50 year feud betwen Belz & Satmar finally ends

Haaretz

On February 21, the Supreme Court struck down the so-called Tal Law, under which ultra-Orthodox men studying at yeshivas were granted a draft exemption. Concurrently, an equally auspicious event, from the viewpoint of the Haredi community, was held. This one was a surprise meeting between the two leaders of the ultra-Orthodox courts from Belz and Machnovka. 

The meeting was the result of conciliatory efforts between the Belzer Rebbe and the Satmar Rebbe - the latest episode in a soap opera that has riveted hundreds of thousands of Haredim around the world since last January. The protagonists are the Belzer Rebbe, Rabbi Yissachar Dov Rokach, and his brother-in-law, the head of the Satmar sect, Rabbi Aharon Teitelbaum. They lead two of the largest Hasidic courts in the world, they are both 64, and they are both married to daughters of Rabbi Moshe Yehoshua Hager, the head of the Vizhnitz Hasidic dynasty and a wholesale producer of daughters for Hasidic courts (a third daughter is also married to a rebbe ). The two sisters, Sarah Rokach and Sasha Teitelbaum, played a key bridging role.

Baby allegedly dies from metzitza - major discussion & sources

Gothamist

A two-week old infant died last fall in a Brooklyn hospital from herpes contracted from a religious circumcision. According to the Daily News, the unidentified infant died last September at Maimonides Hospital—the cause of death was listed as “disseminated herpes simplex virus Type 1, complicating ritual circumcision with oral suction.” The case sounds eerily similar to that of Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer, a Rockland County mohel who was found to have given three babies herpes through the ritual. Fisher specialized in the ultra-Orthodox ritual known as metzizah b’ peh, in which a rabbi or mohel removes blood from the wound with his mouth. One of those three babies infected with herpes by Fisher died, and the city Health Department filed a restraining order stopping Fisher from performing the procedure. But the city ultimately caved and handed the matter over onto a Jewish religious court

Metzitzah B’peh Controversy: The View from Israel By By Mordechai Halperin, Translated from the Hebrew by Yocheve - Jewish Action - OU.ORG

Metzitzah B’peh Controversy: Rabbinic Polemics and Applying the Lessons of History By N. Daniel Korobkin - Jewish Action - OU.ORG

http://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/765633/Rabbi_Aryeh_Lebowitz/Ten_Minute_Halacha_-_Metzitzah_B%27Peh#

Shlomo Pappenheim silenced after being beaten

kikarhashabat

לפני שבועיים ימים, בליל שבת, נזרק שמואל חיים פפנהיים מבית המדרש של חסידות 'תולדות אהרון' בבית שמש, הבוקר, הוא מפרסם מכתב התנצלות ושב לזרועות החסידות.

הזעם בחסידות 'תולדות אהרון' כלפי פפנהיים הגיע לשיא בשל ראיון שהעניק לאחד מכלי התקשורת הכלליים, בו ייחסו לו התבטאויות שונות, שלטענתו כלל לא נאמרו על-ידו.

בעקבות התקרית האלימה, פעלו רבות בני משפחת פפנהיים בקרב קהילת 'תולדות אהרון', בכדי לאפשר את שובו של שמואל חיים לחיק הקהילה.

Before Games, Religious Questions

NYTimes

 The private-schools association, known by the acronym Tapps, was established in the 1970s to coordinate sports among Christian schools. The organization drew national attention this week when it refused to reschedule a state semifinal boys basketball game for an Orthodox Jewish day school, which could not play at the scheduled time because its players observe the Sabbath. [...]

With 500 students, increasing academic prestige and an established soccer team, Iman Academy SW, an Islamic school in Houston, was seeking membership in 2010 to the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools, a group that organizes competition among more than 200 schools in the state.[....]

Daas Torah 2nd edition - Hebrew Sources available

I just published a separate volume for the Hebrew sources found in the 2nd edition of Daas Torah

It is available now from my Amazon estore or directly from Amazon. It consists of 460 pages of the Hebrew texts which were published in translation in the recently published 2nd edition of Daas Torah. Each of the texts in volume I has a reference number which identifies where to find the Hebrew text in volume II. Font size is a more readable size 10 rather than 8 used in the first edition of Daas Torah.

Click link for description of Daas Torah 2nd edition

Israeli court issues unprecedented enslavement conviction

YNet

The Jerusalem District Court issued an unprecedented ruling this week, convicting a couple for the Shufat neighborhood of the enslavement of their Filipina maid.

Wednesday's ruling was the first time a court in Israel defined such wrongful imprisonment as enslavement.

The court found that Ibrahim and Basma Julani held Mary Ann Paoig in their home for over 18 months and denied her the right to leave the premises or contact anyone by phone. 

Jews take issue with posthumous baptisms by Mormons

NYTimes

Although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints promised in 1995 to stop including Holocaust victims in its ritual, the church admitted last week that Anne Frank had been “baptized” in a Mormon church in the Dominican Republic. On Wednesday, The Boston Globe reported that Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was kidnapped and killed by terrorists in Pakistan in early 2002, was baptized last June in Twin Falls, Idaho; Mr. Pearl was Jewish. 

Also on Wednesday, the church released a letter reiterating its policy that “without exception, church members must not submit for proxy temple ordinances any names from unauthorized groups, such as celebrities and Jewish Holocaust victims.”