Among the various justifications for calling the police in the case of child abuse is the following Rambam [Shulchan Aruch C.M. 388:12 according to Gra & Shach] which is found in his discussion of moser. A major concern is the source of this Rambam. There is no direct source in Chazal which says this. It is discussed at length by the Chasam Sofer and the Minchas Yitzchok. Is it a viable source to call the police? Ask your local posek.
Rambam (Hilchos Chovel uMazik 8:11): ...Similarly concerning all those who distress the community and harm it – it is permitted to hand them over to the non‑Jewish government to be beaten, imprisoned and punished. However if the person is only disturbing an individual and not the community – it is prohibited to hand him over....
רמב"ם (הלכות חובל ומזיק ח:יא):עשה המוסר אשר זמם ומסר יראה לי שאסור להרגו אלא אם כן הוחזק למסור הרי זה יהרג שמא ימסור אחרים, ומעשים בכל זמן בערי המערב להרוג המוסרים שהוחזקו למסור ממון ישראל ולמסור את המוסרים ביד הגוים להרגם ולהכותם ולאסרם כפי רשעם. וכן כל המיצר לציבור ומצער אותן מותר למסרו ביד גוים להכותו ולאסרו ולקנסו, אבל מפני צער יחיד אסור למסרו, ואסור לאבד ממונו של מסור ואע"פ שמותר לאבד גופו שהרי ממונו ראוי ליורשיו
שולחן ערוך (חושן משפט שפח:יב):
כל המוסר [המיצר גר"א וש"ך]הצבור ומצערן, מותר למסרו ביד עובדי כוכבים אנסים להכותו ולאסרו ולקנסו; אבל מפני צער יחיד אסור למסרו. הגה: (וע"ל סי' תכ"ה ס"א). מי שעוסק בזיופים וכדומה, ויש לחוש שיזיק רבים, מתרין בו שלא יעשה, ואם אינו משגיח, יכולין למסרו ולומר שאין אחר מתעסק בו אלא זה לבד. מי שרוצה לברוח ולא לשלם לעובדי כוכבים מה שחייב, ואחר גילה הדבר, אין לו דין מסור, שהרי לא הפסידו רק שהוצרך לשלם מה שחייב, מכל מקום ברעה עשה דהוי כמשיב אבידה לעובד כוכבים; ואם גרם לו היזק, חייב לשלם לו מה שגרם לו (מהר"ם מרוזבורג).
Haaretz reports: The Knesset caucus for secular Judaism and organizations from all
streams of Judaism have created a coalition of conversion courts
independent from the Chief Rabbinate. The coalition, which was approved
last week, is being coordinated by PANIM for Jewish Renaissance, an
advocacy group for pluralistic Judaism.
The goal is to create
two new tracks in Israel for conversions to Judaism, one secular and
one national-religious, both independent from the Chief Rabbinate.
These come on top of the conversion courts of the Reform and
Conservative movements, which produce about 300 converts a year.
Converts
of the new coalition will not be permitted to marry through the
rabbinate, but rather in accordance with a ruling by the High Court of
Justice that these converts will be registered as Jews in the Interior
Ministry's Population Registry.
One of the coalition's main
innovations is the inclusion of Ne'emanei Torah Vaavodah, a moderate
Orthodox movement, in a forum that recognizes Reform, Conservative and
secular conversion. The chairman of Ne'emanei Torah Vaavodah, Yonatan
Ben Harosh, said at the forum's latest meeting that his movement plans
to establish independent conversion courts "in close cooperation with
two other organizations: Mavoi Satum (Dead End) and Kolech, Jewish
Woman's Voice."
The forum's founding document explains that
"300,000 of the immigrants to Israel who are eligible under the Law of
Return are not recognized in Israel as Jews in the Population Registry.
Most have integrated into Israel and have forged a covenant of fate but
are not accepted by us into the Jewish people, with all that entails:
the stripping of citizenship rights, alienation and rejection."
The
organizations in the forum say that "the opportunity given by the Chief
Rabbinate of Israel by the state to respond to the challenge of
conversion in Israel has been exhausted. [The rabbinate's] monopoly
must be taken away from it."
The main obstacle to mass
conversion is the demand by the Chief Rabbinate and Conversion
Administration that converts conduct a religiously observant lifestyle
and send their children to religious schools. The crisis between the
national-religious public and the government's conversion system was
created by a ruling by the Great Rabbinical Court seeking to void even
conversions carried out by the head of the administration, Rabbi Haim
Druckman.
The Reform and Conservative movements, like the
Conversion Administration, require potential converts to complete
hundreds of hours of instruction in Judaism. The secular Judaism
institutions might very well do the same, but they will not demand that
converts change their lifestyle.
The secular Knesset caucus is
headed by outgoing Meretz MK Yossi Beilin, a pioneer of the idea of
secular conversion. Currently the only secular organization initiating
a secular conversion process is Tmura, the International Institute for
Secular Humanistic Judaism. Rabbi Sivan Maas, a director and assistant
dean of Tmura, said the organization's first conversion course is
scheduled to begin in January. [...]
Henry Paulson became Treasury secretary 28 months ago, when he was at the top of the financial world: Wall Street’s best-paid chief executive officer,capping his career with a high-profile sojourn in public service.
Today, two months before he leaves office, some say Paulson is a reduced figure, damaged by the financial-market meltdown that happened on his watch and by the government’s struggles to respond to it.
Like many others who have served in President George W. Bush’s administration — among them former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Treasury chief Paul O’Neill — Paulson, 62, will leave office casting a smaller shadow than when he arrived.
“Paulson’s credibility has certainly been substantially diminished,” said Peter Wallison, who was general counsel at the Treasury under former President Ronald Reagan and is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “There has been a lot of shifting back and forth and he clearly hasn’t thought through much of these policies. He has lost a lot of confidence from the market from all of this.”
The latest blow was his announcement last week that the Treasury is abandoning his plan to buy devalued mortgage assets — the one he unveiled dramatically just eight weeks ago, and defended against congressional and market skeptics.
“This is a flip-flop, but on the other hand, when they first proposed the thing,they didn’t really know what they were doing,” said Bill Fleckenstein,president of Fleckenstein Capital in Seattle and author of the book Greenspan’s Bubbles. Paulson has pushed some “cockamamie schemes,” he said. “So one has to ask, does he have any clue?”
“This is not something he’s going to be proud to put on his résumé,” said James Cox,a law professor at Duke University in Durham, N.C., who has testified on securities regulation before Congress and served on legal advisory panels for the New York Stock Exchange and National Association of Securities Dealers. “It does tarnish Paulson’s image, because it shows that a lot of political capital was spent on something that most of us thought was not a good idea to begin with.”
Only history will render a final verdict on Paulson’s handling of this year’s cascading economic crises. But he surely couldn’t have wanted to spend his final days in office this way: spearheading the massive government intervention in the banking, insurance and mortgage industries;fielding requests to bail out automakers and even heating-oil retailers.
“He’s ended up really in kind of a hair-on-fire thing,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at RBS Greenwich Capital. “Particularly in his position, of somebody who was going to be a government official for a very short time and then ride off into the sunset, it’s been very different from what he had in mind.”
The Treasury chief last week said he had no regrets over reversing his plans for the bailout program. “I will never apologize for changing a strategy or an approach if the facts change,” Paulson said at a press briefing.
In an interview with Bloomberg Television, he said “the original plan was a good plan. What changed was our understanding of the magnitude of the problem.”[...]
Jewish History No One Knows (But Should Know) From articles written for the Yated Neeman (USA)
by Avraham Broide (Jerusalem based translator and journalist.
phone: 02-5856133; email: broide2@netvision.net.il)
The Chelm people laugh at was a parallel universe of a real Chelm where Jews lived, learned, prayed, kvetched and died much the same as Jews everywhere else.
You want to know the truth? Chelm was really a perfectly normal town, practically indistinguishable from hundreds of similar shtetls peppered over Poland and Russia. So how did that vibrant little community become buried beneath a mountain of jokes? The Chelm Memorial Book published after World War II devotes some pages analyzing this weighty question.
According one opinion, the Chelm humor tradition, like so much Jewish humor, was rooted in tragedy.
The story began with an Easter Church procession in 1580 that degenerated into an anti-Semitic riot. Ruffians attacked the Jewsin the middle of their Passover prayers and a number of them barricaded themselves with shutters on the shul's roof. Afterwards, people joked that the Chelm Jews had installed shutters on their roofs instead of in their windows and, for better or worse, the town's reputation was sealed.
According to another theory, people picked on Chelm because in Slavic cholem means a fool.
Most likely, however, people picked on Chelm for the same reason other nations picked on particular towns as the butt of their jokes. The ancient Greeks picked on Abdera, the Syrians picked on Sidon, the English picked on the village of Gotham, the Dutch picked on Compen, the Arabs picked on Chevron, and Germany picked on number of towns including Shilburg. In fact, the 1597 publication of a Yiddish book titled, “Shilberg, a Short History,” provided much of the raw material later utilized for Chelm jokes.
For a while, Chelm jokes were an oral tradition. They first appeared in print after a small booklet printed in Vilna in 1867 included a chapter titled “the Wisdom and Witticism of a Certain Town Ch.,” and from then on Chelm jokes were fruitful and multiplied.
In the fullness of time, the real Chelm morphed into a full-fledged parallel universe.
Chelm was once a regular town, it was said, until one day when the angel that dishes out men's souls winged over the place hauling a sack of foolish souls on his back. Now, as everyone knows, Chelm lies adjacent to a sharp peaked mountain. This ripped open the sack, the souls plunged downwards, and ever since the town was never quite the same.
Despite their intellectual shortcomings, the Chelm Jews were of a different stamp than run-of-the-mill fools. Their idiocy stemmed not from lack of intelligence but from their insistence on being over clever, a trait known in Yiddish as being an uber chacham.
For example, the town's charity box was hung high beneath the shul's ceiling as a precaution against theft. When people complained that they could not reach there to drop in their donations, the town's wise men hit on the solution of propping up a ladder beneath to enable people to climb there. Chelmites always knew how to leap between the horns of dilemma.
When the town sexton complained that he was getting too old to make his early morning rounds rapping on people's shutters to wake them for prayers, the city elders collected the populace's shutters and piled them up in his house. Now he could rap them without having to stir outdoors. In his earlier years, when he complained that his shoes got filthy trudging through the town's muddy alleyways in execution of his duties, the town had appointed four strapping youngsters to carry him around the streets on a door.
The real Chelm was a different place altogether where perfectly regular Jews lived, learned, prayed, kvetched and died much the same as Jews in other towns.
Jews first arrived in this small Polish town that lies 40 miles south-east of Lublin in about 1300, in order to wheel and deal with traders passing through on international trading routes between the Black and Baltic seas. Come to think of it, Chelm wasn't such a miserable place after all. By the middle of the 16th Century it boasted a population of 371 at a time when even the capital of Cracow only had 1,800 Jews. It also had its own yeshiva and a cadre of prominent rabbis and sages.
By the outbreak of World War II, Chelm had a population of about 15,000 Jews, including refugees. Most of them perished. Although the Chelm district lies right on the Eastern border of Poland next to Russia, and was the first Polish district liberated from the Nazis in 5704/1944, by then it was too late; most of Chelm's Jews had perished in the nearby Sobidor Extermination Camp and those who struggled back were greeted with hatred.
But the legacy of Chelm humor lives on, helping to soften the hard bumps of life's road.
Medium box. I need a large! I have my children to feed, please - please can I have a large box?
Sorry. Medium box.
That's how it went on a recent Thursday night at the TomcheShabbos food pantry in Brooklyn's Borough Park neighborhood, one of theseveral that provide weekly baskets of strictly kosher food to 500needy haredi families.
Jeno Herschkowits, who has run the pantry since 1975, sayssupplicants have gotten noticeably edgier in recent months, as peoplewho were narrowly avoiding ruin before this fall's stock market crashfind themselves slipping over the brink, now that the American consumereconomy has ground to a near halt.
"People are desperate; they get aggressive," he said. "And there are more people, but less money."
Evidence of pain is everywhere, from deep discounts at chainstores - as much as 60 percent off fall merchandise, that began weeksbefore the traditional Thanksgiving sales - to empty restaurants andupticks in late-night subway ridership by those who might previouslyhave splurged on cabs. But in New York's haredi neighborhoods, wheremost families subsist on a single income, the strain shows up in weeklydebates over "small," "medium" or "large."
A WEEK ago, New York exploded with euphoria after the historiclandslide election of Barack Obama to the presidency on promises ofbringing change, and hope, to America. Now, his transition team isalready racing to craft plans for his first weeks in office, among thema $175 billion stimulus package that would include extendedunemployment benefits and food assistance.
But inauguration is still 68 days away, and in the meantime,financial markets are continuing their downward spiral, with Bushadministration officials taking steps to make bailout money availableto credit-card and student-loan companies, in hopes of keeping cashflowing into consumers' wallets. Investors have responded to theapparent uncertainty over how to spend the $700 billion in bailoutfunds, driving the Dow Jones industrial average down another 400 pointson Wednesday alone.
That, in turn, threatens to empty state coffers of much-neededtax revenue next year. New York State officials are already bickeringover a proposed $5 billion in education and health-care cuts to close ayawning budget deficit, stoking concerns that food-stamp programs mightbe next on the chopping block.
Private charities say that if that happens, they will beill-prepared to make up the difference, because donations have driedup, and fund-raisers are working overtime just to get donors to satisfytheir current pledges, let alone worry about those to come next year.
"We lost one donor who used to give us $400 a week," saidAlexander Rapaport, whose Masbia kosher soup kitchen provides about 160meals a day, prepared by a caterer at a local school. He said he hastaken out advertising on local radio stations citing this week's Torahportion - on Sodom and Gomorrah - to inspire donations.
While Masbia qualifies for some government grant programs, theorganization's strict observance of kosher standards means he can'tmake use of many restaurant or overstock giveaways available for thosefollowing more relaxed codes.
Pantries that follow looser restrictions said they had seen aspike in requests from non-Jews, along with more Jews asking for help.One, the Oneg Shabbos pantry - run by Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch andhis wife, Pe'er - has installed a fence along the sidewalk to protectbags of carrots and potatoes waiting to be packed in with containers ofSabra-brand feta cheese and other goodies for people who wait in a linesnaking up the block.
"We're seeing families who never in their lives thought they would have to ask for food," Pe'er Deutsch told The Jerusalem Post."The thing about us is that we pack it into boxes, and it looks likegroceries - people know they can come here and the kids never have toknow."
LEADERS OF haredi organizations understand the irony of theirconstituents - most of whom backed Republican presidential candidateJohn McCain - waiting for a rescue from the incoming Obamaadministration.
"Our man always wins," said Rabbi Avi Shafran of Agudath Israelof America, winking. He said his organization, which has a staffertaking calls for assistance from the newly jobless or helpless, hasalways been able to work with both political parties, even if "peopleon the ground" disagree with one side or the other.
So, he said, there is hope. But with the first cold snap, the clock is already ticking.
When Asi and Tuvia, two yeshiva students at Machon Meir in Jerusalem,
finish their Torah studies for the day, they head upstairs to a small
TV studio above the yeshiva to produce what has become a major hit
among religious children.
What started as a small online TV
experiment a few years ago has become a household name for religious
Zionist families, many of which don't have televisions.
Asi
and Tuvia don't have the intentions or the capabilities to compete with
Israel's national children's television station. But their online show
has garnered enough affection to have received the nickname "The
Rabbi's Pajamas," a play on the name of a wildly popular secular TV
show called "The Pajamas".
A sense of gloom hung over Mea She'arim on Wednesday afternoon, as
the sting of haredi Jerusalem mayoral hopeful Meir Porush's loss to the
secular Nir Barkat was still being digested.
The hustling buzz of haredim on their way to the polling
stations on Tuesday was gone, and the quiet, subdued manner that often
characterizes this modest enclave returned.
Whereas Tuesday's excitement gave way to an abundance of locals
willing to talk to the press - an anomaly here - Wednesday saw a
rescinding of that relationship and a withdrawn, disenchanted community
with very little to say.
"I'm not involved in politics," was a common answer from
shopkeepers and yeshiva students, even though the majority of the
neighborhood - the same one that had worked diligently to promote its
candidate across the city - had been not only involved in the election,
but engrossed in it.
"I don't pay attention to those things," others said, as the
now obsolete posters of a cartoon Porush blew in the wind from
apartment balconies above.
Near the entrance to the Geula neighborhood, a fruit vendor who gave his name as Ilan tried to break it down.
"It's quiet here today," he said. "It's the quiet after the
boom. Porush's loss is a big blow, and everyone here is still
traumatized."
Ilan added that word on the street was focusing on the Ger
Hassidim, who came out against Porush due to internal strife and, in
some cases, purportedly campaigned on behalf of Barkat.
"I think most of the blame is going toward the Ger," Ilan said.
"Porush made a deal with the Satmar [Hassidim], so the Ger went against
Porush. What happened in the end? Porush lost, and we have a mayor of
Jerusalem who doesn't keep Shabbat." He grimaced a bit at the thought.
"Still, it doesn't matter. What we need to realize, all of the
Orthodox Jews in this city, is that we have to be unified. We split up
into our groups, with our fights, and look what we got. He gave us a
bill to pay," Ilan said, pointing at the sky.
Outside a nearby bookstore, a haredi man named Eli also aired his grievances.
"We suffered from two problems," he said. "The national
religious and our own people who didn't go out and vote. We as a group
have to realize that if we're not together, then we're weak. But am I
worried about Barkat?" he smiled. "Nir Barkat has to realize that now
he needs us more than we need him."
Still, Eli said he put most of the blame on the national religious, many of whom supported Barkat.
"I don't understand how they could vote for him," Eli said. "It just doesn't make sense."
Across town in Kiryat Moshe, however, the national religious crowd made itself clear.
"We don't approve of the haredim, and they don't approve of us,"
said Yehoshua, who learns at an area yeshiva. "I voted Barkat, not
because of what I think he'll do for the city, but because I was afraid
of what Porush would do. We don't dress like them for a reason, and I'm
afraid [Porush] would have dealt with us badly."
Still, others said they had supported Porush, and now they were awaiting the consequences of a Barkat victory.
"The kippa sruga [national religious] who voted for
Barkat are the biggest suckers," said Dudu, as he served food at a
sandwich shop nearby. "They go to the army, they work and pay taxes,
and look what the government does to them - just look at Gush Katif."
Dudu explained that by voting in Barkat, the national religious were, he felt, overlooking their own religious obligations.
"He's going to allow the Gay Pride Parade to come here, to Jerusalem, the holiest city to Jews," Dudu said of Barkat.
But Ya'acov, Dudu's coworker, chimed in, "I think everyone is
out for their own pocket. It doesn't matter whom you vote for - this
one, that one, in the end they're all the same."
Three GOP Senators have sent Treasury Secretary Hank “Never mind”
Paulson a “joint letter of concern.” I’ll have more on this abominable
subject in my syndicated column tomorrow.
Joint Letter of Concern to Secretary Paulson After His Announcement to the Change Intent of the Troubled Asset Relief Program
November 13, 2008
Dear Secretary Paulson:
We are writing to express our deep concern over your
announcement this morning that the Department of the Treasury will halt
all plans to purchase trouble mortgage assets through the Troubled
Asset Relief Program (TARP). We are concerned that the program has been
fundamentally changed from its original intent and worry that continued
changes may erode the structures of accountability put in to protect
taxpayers.
When legislation authorizing the TARP was first proposed to
members of Congress in mid-September, its primary component was a
program to allow the Secretary of the Treasury to purchase “toxic”
mortgage assets from financial institutions. The primary reason for
this course of action, we were told, was to assist the market in
discovering the price of these assets and to return liquidity to the
financial markets.
At a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee on September 23,
2008, you made the following comments on the urgent necessity of a
troubled asset purchase program:
We have proposed a program to remove troubled assets from the
system. This troubled asset relief program has to be properly designed
for immediate implementation and be sufficiently large to have maximum
impact and restore market confidence. It must also protect the taxpayer
to the maximum extent possible, and include provisions that ensure
transparency and oversight while also ensuring the program can be
implemented quickly and run effectively.
This troubled asset purchase program on its own is the single
most effective thing we can do to help homeowners, the American people
and stimulate our economy.
Although the legislation was passed on October 3, the program
was never implemented and now has been officially abandoned in favor of
alternative plans after little more than a month. Such a rapid reversal
raises questions about the TARP’s original design as well as the
propriety of future plans.
Congress never intended for the TARP to be a blank check that
could be spent with unlimited discretion. To ensure proper boundaries
are in place to protect the taxpayer, we hope and expect that
congressional approval will be sought by the administration before
further changes are made.
Sincerely,
U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D., U.S. Senator Richard Burr, U.S. Senator David Vitter
WEDNESDAY, Nov. 12 (HealthDay News) -- Today's American high school students are far likelier than those in the 1970s to believe they'll make outstanding spouses, parents and workers, new research shows.
They're also much more likely to claim they are "A" students with high IQs -- even though other research shows that today's students do less homework than their counterparts did in the 1970s.
The findings, published in the November issue of Psychological Science, support the idea that the "self-esteem" movement popular among today's parents and teachers may have gone too far, the study's co-author said.
"What this shows is that confidence has crossed over into overconfidence," said Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University.
She believes that decades of relentless, uncritical boosterism by parents and school systems may be producing a generation of kids with expectations that are out of sync with the challenges of the real world.
"High school students' responses have crossed over into a really unrealistic realm, with three-fourths of them expecting performance that's effectively in the top 20 percent," Twenge said.
For the study, she and co-researcher W. Keith Campbell, of the University of Georgia, pored over data from the Monitoring the Future study, a large national survey of thousands of U.S. high school students conducted periodically over the past three decades.
The researchers compared the answers kids gave in 1975 and 2006 to 13 questions centered on students' "self-views." These questions solicited students' opinions on such things as how smart they thought they were, or how likely they were to be successful as adults.
"When we look at the responses of the students in the '70s, they are certainly confident that they are going to perform well, but their responses are more modest, a little more realistic" than teens in 2006, Twenge said.
For example, in 1975, less than 37 percent of teens thought they'd be "very good" spouses, compared to more than 56 percent of those surveyed in 2006. Likewise, the number of students who thought they'd become "very good" parents rose from less than 36 percent in 1975 to more than 54 percent in 2006. And almost two-thirds of teens in 2006 thought they'd be exemplary workers, compared to about half of those polled in 1975.
As for self-reported academic achievement, twice as many students in 2006 than in 1976 said they earned an "A" average in high school -- 15.6 percent vs. 7.7 percent, the report found.
Compared to their counterparts from the '70s, today's youth also tended to rate themselves as more intelligent and were more likely to say they were "completely satisfied" with themselves.
There was one exception -- measures of "self-competency" (i.e., agreeing with statements such as, "I am able to do things as well as most other people") did not rise between 1976 and 2006. According to Twenge, that may mean that young people continue to feel great self-worth even as they remain unsure of their competence in specific tasks.
Twenge stressed that youthful confidence isn't necessarily bad. "Young people have always had some degree of starry-eyed optimism, and that's probably a good thing," she said. "And setting goals for yourself is a good thing. It's just when those goals are wildly unrealistic, then that can cause trouble for everyone."
For example, young people entering the workforce may score well in job interviews if they exude self-confidence, she said, but that can quickly sour if a new employer doesn't provide them with the perks or promotions they feel they deserve. "They don't set the right goals for themselves, because they are overconfident -- and that's when it blows up in their face," Twenge said.
The blame for all this may lie with well-intentioned adults, she suggested.
"These kids didn't raise themselves, they got these ideas from somewhere," Twenge said. With Mom and Dad handing out endless praise, kids today readily believe they are somehow superior, she said. And teachers aren't blameless, either: According to Twenge, research shows that high school teachers now give out an "A" grade more easily than their counterparts did in the 1970s, even though today's high school students report doing less homework than students from that era.
Not everyone interpreted the new findings in the same way, however. Jennifer Crocker is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and a longtime researcher in self-esteem. She said that by selecting data from 1975 and 2006, Twenge and Campbell have only presented two moments in time and have not shown evidence of any decades-long trend.
And based on available academic data, today's young Americans might be right to be more self-confident, Crocker argued.
"The fact is that we are all getting smarter -- IQ is going up quite dramatically over this same period of time," Crocker noted. "Students may believe that they are getting trained better than they used to, that they are learning skills that they didn't use to have. So, maybe their predictions aren't unreasonable."
But Twenge, who is the author of a book on young people's self-views called Generation Me, isn't convinced. In fact, she believes that today's parents may be sending another crop of young Americans down the same path.
"I have a 2-year-old daughter," she said. "I see the parenting of kids around her age, and I haven't seen this changing. Look around -- about a fourth of the clothing available to her says 'Little Princess' on it."
by Avraham Broide (Jerusalem based translator and journalist. phone: 02-5856133; email: broide2@netvision.net.il)
When is a corpse not a corpse? When it's still alive of course!
Determining the moment of death is a subject that has many doctors and rabbis at loggerheads. Doctors are anxious to push forward the moment of death in order to save lives with transplants, while rabbis argue that there is no point killing Peter in order to save Paul.
There was once a time when the rabbis fought a very different battle. During the 18th Century, many people thought it barbaric to bury a person too soon, as who knows, perhaps he was still alive. They preferred to wait for only certain determinant of death, physical decomposition, which generally begins after three days.
Rabbis, on the other hand, wanted to bury people before nightfall, due to the Torah's command regarding a criminal whose body was hanged up as a warning (Devarim 21:23), "Do not leave his body overnight on the gallows, for you shall certainly bury him on that day." As the Shulchan Aruch" (Yoreh Dei'ah 357:1) rules, "It is forbidden to leave the dead [unburied] overnight unless it was for his honor, to bring him a coffin and shrouds."
During 5532/1772 things came to a head when the Mecklenburg Province of Germany outlawed prompt burial and legislated that three days must pass beforehand. When German rabbis raised a protest, Moses Mendelssohn was called on to intercede and he promptly found sources that seemed to support the government measure.
For example, a mishnah in Masseches Semachos relates how someone recovered from a death like coma and lived for another 25 years. Because of this, the mishnah says, people buried their dead in catacombs, instead of burying them underground, so that they could visit them for several days afterwards and ascertain their death status. If the corpse yelled or tapped on the walls of his stone coffin, there was still a chance to yank him out. Practically speaking, Mendelssohn had a point, as it is not unheard of for people to suddenly wake up and find themselves in a morgue.
One example of such pseudo-death may be Alexander's passing in 3439/323 BCE, when his body reportedly remained fresh several days afterwards. Some medical men theorize that he may have been suffering from a paralyzing disease.
The Yaavetz rejected Mendelssohn's proofs. Regarding the fear that Jews who determine death as the moment a person ceases breathing might determine someone as dead when he is really alive, the Yaavetz insisted that Moshe Rabeinu received this criteria of death at Sinai or that it is revealed in the verse, Kol asher ruach chayim be'apo (Whatever has the breath of life in its nose), from where the rabbis derive that before digging someone out of a ruin on Shabbos, we check whether he is breathing or not.
As for Mendelssohn's proof from masseches Semachos, the Yaavetz writes that such things happen so rarely that we need not be concerned about them on a practical basis. It is as rare, he says, as the case of Choni Ha'eme'agel who slept for seventy years!
This controversy led to one of the first formal move of Jews away from Jewish custom and law.
When the Berlin Chevra Kaddisha refused to succumb to the Maskilim's demands, some Maskilim, including Mendolssohn's son, Josef, opened up their own burial organization called the "Gesellschaft der Freunde" ("Society of Friends") in Berlin, with branches in Breslau and Konigsberg, which delayed burying the dead and eventually adopted many other non-Jewish funeral customs as well.
Do you happen to have an article - or simply some marei mekomos or something - on the topic of mesirah? I'm working on a domestic violence unit this year, and it's come up. I can't imagine that perpetrators of physical or sexual abuse are to be protected under this halacha, but I'd like to have some actual mekoros to back me up.
... I'm
just getting my feet wet in the sugya since having started to work on a
domestic violence unit. Actually, I'm still confused by the whole
principle. I read through סימן שפח and it seems like we're talking
about handing over someone's money (or body) to be confiscated (or
beaten) by goyim (or nasty Jewish people). How does that get carried
over to not reporting someone who is physically beating his wife,
sexually abusing his children, etc.? I would /never /have assumed that
these people are covered by such a law. And even though it says "אפילו
רשע" - we're not talking about some generally bad guy whom you might
want to hand over to the local goyim because he's a jerk - we're
talking about someone who is not only in violation of laws that are
nearly universal, we're talking about someone who is posing a serious
threat to other people, including children, whether or not there is a
danger of death. A man who chains his child to his bed (perhaps for
years) or rapes his kids regularly or terrorizes his wife may not have
any intent of killing them, but he destroys them mentally, spiritually,
and emotionally. Can we really say that that's not a good enough
reason to stop the abuse because you'd have to give this guy up to the
authorities (who, while not a bunch of saints, are not thugs and
warlords either)?
Sorry, that got a little out of hand there. It's a touchy topic. The
basic question I'm asking is, how do we get from the laws of mesirah to
not reporting dangerous criminal activity? Maybe I just haven't seen
it inside, or maybe I'm just not getting it.
However, none of this justifies the attitude that it's best to just keep these things quiet, for garbage reasons
like shidduchim, family reputation, shonda, etc. According to what you
said so far, there's no reason not to approach the local rebbeim and
let them know that there's an abusive situation somewhere. And there's
no reason for rebbeim to shy away or to assert (as I just heard last
week) that "I can't dirty my hands with this." Where does this come
from? And how did it get blamed on halacha???
State Assembly member Dov Hikind was subpoenaed Monday to provide testimony and files he has compiled about rabbis and yeshiva employees who have allegedly sexually abused children under their charge, and rabbinic leaders who may have protected the abusers.[...] ======================== NYTimes reports:
Since last year, when Assemblyman Dov Hikind invited his radio show listeners to discuss an explosive topic — sexual abuse of children in the Orthodox Jewish community — he says he has collected more than 1,000 complaints and the names of 60 accused sexual predators.
He has kept those stories under lock and key in his Brooklyn office, he says, because the people who said they were victims had sworn him to secrecy, fearful of becoming outcasts in a community where perceived troublemakers risk losing employment, housing and even marriage prospects.
But a prominent lawyer representing a half dozen former yeshiva students who say in a civil lawsuit that they were sexually abused by a teacher in Borough Park, Brooklyn, had Mr. Hikind served with a subpoena this week, demanding that he surrender those files.
Mr. Hikind has refused. “I will go to jail for 10 years first,” he said on Wednesday.[...]
“I’ve been shocked and overwhelmed at the magnitude of the problem,” said Mr. Hikind, an Orthodox Jew and a Democrat who represents the predominantly Orthodox community of Borough Park.
The victims have come to his office in a steady stream to tell their stories, he said. “Abusive teachers and rabbis in the schools,” he said. “Pedophiles on the streets. Incest in the home.”
Michael G. Dowd, the lawyer who had Mr. Hikind served with the subpoena, has been a leading advocate for plaintiffs who say they were abused by Roman Catholic priests. He represents six men who say they were abused by Rabbi Yehuda Kolko, a teacher at Yeshiva Torah Temimah in Brooklyn. Rabbi Kolko, who was charged with sexual abuse in 2006, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and has left the school.
Mr. Dowd’s subpoena demands that the assemblyman turn over not just complaints that Mr. Hikind may have received against Rabbi Kolko, but “any and all reports of sexual abuse at any yeshiva and/or by any rabbi or employee of a yeshiva in New York City.” Mr. Dowd said they were crucial to proving his clients’ contention that sexual abuse was commonplace and routinely covered up by administrators in yeshivas.
He described Mr. Hikind’s refusal as “misguided.” While he said that he planned to have the subpoena enforced, he also said that he understood the reluctance to cross the powers that be in the Orthodox community. “The lead rabbis have the kind of power to shut people up that the Catholic Church had 50, 60 years ago,” he said.
Mr. Hikind said that every complaint he received was in complete confidence, with the understanding that “under no circumstances would their names be known in the community.”
“There is no way in the world, when people have come to me and spilled their hearts out to me, and shared the most intimate and private things with me, hoping I will do something to address the larger, overall issue, that I would ever betray their trust,” he said.[...]
Mr. Hikind said that of all the people who said they had been victims, “99 percent would not go to the police under any circumstances — that is just the reality.”
But Joel Engelman, 23, who grew up in the Orthodox community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and who helped found a group of victims called Survivors for Justice, said that while “well-intentioned,” Mr. Hikind had a classic misunderstanding about sexual predators that is embedded in insular communities like the Catholic priesthood or the Orthodox world. “The community cannot police itself,” he said. “This has been shown again and again.”
In his own case, Mr. Engelman said, a complaint he brought to the attention of administrators at the United Talmudical Academy against a teacher who sexually violated him when he was 8 years old led to the teacher’s brief suspension and subsequent reinstatement. Mr. Engelman has since brought a civil suit against the teacher and the school.
Prof. Marci Hamilton, a visiting professor at the Yeshiva University School of Law and an expert in sexual abuse by religious leaders, said Mr. Hikind’s refusal to turn over the names of alleged predators, if not his entire case file, was “outrageous.”
She said that Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, “should already have convened a grand jury” to investigate.
Jerry Schmetterer, Mr. Hynes’s spokesman, said, “If someone has information about a sex crime, he or she should bring that information to our sex crimes unit, and we will investigate what needs to be investigated.”
