by a childhood rape died at home after refusing food and drink but was not euthanised, a minister and a clinic said on Wednesday, dismissing "incorrect" media reports. Noa Pothoven, 17, who became famous after writing a book about her long battle with anorexia, severe depression and posttraumatic stress disorder, died on Sunday. Pothoven said in a final Instagram post that she had "lost the will to fight".

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Birthright Trips, a Rite of Passage for Many Jews, Are Now a Target of Protests

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/us/israel-birthright-jews-protests.html

But the protests highlight growing unease among many young American Jews over Israel’s policies. They see Israeli leaders who have been drifting rightward and openly embracing the annexation of the West Bank, land on which Palestinians have long hoped to build their own state.
The Birthright protests also highlight a generational divide between Jews who grew up with the constant fear of Israel’s destruction, and younger people today who may be more likely to take Israel’s existence for granted, and who focus instead on the millions of Palestinians left stateless by the conflict.

Rabbi Eliyahu: Help women harmed by Rabbi Sheinberg

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/264425

The Rabbi of Tzfat, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, published a video supporting women who were harmed by Ezra Sheinberg, calling on the public to help them.
"I was privileged to accompany them on part of their path," said Rabbi Eliyahu, adding: "I saw what lionesses, heroines, brave and special women they are.”
At the end of the video, the rabbi said: "We need to help as much as possible, because that is how we will eradicate the spirit of impurity from the land."
The video of Rabbi Eliyahu joins other recently published videos, including of rabbis and rabbanits such as Malka Piotrkowsky and Yehudit Shilat, who called to help the victims with the fundraising process in which they now find themselves.
The victims of Sheinberg embarked on a mass mobilization campaign to raise money to help them in the civil suit they are now conducting against Sheinberg, and to help fund the psychological treatments they need.
They wrote on their Facebook page: "It's hard for us to say this out loud, but we, the victims of Ezra Sheinberg, need the help of the public. Years of treatment and legal proceedings and caused us to go into huge financial debt. We are at a crossroads where we must decide - do we ask for help or abandon everything because of debt? We have decided to fight. For ourselves, for our families, so that there will be no more women harmed in the future."
Sheinberg, the former Dean of Orot Ha’ari yeshiva in Tzfat, was convicted as part of a plea bargain for sexually assaulting eight women and sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison.

Smash the Wellness Industry

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opinion/sunday/women-dieting-wellness.html


The wellness industry is the diet industry, and the diet industry is a function of the patriarchal beauty standard under which women either punish themselves to become smaller or are punished for failing to comply, and the stress of this hurts our health too. I am a thin white woman, and the shame and derision I have experienced for failing to be even thinner is nothing compared with what women in less compliant bodies bear. Wellness is a largely white, privileged enterprise catering to largely white, privileged, already thin and able-bodied women, promoting exercise only they have the time to do and Tuscan kale only they have the resources to buy.

'Today there's no patience. If it doesn't work they divorce'

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/264383

Kikar Hashabbat quoted Rabbi Hirsch: "Once the situation was that a woman by nature was subservient to her husband. He was the king at home and she did kindness for him and was also subservient to him, and he would honor her more than [he honored] himself. And that way, if you live that way, over time love and great friendship is built.
"Today the situation is different. Many girls don't have the natural subservience, they're not subservient to their husbands, they don't make him a king in the home, and especially in our communities, where the woman who works and the husband starts to deal with the house a bit, this kind of situation is created.
"Today there's a lack of patience. Once there was patience to wait. Today there's no patience, if there isn't something immediately, there's a fight and there's divorce. In the past 45 years the percentage of divorces in Israel has risen, grown, jumped. If a person knows that there's a way to get out of marriage, he's not willing to try

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

bitul kiddushin



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.”