Israel Arab recruiter harrassed by Arabs - demands compensation

YNet   The 30-year-old woman, who lives with her husband and children in the Galilee, began to encourage the enlistment of Israeli Arabs to National Service several months ago .

"I thought this was a good way of integrating into Israeli society, and that it is important to contribute to our community." 

She was praised at work and director of the National-Civil Service Administration Sar-Shalom Jerbi said she "did good work." 

However, a few months later, the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee declared it was against such enlistment. "They called me and my friends 'traitors,'" she recalls. "In one case they physically attacked me and I went to the hospital."  [...]

As a result of the incidents, she hired Attorney Eli Malul from Afula, an expert on the National Insurance Institute and labor laws, to insure that the NII recognizes her.

"My client was emotionally harmed by the difficult chain of events she endured at her place of employment," wrote Malul to the NII. "She is suffering from stress, depression and fits of rage. I request to determine that there is a direct connection between her emotional state and her work."

Moshiach Oi! Merges Orthodox Judaism and Punk Rock

NY Times   The band and the weekly Thursday night gathering, known as Chulent, both appear in a new documentary film called “Punk Jews,” about fringe strands that have emerged within New York’s Orthodox community. The movie, which is scheduled for release on DVD this summer, examines loose bits of subculture inside what is often seen as an insular, rule-oriented cloister. To be a hard-core punk band chanting, “Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman,” the song of global healing for an obscure branch of Hasidism, is to be something beyond a square peg in a round hole. It is to give up the idea of fitting in altogether. Even at Chulent their din divides. 

“It’s very amusing to me to see the looks on people’s faces,” Mr. Romanoff said, wearing a long beard and a skullcap with the “Na Nach” phrase embroidered in Hebrew around the edge. “Most religious Jews have never seen anything like this, so they have no idea what’s going on.” 

Yet he saw no contradiction between his music and his submission to his faith. “To me, Judaism is like punk rock,” he said. “Real Judaism is very in your face. The world is chasing after desires for money and sex and drugs and materialism, and Judaism is the opposite. Judaism is like, this world is nothing. This world is only to serve God and bring light and redemption. To me, that’s very punk rock.” 

The New York area’s Orthodox Jewish population has swelled by more than 25 percent in the past decade, to almost half a million in 2011, according to a study by UJA-Federation of New York. One in three Jews in the area is now Orthodox, and more than half of Jewish children live in O

Rav Steinman : Chinuch - education children 2008 Har Nof

 לדף בעברית

Cheshvan 5769 - November 2008

Series of Lectures on Chinuch HaBanim - Child Education, organized by Moreinu HaRav Yitzchak Mordechai HaCohen Rubin shlit"a and hosted by Kehilat Bnei Torah - Har Nof.

Everybody knows that our future lays with our children and we all know how much there is and can be improved in their education. Both parents, as well as the educators that we entrust our children with, know that we need guidance and help from our Torah leaders and other experts in the field of Chinuch.

Therere, Moreinu HaRav Yitzchak Mordechai Rubin initiated and organized a series of lectures on the topic of Chinuch HaBanim - Child Education. Lectures will be held every 3-4 weeks this coming winter and will focus on different aspects of Chinuch and different goal groups. Seperate lectures will be held for educators, for fathers, for mothers, both in Hebrew as well as in English.

The opening session of this series was on Tuesday 20 Cheshvan 5769 (November 18, 2008).

We were greatly honored to be able to host one of the great Torah leaders in our generation HaGaon Rabbi Aaron Leib Steinman, shit"a. Rabbi Steinman addressed the appr. 1100 participants (men and woman) with his advice on Chinuch, as well as answer to questions submitted before the conference.

Opening words were said by Moreinu HaRav Yitzchak Mordechai Rubin, followed by the well-known Mechanech Rabbi Chizkiyahu Mishkovsky.

The Kennes was broadcasted live via Kol HaLashon, and the audio recordings are available for listening and downloading on this page. (Click to listen or right-click to download.)

* HaRav Yitzchak Mordechai HaCohen Rubin, 16 min Listen or Download (See Video)* HaRav Chizkiyahu Mishkovsky, 30 min Listen or Download  (See Video)

* HaGaon HaRav Aharon Leib Steinman, shlit"a - Main Address, 25 min Listen or Download   See Video  or   Read it

* Question and Answers with HaGaon HaRav Aharon Leib Steinman, shlit"a, 32 min Listen or Download   (See Video)

(Read the questions that were asked to HaGaon HaRav Rabbi Aaron Leib Steinman, shlit"a during the conference: Link to view the PDF file with 26 questions)

Haaretz backtracks on claims Israel forced birthcontrol on Ethiopians

Tablet Magazine   There was no shortage of outrage following a report by Haaretz in late Janaury asserting that Israel had acknowledged a policy of forcing long-acting birth control shots upon Ethiopian women in transit camps who wished to emigrate from Ethiopia to Israel. The story also charged that Israeli officials hadn’t told the women that the effects of the Depo-Provera shots. The explosive first of the story went like this:

A government official has for the first time acknowledged the practice of injecting women of Ethiopian origin with the long-acting contraceptive Depo-Provera.

Beyond the normal outlets that selectively focus on Israeli scandals, sites that report on women’s issues reprinted the Haaretz story and, in multiple acts of stenographic journalism, cast their vicious judgments of Israeli racism and sexism to their readerships.a

The first problem with the story: No Israeli official ever acknowledged there was such a practice at all, it was denied by Joint Distribution Committe, which ran the clinics, and the Health Ministry. (The Scroll was able to convince the popular site Jezebel to retract a damning first line after the story had already blown up and commenters had accused Israel of committing genocide.)

After an Israeli committee was established to investigate the matter, a second story ran in Haaretz last week repeating much of its original reporting. Then, earlier this week, came this correction (caught by CAMERA):

This article, which was updated on March 6, 2013, reported on Health Ministry director-general Prof. Roni Gamzu’s instruction to gynecologists not to renew prescriptions for Depo-Provera if there is any doubt that recipients did not understand the implications of the treatment. The original version failed to state that this instruction was issued “without taking a stand or determining facts about allegations that had been made,” and referred to all women and not just women of Ethiopian origin.

So not only had the head of the Health Ministry not admitted the practice, he had–of his own volition and not under duress from scandal–issued a directive for doctors to make sure that all women (and not just Ethiopian women in transit camps) fully understood what the shots would do. [...]

NY Times Looks at Orthodox Community through Pomegranate

NY Times    In Midwood, Brooklyn, there’s a luxury kosher grocery store called Pomegranate serving the modern Orthodox and Hasidic communities. It looks like a really nice Whole Foods. There’s a wide selection of kosher cheeses from Italy and France, wasabi herring, gluten-free ritual foods and nicely toned wood flooring. [...]

Nationwide, only 21 percent of non-Orthodox Jews between the ages of 18 and 29 are married. But an astounding 71 percent of Orthodox Jews are married at that age. And they are having four and five kids per couple. In the New York City area, for example, the Orthodox make up 32 percent of Jews over all. But the Orthodox make up 61 percent of Jewish children. Because the Orthodox are so fertile, in a few years, they will be the dominant group in New York Jewry.

Another really impressive thing about the store is not found in one section but is pervasive throughout. That’s the specialty products designed around this or that aspect of Jewish law. There are the dairy-free cheese puffs in case you want to have some cheese puffs with a meat dish. There are the precut disposable tablecloths so you don’t have to use scissors on the Sabbath. There are the specially designed sponges, which don’t retain water, so you don’t have to do the work of squeezing out water on Shabbat. 

Pomegranate looks like any island of upscale consumerism, but deep down it is based on a countercultural understanding of how life should work.[...]

For the people who shop at Pomegranate, the collective covenant with God is the primary reality and obedience to the laws is the primary obligation. They go shopping like the rest of us, but their shopping is minutely governed by an external moral order. 

The laws, in this view, make for a decent society. They give structure to everyday life. They infuse everyday acts with spiritual significance. They build community. They regulate desires. They moderate religious zeal, making religion an everyday practical reality. 

The laws are gradually internalized through a system of lifelong study, argument and practice. The external laws may seem, at first, like an imposition, but then they become welcome and finally seem like a person’s natural way of being.[...]

Digital version of Daas Torah - is it possible without loss?

I just received the following email regarding putting my books in digtial form. I agree with the writer who would prefer an electronic version over a printed version - I use the electronic form almost exclusively.  The simple problem is how to do this without losing all my rights and possible financial compensation as thousands of copies proliferate across the internet with the click of a mouse. The NY Times has a good article on the demise of the industry as the result of being able to get an electronic book for nothing or at most pennies. At the present I am not presenting my books in electronic form - but I would like to. Anyone have a realistic solutions?

================================

I think your book Daas Torah is an invaluable work, really fantastic. If possible I would really like to buy a digital copy of the book, preferably PDF. The reason for this is that, as a student of the 21st century, indexes and tables of content don't do much for me when I'm looking for source material. I search for keywords. I use Bar Ilan daily. B"H my Beis Midrash has Wifi. For this reason, you're book would be indescribably more practical to me if it was in a digital format that would allow me to type in keywords and find exactly what i'm searching for. I'll pay you the full 35 dollars for the book. And I will do my utmost, bli neder, to never distribute the book, or parts of it, in any way that would breach the copyright. I would probably not even tell anyone else that I have a digital copy so that they don't even ask for it. But it would be extremely helpful and useful for me to have a digital copy of the book, again, preferably PDF.

Todros Grynhaus - alleged sex offender - arrested in Israel after fleeing England

Jewish Chronicle   An international hunt has ended for a suspected British sex offender who fled to Israel to avoid trial for alleged crimes against children, when the man was arrested in Jerusalem after two weeks on the run.

Todros Grynhaus, from Salford, is thought to have escaped from the UK on false documents after being arrested and charged with historic sexual and indecent assault against three minors.

He was given strict bail conditions by the UK courts to surrender his passport and was forbidden to travel abroad, but Israeli police confirmed the 48-year-old was apprehended by its officers last Thursday (February 28)).

Divorce Tragedies - Letter to Jewish Press

Jewish Press   In a Feb. 15 op-ed column titled “An Agunah Day Message,” the author asks what a young girl caught in an unresolved divorce situation will eventually think and feel about her father and grandmother. I think the answers to that question are clear.

The first rule of good parenting is not to fight when the children are present and certainly not to blame each other in front of the kids. The same is true for separated or divorced parents. If mother and father and assorted grandparents follow that principle and do not drag their children or the public into their personal disagreement, the child will know that there are two sides to every story.

On the other hand, if one or both parents decide to drag their child into their fight, the child will, at a young age, presumably take the view of only one side – the side that decided to attack the spouse; the side that had more regular custody and time to propagandize.

As the child grows up, she will, as the op-ed article indicates, eventually search the Internet. Most likely in the short run she will unfortunately continue to disrespect the parent who has been badmouthed. But as the growing child further searches online she will then begin to see that who is right is not determined by which side has more Internet hits, more blog entries, or yells louder. She will realize that when a divorce is messy or a get not given, it is typically because the two sides cannot come to an agreement, whether over division of property, alimony, child support, child custody or visitation rights.

If the grown child delves further into the issue of Jewish divorce, she’ll find more. She’ll find that many Orthodox Jewish men and women run to civil court in divorce (and many other) cases, when they should be going to beis din. She’ll also find that the beis din system is often broken, with litigants searching for a friendly judge; with rabbis signing decrees without hearing from both sides; with rabbis who are friendly with one of the litigants; with rabbis who are afraid to oppose their colleagues; and with money often doing the talking.

If this grown child explores still further, she’ll find that many Orthodox rabbis hold that, with very rare exceptions, a women does not have the right, halachically, to initiate a divorce action. She’ll learn that many rabbis believe a women cannot just end a marriage because she is “unhappy.” If she enters the word agunah in a search engine and really studies the results, she’ll see that the term is vastly overused, and that a real agunah is a woman whose husband is missing. She’ll find that certain activists use the term the way pro-abortion advocates use the term “free to choose” – because it sounds better. She will also find that Agunah Day was established in 1990 by the International Coalition for Agunah Rights, not by a panel of gedolim. [...]

R Chaim Halpern under partial house arrest

BHOL

רשת הלפרין' בלונדון: המשטרה האריכה את תנאי השחרור של הגאון רבי חיים הלפרין - ראש קהילת 'דברי חיים', אחיו הרב דוד הלפרין - ראש קהילה בשכונת הנדן, ושני העסקנים, גבריאל אסט - מראשי ארגון 'השומרים' בגולדרס גרין, ואלכסנדר שטרום.

הארבעה נעצרו לפני שבועיים בחשד למעורבות בפרשה המסעירה את הרחוב החרדי מזה חצי שנה. הגאון רבי חיים הלפרין, בנו של הגאון רבי אלחנן הלפרין - גדול רבני אנגליה - נחשד בפגיעה בנשים שהגיעו אליו לייעוץ בענייני שלום-בית. שלושת העצורים האחרים חשודים בשיבוש הליכי משפט.

[...]
המשטרה הודיעה לרב הלפרין כי נאסר עליו לצאת מביתו מהשעה 22:00 בלילה ועד ל-6 בבוקר. בנוסף, יהיה עליו להתייצב בתחנת המשטרה חמש פעמים בשבוע, כדי לוודא שאין בכוונתו להימלט מהחקירה.
[...]
.

Jailed "Get Refuser" Shay Cohen - escapes from Beis Din

YNet  A Holon resident jailed for "get refusal" since 2007 escaped on Wednesday from the Jerusalem Rabbinical Court during a debate regarding a possible divorce agreement.

The man, 40-year-old Shay Cohen, apparently climbed out of a bathroom window on the second floor and ran off. Police are currently searching for him with the aid of a helicopter. [...]

Israel's Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger, sitting on the rabbinical judges panel, urged Cohen to turn himself in. "We've reached agreements after six years of suffering for your wife. Your way to freedom is short, turn yourself in and we'll find solutions," Metzger said. [...]

Cohen and his wife have been separated for more than 12 years.

Haredim dealing better with abuse: R' Cohen - Director of Prisoner rehabiliation

JPost   Despite the prevalence of these stories, Rabbi Avinoam Cohen, the director of the Welfare and Social Services Ministry’s Torah-Observant Prisoner Rehabilitation Program, believes the haredi community is doing a better job of dealing with the issue of pedophilia.

“Slowly they’re starting to understand, there’s a type of movement,” said Cohen, who deals with around 60 ultra- Orthodox prisoners at a time who have agreed to go through a personalized rehabilitation process. “It’s not like it was five or eight years ago. They’re not going to leave their children with someone like this [who is known to have a problem], or they will go to the police.”

“The victims [of sexual abuse] caused this movement,” he said. “They feel it in their bones that it’s getting better. The awareness has increased because of the publicity about the incidents, and the children who are failing out of school and no one understands why.”

Cohen works to implement successful rehabilitation programs for pedophiles to ensure they don’t re-offend, a difficult struggle given the large numbers of unsupervised children in haredi neighborhoods.[...]

But a trusted adult or parent ignoring a child who says they were sexually abused, or, as in T.’s case, trying to convince him it didn’t happen, “is worse than the original abuse,” the rabbi continued.

That attitude, at least among the less extremist haredi communities, is changing. Cohen spares no words in his anger over rabbis who allow known sex offenders to move to another community, rather than deal with police.

“They need to put rabbis who don’t go to police in prison,” he said. “I can think of at least 20 religious commandments that they’re breaking.”

Another remaining challenge is dealing with convicted offenders who have served jail time and then return to the community. Even if they don’t return to their own community, they will still likely be in a neighborhood with many children.

Russia is an obscenely corrupt society: Killing the messenger

Time Magazine   For the first time in Russia’s history, a dead man has been placed in the dock, and it will not be easy for the court to parse all of the cryptic corollaries of that lurid fact. How, for instance, is the defense attorney supposed to consult with his client? A Ouija board? Some kind of voodoo mediation? And what about the issue of habeas corpus — literally, “show me the body” — the bedrock principle of common law that requires the accused to be brought before a judge? Are we to expect an exhumation? “It is a self-evident absurdity,” says William Browder, Magnitsky’s former employer and now his co-defendant in the case. “There’s no way in the world that a lawyer can represent him.” But with a trial as steeped as this one in Russian politics, nothing should seem too far-fetched.

The saga that led to Magnitsky’s death — and subsequently his trial — began in 2009, when Browder hired the young tax attorney to keep the books of Hermitage Capital, Browder’s investment fund in Moscow. While digging into the some of the fund’s corporate documents, which Russian police had seized during a raid, Magnitsky uncovered the largest known tax fraud in Russian history. A gang of detectives, tax inspectors and other bureaucrats had allegedly used the fund’s corporate seals and documents to file for a tax refund worth $230 million. Following the paper trail, Magnitsky found that this refund — also the largest in Russian history — had been rubber-stamped at a Moscow tax office in just one day. After that, the money vanished into various offshore accounts. Magnitsky immediately blew the whistle, even offering to give testimony against the officials in court, including agents of the FSB secret police, which Vladimir Putin led before becoming Russia’s President in 2000.

But instead of investigating his claims, which were backed by a paper trail, police placed Magnitsky under arrest and charged him with tax fraud. In his prison cell, he kept a diary documenting life in pre-trial detention — with rats, hunger, flooded and freezing cells — and without the medical treatment he needed. Transferred repeatedly from cell to cell, Magnitsky developed acute pancreatitis, which doctors refused to treat. In November 2009, Magnitsky died in excruciating pain at Moscow’s Butyrka prison. According to the Kremlin’s own human rights council, which later investigated the case, he was also badly beaten shortly before he died.

To this day, all of the officials Magnitsky incriminated, as well as those involved in his alleged torture and death, remain free. Nearly all of them have either kept their jobs or been promoted. So Browder, his former boss, began to seek justice in western capitals, a campaign TIME reported on here. The greatest success of that effort was the U.S. Magnitsky Act, which passed with a huge bipartisan majority in both the House and the Senate last year. It prohibits corrupt Russian officials from holding U.S. visas, bank accounts or property, and it starts with the group implicated in Magnitsky’s death.

Real world diplomacy: Basketball player meets N Korean dictator

Weiss-Dodelson case: Rejection of Rosh Yeshivas letter

Rabbi Dovid E. Eidensohn

/2 Phyllis Terrace/Monsey, NY 10952

 phone 1-845-578-1917

21 Adar 5773

A  signed letter from major Rosh Yeshivas has been issued attacking Rabbi Avrohom Mayer Weiss for not giving his wife, a Dodelson, a GET. The letter declares three things: One, that the Siruv given the husband by Beth Din Machon LiHorah requires everyone to treat him as if he was in Cherem. Two, everyone should pressure him with public humiliations and by taking away his livelihood to force him to give his wife a GET.

All three things are completely wrong. Let us begin with the Siruv issued by Beth Din Machon LiHorah. Yes, they issued a Siruv and claimed that he did not respond to their demand that he go to a Beth Din to settle his issues with his wife. But there is another Beth Din, that of Rav Gestetner  in Monsey, that has issued a Bitul Siruv, claiming that the husband acted in a proper way and did accept the obligation to go to a Beth Din. The family claims that it has over twenty pages of proof [click here to view them]  in writing that they did accept the demand by Machon LiHorah to enter the Beth Din process to resolve the issues with his wife.  So the issue must be resolved by a third Beth Din, impartial and fearless and not the cousin of the wife as in this letter.

Number two,  is the mistaken demand made by the Rosh Yeshivas that everyone publicly humiliate him.  Humiliating a husband so that he is coerced to give a GET makes an invalid GET. This is taught in the Rashbo VII:414, Radvaz II:118, Bet  Yose 154 DH kosuve,  and Chazon Ish 108:12. If the humiliation is very strong, such as the kind of humiliations demanded by the Rosh Yeshivas, Rabbeinu Yona considers it worse than murder (Shaarei Teshuva 139). See Brochose 23Aa Talmid Chochom  was humiliated in public and committed suicide.  Surely  severe humiliation creates an invalid GET.

The same is true of the demand by the Rosh Yeshivas that people take away the parnoso of the husband. This is fiscal coercion that renders a GET invalid.  See Choshen Mishpot 205:7 Ramo, Gro and others based on the sugya of Pardiso in Bovo Basro; Michtov MaEliyohu Simon 19.

Anyone who signed this document is not educated in the laws of Gittin or Choshen Mishpot. The fact that Rosh Yeshivas sign together with a cousin of one side and pasken as if they are the Beth Din  even though they were accepted by only one side and did not hear the side of the husband shows they are ignorant of the most basic laws of Beth Din.

The Beth Din of HaGaon  Rav Nissim Karelitz  shlit”o in Bnei Braq has recently issued a letter stating that anyone who humiliates a husband or damages his income to force a GET has produced an invalid GET.

The  letter from the Rosh Yeshivas in utter defiance of the most basic laws of Choshen Mishpot and Even Hoezer is wrong and is a disgrace.  For shame.

Shalom,

Dovid Eidensohn

Musmach liRosh Beth Din of Gittin by Posek HaDor HaGadole Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashev zt”l