Chaptzem Blog!      

There are many issues that plague the Chasidishe community today in general, and Kiryas Yoel in particular. Children leaving the fold because they are not being accepted, loved and understood is one of the major deficits with a community that will not accept change. Parents and educators must, and will more sooner then later, realize that there are too many people out there that are ready to accept their precious children just the way they are, if they are not willing to.

However, the greatest hypocrisy is when a group of people from the outside come to Kiryas Yoel's defense. These are people who have not been born or bred in Kiryas Yoel and have never experienced any of the trials and tribulations common to the children of Kiryas Yoel. Even more so, the women that have come to the rescue of Kiryas Yoel's honor, not only are they not of the Chasidic persuasion, but they are professionals with higher education degrees, which is unheard of in Kiryas Yoel and still very uncommon even for Chasidim in general.

The fact that these professional women have taken matters into their own hands to defend Kiryas Yoel's honor without any official post to do so, is as insulting as the magazine article with Gitty Grunwald. Kiryas Yoel has always been a private and insular community with no interest of outside attention or proselytizing.

The fact is Kiryas Yoel will seem eccentric to outsiders no matter what. A thousand positive spin articles will not change peoples' minds that Kiryas Yoel is a village filled with extremist Chasidic relics. The best that such a community can do is to live their lives the way they like and ignore any negative outside attention. Bringing in the press, the way these outsider women have, only serves to weaken the community and open it up to even more ridicule.