Sunday, February 19, 2012
Woman endures 'unorthodox' custody battle after leaving strict community
This rabbi’s daughter has an unorthodox custody battle on her hands.
Pearlperry Reich, 30, a stunning mother of four, said she’s done with the Hasidic community after it fought tooth-and-nail against her repeated attempts to end her rocky marriage — despite her claims of emotional and physical abuse.
“It was an arranged marriage,” she said of her betrothal at the tender age of 18. “We got married and right away we had issues.”
Now, after 12 years of “war zone” living, she wants custody of her kids, is trying to launch a career in acting and modeling, and no longer plans to follow the Hasidic teachings she was raised with in Borough Park, Brooklyn.
Her husband, Sinai Susholz, wants his children to remain within the faith.
“There are issues of her leaving Orthodoxy,” said Susholz’s attorney, Richard Sevrin. “It’s not in the best interest of the children to raise them other than how they’ve been brought up.”
But apparently that isn’t the only bone Susholz has to pick.
In a Facebook exchange, someone identifying himself as Susholz leveled accusations including “promiscuous sexual activities.”
“There are much more deeper issues involved,” the Facebook post noted. “She has no ability to think in long term logical terms and behaves on her sexual impulses all the time.”
Reich — who now lives in Lakewood, NJ, where she says she continues to keep a traditional Orthodox home — contends Susholz is trying to portray her as unstable merely to make it harder to get a “get,” or a divorce, in rabbinic court.
Even her father, a prominent rabbi of the Riminov line, has encouraged her to remain married.
“My father gave me a very hard time. He didn’t want me to get divorced, period,” she said. “They discouraged me from making police reports about abuse — my father, the rabbis and my husband’s family . . . His parents made a meeting with my parents. They called me a bitch and a whore, and my parents accepted it.”
Reich’s father and husband refused to comment.
Reich claims that Susholz cut up her $4,000 wig, threw her sneakers in the garbage, stole her glasses and told their daughter that her mother was a “slut.”
Lakewood Police records show that Reich has been granted at least one restraining order after she received a text from Susholz stating, “You are playing with fire and by the time you realize it will be too late.”
The couple’s custody case will begin in a New Jersey Family Court in April.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/bronx/marriage_holy_war_tyfZMjU8fVFyuOdIlvm6iI
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Orthodox Jew cleared of failing to carry ID, because it was Saturday
An orthodox Jew has been found not guilty of failing to produce an ID card because it was against his religious principles to carry any object on Saturday – the Jewish sabbat - the Telegraaf reports.
The Hague appeal court ruled on Friday the man should not be prosecuted for failing to prove his identity as required by police. He had faced a €150 fine.
‘This religious requirement is more important than the requirement to meet Dutch laws,’ the court press spokesman told the paper.
http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2012/02/orthodox_jew_cleared_of_failin.php
Friday, February 17, 2012
'Unorthodox' Author’s Claim Of Murder Cover-up Rebutted
With allegations of communal cover-ups involving child sexual abuse dogging the haredi community over the past several years, it may not be much of a stretch for some readers to believe a gruesome story that appears in a new memoir about growing up in, and leaving, the Satmar community.
The story, recounted by Deborah Feldman in "Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots" (Simon and Schuster), involves the alleged mutilation and murder of a boy by his own father — supposedly for masturbating — and the subsequent cover-up of the crime by Hatzolah, the community's volunteer ambulance service.
The only problem, however, is that based on information obtained by The Jewish Week, the story seems not be true.
Feldman claims she first learned of the grisly crime from her husband who had, in turn, heard about it from his brother, allegedly a member of Hatzolah at the time, who had been called to the blood-soaked scene. Apparently, the boy's "penis was cut off with a jig saw and his throat was slit too," Feldman writes.
Feldman recounts that her husband told her his brother "said the neighbors told him they heard loud arguing coming from the house. When he called the [volunteer ambulance] dispatch, they told him to go home and keep quiet about it, that they would take care of it. He said they buried him in thirty minutes and they didn't even issue a death certificate."
In a pre-publication interview with Julie Wiener in The Jewish Week, Feldman was questioned about the veracity of the story. Feldman not only insisted that she was not lying, but asserted that the father was known to be mentally ill and implied that he had escaped justice for his crime.
"I worry about his other children," Feldman told Wiener, "and I worry about people thinking if he could get away with that, then they can get away with anything."
This is not the first time Feldman has made this allegation. Indeed, in December of 2008 it appeared on her then anonymous blog, Hasidic-Feminist, where it was described as a "Class A secret." In the blog post, Feldman recounted the story of a "thirteen year-old boy [who] had been castrated with a jig saw and bled to death."
The incident, according to Feldman, took place "two years ago on an Erev Shabbos in [Kiryas Joel]." She goes on to elaborate that when Hatzolah arrived at the crime scene (a basement) and tried to question the father, "he refused to cooperate, saying only that his son deserved it and that he was a chazar, a pig, because he touched himself." Feldman then notes that no police report was ever filed and the boy was "under ground" in 30 minutes. "People of KJ," she warned, "a murderer walks in your midst."
While some of the 31 comments on the blog post were credulous of Hasidic-Feminist's claims, several expressed serious skepticism. At least one claimed knowledge that the death was in fact a suicide and that the young man (who, one commenter noted, was not 13 but 19) was well known to have been mentally ill.
"Our community would not have ignored a murder," wrote a commenter with the screen name Product, "but anyone familiar with Hasidic culture knows that any mention of a familial disgrace such as suicide would be stifled. This explains why the story is so shrouded in mystery."
A few commenters even chastised Feldman, in the guise of Hasidic-Feminist, for not reporting her knowledge to the police. "[No] one has gone to the police," she responded to one of these charges, "because no one wants to be publicly outed as a musser — a tattletale. That's a sin that merits 'honor killing.'"
However, The Jewish Week confirmed that the state police do in fact have a record of the incident and its office provided the paper with the names of two of its investigators called to the scene, John Van Der Molen and Michael Colern. Calls to the two officers were not returned Thursday.
Further, a death certificate obtained by The Jewish Week indicates that the death — which it noted occurred in a "storeroom" on a Friday afternoon in Kiryas Joel around the approximate date Feldman's blog alleged — was ruled a suicide by coroner Thomas A. Murray, and lists the cause of death as "partial decapitation, severed carotid arteries due to circular saw." The deceased's age was listed as 20.
Several e-mails to Feldman and her publisher, Simon and Schuster, seeking comment did not receive a response.
Privacy laws prevent Hatzolah from commenting on any case, but Moses Witriol, the director of public safety and chief constable for Kiryas Joel, told The Jewish Week that the story was patently false.
"When the first Hatzolah member showed up on the scene, he cordoned off the area and contacted the public safety office, which in turn immediately contacted the state police. Except for them and the coroner, no other people were in the room [where the boy was found]. The state police conducted a full and thorough investigation and interviewed every member of the family.
"If Mrs. Feldman knows about a crime in the village [of Kiryas Joel]," Witriol continued, "I invite her to come forward to law enforcement."
Reached by phone, a relative of the deceased told The Jewish Week, "I cannot understand how a person could possibly find it within themselves to fabricate such a gruesome story and slander a completely innocent, grieving and tragedy-stricken family in such a horrific way. The facts are that the boy had a long history of mental illness, and his family and the community did a lot to try and help this individual. It was a very tragic end to a life full of suffering."
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/breaking_news/unorthodox_authors_claim_murder_cover_up_rebutted
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Jewish rapper Matisyahu is letting his beard grow back
For fans of Matisyahu's signature bushy beard, it was nice to see the latest photo the Jewish singer tweeted of himself (with his young son) last week.
His grey-brown facial hair is filling in a month since he shocked fans and fellow Jews by going clean-shaven. He spent years performing religious-themed reggae-rap with that beard, an outward sign of his Hasidic beliefs as a member of the Chabad-Lubavich community.
In December 2011, Matisyahu offered vague explanations for why the beard was gone, citing his continuing journey through Jewish spirituality, and promised that it would be back.
"Get ready for an amazing year filled with music of rebirth," he blogged. "And for those concerned with my naked face, don't worry…you haven't seen the last of my facial hair."
His decision to let go of his "big, Jewish beard" made headlines everywhere from TMZ to Rolling Stone, plus plenty of music and Jewish blogs.
Matisyahu is best known for his 2005 hit "King Without A Crown."
http://blog.chron.com/believeitornot/2012/02/jewish-rapper-matisyahu-is-letting-his-beard-grow-back/
Kid City thrives in Brooklyn
Welcome to Kid City.
A swath of Brooklyn has the most kids compared to other neighborhoods across the city, with the largest number of children under the age of 6.
The highly concentrated pocket of kids stretches across Hasidic- Jewish Borough Park and also includes growing numbers of Chinese, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in Kensington, Sunset Park, and Flatbush.
"There is no other place like it on the planet," said CUNY Graudate Center sociologist Philip Kasinitz.
"You have a lot of Hasids who have a lot of kids. And you have immigrants in Kensington and Sunset Park who have a lot of kids. Where else are Bangladeshi, Mexicans, and Hasids, going to come together?" Kasinitz said.
Department of City Planning's crunch of U.S. 2010 Census data totals the pint-sized community at 26,221. The second largest kiddie cluster is on the Upper West Side, only one-fourth of the size of Kid City.
While Jewish families continue to lead in the Kid City count, other immigrant groups are quickly catching up.
Asians, for instance, 17 years and under, nearly tripled in population since 1990 from 3,379 to 8,644.
"The diversity is tremendous," said granddad Gene Tully, 66, who raised his two daughters and now his grandson Christian Hoffman, 9, in Kensington.
Christian, a third-grader at P.S. 230 on Albemarle Road, where parents said 60 languagues are spoken, claims Pakastani immigrant Muhammad Luqman, 9, as one of his best pals.
"I am learning English from him," said Muhammad, who moved to Brooklyn when he was 5.
All those children can create kid gridlock.
"We have a long wait list of children," said Helene Reisman, the daycare director at the Brooklyn Chinese-American Association on 8th Avenue which has nearly 1,000 kids waiting for 343 seats. "The need is so great, and we can only do so much."
The area's main hospital, Maimonides Medical Center, prides itself on keeping up with the young demand. Maimonides leads the state in births, delivering about 8,000 newborns each year, where 80 percent of moms are on Medicaid.
It also has a separate childrens' hospital with its own pediatric emergency room and neonatal intensive care unit.
Health officials said they treated 36,000 children in the ER last year. 20 percent were Chinese.
"Our clinic volume has done nothing but gone up," said Maimonides CEO Pamela Brier, adding hospital staff speak
70 languages.
P.S. 230 third-grader Ariel Bonill, 8, said he doesn't worry about living in Kid City, but wishes the school and nearby playground weren't always so packed.
"It's always very crowded," said Ariel whose mom is from Mexico. "When you parents come to pick you up, there is always a line."
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/kid-city-thrives-brooklyn-a-slice-borough-leads-city-children-population-article-1.1023339?localLinksEnabled=false
Borough Park tree serves as pacifier bush
Even the trees in the city's baby capital are going gaga for the little ones.
Rubber pacifiers hang off the branches of saplings surrounding the brick apartment building at 1450 48th Street in Borough Park.
Super Yusuf Oner works with local mothers who donate their tot's soother once she feels her babe has outgrown it.
"The moms put it up when their babies don't need it anymore," Oner said.
Oner said the three-decade-old tradition serves as a shrine for the community's ever-growing child population.
In 2010, Borough Park led the city in bambinos with 3,152 of them, according to the Department of City Planning's U.S. Census analysis.
That's nearly twice the amount of the city's second largest baby capital, the Upper West Side which had 1,618 people under the age of 1.
Borough Park's high numbers are tied to the Hasidic Jewish tradition of producing large families averaging about six kids and sometimes growing to a dozen or more.
"It's a good example for the little ones," said Oner about the dangling pacifiers showing the stroller crowd that weaning off them is a good thing.
Moms say '"Look, your brother can do it. So you can do it,"' Oner said.
Parents from across the neighborhood flock to 48th Street to use the trees.
"It's all about the memories," Oner said.
But the branches get so packed that the pacifiers drop to the ground prompting Oner to sweep them up at least once a week.
"It's cute," gushed one young mom who just moved into the building with her husband and new infant. "It's a very child friendly place."
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/borough-park-tree-serves-pacifier-bush-local-moms-hang-babies-soothers-branches-article-1.1023206
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Kate Middleton Goes Hasidic Chic
Just last week we were treated to a provocative fashion spread in Israel's Belle Mode magazine that was both inspired by and meant to protest the exclusion of women in the public sphere. In it, the models struck sexy poses, wearing ultra-Orthodox garb, in a vintage bus.
As highly unlikely as the scenes in those photos would be in real life, we now learn of another highly improbable connection between high fashion and the Haredim. It turns out that none other than the Duchess of Cambridge is walking around in clothes meant to imitate those worn by ultra-Orthodox Jews. We're not even talking about the long skirts and high necklines of Haredi women's wear — but rather referring to the long (typically black) coats, or capotes, worn by Hasidic men.
According to New York Magazine, the taste of the former Kate Middleton (now officially Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge) runs toward coats modeled after a capote that once likely belonged to a Haredi teen. Katherine Hooker, one of the Duchess's preferred designers, revealed in an interview that she started her outwear label after deciding to replicate a coat she found in a used clothing store in Jerusalem in 2003. "I bought a young boy's Hasidic coat in a junk shop," she said. "And it was an old one, like when clothes used to be made for people as opposed to mass market. I was 18 and tiny and skinny, and it fit me absolutely perfectly; it was made for a 14-year-old boy or something."
The coats, which Hooker had made in India, were such a hit that she opened her shop in London in 2004. She is doing trunk shows in New York, but does not yet have any plans to open a shop in the U.S.
When asked why she thinks her coats are popular among with the Duchess, her sister Pippa Middleton and other royals (including Princess Beatrice of fascinator fame), the designer suggested, "They're made much more in the way clothes used to be made before everybody had their clothes mass produced. The structured, more tailored styles are cut with high armholes so they're very elongating, which also gives you mobility."
The "Tori," a double-sided cashmere merino with six fabric panels in the back and a price tag of $1,750, is Hooker's most expensive model. However, most of her (shall we describe them as "Hasidichic"?) coats cost at least $1,000, which The Shmooze confidently assumes is far more than she paid for that second-hand capote.
http://blogs.forward.com/the-shmooze/151344/
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Rebbetzin answers the call to inspire others
THOSE close to Rebbetzin Fruma Schapiro of Chabad North Shore often refer to her as a "super rebbetzin" or the queen of multi-tasking.
On any given day, she's running the shul's long daycare centre, teaching a shiur, mentoring bat mitzvahs, doling out advice to those in need – all the while raising her own eight children.
Her good work hasn't gone unnoticed. The 42-year-old rebbetzin was recently selected by her peers to be the keynote speaker at the annual women's International Convention for Chabad women emissaries in New York from February 16-19.
It is the first time an Australian rebbetzin has been bestowed with the honour.
"I'm humbled," Schapiro told The AJN.
It is expected that about 4000 women emissaries will fly in from all over the world to attend four-day convention culminating in a gala banquet, at which Schapiro will speak. The speech will be streamed live on www.chabad.org, while North Shore Chabad will also hold a live screening at its centre on Monday, February 20, at noon.
The rebbetzin said she planned to talk about life as a Chabad emissary and the concept of being a role model.
"It's a message to take home – the mandate of what it is to be who we are. It's inspiring in that vein."
Schapiro always knew that this would be her calling. As the daughter of Rabbi Pinchus and Pnina Feldman, heads of NSW's Yeshiva Centre, she grew up in a deeply religious and spiritual environment. Later, she married Rabbi Nochum Schapiro and for the last 22 years, the couple has served as directors of Chabad North Shore.
Among her duties, Schapiro delivers weekly shiurs in the new Chabad centre in St Ives, and prepares girls for their bat mitzvahs. She also offers marriage and family counselling to those in need and serves as director of the Ganeinu Long Daycare Centre, a pre-school for children up to the age of four.
Meanwhile, she is busy rearing her own children aged from four to 22. "It's a juggle," she admitted, "but I feel I get help from above.
"It's getting strength from a higher place. I believe very strongly in the value of giving back to the community. As rebbetzins, we're very fortunate to give to others because that's the biggest gift we can give ourselves and our families in life."
http://www.jewishnews.net.au/rebbetzin-answers-the-call-to-inspire-others/24793
Monday, February 13, 2012
Former Deadhead starts synagogue for NYU students
nce he followed the Grateful Dead. Now he leads a flock that follows Hasidic Judaism.
Rabbi and former Deadhead Dov Yonah Korn says he plans to harness the punk-rock energy of Manhattan's Bowery "in a Jewish way."
Korn and his wife, who met at a concert, are starting a synagogue for New York University students.
The New York Post says the Lubavitch (loo-BAH'-vihch) shul (shool) will be just a stone's throw from the former home of legendary rock club CBGB.
The synagogue's $8.3 million price tag was paid for by donations from hundreds of past and present NYU students. It's in a commercial section of a condo building that's also home to Grammy winner John Legend.
http://www.wisconsinrapidstribune.com/usatoday/article/38564439?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|s
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Dutch Chief Rabbi Offers a Positive Outlook
Despite the loss of 90 percent of their Jewish population in the Holocaust and periodic legislative battles against kosher practices and ritual circumcision, the vast majority of the people of the Netherlands are not anti-Semitic, Dutch Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs concluded during a speech in Oxford, England.
Speaking about the phenomenon of European anti-Semitism and the future of Dutch and European Jewry, Jacobs, president of the Rabbinical Council for the Netherlands, told those gathered at the Oxford University Chabad Society’s Slager Jewish Student Centre that, to be sure, the Netherlands had much to answer for in its across-the-board indifference to the fate of its Jews during World War II. Dutch police were instrumental in the rounding up of Jewish citizens and refugees on behalf of the Nazis, noted the Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi, and any attempt to whitewash that reality by focusing on the small number of cases in which individual people hid Jews is “serving a grave injustice to a Jewish community that was decimated in the Holocaust.”
In that context, Jacobs was critical of the official government and tourism emphasis on the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam at the expense of sites such as Westerbork, where Jews were assembled by police forces before their deportation to Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
Nevertheless, he pointed to such events as the recent public apology by a Netherlands police chief as evidence that “lessons have been learned from the past.”
Jacobs was welcomed by Oxford Chabad Society director Rabbi Eli Brackman and introduced by student vice president Matt Kaplan. The address followed a high-profile Holocaust Memorial Lecture the week before by Auschwitz survivor Victor Greenberg, Kinder transport refugee Fritz Sternhell and Oxford lecturer Alexandra Lloyd.
On the whole, Dutch society is not anti-Semitic, stated Jacobs, who offered examples of popular support he encounters across the country. Although Geert Wilders’ PVV party has received criticism for its anti-Islamic stance, there are no anti-Semitic parties in Dutch politics, unlike in European countries, he added.
Those groups opposing ritual kosher animal slaughter, he pointed out, appear to be doing so on purely animal rights grounds.
The biggest threat, as the chief rabbi sees it, to Dutch Jewry is a high rate of assimilation, which he attributed to Holocaust survivors being raised by non-Jewish families after the war.
Using the Netherlands as a model, he said that the future looks bright.
“While Jews in Europe should never become complacent, and should always be committed to preventing a repetition of history,” he emphasized, “the future looks very positive for European Jewry. European multiculturalism sits very comfortably with the Jewish outlook, whereby each community has its own role within society, and can live side-by-side, appreciating each other’s contributions rather than attempting to cast everyone into the same mold.”
http://www.chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/1769440/jewish/Dutch-Chief-Rabbi-Says-Positive.htm
Saturday, February 11, 2012
After arson-attack deal, New Square returns to normal
Residents in this insular Hasidic Jewish village are hoping to forget last spring’s arson attack on a dissident community member and Tuesday’s guilty plea in the incident from an 18-year-old follower of the grand rebbe.
People are going about their normal routines, working, praying in the synagogue and studying in the yeshiva, several residents said.
Even in winter, the streets, lined with high-density housing and named after U.S. presidents, are filled with women pushing strollers while young men dash between prayers and school.
Not much has changed through the generations among the Skver Hasidim, a sect founded in Chernobyl and now led by Grand Rebbe David Twersky. Many feel no changes are necessary within the village off Route 45 nestled between Hillcrest and New City.
Shmarya Rosenberg, who monitors Hasidic culture on his Failed Messiah website, said Thursday that the 57-year-old community’s rigid traditions under Twersky will continue following the arson assault last May by Shaul Spitzer against Aron Rottenberg, a 44-year-old married plumber with children.
“I think they are definitely loyal to the rebbe,” Rosenberg said of the New Square Hasidim. “There will always be exceptions who will buck the normal behaviors. There are always people twisting on the fence. I don’t see any signs of them rejecting him or what New Square is.”
Spitzer, who lived in Twersky’s house and worked for him as a butler, admitted his guilty plea Tuesday to first-degree assault when he set himself and Rottenberg on fire during a confrontation. Spitzer admitted he acted because of Rottenberg’s defiance of the grand rebbe’s edict that all his followers pray in the community’s only synagogue on Truman Avenue. Rottenberg had received threatening calls a week before the attack and said people loyal to the grand rebbe marched on his house and vandalized his home and car months earlier.
Rottenberg suffered third-degree burns across 50 percent of his body. Spitzer suffered severe hand and arm burns.
http://www.lohud.com/article/20120211/NEWS03/302100077/After-arson-attack-deal-New-Square-returns-normal?odyssey=nav|head
Friday, February 10, 2012
Chutzpah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey has discovered her inner Jewishness.
Winfrey, who rarely does interviews, sat for a TV chat with a Hasidic rabbi on the day last fall she immersed herself in Brooklyn's Hasidic neighborhoods.
The interview, produced by Oprah's OWN network and posted Wednesday only on chabad.org, the Web site of the Lubavitcher sect, was a rare scoop for a site that deals mainly in religious practices.
"There's more Hasidic Jew in me than I know," says Winfrey — dressed in a modesty-preserving ankle-length skirt— at the end of the interview with Rabbi Motti Seligson, the Web site's media liason.
"She was very real and very warm and easy to connect with," Seligson told The Post yesterday. "What I really think was nice about this was [Winfrey's] willingness to experience Hasidic life — as opposed to just going off stereotypes."
Last October, Oprah took cameras into Hasidic homes in Borough Park, Crown Heights and a mikvah, a ritual bathhouse, in Brooklyn Heights as a part of her "America's Hidden Culture" segment on her weekly "Oprah's Next Chapter Show" show.
Seligson is briefly featured at the beginning of Sunday's episode, in which Winfrey also visits the Ginsberg family.
In the interview, Winfrey says that her experience dispelled some of her misconceptions about Hasidic Jews.
"I have been perhaps, like most people who've walked down the street and seen Hasidic Jewish men, in particular . . . oftentimes wearing the hats and long beards and always found it somewhat formidable or intimidating," she says.
"This experience has really confirmed and affirmed what I truly believe as one of my deep spiritual principles — that we're all more alike than different."
Winfrey also says she was "speechless" that, when she visited the Ginsberg family — and mentioned Mickey Mouse, Shrek, Beyoncé and Jay-Z to their kids — none of them recognized the references.
"They said they didn't even care and weren't even curious about it," she tells Seligson.
"We live in a culture where seven-and-a-half hours a day are spent consumed by some electronic device . . . It's amazing to me that, right across from Manhattan, there's a whole world of children who aren't doing that and who are happy, fulfilled and loved."
"I had a few questions I wanted to ask her," Seligson said yesterday, explaining innocently how he got the interview.
"I really wanted to hear about her experiences," he said.
http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/chutzpah_winfrey_XrVGo0ZFoOh0J7ZUV76AwN
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Orthodox Jews mount appeal for Eruv in Sydney
Orthodox Jews have appealed to a court in Sydney to overturn a decision to deny them an Eruv.
Plans for a symbolic religious enclosure have been underway for more than five years on Sydney's north shore, but last year the local council voted against allowing the construction to go forward.
The New South Wales Land and Environment Court is this week considering the case after the organizing committee of the Northern Eruv appealed the decision.
A heated debate has raged among locals in Sydney's north shore with many opposing the idea of a designated religious enclosure for the several thousand Jews who live there.
An Eruv has existed in the eastern suburbs around Bondi Beach - where most of Sydney's 40,000 Jews live - since 2002.
http://www.stljewishlight.com/news/world/article_48966793-dce9-5314-96d2-a83a6efe7adf.html
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Plea averts trial in NY Hasidic firebombing case
A Hasidic teenager pleaded guilty Tuesday to assault, averting a trial in an attempted murder case that brought unusual attention to a religious dispute in a Jewish enclave.
Shaul Spitzer, 18, accepted a plea bargain as jury selection was about to begin at the Rockland County Courthouse in New City, said defense attorney Deborah Lowenberg.
Spitzer had been accused of severely burning neighbor Aron Rottenberg with a firebomb outside Rottenberg's home in New Square, an insular Hasidic village of 7,000.
Spitzer and Rottenberg were seriously injured on May 22 when the flammable liquid ignited. Rottenberg suffered third-degree burns on half his body. Spitzer had burns on his hands and arms.
"We just both burst into flames," Rottenberg said.
Rottenberg claimed in a lawsuit that Spitzer was acting at the direction of the village's chief rabbi, David Twersky. Spitzer occasionally worked for Twersky.
Rottenberg alleged that Twersky was angered because Rottenberg had stopped praying at his synagogue.
The rabbi denied involvement, criticized the attack and was not charged. Spitzer's lawyers also said the rabbi was uninvolved.
Rottenberg's relatives said that they had endured broken windows and threats after Rottenberg began worshipping at a nearby nursing home and that they feared an attack.
Under the plea bargain, a state Supreme Court judge promised a sentence of no more than 10 years, Lowenberg said.
She said sect leaders didn't pressure Spitzer to accept the plea bargain to avoid a trial.
"Mr. Spitzer took counsel only from the defense team," she said. "We understood the evidence was very strong against our client and explained to him that there was a significant risk of facing 25 years.
"This way, he has the peace of mind of knowing the sentence won't be more than 10 years," she added. "We hope to show the judge that a less severe sentence would be appropriate."
Sentencing was set for April 17.
New Square is about 30 miles north of Manhattan. Nearly all of its residents are members of the Skver Hasidic sect. The sect and the village are named for the Ukrainian village of Skver, where its members were killed during the Holocaust.
http://online.wsj.com/article/AP2c177aa8498c448bae47107355681d88.html
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
U.S. tourists to Israel advised to dress modestly
The U.S. State Department is advising visitors to Jerusalem to dress modestly when visiting certain neighborhoods, or to avoid the areas entirely, in hopes of not provoking local sensitivities.
The State Department guidance did not specify which neighborhoods are considered problematic, or what, exactly, constitutes "modest" attire.
The Jerusalem advisory, updated on Jan. 10, says travelers "should exercise caution at religious sites on holy days, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays" and "dress appropriately" when visiting ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods and the Old City of Jerusalem, where religious Jews, Muslims and Christians live in distinct quarters.
The warning notes that most roads into ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods are blocked off on Friday nights, Saturdays, and Jewish holidays, and that "assaults on secular visitors, either for being in cars or for being 'immodestly dressed' have occurred in these neighborhoods."
The advisory was added to the State Department's website for travel to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. It comes in the wake of many recent incidents in which ultra-Orthodox Jewish extremists physically or verbally attacked women they said were dressed immodestly.
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women cover up everything except their faces, necks and hands.
In Beit Shemesh, a city between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, extremists have attacked religious schoolgirls on their way to school, deeming them not religious enough.
For years, ultra-Orthodox Jews have also stoned cars driving in or near their neighborhoods on the Sabbath or holidays.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/us-tourists-to-israel-advised-to-dress-modestly/2012/02/06/gIQAVUfKuQ_story.html
Monday, February 06, 2012
Building a Better Gefilte Fish
What in the world has gotten into Jeffrey Chodorow?" muttered one of the food snobs at my table as he took a perfectly brined pickle from the exceptional "delicatessen" board at the rashly conceived, surprisingly accomplished "modern Jewish-American" restaurant Kutcher's Tribeca and crunched it happily between his teeth. Chodorow, of course, is the restaurateur New York food snobs love to hate. Over the years, the successful entrepreneur (he's made millions in real estate, among other investments) has been derided by members of the self-appointed culinary smart set as a hopeless populist (his five China Grill franchises are wildly profitable), a purveyor of overpriced, passé luxury foods and schlock décor (the samurai-sword-covered Kobe Club), and a serial sponsor of endless star-crossed, crackpot dining schemes (Rocco DiSpirito's reality-TV restaurant Rocco's, as well as Wild Salmon and Brasserio Caviar & Banana, to name just a few).
But lately, Chodorow's dark reputation has begun to brighten. In the past few years, while many restaurateurs have been cowering on the sidelines, he's put his money behind a string of popular, even critical hits, including Bar Basque, Zak Pelaccio's Fatt 'Cue and Fatty Crab, and the fashionable new Chinese farm-to-table establishment RedFarm. Now comes Kutsher's, which has been designed by Chodorow's young partner Zach Kutsher as a kind of upscale homage to his family's famous Kutsher's Country Club resort in the Catskills. The room, on Franklin Street, is appointed in a stylish, nouveau-Fontainebleau way with gold-colored light fixtures, whitewashed backlit walls, and a bar top made of copper. There's a dish called pickled herring "two ways" on the menu, the kasha varnishkes are made with wild mushrooms and quinoa, not kasha, and the house gefilte fish is molded into decorative gourmet pedestals and feathered with micro-greens and a parsley vinaigrette.
"This is not my grandmother's Kutsher's," said one of my guests as the first wave of newfangled, heretical deli creations began arriving at the table. A platter of kreplach, filled here with creamy ricotta, was dismissed out of hand by the assembled experts ("This tastes like something from a kosher Italian restaurant in Scarsdale," one said), but the contents of the excellent house delicatessen plate (which include pink veal tongue and strips of soft, house-cured duck and deckle pastrami with pickles, mustard, and a pot of delicious horseradish aïoli) were quickly devoured. The same thing happened to a platter of crisped artichokes alla Judea (frizzled in the Roman style with garlic, Parmesan, and lemons) and to the ingenious aforementioned herring dish, which is also cured in-house and served in two little Alfred Portale–style towers, one of them dressed in the traditional way, with sour cream and pickled onions, the other with wasabi and yuzu.
Kutsher's executive chef, Mark Spangenthal, has worked at top kitchens around the city, and if there's a problem with his radical interpretations of these ancient dishes, it's that some of them are actually too good. At least that was the twisted, Talmudic argument presented by one of the food scholars at my table, who pronounced his matzo-ball soup to be "overstudied." The smooth chopped chicken liver at Kutsher's is folded with unorthodox spoonfuls of gourmet duck liver ("nouvelle chopped liver," one of the scholars called it), and you can get your (slightly sodden) potato latkes topped with three kinds of caviar or a compote made with local Greenmarket apples. The traditionalists at the table were confused by the weirdly elegant shape of the gefilte fish, but the texture and taste, it was generally agreed, were a cut above what they'd been forced to endure over the decades at family holiday feasts.
The entrée list at Kutsher's is filled with similar game attempts to enliven old canonical favorites. The falafel-crusted salmon tasted like a piece of cafeteria-quality fish with a shmear of dry falafel on top, but the Catskill Mountain trout is cut in two nicely roasted fillets and served with Meyer-lemon confit on the side. My order of Friday-Night Roast Chicken was overbrined, but the totemic Eastern European beef dishes (gray blocks of flanken braised in red wine, improbably tender Romanian skirt steak smothered in sweet onions), my experts assured me, are as good as anything served by the tottering old waiters at Sammy's. The bountiful lunchtime deli-style sandwiches (try the Reuben or the KT pastrami) may not have quite the pedigree of the venerable classics at Kats' or Carnegie, but you can complement them with towers of fries tossed with duck schmaltz, or order a first-rate La Frieda special-blend burger, served on wedges of toasty sesame-seed challah.
On the evenings I dropped in, the tables were crowded with a mix of swank-looking downtown diners ("This is JDate ground zero," someone said) interspersed with groups of bewildered-looking elders bundled in their thick winter coats. There's no Manischewitz on the wine list at this decidedly un-kosher restaurant. Instead, you can obtain a glass of Nicolas Feuillatte Champagne to sip with your caviar-topped latkes, along with a selection of $12 cocktails with belabored Catskill-era names like Bug Juice and Bungalow Bunny. The desserts include a bread pudding awkwardly constructed from chocolate babka and a decorative rainbow sundae with spongy rainbow cookies at the bottom. But after a heavy dinner, the best option is the cookie plate, the ceremonial contents of which (hamantaschen, weighty macaroons, house-baked rugelach) are designed to be nibbled with a digestive cup of tea.
http://nymag.com/restaurants/reviews/kutshers-tribeca-platt-2012-2/
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Escape from Williamsburg
Deborah Feldman’s memoir, “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,” begins with Feldman describing her father, a mentally disabled Hasid employed by pitying community members to preform simple tasks, like picking up people from the airport. Sometimes he takes along 5-year-old Deborah.
“I know it’s strange for me to enjoy visiting the airport itself,” Feldman writes in the first chapter, “when I know I will never even get on a plane, but I find it thrilling…. Watching the crowds hurrying to and fro with their luggage squealing loudly behind them, knowing they are all going somewhere, purposefully. What a marvelous world this is, I think, where birds touch down briefly before magically reappearing at another airport somewhere halfway across the planet. If I had a wish, it would be to always be traveling, from one airport to the other. To be freed from the prison of staying still.”
“Unorthodox” is a memoir about a young woman who has a lot of opinions. But in the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic world of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, opinions in general, and certainly those of young women, are not appreciated.
I grew up in a similar world nearby, the Hasidic world of Boro Park. Reading “Unorthodox” was like seeing a variation on my own life mapped out meticulously, down to the last traditional detail. I found it oddly compelling, visiting scenes and dialogues that so perfectly encompass a world so familiar. When Deborah and her older cousin, Mimi, go to an ice skating rink, a young girl offers Deborah a Hershey chocolate kiss and tells her that it’s kosher:
“You can’t eat the chocolate,” Mimi announces. “It’s not kosher.” “But she’s Jewish! She said so herself! Why can’t I eat it?” “Because not all Jews keep kosher. And even the ones that do, it’s not always kosher enough….”
And Deborah’s grandfather makes it clear that secular books are evil, a toxic influence on a chosen, pure soul.
When my zeide gets angry his long white beard seems to lift up and spread around his face like a fiery flame. “Der tumeneh shprach” [“The evil language”], he thunders at me when he overhears me speaking to my cousins in English. “An impure language, zeide says, acts like a poison to the soul. Reading an English book is even worse; it leaves my soul vulnerable, a welcome mat put out for the devil.”
“Unorthodox” is a fascinating book, and well written in English. My favorite part comes in the early chapters, when 12-year-old Deborah secretly purchases a translation of the Talmud so that she can understand the forbidden mysteries of the Torah. She lies to the elderly salesman in the bookstore, mumbling that the book is a purchase for her cousin.
You can feel her excitement as she walks down the block, holding the precious book, quickly hiding it under her mattress when she reaches home. Before reading it, she waits until the house is empty. And then, on page 65, she reads about King David who took Bathsheba as a wife after sending her husband, Uriah, to the front battle lines, where he was killed. Upon looking into the women’s eyes, though, King David recognized his sin, and Bathsheba was sent back to the harem, ignored and forgotten until her death.
Not only did David cavort with his many wives, but he had unmarried female companions as well, I discover. They are called concubines. Con-cu-bine. I whisper aloud this new word, con-cu-bine, and it doesn’t sound illicit, the way it should. It only makes me think of a tall stately tree. The concubine tree. I picture beautiful women dangling from its branches. Con-cu-bine. … I am not aware at this moment that I have lost my innocence. I will realize it many years later.
It is in chapter four, when Deborah is a freshman at Satmar, a girls high school, that she loses her innocence, and then immediately the story begins to hurry up. It is as if the author, a talented 24-year-old graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, is trying to pack a lifetime of big moments into a book too slender for the weight it carries. There is so much to say about this strange and different place: adolescence, all-girls summer camp, teenage angst, high school, pre-marriage, and, of course, the short-lived marriage arranged by the family, the bride serving only as an observer.
But as Deborah grows, she becomes a stranger to her own life, and by the fifth chapter the innocence is lost in her mind and in her writing. The believing child turns into the disillusioned adult, and words become tinged with bitterness. There is a rush of events and a loss of the wonder that has given her writing power until then. We are introduced to seemingly significant characters randomly. Most are never heard of again. Teachers, family and friends come and go, portrayed as flat, one-dimensional characters, notable only for their ignorance.
As a member of the Hasidic community for the first three decades of my life, I well know that one can be ignorant and still have an endearing personality; one can have blind faith but still have a vivid character. Compassion and narrow-mindedness, sweet innocence and crude naivety, mix easily, creating nuanced personalities where black and white, and sometimes a hint of gray, coexist. Feldman, though, shows only what we thought we knew about the Hasidim: There is little that brings them to life.
By its second half, “Unorthodox” reads like a hastily written diary, as if the author wanted to hurry already to the good part — the part where she is no longer in Williamsburg. It is as though Feldman does not want to spend one word more than absolutely necessary on the parts of life she worked so hard to be rid of. This is a pity.
Reading the descriptions of Feldman’s life, I found I was walking with her. I found myself in scenes crowded with people I knew, in moments so intimately familiar to anyone who grew up in the Hasidic world: the shviger, or mother-in-law; the ceremonies, the l’chaim, or celebration of engagement, set up before you ever met the groom. I found myself back in a place where, yes, there is superstition and fanaticism, absurdity and suppression, but there’s a darkness that exists alongside a rich and vibrant culture, a community that has survived centuries of persecution and is still so very much alive.
I wish Feldman had delved more expansively into the elements that infuse the Hasidic community with life and meaning and joy. I wanted to sense her wonder as a teenager, as a bride, as a new wife. There is a strong sense of purpose in this ancient world; that’s how it has lasted for so long. There is a binding connection with the past, a powerful core of identity, so that even if you do not agree, you can understand why most never leave.
Still, it is worth the read. Even with what is lacking, Feldman’s voice resonates throughout. You badly want to know what happened to the little girl watching people rushing to and fro in the airport; you want to see the kind of woman she becomes. With a baby on the way and a disintegrating marriage, Feldman has a story that is a journey, and I won’t spoil any more of it. The curiosity will keep you reading if only to watch how she untangles herself from her past, and how she ultimately frees herself from “the prison of staying still.”
http://www.forward.com/articles/150629/
Saturday, February 04, 2012
Gur Hasidim and gender separation
One day in 1976, a student entered our classroom at Beit Yaakov Seminar in Tel Aviv, weeping passionately. She informed us that the revered Gerer rebbe - the so-called Beis Yisroel - Rabbi Israel Alter, had died. Classes at the seminar, which was affiliated with the Gur Hasidic sect, were suspended immediately, and all of us, including girls from the Lithuanian community (those ultra-Orthodox Jews historically opposed to Hasidism ) to which I belonged, bawled our eyes out.
The Beis Yisroel, who ruled Gur Hasidism from 1948 to 1976, was a dominant leader who revolutionized that sect, which in those days won admiration in the ultra-Orthodox world - even though, or perhaps because, it had always been steeped in secrecy when it came to relations between men and women. Over time it emerged that the unusual Gur customs in this realm are tied to the concept of kedusha (sanctity ), from which stems the unique attitude to sexuality and conjugal relations within the sect. (Much of our understanding of the topic is the result of the research of Dr. Benjamin Brown of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem over the last few years ).
A new study that focuses on the private and public lifestyle of Gur Hasidim lifts the veil further on sanctity in the sect. "Sanctity is the ideology of the art of drawing apart," says Dr. Nava Wasserman, whose study of private and public life among Gur Hasidism was the subject of her doctoral dissertation (which she wrote under the guidance of Prof. Kimmy Caplan, at Bar-Ilan University ).
According to Wasserman, "This view dictates the strict separation between the sexes in this Hasidic sect, and primarily the practices of prishut [separation] that guide the relationship between spouses in this society, which is unparalleled in other ultra-Orthodox groups. Hasidism is doing more than is demanded by Jewish law. If in the Western world sexuality is a constant presence, it is precisely against this that Gur Hasidim fight. They don't want to get anywhere near the atmosphere and tension of sexuality, even if matters do not reach the level of prohibition. This is the fulfillment of Hasidism: Separation beyond that which Jewish law requires."
http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/gur-hasidim-and-sexual-separation-1.410811
Friday, February 03, 2012
Katz Women’s Hosp delivers baby No. 1
In the four times Rosa Kichikova has given birth, she never mistook the hospital for a hotel.
But that almost happened the fifth time, when the Flushing mother last week became the first woman to deliver a baby at the new Katz Women's Hospital in New Hyde Park.
Little Avital Kichikova was brought into the world at 10:24 p.m. Jan. 24, the first birth at the new hospital.
"It feels like something special," Kichikova said. "It's very nice here. Beautiful. It's like a hotel. It's very comfy here. Privacy, your own room. Your own place, your own privacy. It's what I like."
What gives the hospital the look of a hotel are its single-bedded rooms and amenities, such as a meditation center and a women's garden.
"This is really what the whole new building is all about and we're thrilled to have a new women's hospital," said Chantal Weinhold, executive director of Long Island Jewish Medical Center, which runs the women's hospital. "I think what we've done is transformed it into looking like a hotel. We're very proud. This is really, from our perspective, the future of health care."
The $300 million hospital, named after donors Saul and Iris Katz, opened Jan. 23.
Saul Katz was chairman of the North Shore-LIJ board of trustees and Iris is an associate trustee.
Rosa's husband, Ilya Kichikova, gave their child the name of Avital, which means "gift from G-d" in Hebrew.
As Orthodox Jews, the couple waited until the girl was born before naming her.
"We were thinking the whole night," Rosa Kichikova said. "Usually mommies look and they know."
Rosa said she looks forward to the day when she can tell Avital how she was the first baby born in the new hospital.
"She's going to be excited to hear that," Rosa said.
The Flushing couple have four other children: two boys, ages 6 and 8, and two girls, 3 1/2 and 5.
Avital was delivered by Dr. Sarah Linkie, who helped deliver babies at nearby LIJ for 17 years.
"It's an honor and a pleasure to have delivered the first baby at Katz Women's Hospital," she said.
http://www.timesledger.com/stories/2012/5/katzfirstbaby_ln_2012_02_02_q.html
Thursday, February 02, 2012
New Square arson trial starts Tuesday; teen charged with attempted murder
An 18-year-old New Square man who worked for the Hasidic Jewish community's rabbinical leader is scheduled for trial next week on a charge of attempted murder stemming from accusations that he set fire to a fellow village resident who had defied the edicts of the community's spiritual leader.
Shaul Spitzer waived his right to a pretrial hearing Wednesday in state Supreme Court. Justice William A. Kelly scheduled jury selection for Tuesday in his fourth-floor courtroom at the Rockland County Courthouse in New City.
Spitzer opted for trial because he faces five to 25 years in state prison if convicted of the top charge of attempted murder, the only offer made by Rockland County prosecutors in exchange for a guilty plea.
Spitzer and his lawyers can change their minds about going to trial, but Spitzer likely would face up to 15 years in prison from the justice if he pleads guilty.
Rockland District Attorney Thomas Zugibe said prosecutor Stephen Moore has made no special plea offer and that a sentence is at the justice's discretion upon conviction.
Spitzer is accused of setting Aron Rottenberg on fire after trying to burn down the family's Truman Avenue house at 4:15 a.m. May 22, tossing a homemade incendiary device onto the back porch of the house, Ramapo police investigators said.
Because of months of threats — including telephone calls days earlier — and vandalism, Rottenberg's son had been monitoring surveillance cameras installed on the house.
The elder Rottenberg then confronted the masked man and during a struggle another incendiary device carried by the man detonated, burning Rottenberg and Spitzer. Spitzer ran off and a resident treated him for his burns.
Rottenberg, 44, a plumber, suffered third-degree burns across 50 percent of his body, leading to skin-graft surgeries and months of hospitalization.
Spitzer, who lived with Grand Rebbe David Twersky and did butler work for him, suffered third-degree burns to his arms and after several weeks of hospitalization returned to school in the community.
Rottenberg and several other village residents were targets of street protests and vandalism for not praying in the grand rebbe's synagogue, less than 100 yards from Rottenberg's house on Truman Avenue.
There is one synagogue in New Square, and the grand rebbe wants all his followers to pray with him. Weeks after the attack, Twersky condemned the violence and offered prayers for both men to recover.
Rottenberg led a weekly Sabbath service at the Friedwald Center rehabilitation facility, about a mile from the center of the Ramapo village.
One other family moved out of the village following the protests they and Rottenberg said were orchestrated by minions who enforced the grand rebbe's edicts.
Rottenberg has filed a civil lawsuit against Twersky and Spitzer. The grand rebbe's followers were supposedly raising money for a settlement offer, but Rottenberg is ready to testify at the criminal trial, his son-in-law Moshe Elbaum said Wednesday.
"We're ready to go, and we're happy that it's finally starting," Elbaum said. "Hopefully they will finally learn their lesson that they are not above the law."
Following a Ramapo police investigation into the May incident, a Rockland grand jury indicted Spitzer in June on charges of second-degree attempted murder, second-degree attempted arson and two counts of first-degree assault, all felonies.
On Wednesday morning, defense lawyer Kenneth Gribetz told Kelly that Spitzer waived his right to a hearing on the admissibility of statements he gave to police.
Spitzer's defense lawyers are not challenging that the teen was at Rottenberg's house during the early morning hours. Gribetz has contended that Spitzer did not intend to harm Rottenberg or to set his house on fire.
The night of the confrontation coincided with the Lag BaOmer festival, when religious Jews have bonfires marking the anniversary of the death of a leading rabbi and a revolt against the Roman Empire. A community group circulated a letter in August claiming Spitzer just wanted to make mischief that morning.
Gribetz and co-defense lawyer Paul Shechtman said the defense case will develop during the trial.
"The defense will come from the lips of the witnesses," Gribetz said after Wednesday's court appearance. "We don't want to make any other statements."
Spitzer also faces a charge of second-degree criminal contempt, a misdemeanor, in New Square Village Court. On Oct. 26, a photograph taken by a village resident surfaced, showing Spitzer in front of Rottenberg's Truman Avenue home about 3:15 p.m. Oct. 4. That case is scheduled for this month.
http://www.lohud.com/article/20120202/NEWS03/302010082/New-Square-arson-trial-starts-Tuesday-teen-charged-attempted-murder
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Ramapo backs down on zoning
Once again, Ramapo proves that, when it comes to land use, it is easier to seek forgiveness than ask permission, even if it takes almost two decades.
The town last month updated its zoning laws to allow homeowners in a Monsey housing development — long referred to as "the infamous Bates-Horton" homes — to finally get certificates of occupancy for their dwellings, built in the early 1990s. The town will basically forgive zoning and safety violations. In exchange, residents will agree to maintain their properties, or basically do what any good neighbor would.
That's certainly setting a low bar for a development that's had such a notorious history. But after some 18 years of court challenges, discrimination lawsuits and families remaining in homes that don't comply with local zoning or safety standards, what does anyone expect?
Trail of misdeeds
In the mid-1990s, 15 homes were illegally built as two- and three-family dwellings, even though the area was zoned for single-family homes. The town stepped in, the development halted, and vacant lots at the 17-acre site became magnets for illegal dumping. The conditions were so bad, the town changed its laws to allow its public works department to engineer a cleanup. Meanwhile, efforts to get the builder to comply with the original single-family zoning filtered through the courts. By 2000, the town won Supreme Court permission to evict the families from the illegally converted homes and restore the properties to single-family dwellings; it never happened.
Concurrently, the Orthodox and Hasidic residents of Bates-Horton sued for zone changes, saying the town was discriminating against them. They maintained that the community needed more housing, and within close proximity to their extended families, to freely practice their religion.
Compromises
By the mid-2000s, the town had devised a plan to allow more housing for the burgeoning Orthodox community by allowing condominium-style apartments at the site, many of which are now under construction. It also came up with a pathway for homeowners to stay in the illegally built duplex and triplex homes and finally earn legal status for the properties. The residents would join a homeowners' association that would ensure the site was maintained — a way to combat the site from sliding back into an illegal dumping ground — and would manage the apartments that had been allowed on the site.
http://www.lohud.com/article/20120201/OPINION01/302010022/Editorial-Ramapo-backs-down-zoning
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
New Hempstead moves to close religious schoolNew Hempstead moves to close religious school
After coming under fierce criticism from Hillcrest firefighters, the
mayor today will begin the legal process to shut down a Route 306
religious school that continues teaching children amid what firefighters consider unsafe conditions.
Mayor Lawrence Dessau instructed the village attorney last week to take steps to make sure the building is vacated.
The village's code enforcement officer did not work Friday, but the mayor said he would visit the school today.
Hillcrest Fire Chief Lloyd Hovelmann said the school is operating without any
village approvals for the construction of the building or an addition.
"It was unacceptable as far as the village letting this go on," said
Hovelmann, who was among the 10 volunteer firefighters to express
outrage about village inaction at a New Hempstead Board of Trustees
meeting on Thursday night.
While the lawyer for Ohr Torah and the New Hempstead mayor contend the school has installed adequate fire safety equipment since buying the
10-year-old property in March, the Hillcrest fire chief and other
officials countered that's not enough to ensure the safety of students.
All of the interested parties are expected to meet Wednesday.
"I am concerned about the violations, the lack of certificate of occupancy and no permits for construction," said Hovelmann, adding the school
should be closed until it gets proper inspections and approvals. "I am
concerned for the children."
Dessau had hoped to work out an agreement with school administrators to bring
it up to standards, but Trustee Michael Koplen said the village should
not make special exemptions because it risked traveling down a slippery
slope.
Koplen said the firefighters on Thursday "excoriated" the board, particularly the
mayor, for allowing the building to operate without a certificate of
occupancy.
"It was one of the more intense board meetings that I've attended, and I've been on the board for more than 10 years," he said.
Before the meeting, Dessau said he had given the congregation a "little slack" since "they are working on a site plan."
http://www.lohud.com/article/20120130/NEWS03/301300066/New-Hempstead-moves-close-religious-school
Monday, January 30, 2012
The Allure of the Burka
Why do fundamentalists always end up wrapping women in shmattes?
I ask because, as we've seen in Israel's Beit Shemesh
recently, ultra-uber-Orthodox men have been spitting on
less-ultra-but-still-Orthodox girls as young as age 8 for wearing
clothes that aren't "modest" enough. The fact that the girls' outfits
seem very modest to most of us just means that the fundamentalists are
seeing something the rest of us don't. Something sexy. Something scary.
Something so shocking that the men scream, "Whores!" and demand that the girls cover themselves more completely.
Which, of course, sounds a lot like the Taliban (not to mention the religious fanatics in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan.…).
Why, in this age of boob jobs and thongs, are some women forced to wrap
up like never before? Ask around, and you hear a lot of theories.
Theory No. 1 involves power.
"Basically, demanding that women dress more and more modestly is a form
of bullying," said Constance Talmadge, Dallas-based author of the "Green Stone of Healing" series of novels, about an evil theocracy. "Society
still has ambivalent feelings about women's roles, so it's a great place to start making demands." If and when those demands are met, she says,
the leaders feel emboldened to impose some more, because now they have a "track record" of success.
While men in many religious sects are often required to dress a certain way, too — think of the Amish with their beards, or
Hasidic men wearing sidelocks — women's dress is bound up with their
sexual appeal, which brings us to Theory No. 2 of burka-dom: Guilt. Religious male guilt.
Many religious guys feel guilty when their bodies react to women in a way they think is not only unspiritual, but also sinful.
There are two ways to remedy this. One is just to feel less guilty,
which is what most psychologists, sex ed teachers and anyone who lived
through the 1960s recommends: a modern-day shrug. The other remedy,
California author and artist Nancy Hand explained, "is to remove the
temptation that prompted the natural but unwanted reaction." Hide away
the women, or at least cover them up.
Alas, for the distraught males — and ever-more-hidden
females — that doesn't work. "Men who grow up seeing women all wrapped
up learn to 'see' the body through the wrappings," Hand said "So they
will still react to a woman, and that will result in ever more calls to
hide temptation." This leads to a sort of modesty arms race.
Fraidy Reiss, founder of the not-for-profit
organization Unchained at Last, which helps women leave arranged
marriages, watched that modesty race escalate as she was growing up an
Orthodox Jew. Her mom was allowed to wear ankle socks until about age
12, Reiss says. By the time Reiss herself came along, girls were
expected to switch to leg-covering tights at age 3. And today, in the
New Jersey Orthodox community Reiss eventually abandoned, girls wear
tights starting at, she said, "basically age 2. What scares me is men
making rules about these little girls, because what does it show you
that they're thinking? Would you trust this rabbi around your daughter
if he thought your 2-year-old's legs were too sexy to be around? Would
you trust him to baby-sit?"
That's the strange thing about fundamentalists; while
the rest of the world is downloading porn and popping Viagra to get
excited, all the zealots need to do is glimpse an elbow, or a wisp of
hair. Which brings us to Theory No. 3: When you do live in a world of dot-XXX sites, women's rights and every kind of social,
sexual and religious liberation, fundamentalism actually flourishes,
because it is the yin to society's ever more open-minded yang.
"For the majority of history except the last 200 years, culture changed very slowly. You didn't have much to react to," said
Don Nations, a United Methodist minister and adjunct professor at Argosy University, in Florida. You dressed and ate and prayed the same way as
the people around you. Your religious life and your day-to-day life were not separate.
Then came the Enlightenment, and everything fractured.
There were new religious denominations, new human rights, new scientific explanations. Gender roles changed. Secular life became possible. And
pretty soon, life had become a smorgasbord of options — liberating but,
to some, unsettling. How could they know exactly how to live anymore?
They had to separate from modernity itself. That's what fundamentalism
does.
To make this separation clear and complete,
fundamentalists flamboyantly reject the things that are most obviously
modern, like women's rights — and especially women's fashion. "One of
the symbols of the Enlightenment is the liberation of women, so that
would be one area where you'd really signal to the mainstream that you
were dissenting," said Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the
University of London and the author of the 2011 book "Shall the
Religious Inherit the Earth?" "It's not the only way — there's also a
men's dress code," he added. But by aiming for women's clothing along
with their rights, fundamentalists get a twofer.
Why reject the clothing that seems already modest, like the little Beit Shemesh schoolgirls' outfits? Because fundamentalists
believe that anyone who has made any concession to modernity (even
teaching girls!) is on the slippery slope toward secularism. When a
traditional religious group tries to make peace with the surrounding
society, it is more threatening to fundamentalists than, say, a Reform
Jew eating a BLT, because it is someone just like them starting to
"stray." The fundamentalists must draw a line in the sand.
So they spit and swear.
"It's designed in some ways to get other people's backs up," Kaufmann said. "It's what's called 'creating tension' with the
surrounding society." The "us vs. them" mentality reinvigorates the
fundamentalists. And, confoundingly enough, the more we react, the more
resolved they become: They must be doing something right if the fallen
world sees them as wrong.
Considering that fundamentalists are motivated by
power, shame and/or the deep desire to be different from even the most
orthodox of others, the way to defeat them isn't clear. I'd love to hear some ideas, because the one thing that is clear is that defeat them we
must.
http://www.forward.com/articles/150252/
Read more: http://www.forward.com/articles/150252/#ixzz1kws4QizY
Hasids can use former synagogue building in Uman
Cherkassy, January 30, Interfax - Hasids who come to Uman, Cherkassy
region of Ukraine, to visit the grave of their spiritual leader tsadik
Nahman every year can now use the building of a former synagogue, Sergey Tulub, the head of the Cherkassy Region's administration, said.
"The Hasidic religious community has full rights to use the building of
the former synagogue in which tsadik Nahman used as a prayer house,"
Tulub was quoted by the administration as saying.
The land site, which has an area of four hectares, is located in Uman, 49 Ulitsa Sovetskaya, where the instrument-making plant Megommetr has been located since 1957. On December 22, 2011, the Cherkassy
Region's Economic Court invalidated the sale by the city council of the
four-hectare land site with the building of the former synagogue on it
to the plant, granting a lawsuit filed by the local culture department.
The court also ordered the enterprise to return the land site to the
city and the state council to return the money paid for the land site to
the enterprise.
Every fall, pilgrims go to Uman to visit the grave of Rabi Nahman. Their
number is increasing now that the visa regime has been lifted between
Ukraine and Israel.
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=9019
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Torah Burned in Second Synagogue Fire in Old Ramle
Jewish congregants arrived at the Algriva synagogue in Old Ramle on Saturday morning to find fire fighters trying to put out a blaze that had erupted inside their house of worship.
By the time the fire was subdued a Torah scroll, a pair of tefillin [phylacteries – ed], the library of holy books, and seating inside had been ravaged by the flames.
Fire officials declared the synagogue sealed to the public and fire investigators began searching the building for clues as to what caused the fire to start.
Worshippers now suspect arson since no Shabbat candles were lit inside and fire investigators did not discover an electrical fault.
Another congregant who spoke to Arutz Sheva on Saturday evening after Shabbat said the situation in Old Ramle is complex due to the presence of Arab crime families in the neighborhood.
Speaking on condition of anonymity he said, "These families host the numerous criminal elements, there drugs and celebrations into the night with disorderly conduct. The police are working to end this phenomenon."
Saturday morning’s fire is the second at the Algriva synagogue in Old Ramle. A month ago Arabs set fire to the second floor of the building where religious supplies are kept.
At the time Israeli police officials blamed the fire on an electrical short, but congregants pointed to bars on the windows of the room where the fire started being cut saying police did not want to admit it was arson.
Two weeks ago vandals broke into the synagogue in Emek Lod in Judea. Congregants were shocked to find the ark desecrated and the Torah scrolls thrown in the mud and trampled upon.
In that incident, burglars removed the silver plate from the Sephardic case for the Torah scrolls, stole the decorative pomegranates made of pure silver, and robbed the charity fund.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/152192#.TyTm1PmxtMI
Friday, January 27, 2012
Read the new Chaptzem article in the Country Yossi Family Magazine
Make sure to pick up your free copy of the Country Yossi Family Magazine and read the brand new original article
'The Dirtiest Job Ever' written by Chaptzem, the only
Heimishe blogger to make the transition from cyberspace to print.
Man, 53, dies after getting hit by 2 vehicles
A 53-year-old man, Noah Foxman, was left to die on a Brooklyn street after two
motorists plowed into him in a grisly hit-and-run Thursday night, police sources and witnesses said.
A white van first hit the man, clipping him while he was in the
crosswalk at Coney Island Ave. and Avenue K in Midwood, witnesses said.
As he struggled to get up, a dark-colored sedan mowed him down and kept
on going, according to bystanders.
"A guy was on the floor in the crosswalk," said another motorist who pulled over after he saw the 10:13 p.m. accident.
The good Samaritan, who declined to be named, recalled the victim saying, "The guy hit my leg a little but I'm okay."
While the Samaritan dialed 911, the second car came barreling through the intersection.
"The light turned green and a sedan slammed into him," he said. "I saw the fender hit his face - it was not good."
The impact was so hard it sent the man flying from one crosswalk to another across the road, witnesses said.
"The sedan didn't even slow down," the Samaritan said.
The unidentified victim was taken to Coney Island Hospital in traumatic arrest, fire officials said. He died at the hospital 45 minutes later,
another police source said.
The driver of the van initially stopped to check on the pedestrian but
took off after he was hit the second time, a witness said. It was
unclear if the van had returned to the scene.
Police are investigating the crash and no arrests have been made.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/man-53-dies-hit-2-vehicles-article-1.1012819?localLinksEnabled=false
Orthodox Jews in United Kingdom offer 'kosher' certified cell phones
Friday afternoon can be a stressful time in Stamford Hill, a working class neighborhood in northern London.
The ultra orthodox Jews, are in a rush to buy challah, rugalach and
other Jewish baked goods so they can take it easy after sunset, when the Sabbath starts. Resting on the Sabbath is part of an effort to live as
closely as possible to Jewish law.
But despite the community's traditional ways, the members aren't opposed to new things.
"Anything that can be used to enhance Judaism is welcomed," said
Rabbi Chanoch Kesselman. "But like so many things there are uses and
abuses."
Rabbi Chanoch Kesselman represents the British rabbinate, the main
Jewish authority in Britain. Kesselman said the Internet, for example,
offers access to valuable religious texts and discussions. But the rabbi said it can also lead to immodesty. He said in the same way, cell
phones can help people do business or help parents keep track of their
children. But they also can lead children astray.
"The rabbinate was very concerned that cell phones with texting facility should not be used by youngsters," said Kesselman.
Texting is not only a waste of time, the authorities decided, but it
also encourages "immodest" exchanges that would not happen on the
telephone or face-to-face. So the rabbinate decided to grant certain
cell phones official approval, calling them kosher — a system that has
been most well-known for its use in food. The kosher phones are stripped down devices that can only receive and make calls. It helps the
community feel more comfortable about choosing a phone, he said, much
like shopping for kosher food.
"Using a phone with a similar seal on is similar to buying any article that is certified as kosher," Kesselman said.
The pace of passersby becomes more hectic as the Sabbath approaches.
Menachem Weinstein is smoking a cigarette outside a synagogue. Before
rushing off, he said not all Ultra-Orthodox agree on the need for kosher cell phones.
"I think in this day and age they should be more focusing on, not
disallowing stuff, but finding out why the teenagers, because that's why they made the kosher phone, why the teenagers are abusing it,"
Weinstein said.
Shortly afterwards speakers blasted out music, telling the neighborhood that the Sabbath was about to start.
At Rose Communications, the company which sells the phones, Maxi Rose said there are only about 20,000 to 30,000 Ultra-Orthodox families in
the U.K., not enough to make it practical for a cellular network to
offer Kosher phone service.
"So no network would come really and make those changes," Rose said.
"So the changes had to made from the hardware and software in the
device, rather than from network level. So the devices are modified. No
cameras allowed, no SMS allowed, no Internet allowed."
Rose says the phones have been a big hit. Not just to protect
children, but among adults who prefer the simplicity. He said there's
also been a kind of crossover appeal. Most of his online sales are to
non-Jewish customers around the world, in places like Saudi Arabia.
Kesselmen said British Muslims tell him they too are concerned about
the decline in moral standards among Muslim youth. Just as halal or
Islamic dietary laws are very similar to kosher, the rabbi said Muslims
and other non-Jews have no problem following the lead of "kosher"
phones.
http://www.pri.org/stories/science/technology/orthodox-jews-in-united-kingdom-offer-kosher-certified-cell-phones-8125.html
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Haredi sector cutting wedding costs
The cost of an average wedding in Israel may reach some NIS 100,000 (about $26,750) – a sum not every family can afford, especially with the recent social protest. The ultra-Orthodox sector has found a way to cut these expenses. Large Hasidic movements – such as Ger, Vizhnitz, Satmar, Sanz and Belz – recently issued special rules aimed at cutting wedding costs. The Sanz movement, for example, released a book of rules presenting the maximum prices the bride and groom's families should pay for each wedding clause in order to save tens of thousands of shekels.
The expenses begin as early as the matchmaking stage. Matchmaking fees, for example, have been limited to NIS 3,700 ($990), and the engagement party must cost up to NIS 800 ($215). Up to NIS 500 ($135) can be spent on a bouquet of flowers for Shabbat, preferably a synthetic one. So far, the families have saved some NIS 6,500-7,500 ($1,740-2,010).
In the groom's gifts chapter, the maximum sums are NIS 400 ($110) for a luxury watch, NIS 2,490 ($665) for the Orders of the Mishna, NIS 950 ($255) for a set of Shulchan Aruch books, NIS 800 ($215) for a goblet with a saucer and NIS 400 ($110) for a Passover set of books or a tefillin and tallit case.
There is a general restriction of six gifts and NIS 7,000 ($1,870) for the groom, and the bride's parents are expected to save NIS 12,000-15,000 ($3,200-4,000).
In the bride's gifts chapter, the maximum tariff is NIS 600 ($160) for a watch, NIS 2,600 ($700) for a gold necklace, NIS 2,400 ($642) for a bracelet, NIS 1,500 ($400) for a gold ring with a semi-precious stone, NIS 500 ($135) for pearls and NIS 600 ($160) for a set of holiday prayer books. And there is a non-financial restriction on a pair of candlesticks: They must weigh up to half a kilogram (1.1 pounds) and be up to 33 centimeters (13 inches) high.
The total sum spent on gifts is limited to NIS 10,000 ($2,675). The groom's parents are expected to save NIS 15,000-17,000 ($4,014-4,550). Other gifts between the in-laws have also been limited. In the Shabbat Chatan and Shabbat Kallah customs, the restrictions include throwing small bags with a selection of almonds, raisins and sweets when the groom is called up to read from the Torah; the groom's family will have the Shabbat meals at its own house; the Friday night meal will not include any guests, or only the father of the bride and grandfathers; the other family members may join the end of the meal with some refreshments. The family is expected to save NIS 10,000-13,000 ($2,670-3,480) on this clause.
In the wedding party chapter, the maximum price for the wedding dress is NIS 3,500 ($935), renting clothes for schoolgirls – NIS 200 ($55), renting clothes for high school or seminary girls – NIS 300 ($80), a chair for the bride – NIS 450 ($120), a bouquet of flowers for the bride – NIS 200 ($55), drinks – NIS 4,000 ($1,070), a photographer – NIS 2,500 ($670), and a band (including a singer and equipment) – NIS 3,300 ($885). Some NIS 19,000-23,000 ($5,085-6,155) are saved in this chapter.
Rabbi Avi Zarki of north Tel Aviv has convinced couples to have a relatively modest wedding more than once. "I've conducted weddings which cost millions of dollars, just to make others jealous," he says.
"It's unnecessary. When I see people investing money in a wedding instead of in an apartment, leading to debts, I ask the permission of the parents and the young couple and advise them to change their list of priorities."
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4158597,00.html
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Hasidic Landlord Sick Of "Sun Tanning Goyim" In Crown Heights
The yuppie goyim are TAKING OVER Crown Heights, turning the once idyllic neighborhood into a wicked G-dless hellhole known among interlopers as "ProCro," a veritable Sodom where they party half-naked on rooftops and corrupt
the area youth! So says one local landlord, who has fired off an open
letter begging fellow property owners not to rent to these licentious
libertines. In a desperate missive titled "Take Back Our Neighborhood," the anonymous landlord writes:
Demographic changes are swiftly changing the culture of our
neighborhood. Local Lubavitch landowners and outside chassidic investors are making Crown Heights an attractive location for young, non Jewish
tenants. In fact, it has come to attention that some investors are
specifically targeting their advertising for this purpose. This is
clearly seen with the new PLEX building Montgomery Street and Nostrand
Avenue.
>Young, upwardly mobile professionals may seem to be pleasant tenants
who bring in reliable income, but they also introduce a very different
way of life: new nightclubs and bars, sun tanning on rooftops, bike
lanes and an increasing amount of immodesty on our streets. Some of
these changes are hard to ignore; for instance, one of the sun tanning
parties are visible for our young children to see from the window of a
local school.
>Rising rent compounds the problem and makes it even harder for our
young couples and families to compete in the rental market. Friends, we
pay a premium to live in this neighborhood, and we strive to create an
atmosphere of holiness and kedusha for our children and teens. These
yuppies bring pritzus to our neighborhood. They come out at night to our restaurants and act inappropriately while waiting on line etc.
We're guessing "pritzus" is a strain of particularly potent
marijuana? Anyway, the letter's author finds it deeply troubling that
"some young agents and landlords will specifically rent to these goyim
instead of a fellow Jewish family." His solution? "We must form a group
to come up with effective ways to reinforce the observant Jewish
character of crown heights. The Satmars in Williamsburg are faced with
the same problem and have made a successful committee to curb this
issue. This could include meeting with investors from our own community
and possibly outside, subsidizing rent for our own community members."
For perspective, we spoke with one non-Orthodox Crown Heights resident, who tells us, "I do think this guy's 'fears' are reasonable. There have been so many new businesses opening; there's a place called Owl and Thistle that opened up and my first thought when I walked in was 'who the hell in this neighborhood is going to pay $70 for a pizza stone.' But I'm guessing places like that are getting in while the rents are still cheap, anticipating a boom in 3-4 years. The neighborhood has beautiful brownstones and it's going to get yuppified, no doubt." Crown Heights resident Tien Mao adds, "I know I sunbathe nude and ride my bike topless all the time." JUST TRY TO STOP HIM! (Seriously, please try to stop him.)
http://gothamist.com/2012/01/24/hasidic_jewish_landlord_in_crown_he.php
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Attack on Chabad Emissaries Thwarted
It was revealed, this week, that the security forces of Azerbaijan arrested three Azerbi citizens on suspicion of planning to attack Rabbi Shneor Segal of the Chabad Lubavitch hasidic movement and Rabbi Mati Lewis, principal of the Or Avner school in Baku. The national security office said the three were sent by Iran in revenge for the recent deaths of Iranian nuclear scientists.
During the investigation of the suspects, pictures were found of Rabbi Segal's house and of the school. Authorities warned the emissaries and during the weekend, the rabbis were accompanied by security guards out of concern for additional terrorists.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/230222
Monday, January 23, 2012
IDF personnel chief: All Israelis including ultra-Orthodox should serve in military
Head of the Israel Defense Forces' personnel directorate Major-General Orna Barbibai said on Monday that the IDF should enlist every Israel "into meaningful service."
Barbibai was speaking at a meeting of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee to discuss the "Tal Law," which deals with exceptions from compulsory military service granted to ultra-Orthodox Jews.
"There is no dispute that the challenging security reality demands that we enlist everyone into meaningful service," Barbai said.
According to Barbibai, one out of every four Israeli men and almost half of Israeli women are not drafted into military or national service. "These statistics indicate a need to conduct a thorough re-evaluation of the universal requirement to serve and equal distribution of the burden [of service]."
National Economic Council head Eugene Kandel, who represented the government in the discussion, took issue with Barbibai's statements, claiming the IDF would have difficulty absorbing additional ultra-Orthodox conscripts.
According to official IDF statistics presented by Kandel, the number of ultra-Orthodox conscripts to the IDF rose from 288 in 2007 to 1,282 in 2011, which he said exceeded goals set by the government.
Committee chairman Shaul Mofaz (Kadima) criticized the law and called to abandon it in its present form. According to Mofaz, only half of young people of draft age in Israel are actually drafted into service, and the number is expected to fall to forty percent by 2020.
"We cannot accept the norm that the peoples' army will become the army of half the people, and in eight years, the army of the minority of the people," he said.
MK Yohanan Plessner (Kadima), who heads the team charged with monitoring the law's implementation on behalf of the committee, said that instead of increasing equality, the law was bolstering inequality.
"We must put forward an alternative to the existing legislation, and we have a window of opportunity to create a new agenda," he said.
Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the law, which expires in the summer, will not be extended for another five years. However, following a disagreement with Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the matter, Netanyahu later announced that the law would be extended for another five years.
Barack recently called to extend the law for one year, while formulating an alternative framework in the interim period. Under such a framework, he said, the IDF would choose who to draft, while everyone else would be required to complete a year of national service.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/idf-personnel-chief-all-israelis-including-ultra-orthodox-should-serve-in-military-1.408811
