Scientists have warned for decades that climate change will make heat waves more frequent and more intense. That is a reality now playing out in Canada, but also in many other parts of the northern hemisphere that are increasingly becoming uninhabitable.
Sunday, July 4, 2021
Unprecedented heat, hundreds dead and a town destroyed. Climate change is frying the Northern Hemisphere
Jerusalem wig shop vandalizer busted
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309194
Police detectives conducted an operation on Friday after a number of cases in the past month during which businesses selling wigs in Jerusalem were damaged.
Police officers were waiting at one of the businesses for the suspect, who arrived at the scene armed with a hammer and spray paint and broke down the business door.
As he began to damage the store he was caught in the act and arrested.
Saturday, July 3, 2021
Cop’s life saved by a rock to the head — and the tumor it revealed
https://www.timesofisrael.com/cops-life-saved-by-a-rock-to-the-head-and-the-tumor-it-revealed/
For policeman Barak Daddon, getting hit in the head by a rock during a Jerusalem funeral may have been the best thing that ever happened to him.
Daddon, a superintendent, was commanding police forces securing a Haredi funeral in the capital some six months ago, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Clashes erupted between the masses that took part in the event and police officers attempting to uphold restrictions on gatherings, and Daddon was hit in the head with a rock, sending him to the hospital.
Women in the Modern Military: A Second Look
https://www.jewishideas.org/article/women-modern-military-second-look
One of the most contentious religious issues to roil Israeli society ever since the creation of the State has been the role of women in national service in general and in the military in particular. Israel was one of the first states to draft women into the military; the government gave religious young women the option of entering national service. Haredi authorities considered even national service as a most serious violation of halacha, indeed an outright sin. R. Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, the undisputed leader Israel’s Ashkenazi Haredi community when the state was proclaimed (he is generally known by the title of his best known writings as Chazon Ish), was unequivocal in his opposition. He asserted that national service was the virtual equivalent of adultery, idolatry and murder, three sins which Jews are mandated to resist even at the cost of their lives (yehareg ve’al ya’avor).[1] Needless to say, military service was totally out of the question as well. Indeed, R. Zvi Pesach Frank, the head of Haredi Beit Din and Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem for 36 years until his passing in 1961, explicitly stated that the drafting of women into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was a gzerat shmad, a decree compelling Jews to abandon their faith for another.[2] Such hyperbolic statements reflect the depth of opposition that the Haredi leadership[3]evinced toward the policy of drafting women into the military.
It is doubtful that the ongoing changes in both the means by which war is fought, and the treatment of women in the military, will have the slightest effect on many Haredi decisors. Their opinions regarding the intermingling of the sexes has hardened in recent years; and neither the evolution of combat operations, nor any regulations adopted either by non-Jewish militaries, or the IDF, will convince them to moderate their views. On the other hand, these changes may further moderate the views of those decisors who have chosen to address in constructive manner the issues of female membership in the military; the military occupational specialties (MOS) they might assume; and the commands to which they could ascend, whether in Israel, the United States, or other freedom-loving democracies.
Drafting Women for the Army and national service
Drafting Women for the Army
Rabbi Alfred Cohen
https://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/735795/rabbi-alfred-cohen/drafting-women-for-the-army
They left no doubt as to the cause for their opposition - the army in any country. and Israel is no different, is a place where moral standards are relaxed. to say the least, and it was just not the proper environment for a Jewish daughter, Against their will, the girls would be affected by the atmosphere and the environment to which they would be exposed, a milieu which would replace the positive reinforcement they would have gotten at home from parents and family.
Rabbis Isser Zalman Meltzer and Tzvi Pesach Frank also issued pronouncements that a person must choose death rather than accede to the government decree, as did the Steipler Rav and Rav Shach. When another rabbi suggested that perhaps it would not be so terrible if the girls served under carefully supervised conditions, the Chazon Ish retorted that the rabbi's opinion was totally worthless and, had he had any children, he would not have been able to say something like that The Chazon Ish actually ruled that the Sabbath should be desecrated to avoid compliance with a draft order and urged parents and teachers to inculcate young women with the laws of dying "al kiddush Hashem;' in sanctification of the Name.
Sephardic Chief Rabbi: Women in the army? Only to cook and do laundry
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4891186,00.html
Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef says women serving in the IDF is 'not the way of the Torah,' further determining that women should not do national service either; he claims his father Rabbi Ovadia Yosef 'died of the sorrow he felt over the drafting of yeshiva students' just as Chazon Ish, a religious leader in Israel’s early days, might have 'died of the sorrow this holy struggle against the enlistment of women caused him.'
Can Women Serve In The IDF According To Halacha?
Many assume that leading rabbis in the Religious Zionist camp support women enlisting in the IDF.
They are mistaken. Every leading Religious Zionist Torah authority forbids young religious women from enlisting in the army. Rav Shlomo Aviner has stated that women are not permitted to serve in the army just like they are not permitted to violate Shabbat.
Some people claim that Rabbi Shlomo Goren, of blessed memory, the
first chief rabbi of Tzahal, permitted the enlistment of female
soldiers, but he did so only in specific individual cases. Every other
chief rabbi of Israel prohibited women from enlisting in the military.
Outside of rabbis in the liberal camp of Religious Zionism – who are
famous for expressing opinions contrary to the accepted halacha – the rabbinic opposition to women in the military is almost unanimous.
Friday, July 2, 2021
Thursday, July 1, 2021
It's time Ilhan Omar and "the Squad" learned the truth about Israel and Hamas
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309061
U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar appeared on CNN's "State of the Union" Tuesday, and was asked by host Jake Tapper about her long record of virulently anti-Israel comments (which included her comparison earlier this month of Israel to Hamas) and why some of her Jewish congressional colleagues had called her out for again issuing anti-Semitic tropes.
As Omar has done so many times in the past, she blamed her critics rather than take responsibility. "I've welcomed any time my colleagues asked to have a conversation to learn from them [and] for them to learn from me," said Omar, D-Minn. "I think it's really important for these members to realize that they haven't been partners in justice."
I'm a Palestinian Arab who grew up in a UNWRA refugee camp outside of Jerusalem, and been a human rights activist all my life. Let me say this as directly as I can: Rep. Omar does not know what she is talking about. Worse, for years, Rep. Omar has been engaged in not arguing any facts, but simply throwing out dirty anti-Semitic epithets, a mirror image of the anti-Semitism by "white supremacists" she claims to decry.
In first, rabbinical court rules lawyers of get refusers can be sanctioned
Lawyers who act to prevent the giving of a get (Jewish divorce document) and harm divorce proceedings can be slapped with sanctions, the Jerusalem Rabbinical Court ruled in a groundbreaking decision earlier this week.
Knesset approves law permitting IDF to revoke girls' exemptions
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309069
“What did the Chief Rabbinate – the halakhic authority of the State of Israel – have to say on this issue of drafting girls into the IDF?” demanded MK Moshe Gafni? “The Rabbinate stated that it is absolutely forbidden. Why are you bringing this law to a vote now? What for? You really want to go into minute detail about whether a girl made Kiddush on Shabbat, whether she’s really traditional? Is this a democratic state? This is forbidden, yehareg ve’al ya’avor [a sin that one is forbidden to commit even if one must give up his life due to refusal to submit] … This law goes against the decisions of all the rabbis of Israel.”
MKs voting in favor and 50 against.
MK Yisrael Eichler (UTJ) asked his fellow Knesset members to “imagine to yourselves that the Rabbinate got up one day and announced that it was establishing committees of inquiry to investigate the level of religious observance of this person or that. You would be up in arms, screaming that it was an Inquisition,” he accused. “But now, when it’s the Defense Ministry doing that, checking up on girls to see whether they really know Jewish laws, whether they really are traditional, you’re fine with it … The law requires only a declaration that the girl in question does not travel on Shabbat and that she eats kosher food. She doesn’t need to know the entire body of Jewish law. What these committees are trying to do is coerce these girls to enlist.”
Democracies Don’t Try to Make Everyone Agree
I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a Communist.”
Former Democratic Congresswoman claims Jews caused 9/11 on Twitter
Former Democratic Congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney tweeted a dangerously antisemitic trope on Monday afternoon, accusing the Jews of being behind the 9/11 bombings.
After Israel controversies, Omar says some colleagues ‘not partners in justice’
US Representative Ilhan Omar on Tuesday said some of her fellow Democratic House members — specifically those who have criticized remarks she has made about Israel, some of them Jewish — “haven’t been partners in justice.”
In an interview with CNN, Omar was asked about some of her past comments that were critical of the Jewish state, including a 2012 tweet in which she claimed Israel “hypnotized the world” and another from 2019 implying Jewish money explained American elected officials’ support for Israel. Anchor Jake Tapper asked Omar if she could understand why House Democrats, and particularly Jews, would consider such remarks antisemitic.