Living with convicted sex offenders in your community

Haaaretz   In 2006 the Knesset passed the Public Protection from Sex Offenders Law, the first of its kind in the country. Its main provisions were to mandate an assessment, prior to parole, of the threat posed to the community by each convicted sex offender, and to establish a monitoring unit. This year an amendment providing for treatment and rehabilitation of sex offenders was passed. 

Plant's whereabouts became public knowledge when his wife registered their children for school. Last Friday morning dozens of neighbors gathered outside their building and prevented the family from going into their apartment. Plant charged at the group and made it very clear that he had no intention of backing down. Police officers who were dispatched to the scene explained to the residents that they could not prevent Plant and his family from living in the building, but in the end the Plants moved once again. 

Plant, 49, has served six separate prison terms for the same number of convictions for sexual offenses against minors. In the most recent, in 2006, he was sentenced by the Rehovot Magistrate's Court to seven years for performing indecent acts on nine underage girls while pretending to be an instructor of Capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that combines dance and music. 

The sex-offender monitoring agency established under the 2006 law and known as the Tzur unit, has broad powers that can include surveillance operations, surprise visits, frequent phone calls and visits with parole officers, as well as almost around-the-clock supervision and approval prior to an offender's hiring at a new place of work. 

Israel maintains a registry of convicted sex offenders, to which all of them must report their home address prior to their release from prison. But in contrast to many countries, most notably the United States, Israel's registry is classified. The authorities oppose moves to make the records public, in part out of fear of widespread violence against offenders living in the general community.

תשובת רביד נגר לאישה שנפגעה מהתעללות חוללה סערה

kikarhashabat        הרב רביד נגר, מחזיר בתשובה מוכר, מחולל סערה כשהוא מתבטא בצורה שנויה במחלוקת

בתשובה לאישה שסיפרה בפורום אינטרנטי על אירוע בו התוקפה בנערותה על ידי גבר זר, ענה הרב כי מדובר בעניין של תיקון "העולם הזה הוא עולם של תיקון" אמר הרב

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"אני לא מבינה איך ה' יכול היה לעשות לי כזה דבר. כששאלתי רב באמת גדול ע"כ הוא אמר שזה התיקון שלי. אני כועסת על ה'. איך אפשר להגיד שזה התיקון שלי" שאלה האישה

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הרב נגר, בתשובה ארוכה מאוד, הגיב לשאלתה של האישה, אולם חלקים מתוכה הצליחו לגרום לסערה בכלי התקשורת.

הרב רביד נגר שפתח ב'אני ממש מצטער בשבילך', כתב לאישה: "למה ילד צריך להיוולד עם מום? למה יש תינוקות שנולדים מוגבלים? עיוורים? חרשים? למה? מה ה' אוהב להתעלל בילדים? אני בטוח שלא ! התשובה פשוטה ! העולם הזה הוא עולם התיקון ! עולם שבו אנחנו מתקנים את חטאי העבר , את החטאים שלנו בגלגולים קודמים , מי יודע מה את היית בגלגול הקודם? אולי היינו אלימים? אולי פגענו באנשים אחרים? כל זמן שאין לנו מושג מה היינו בגלגול הקודם , אין לנו שום זכות לשפוט את בורא עולם ! ה' רוצה שנתקן כדי שנזכה לגן עדן לנצח ! במקום שנסבול שנים של צער , ה' נותן לנו זכות לסבול כאן בעולם הזה כמה שנים בודדות וע"י כך הוא מציל אותנו ממאות שנות סבל בעליונים".

Obama’s Campaign Diminished the Presidency

Time  by Karen Hughes former counselor to President George W. Bush

Like many Republicans across the country, I woke up this morning deeply depressed, my mood soon matched by the falling stock market. I’m distressed not only by the outcome of the presidential election, but also because of the way it was won.

In stark contrast to the hope and optimism he stirred in 2008, this time, President Obama won ugly. During his first election, although I didn’t agree with his proposals or philosophy, I was among those who found myself inspired by the president’s call for our politics to be higher and better. Unfortunately, the way he has governed and the way he conducted this campaign undermined that central and hopeful promise.

I felt that I was watching a shrinking presidency as the campaign unfolded, with President Obama getting smaller each day. He often came across as peeved, petty and not presidential. On stage during the first debate he looked as if he wanted to be anywhere else, and his comments about his opponent were cutting and deeply personal. The final blow came with his comments in the final days to his supporters that “voting is the best revenge.” The mindset that comment reveals is deeply disturbing:  an election as a weapon to be wielded against our fellow Americans.

At its core, the central message I took away from the President’s re-election campaign was: Stick with me, we are inching forward and things could be a lot worse. Not exactly a hopeful agenda on which to build.

Nachalot abuse - case of hysteria & moral panic?

Times of Israel  This post is a response to “Nachlaot, where pedophiles roam free,” by Elana Kutscher. In it, I examine the main points made by Elana and analyze their validity.

Elana claims that there are pedophiles in Jerusalem’s Nachlaot neighborhood and that this was reported to the police over a year ago, but that the pedophiles are still there. The implication is that the police did not really do enough about the problem.

On the contrary, the police took immediate action as soon as they were notified about the initial suspected pedophile in November 2010. Afterwards, when neighborhood residents reported more suspects in the summer of 2011, the police again took action and arrested a group of suspects. If anything, the police were overzealous in their pursuit of potential suspects. They arrested several more individuals in January, 2012, simply because of public pressure, even though there was no substantive evidence.

She states that the police say this is the largest pedophile ring in the history of Israel, and that over 100 children have been abused.

In fact, the position of the police is that there is NOT a pedophile ring in Nachlaot at all – and there is not a ringleader. The police DO believe that there were pedophiles molesting children in Nachlaot, but that each one acted on an individual basis, and not as part of an organized group. The concept of a pedophile ring was the figment of the over-active imaginations of worried parents. They also claimed that this imaginary pedophile ring was producing movies of pedophilia for financial profit. No such movies were ever found. No forensic evidence of any sexual molestation was ever found either, even for those suspects who were indicted. The indictments were based entirely on the testimony of the children.

Not all the children who gave testimony were actually abused. Though more than 100 children testified that they were abused, much of that testimony was corrupted by the improper methods the parents used to obtain it. Some mothers went door to door, trying to convince as many parents as possible that their children were molested. The children were also shown pictures of the suspected pedophiles. [...]

Principal convicted of violating mandated reporting law

San Jose Mercury News   In a verdict hailed by child-abuse experts, a jury Monday found a principal guilty of the extremely rare charge of failing to report suspected sexual abuse to authorities, despite being told by an 8-year-old girl in vivid and explicit detail about a possible sexual act a teacher performed on her.

The conviction of former O.B. Whaley Elementary School principal Lyn Vijayendran was only the second time in two decades that Santa Clara County prosecutors had brought such a misdemeanor charge -- and the first time they'd won.

Vijayendran, 36, dabbed at her eyes with a tissue while the clerk read the guilty verdict.

She later wept when Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Deborah Ryan took the unusual step of immediately sentencing her.  [...]

In the end, the strongest evidence against the principal were her own notes from interviewing the child. The girl told the principal that Chandler blindfolded her in a room with no one else there, made her lie down on the classroom floor, told her to open her legs, touched her feet with something that felt like a tongue, inserted something gooey in her mouth and then wiggled her head around until she tasted a salty liquid. Chandler told Vijayendran that he called the girl into the classroom to prepare a lesson on Helen Keller, which he had been using for years.

Vigilantes protect Egyptian woman against abuse

NYTimes   The young activists lingered on the streets around Tahrir Square, scrutinizing the crowds of holiday revelers. Suddenly, they charged, pushing people aside and chasing down a young man. As the captive thrashed to get away, the activists pounded his shoulders, flipped him around and spray-painted a message on his back: “I’m a harasser.” 

 Egypt’s streets have long been a perilous place for women, who are frequently heckled, grabbed, threatened and violated while the police look the other way. Now, during the country’s tumultuous transition from authoritarian rule, more and more groups are emerging to make protecting women — and shaming the do-nothing police — a cause. 

The attacks on women did not subside after the uprising. If anything, they became more visible as even the military was implicated in the assaults, stripping female protesters, threatening others with violence and subjecting activists to so-called virginity tests. During holidays, when Cairenes take to the streets to stroll and socialize, the attacks multiply.

But during the recent Id al-Adha holiday, some of the men were surprised to find they could no longer harass with impunity, a change brought about not just out of concern for women’s rights, but out of a frustration that the post-revolutionary government still, like the one before, was doing too little to protect its citizens.

Divorce is no longer fashionable?

NYTimes   That a woman who has been divorced should feel such awkwardness and isolation seems more part of a Todd Haynes set piece than a scene from “families come in all shapes and sizes” New York, circa 2011. But divorce statistics, which have followed a steady downward slope since their 1980 peak, reveal another interesting trend: According to a 2010 study by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, only 11 percent of college-educated Americans divorce within the first 10 years today, compared with almost 37 percent for the rest of the population. 

For this cross section of American families — in the suburban playgrounds of Seattle, the breastfeeding-friendly coffee shops of Berkeley, Calif., and the stroller-trodden streets of the Upper West Side — divorce, especially for mothers with young children underfoot, has become relatively scarce since its “Ice Storm” heyday. 

For every cohort since 1980, a greater proportion are reaching their 10th and 15th anniversaries, said Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, a History.”[...]

The experience of being a divorced woman has changed, along with the statistics. “The No. 1 reaction I get from people when I tell them I’m getting divorced is, ‘You’re so brave,’ ” said Stephanie Dolgoff, a 44-year-old mother of two elementary-school daughters who was separated last year. “In the 1970s, when a woman got divorced, she was seen as taking back her life in that Me Decade way. Nowadays, it’s not seen as liberating to divorce. It’s scary.”  [...]

“What happened?” asks the writer Claire Dederer in her memoir, “Poser,” which examines life as a new mother in Seattle. In the 1970s, “the feminists, the hippies, the protesters, the cultural elite all said, It’s O.K. to drop out.” In contrast, “We made up our minds, my brother and I and so many of the grown children of the runaway moms, that we would put our families first and ourselves second. We would be good, all the time. We would stay married, no matter what, and drink organic milk.”

Netziv:Why Rikva couldn't communicate with Yitzchok

Netziv(Bereishis 24:64): And Rivkah lifted her eyes – and she saw Yitzchok while he was still praying and he was at that moment like an angel of G‑d – extremely awesome. and she fell off her camel – Because of her great fear and awe. However she did not know who she was afraid of. If she had been sitting with Eliezer the servant on the same camel and she had been sitting behind him then she would have relaxed when she would have seen the man go and greet the servant and seen them talking together like all men. Then eventually when she would have been informed who it was – her fear would already have dissipated. But since she was sitting together with Eliezer she didn’t wait – but asked immediately who it was out of great fear. Who is that man - that makes me agitated and frightened? We see in Bereishis Rabbah that the term “that” implies someone fearsome and frightening. Therefore when she heard that it was her husband she took out her veil and covered her face out of her great fear and embarrassment because she realized she wasn’t fit to be his wife. From that moment on that fear was permanently planted in her heart and she was not able to have the relationship with Yitzchok that Sarah had with Avraham and Rachel had with Yaakov. In particular when the others objected to something their husbands had done they were not embarrassed to speak firmly with them.  Rivkah was different. All of this served as a necessary preliminary to the events that would follow in Parshas Toldos when Yitzchok and Rivkah had strongly different views. Nonetheless Rivkah could not find the courage to stand up to Yitzchok and defend her views – even though it was true that Esav was a fraud. The same thing happened at the time of giving the berachos. In fact all of this was the means by which G‑d caused the berachos to be given to Yaakov in this manner as we will explain later. All was done with Divine Providence from the beginning - that Rivkah should arrive when Yitzchok was praying and thus she should see him as an awesome and frightening spectacle – it all happened according to G‑d’s Will.

Changes in marriage:Tragedy of Seridei Aish

I met Rav Nosson Kaminetsky tonight at a chasuna and asked him for some leads regarding changes in the nature of marriage. He reminded me of the following quote regarding the tragic experiences of the Rav Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg that he had written about.

Making of a Gadol by Rav Nosson Kaminetsky page 819:

page 816 - When describing the disaster he entered into, he wrote, "This shiddukh was forced upon me by the Alter of Slabodka and the heads and members of Yeshivath Kneseth Yisrael (emphasis added)./'' An article in ... reveals the background of the misatch between the Chekhanovtzer 'Iluy, R' Weinberg, and the simple, orphaned daughter of the Rav of the small Lithuanian town of Pilvishok. R' Weinberg had been "dabbling with the idea of leaving the yeshiva world for the world of the Haskalah. (R' Finkel) sensed that (R' Weinberg) was at a crossroads and aranged the shiddukh which would bring him the dowry of that town's rabbinic post" and thereby bind him to the Torah world. Weinberg Obituary cites the following from R' Weinberg's letter: "Being young, I submitted to [their guidance], and by that, I ruined the course of my life [...]. During my tenure as the Rav of Pilvishok, the Alter of Slabodka established in Pilvishok a kibbutz of select bahurim in order to enable me forget my pain and my travails through the toil of delivering shai'urim." R' Weinberg's reference to having "ruined... (his) life" goes beyond his personal happiness because, with his talents, he could have developed into the greatest Torah leader of his generation, as discussed in the fourth paragraph of the following excursus.

page 819 - It is possible, too, that the Alter, though expert in understanding what made people, especially the young, tick - in my father's opinion, he understood people better than Freud  - was out of step with the change in the relationship between mates which modem trends had wrought in Jewish society as a whole, even the Torah world, by the time R' Weinberg married. We may speculate that the Alter's own domestic arrangement, which my father from his latter-day perspective described as "terrifying '', could not have endured even among bnei Torah 40 years later. Shades of the generational dichotomy in outlooks on this matter may be found in a report of an exchange between the Alter and R' Weinberg which was reported by R' Shmuel-Hayyim Domb in the name of R' Yehiel-Yankev's talmid R' Pinhas Biberfeld: When the Alter tried to convince R' Weinberg not to separate from his wife, he responded, "Where is the drugstore which sells a potion for love?" It may be assumed that R' Weinberg's purpose in repeating this conversation to his talmid was to convey this very idea - that by making the attempt to get him to stay with his wife, the Alter had demonstrated that he did not grasp what degree of compatibility was expected between couples in the new times. Even the extreme forbearance that the Alter knew R' Weinberg was possessed of could not hold a relatively modem marriage together.

page 826 - Based on what R' Hayyim Sarna heard from his father, the Alter held that R' Weinberg would become the gedol hador (greatest[Torah leader] of [his] generation); "And he would have become that, but for his unfortunate marriage, ,'' R' Sarna said °. He explained: "In Lithuania only teamsters (...) got divorced any person of standing would, as my mother would say, 'eat nails (... [suffer])' and stick it out." [Rachel Sarna used another idiom, viz., "any person of standing would 'bite into the quilt [...,,, (probably meaning, clench one's teeth under the covers, in privacy)]'". The interviewee said further that R'Weinberg "had to leave Lithuania because of the divorce"...

Ex Penn State president charged in abuse coverup

NYTimes

 Former Penn State President Graham B. Spanier was charged Thursday with hushing up child molestation allegations against Jerry Sandusky, making him the third school official to be accused of crimes in the alleged cover-up. [...]

Spanier has said he had no memory of email traffic concerning the 1998 complaint — by a woman that Sandusky had showered with her son — and only slight recollections about the 2001 complaint — by a team assistant who said he stumbled onto Sandusky sexually abusing a boy inside a campus shower.

Ex-gays protest view that therapy doesn't work

NY Times   Mr. Smith is one of thousands of men across the country, often known as “ex-gay,” who believe they have changed their most basic sexual desires through some combination of therapy and prayer — something most scientists say has never been proved possible and is likely an illusion. 

 Ex-gay men are often closeted, fearing ridicule from gay advocates who accuse them of self-deception and, at the same time, fearing rejection by their church communities as tainted oddities. Here in California, their sense of siege grew more intense in September when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law banning use of widely discredited sexual “conversion therapies” for minors — an assault on their own validity, some ex-gay men feel.

Signing the measure, Governor Brown repeated the view of the psychiatric establishment and medical groups, saying, “This bill bans nonscientific ‘therapies’ that have driven young people to depression and suicide,” adding that the practices “will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery.” 

 But many ex-gays have continued to seek help from such therapists and men’s retreats, saying their own experience is proof enough that the treatment can work.