Sunday, April 25, 2010
Concern about abuse - only from 1970's
Abuse lawsuit: Boy Scouts ordered to pay $18.5 M
An Oregon jury's decision to award a man $18.5 million in punitive damages in his case against the Boy Scouts of America will likely be the first of many financial hits the Scouts will take as it prepares to defend itself against a series of sex abuse lawsuits.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
World's first full face transplant
Dr Joan Pere Barret said the patient, who is in his 30s, received a new beard from a donor as part of his new face.
In an operation at Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron University Hospital lasting 24 hours, the patient now has a new nose, lips, tear ducts, cheekbones and jaw.[...]
Friday, April 23, 2010
R' Shafran: Community's learned elders are wisest arbiters of what is Jewish
As a Jewish teenager, I absorbed a vital truth—arguably the essence of Orthodoxy: The community’s learned elders are the wisest arbiters of what is and is not Jewishly proper.
Over the many years since, I have come to see that truth vindicated time and again. Had I not perceived it in my youth, I sometimes reflect, I might have become enamored of the Conservative movement, which declared fealty to halachah while expressing sensitivity to American realities. I could have chosen to see it as the most promising standard-bearer for Jewish observance in America. And I would have been devastated to see its claim to halachic integrity crash and burn. But I trusted the elders. And, it turned out, they saw more than I did, and predicted precisely what came to be.
What brings the thought to mind are reactions to a recent pronouncement of our contemporary gedolim and z’keinim. When a congregational rabbi tried to create a new institution in Orthodoxy—women serving as rabbis—the Council of Torah Sages felt compelled to declare that any congregation with a woman in a rabbinical role “cannot be considered Orthodox.”
Ben Hirsch: Cracks in the wall of silence about abuse
Last week, the Flatbush Shomrim issued an alert – a warning – to sex offenders that they would be arrested and prosecuted. The alert also instructed people to report sex crimes directly to the police. Judging from the positive blog posts and the flood of appreciative calls to the Shomrim hotline (to which I was in some cases privy) this message is a welcome one in our community. Indeed, the spate of recent arrests and convictions of those who have preyed sexually on young people seem to be a clear indication that, despite long-held communal norms and pressures, people are gaining the courage to do the right thing and report abusers to the authorities. The endorsement of this behavior by a trusted communal organization whose mission often puts it on the front lines dealing with this issue will, I believe, only reinforce this positive trend. However, in the midst of these positive developments, I am still left to wonder: where are the voices of our rabbinic leadership? While the Flatbush Shomrim alert seems to be endorsed by unnamed local rabbi(s), to date, not a single charedi rabbi has publicly expressed support for this position. Why? [...]
Rav Sternbuch: Prohibition of Lashon Harah
HaGaon Rav Moshe Sternbuch, shlita Ravad of Yerushalayim
"Do not worry about those people who have spoken against you. They haven't harmed you; just the opposite, they have helped you. When someone speaks lashon hara about his friend, his mitzvos get transferred to whomever he spoke about. If people realized this, they would have great joy when they hear that someone spoke about them. They would even give gold or silver coins to the person who spoke about them." (Magid Mesherim, Parshas Vayakel)
Questions regarding child abuse
Hi Rav Eidensohn,
I have been following your blog for some time and specifically the topics of molestation. Additionally, I have followed stories of molestation on other Jewish sites, as well as in mainstream media with the current stories about priests.
There are a few questions I have and it is a difficult ones but I want your experienced opinion based on the information you know.
It seems from what I have read that nobody really has a clue what to do with molesters and how to solve the molestation problem. Additionally, there is no real proof that a molester can be cured. From what I have read, it seems that the only way to keep children safe is to lock these people up for life, or castrate them.
These people have a sick desire. Just like normal heterosexuals desire the opposite sex, these people desire children. Can one become homosexual with therapy if they are heterosexual? Can a homosexual become a heterosexual with therapy? Extremely unlikely, if not flat out no correct?
However it is an urge that normal people can control. Normal people don't go raping the opposite sex.
However these predators, desire children and put their desire before the welfare of the child.
Do you think a molester can be healed with therapy to the point that you can say he is no longer a threat to kids?
How many years of therapy?
Should they be in seclusion during therapy? (Prison or a mental home...)
How can we be confident that these people are healed to truly ever allow them near a child?
These are difficult questions, however it troubles me that most molesters get a few years prison and once they are out they get right back to business. Prison doesn't change. Them or deter them. It just makes them more careful and sneaky.
Personally, I think they need to be kept from chiildren permanently which means a life sentence, or castrated. This may sound extreme but is it really? How can we justify 10 years in prison when all reseaech points to the molester being likely to repeat his offenses once he is out?
I just don't see how the system is properly dealing with this problem. These guys get a slap on the wrist for destroying multiple childrens lives.
What about monetary punishment? If large cash rewards were awarded to victims (I mean over $1,000,000) would that do anything as a deterrent?
Please let me know what you think about all of this.
Best regards,
Josh
Dr. Marc Shapiro - Grossman execution & Tropper
SeforimBlog
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Netanyahu reject U.S. demand for Jerusalem freeze
Haaretz
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the Obama administration's demands to freeze construction in East Jerusalem, his bureau confirmed on Thursday.
The Prime Minister's Bureau was responding to a Wall Street Journal report that Netanyahu's government had delivered over the weekend its most substantive response yet to that U.S. request.
Obama reportedly made the demand for an East Jerusalem construction freeze, along with other requests, in a tense White House meeting with Netanyahu on March 23. His administration had seen been awaiting his reply, while Netanyahu had deliberated with his top ministers on possible confidence-building measures that would allow a revival of peace talks with the Palestinians.[...]
New Square appoint Vaad for abuse
At noon on a Sunday afternoon, Isaac Brewer sits at his desk in the back of Fax Unlimited, the electronics store he operates on Route 59 in Spring Valley. The flat-screen monitor on his desk displays several camera views that let him watch the unattended front of the store. Every so often, a customer walks in and Brewer dishes with them over what printer to buy, and every so often, the phone rings and Brewer switches fluently between Yiddish and English, telling one customer that he’ll be happy to drop off a toner at so-and-so’s mother-in-law. And in between conversations, Brewer speaks about sexual abuse.
“The problem has been going on since the world has been created,” explained Brewer, black waistcoat and gray sweater draped over the back of his chair. “But the Rebbe felt a need to get serious about it and to help victims and stop predators… The Rebbe has given us a carte blanche.”
Brewer is part of a six-member committee established 18 months ago by the Skverer Rebbe, Rabbi Dovid Twersky, to combat sexual abuse inside the New Square chasidic community. The committee, known simply as the Vaad, in many ways represents a giant leap forward for the community in dealing with sexual abuse. Advocates for victims of sexual abuse are not as charitable, however, and view the Vaad as a continuation of the legacy of cover-ups that have tainted the larger Orthodox community’s past dealings regarding sexual abuse. [...]
Monday, April 19, 2010
In some adoptions, love doesn't conquer all
At times, Kelly Lytle Baehr wondered how they would all get through it. Two years ago, she and her husband adopted three boys from Ukraine — two of them 8, the other 16 — and brought them back to their home in Omaha. She knew assimilation into a family life would not be easy; all had come from troubled backgrounds, including one who had spent the first five years of his life in a prison orphanage back in Ukraine, and had a mother who drank while she was pregnant.
She was often tested by the strains of raising these three new sons. The youngest of them, Ian (born Igor) had rummaged in garbage dumps in Ukraine for toys, with hub cabs and discarded car parts his only possessions. At the Baehrs’s home in Nebraska he soon became a wild, uncontrollable kleptomaniac, she said. The other 8-year-old, Erik, struggled to attach to her — kicking, screaming, biting and yelling, “I hate you.” Only the oldest son, Viktor, seemed to welcome his new life quickly, blending easily into the family and eventually making the honor roll at his high school.
When Ms. Lytle Baehr, who is going through a divorce and has custody of her children, heard the news break two weeks ago about Torry Ann Hansen shipping her 7-year-old adopted son back to Russia on a plane, unaccompanied, with just a note to the authorities, she felt something approaching sympathy. “When it boils down to it, I’m really similar to the woman in Tennessee,” Ms. Lytle Baehr said in a telephone interview this week. “We’ve all been there.”[...]