Yemen: End of the Jewish community

Haaretz

About 60 Yemini Jews have been secretly flown in to the United States since July, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, adding that 100 more were scheduled to arrive in the coming months.

Earlier in the year Haaretz reported that the U.S. government was taking part in efforts to extricate Jews in Yemen as result of the physical harassment they had suffered from their Muslim neighbors.[...]

Re-endorsing Caterer who lost certification

1) LASHON HARAH ALERT

Assertions made by any poster - should not be assumed to be true until checked with authoritative rabbis. They are allowed only for the concerns that they raise - so that people can be alterted to investigate so as to avoid harm.

Acceptance of a post is not assurance that it is accurate or in proper context. Even notices said in the name of major rabbis need to be checked out to see that they were actually authorized by those rabbis.


Just received the following letter

Recently, the head of a kashrus supervision agency asked me for marei mekomos for not reendorsing a caterer who lost his kashrus license for deliberately violating policy and halocha.

Below is what I have come up with so far. I would like to find more contemporary applications especially involving hechsheirim. Please let me know if you have anything to add or if you know who might.

Ikar that a yid is more chomer than a goy and svora: SA 118 taz sk 2

Ikar that when caught must be removed and only takanah etc.
SA 119 15-17 vn"k shom

Ikar heter (shoel umeshiv) and that it is to be used with discretion Darkei Teshuva here, 117. Also see earlier DT leading up to that.

Of contemporary teshuvos that mashgiach can't possibly watch someone choshud 24/7 and doesn't help dayan Weiss- shu"t minchas yitzchok chelek 3 siman 95 (talking about shaala with goy but talks about yid....)

Thank you and AGSH

Naomi Remen: "Our stories are all we have"

Turkey is no longer Israel's ally

JPOST Daniel Pipes

"There is no doubt he is our friend," Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even as he accuses Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman of threatening to use nuclear weapons against Gaza. These outrageous assertions point to the profound change of orientation by Turkey's government - for six decades the West's closest Muslim ally - since Erdogan's AK party came to power in 2002.

Three events this past month reveal the extent of that change. The first came on October 11 with the news that the Turkish military - a long-time bastion of secularism and advocate of cooperation with Israel - abruptly asked Israeli forces not to participate in the annual "Anatolian Eagle" air force exercise. [...]

Abusive use of religious noise

JPOST

While recent rioting in and around Jerusalem's Old City has left religious tensions between the capital's Muslims and Jews simmering, a new dispute - this time concerning the volume of prayers, more than the prayers themselves - is resonating in outlying neighborhoods.

Jewish residents of these areas, all of which are in close proximity to Arab neighborhoods in the capital's east, have begun to complain that the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, which is broadcast five times a day from loudspeakers inside local mosques, has become an intolerable nuisance, particularly when it blasts through their neighborhoods at 4 a.m. every day.

"It's as if they took the speakers and put them inside my bedroom," Yehudit Raz, a resident of the northeast Pisgat Ze'ev neighborhood, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. "And it's not from one mosque or two mosques - we're talking about tons of speakers going off, one after the other, every morning." [...]

Fears of Modern Orthodox Geirim

An anonymous commentator wrote:

I converted with a MO beis din, well actually two MO dayanim (definitely MO NOT conservadox/traditional/or anything of that nature) and one yeshivish dayan, in a mid-sized, but long established, out of town community twenty years ago. Since that time I married, am raising kah several children, wear a sheitel, and am pretty indistinguishable from the rest of my "middle of the road" slightly to the right of MO community.

I admit that there have been times when I've cringed at some conversions (not by my beis din) which I've seen. That being said, though, I am shaking in my shoes over what is lying in wait for me when my children reach shidduchim.

It seems that geirus has turned into nothing less than a witch hunt in recent years. That long-standing conversions are now going to be under a microscope seems very wrong, and something that is likely to prove a great embarrassment and emotionally traumatic for many totally sincere converts. It frightens me that the chareidi world, which does not accept MO as an acceptable hashkafa, is going to determine MY status and that of my children as well.

Add this to the other items I've seen, such as an opinion that the geirus of somebody could possibly be invalid if a dayan does not believe the universe is less than 6,000 years old, a position which was taken by no less than Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan back at that time and by dozens of those now well known in kiruv, and everybody who was converted by MO must be in great fear now.

Emotionally, it takes its toll - I always felt accepted, warmly accepted, but now it is all too clear how many don't really, at heart, want us. It is so terribly terribly painful. I did my part - I've embraced halacha, I've embraced this people, I've sacrificed to pay tuition for the children, and I have done my best, but it feels like hands are grasping to take it all away. How can Hashem let this happen to us? How is it permissible to oppress many sincere geirim in the name of ferreting out a few doubtful conversions?

Bedatz: Pappenheim & Kraus - rejected

בחדרי חרדים | בחצרות קודש - 'תולדות': "פפנהיים וקרויס מתחזים"

EJF's aggressive new relationship with kiruv

5 Towns Jewish Times

For 100 Jewish youth from the former Soviet Union, many of them students, Shabbos Bereishis was an opportunity to plant deeper roots in their commitment to Judaism. The occasion was a Shabbaton sponsored by the Russian American Jewish Experience (RAJE) of Gateways and Horizons/Eternal Jewish Family (EJF) at the Stamford Hilton. From the inspirational song and dance at Kabbalas Shabbos led by Rabbi Avrumi Jordan to the moving havdalah by Rabbi Yisroel Cherns, it was an important Shabbos in the lives of the youth.

For RAJE, this was a key event in their ongoing programs for youngsters from the former Soviet Union. Every Sunday nearly 400 youth gather in Brooklyn for several hours of lectures and programming. The change in the youngsters, say the devoted mentors who are part of Gateways, "is nothing less than sensational." For Horizons/EJF this was the next chapter in an aggressive new partnership with kiruv organizations that in addition to Gateways includes Ohr Somayach, Arachim, Lev Le'achim, Hidabroot, and Nefesh Yehudi. Similar seminars have been held in cities throughout Israel, in Baden, Austria and Odessa, Ukraine. It is part of a program to assure that youth build strong Jewish ties, most importantly by marrying Jewish. [...]

RaP: EJF's conflict between kiruv & geirus

Jewish Press: An Emerging Gold Standard For Conversions (Jun 14 2006)

Editorial Board
Posted Jun 14 2006

As reported this week on page 3, Israel's Chief Rabbinate has begun to formalize - through an agreement it entered into with the Rabbinical Council of America - its historic effort to tighten the process of conversions in the U.S. and throughout the world. The Jewish Press has also learned that the chief rabbis - in addition to addressing the immediate issue of RCA conversions - are working with a new organization, the Eternal Jewish Family, to develop and implement what would amount to a Gold Standard for conversions. EJF, funded by the Lillian Kaplan Foundation, is in the midst of a series of conferences around the world with the participation of the chief rabbis and other leading halachic and Torah personalities in an effort to establish standards that will lead to universally accepted conversions...[...]

RaP: EJF as viewed in 2006

RaP: The Jewish Press from June 2006 [posted on this blog in 2007], a full year before this blog started really focusing on the EJF conundrum reveals and conforms a lot including all the "rationalizations" that Roni/Tropper kept on hammering over and over again.

In fact this could be called the standard EJF self-justification script when EJF was openly launched. Obviously at that time already Tropper knew he would have to answer for his new innovations and therefore he carefully laid out the whole script and battle plan. In hindsight, lots of it becomes self-contradictory with all the unknown variables that came flying there way: the Uproar over their excitable partner Rav Nochum Eisenstein's insulting the RCA and YU rabbis at the early EJF convention, the written declarations of Rav Shternbuch and the entire BADATS against EJF, and the final blow the disgraceful and ugly fall-out between Rabbi Tropper & Tom Kaplan with Guma Aguiar.

This makes for interesting reading even now and reveals a lot that is self-explanatory for anyone who has been following these events:

Billionaire claims police brutality

R' Ovadia Yosef: Report dangerous driver