Monday, September 17, 2018

The Empowering Internet Safety Guide for Women

.vpnmentor.

Have you ever been harassed in the street? Received a crass message on a dating app? Had a coworker make a comment about your appearance that just didn’t sit right?
You’re not alone.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe's Blessing Before Yom Kippur

Rav Soloveitchik on the Avoda of Yom Kippur

The Two Voices: A New Perspective on the Meaning of Teshuvah

Israeli official colluded with Manafort in anti-Semitism scandal


Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Sunday that he has asked Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked to ask US officials for clarification on the identity of the Israeli official who assisted President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort to slander the opposition candidate in Ukraine during the Obama administration.

An indictment submitted against Manafort said that he acted, together with a senior Israeli official in order to discredit the leader of the opposition in the eastern European country, Yulia Tymoshenko, and to label her as an anti-Semite.

According to the indictment, Manafort and the Israeli official colluded to ensure that Israel would publish a statement against an anti-Semitic comment made by one of Tymoshenko’s supporters.

Two Prominent Jewish Republican Donors Cut GOP Ties Over Trump




 Two prominent Jewish donors to the Republican Party announced over the past days that they are cutting their ties to the GOP because of U.S. President Donald Trump. The two donors, Seth Klarman and Leslie Wexnner, have both contributed millions of dollars to Republican groups and candidates in recent years. They are both also known as major Jewish philanthropists and supporters of Israel.

Wexner anounced his decision last week following a visit by former U.S. President Barack Obama to Ohio. Wexnner, who in 2012 gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups supporting Obama’s Republican election rival that year, Mitt Romney, said he now misses Obama’s humility and candor. He then stated, speaking at a philanthropic event: “I’m no longer a Republican.”

Newspapers in Ohio made headlines from the statement, describing Wexnner as the largest Republican donor in the state prior to last week’s announcement. In the current election cycle, Wexnner and his wife have donated $2.8 million to “With Honor,” a political action group that supports both Republican and Democratic candidates who have served in the military and who promise to 
engage in bi-partisan legislation if elected to Congress.

The Columbus Dispatch quoted Wexnner as saying: “I won’t support this nonsense in the Republican Party. I’ve been a Republican since college, joined the Young Republican Club at Ohio State. I’m an independent now.”

Sharia court in Israel places Jewish girl in Arab custody

RUTZ 7

An anti-assimilation group in Israel says it has challenged a decision issued by a state Islamic court in Israel which awarded full custody of a Jewish girl to her Arab grandmother, despite the objections of the girl’s mother.
According to the Yad L'Achim organization – which works to counter efforts to missionize Jews in Israel and to combat assimilation – a state Sharia court which serves Israel’s Muslim minority population awarded custody of a two-year-old Israeli girl, named Yasmin, to her Arab grandmother.
Eight years ago, Yad L’Achim officials say, the girl’s grandmother moved to Israel, along with her three children, after the head of the household had passed away.
The family moved to a mixed city with a significant Arab population. The family had a difficult time adjusting, and found itself in dire financial straits. One of the three children soon dropped out of school, and eventually married a local Arab man.
Two years ago, the young woman, gave birth to a daughter, Yasmin, who was raised at first by her Jewish grandmother.
After her Jewish grandmother died, however, the young woman’s Arab husband urged her to let his mother care for Yasmin. The young woman agreed, and her mother-in-law cared for Yasmin while she could recover from the loss of her mother.

ISRAEL MOURNS ARI FULD


Thousands gathered to mourn Ari Fuld from late Sunday night into early Monday morning in Kfar Etzion, a religious kibbutz in the West Bank.  

Fuld, 45, left his home for a routine shopping trip and became a national legend for the way he shot a terrorist after he himself was mortally wounded by the Rami Levy supermarket in the Gush Etzion junction.

The father of four, was the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and had miraculously dodged a bullet while serving as an IDF soldier in Lebanon.


“If there is one word to describe my brother, it was a hero,” his brother Moshe told the mourners who surrounded the small chapel on the edge of the Kfar Etzion cemetery just after midnight on Monday.

“Who else could manage upon sustaining a fatal [stabbing] injury, to draw his pistol, jump a fence and shoot his attacker to make sure that his attacker would not hurt anyone else; only my brother, only my brother,” Moshe said

Sunday, September 16, 2018

Trump officials reportedly angry at US Jews for not cheering embassy move

timesofisrael.


The Trump administration is reportedly frustrated with the American Jewish community for not embracing the US president more warmly after he moved the US embassy to Jerusalem.
new report released Sunday by the Jewish People Policy Institute, a branch of the Jewish Agency, quoted a White House official who alleged the president’s predecessor, Barack Obama, would be beloved for doing the things Trump has done.

Friday, September 14, 2018

Elizabeth Smart pleads with officials to reconsider release of kidnapper


SAN FRANCISCO — Elizabeth Smart pleaded Thursday with authorities in Utah to reconsider releasing one of her kidnappers. Smart was held captive for nine months in 2002 when she was just 14.
Smart says the release of 64-year-old Wanda Barzee, years earlier than expected, was a shock.
In 2002, Smart was 14 years old when she was kidnapped from her Salt Lake City bedroom. Nine months later she was discovered.
She had been held captive by a onetime street preacher, Brian David Mitchell, and his wife Wanda. Smart says Mitchell raped her almost daily with Barzee's help.
"She is a woman who had six children, but encouraged her husband to continue to rape me," Smart said Thursday.
In 2011, Mitchell was sentenced to life in prison. In June, the Utah parole board set Barzee's release date in 2024, but last week announced it had miscalculated credit for time served in federal prison. She will now be set free Sept. 19.

In Unprecedented Move, Israel Indicts Husband for Refusing to Grant Wife Jewish Divorce

haretz.

Jerusalem police charged a man Wednesday with violating a legal order after he has refused to grant his wife a Jewish bill of divorce, known as a "get," for almost 20 years.
The man has been in prison since 2000 for his refusal, but with criminal charges filed, his case is the first in Israel in which a husband has been indicted for refusing to grant his wife a get.
According to the indictment, the 61-year-old defendant, who can only be identified publicly as M., and his wife, S., were married 26 years ago. In 1998, the two began divorce proceedings in the course of which M. refused to grant his wife a get.

Thursday, September 13, 2018

Bob Woodward's Fear sells more than 750,000 in first day

theguardian

Donald Trump may have dismissed Bob Woodward’s Fear as “a joke”, but readers are showing themselves to be keen to share in the comedy, with more than 750,000 copies of the White House exposé sold in American in just one day, according to its publisher.
Fear, which “depicts a White House awash in dysfunction, where the Lord of the Flies is the closest thing to an owner’s manual”, according to a review in the Guardian, was published on 11 September. Simon & Schuster said yesterday that it sold a combined total of more than 750,000 copies of the book on its first day on sale in the US. The publisher has now ordered a ninth printing, bringing the total number of hardbacks in print in America to more than 1.15m.
“Bob Woodward’s Fear is selling with the force of a cultural phenomenon, in extraordinary numbers across the board, in hardcover, ebook, and audio editions,” said S&S president Jonathan Karp. “Based on immense pre-publication and ongoing interest, the reading public clearly has an enormous appetite for what we believe, as Woodward says, is ‘a pivot point in history’.”

Confusion over pro-Corbyn letter ‘from strictly-Orthodox rabbis’

timesofisrael.


A row has broken out in Stamford Hill over the authenticity of a letter posted in synagogues before Rosh Hashanah, purporting to have been signed by leading rabbis in the area.
The letter, translated by the blogger If You Tickle Us, who lives in the neighbourhood, says it is “an open letter from leading Orthodox Jewish community leaders in the UK”, and publicly dissociates the strictly Orthodox community from recent attacks on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The Odd Chabad Connection Between Putin and Trump

washingtonmonthly


Three days before the presidential election, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump visited the Queens gravesite of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson and, according to The Times of Israel, they prayed for Donald Trump’s victory.
Schneerson, who died in 1994, is an interesting character. Although he never claimed it himself, some of his followers consider him the Messiah, and others believe he is still alive.
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known to many as the Rebbe, was a Russian Empire-born American Orthodox Jewish rabbi, and the last Lubavitcher Rebbe. He is considered one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th century.
As leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, he took an insular Hasidic group that almost came to an end with the Holocaust and transformed it into one of the most influential movements in world Jewry, with an international network of over 3,000 educational and social centers. The institutions he established include kindergartens, schools, drug-rehabilitation centers, care-homes for the disabled and synagogues.
The Kushner family is Modern Orthodox, and of course Ivanka converted to Judaism prior to her marriage to Jared. Still, according to Ben Schreckinger of Politico Magazine, Kushner was affiliated with the Chabad house at Harvard when he was a student there. Since settling in DC, the couple has reportedly been attending services at a Chabad synagogue.
What Jared and Ivanka want to do in their spiritual lives is their business, and I have no intention of casting any aspersions on the Chabad-Lubavitch movement or Rabbi Schneerson. I do however want to explore some things that may circle back to this pre-election pilgrimage to Schneerson’s grave.

Let’s begin here:
Starting in 1999, [Vladimir] Putin enlisted two of his closest confidants, the oligarchs Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich, who would go on to become Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide, to create the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as “Putin’s rabbi.”
There’s a good chance that if you know of Roman Abramovich, you know him as the owner of the Chelsea Football Club of the English Premier League. You may not know that he was a victor (along with Paul Manafort’s patron Oleg Deripaska) in the bloody aluminum wars of the 1990s, or that he was reportedly the person who convinced Boris Yeltsin that Putin would be a proper successor. You probably are not aware that Ivanka Trump is very close friends with Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova, with whom she recently attended the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Queens. Zhukova reportedly attended the inauguration as Ivanka’s personal guest.
It takes a little more doing to understand the Trump family’s connections to Lev Leviev. To begin with, we need to go back to Bayrock, the company that Donald Trump teamed up with to build his Trump Soho project. There were three main actors in that enterprise. One was convicted mob associate and murky FBI informant Felix Sater. Another was Tevfik Arif, a shady man with likely Russian intelligence connections who was once was arrested by the Turks on Mustafa Kamal Ataturk’s yacht and “charged with running an international underage prostitution ring.” The third was the late Tamir Sapir, another man with ties to Russian intelligence. If you’re interested in this aspect of the story, I refer you to my Trump’s Soho Project, the Mob, and Russian Intelligence article and also Mike Lofgren’s piece: Mobbed Up, both written in late February.
Interestingly, all these men have connections to the Chabad movement. Felix Sater was honored as Man of the Year in 2014 by the Port Washington Chabad house. The same Chabad house’s website lists Tevfik Arif, who is not Jewish, “among its top 13 benefactors.”
But it’s Tamir Sapir who links Trump back directly to Lev Leviev.