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Our news feeds and Shabbos tables are abuzz with talk of ‘One of Us’, the latest Netflix film by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (the creators of Jesus Camp), about the lives of those who leave the Hasidic community and are ostracized.

I confess: I will not be watching this documentary. This isn’t out of despair for the social issues faced in parts of our Jewish community, but rather, because I am tired and frustrated with the blatant prejudice shown in the media’s obsessively negative coverage of religious Jews, where they are purging all our communities for the sake of viewers and clicks. How many Vice, BBC and Netflix ‘specials’ — on the backwardness of Jewish groups — must we bear, before we plainly see that we are looking at another iteration of bigotry?

Let me be clear: It is completely abhorrent that any human should suffer extradition from their community for being different, whether it be difference in lifestyle, sexual orientation or perspective. No man, woman or child should ever be subject to abuse at the hands of their family members or leaders, as ‘One of Us’ portrays, while feeling that they have no one to turn to. It is vital that we come to terms with the abuse which people suffer in our community and that we tear down the systems which keep abusers in places of power. This complex issue requires us to create an environment where people can feel comfortable in speaking out against those who damage our society.

Yet films like these will never empower suffering members of the Orthodox Jewish community to speak truth to power – it will only inflame leadership more, and thus intimidate community members from voicing their fears.

These narratives do not seek to create positive change, but rather to exploit sensational stories, to put ‘weird’ Jews under a microscope for the world to see. Positive change can only occur between the individuals involved and the steps our communities take to improve our situation, from within. No number of cameras being thrust into our faces will stop victims from being taken advantage of or abusers exploiting them; it will only deepen our prejudices and ignorance we have of each other’s communities.

Each time I watch another one of these documentaries, it only adds to my feelings of shame over my identity as a Jew. And as an Orthodox Jew, I am frustrated by the one-sided perception of my larger community. My father is a baal teshuva, who came to Chabad Hasidism; I have personally only witnessed a community of deep kindness, charity and empathy, a kind of understanding that no secular society I’ve ever seen achieve. Surely intolerance, molestation and hatred exist in the darker segments of our society – but how tragic it is that we are allowing the media to define us by the latter alone.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has pointed out repeatedly that each iteration of anti-Semitism in our history has unified us, that each time an accusation has been made against the Jewish people, we united against each threat and supported one other. However, he points out that today is the first time in history where the rhetoric against the Jews has started to divide us internally, where we now accept the narratives against our own people; whether it be accusations made against Jews living in Israel or the demonization of our religious communities. We are becoming divided.

If Netflix’s ‘One of Us’ is anything like any of the other documentaries I have seen on the Jews, it’s not an honest portrayal of a Jewish religious society as a whole, but a sucker punch made against a religious group who they know will not fight back and will never have their story told with dignity. I can’t remember the last time I saw or heard a balanced documentary made about Jews or Israel by any non-Israeli media outlet. I dare you to type in ‘Jew’ or ‘Judaism’ into YouTube and see what disturbing videos come up first.

If you want to see some more balanced and more honest portrayals of the totality of the Hasidic Jewish experience, consider instead seeing Rama Burstein’s ‘To Fill The Void’, or Joshua Weinstein’s ‘Menashe’. They’ll tell you stories of challenges faced by Hasidic Jews, the rhythm of their daily lives, the beauty and problems of living in this community.

As Orthodox Jews, it is time we say “enough” to allowing the media to only show the worst in each other’s communities, only further deepening the rifts between our communities. It’s time for us to show another side of the story.

http://forward.com/life/faith/386293/is-the-medias-obsession-with-hasidic-jews-anti-semitic/
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After four years of conflict, packed meeting rooms and reams and reams of legal papers, the controversy over Kiryas Joel’s quest to expand its borders could end on Nov. 7. That’s when Monroe residents will head to the polls to vote on the creation of a whole new town for Kiryas Joel with more land and a tropical-sounding name.

If approved by a majority of Monroe voters, including those in Kiryas Joel, Monroe would be divided to create the Town of Palm Tree, the first new town in New York in 35 years. The Satmar Hasidic community of about 23,000 would pull itself out of the town in which it was formed in the 1970s and become an autonomous municipality with no involvement in Monroe. A smaller Monroe would be left with two villages - Monroe and Harriman - and its unincorporated areas.

The referendum is the culmination of a saga that began at the end of 2013 with the filing of a petition by Monroe property owners for Kiryas Joel to annex 507 acres. The ensuing years brought a clash with neighboring communities over Kiryas Joel’s growth, a second petition to annex 164 acres instead, and finally - after court cases and a couple side conflicts in Albany - a third petition for the Orange County Legislature to allow a referendum on creating a new town.

The fate of that petition was uncertain until Kiryas Joel officials and leaders of the United Monroe citizens group negotiated a deal earlier this year, one that would settle their annexation court fight, reduce the size of the proposed town and set other conditions. With that agreement in place and both sides pledging to support the new town, the Palm Tree proposal sailed through the Legislature in an 18-3 vote on Sept. 7.

The town name is an English translation of Teitelbaum, the last name of the Eastern European rabbi and Holocaust survivor who founded the Satmar Hasidim.

The combined support of Kiryas Joel’s main political faction and United Monroe makes it likely that voters will approve Palm Tree’s creation. Here are some key factors in the decision:

Borders and voters

The new town would consist of Kiryas Joel and 56 acres outside its existing borders, which already take in 164 acres that the village annexed in 2015 with the Monroe Town Board’s approval. Palm Tree would take up 940 acres (1.5 square miles) and would be fully independent of the Town of Monroe, including its elections.

That means Kiryas Joel’s roughly 10,000 voters - about 45 percent of Monroe’s electorate - would no longer dominate Monroe Town Board elections every two years, a point of friction that reached a pitch in the 2013 election. United Monroe leaders have argued strongly for political separation as good for both communities.

Monroe fiscal impact

An accounting firm working for the Monroe Town Board estimated that losing Kiryas Joel’s property taxes and other revenue would result in a net revenue loss of about $1.9 million a year. What the board will do to soften the impact on its budget, which was $9.3 million this year, has not been determined.

The accountants, RBT CPAs of Newburgh, have calculated that if the board were to make no effort to mitigate the loss, strictly raising property taxes to cover the shortfall would cost the owner of a $280,000 home roughly another $145 to $210 a year in town taxes. Even if voters approve the creation of Palm Tree on Nov. 7, there would be no impact on Monroe’s 2018 budget, because the new town wouldn’t take effect right away.


School boundaries

The Monroe-Woodbury and Kiryas Joel school boards have agreed to shift district boundaries so that the 164 acres Kiryas Joel annexed and the 56 additional acres in Palm Tree would be inside Kiryas Joel School District. Monroe-Woodbury residents were eager to avoid having a growing bloc of Hasidic voters in their district to influence future board elections and budget votes. For current and future residents of those 220 acres, it means much lower school taxes.

Monroe-Woodbury’s consultants have calculated the property shift will cost the district $343,860 in net revenue, or 0.2 percent of this year’s $171.2 million budget. That amount weighs the property taxes the district would lose against what it now spends on busing and special education for children now living in those areas.

Effective date

Under current state law, the new town would come into existence on Jan. 1, 2020, more than two years away. Kiryas Joel officials hope to expedite that effective date with special legislation, and Assemblyman James Skoufis, D-Woodbury, is working on a bill that would both enable Palm Tree to take effect earlier and provide Monroe-Woodbury School District extra state aid to offset its revenue loss.

Palm Tree would hold its first Town Board election before the town comes into existence, but there are unlikely to be two overlapping boards - Palm Tree’s and Kiryas Joel’s - for long. Kiryas Joel leaders plan to make the town and village coterminous by annexing the 56 additional acres in Palm Tree, enabling there to be a single government for both.

Past and future annexations

Under a deal negotiated by Kiryas Joel officials and leaders of the United Monroe citizens group, United Monroe will withdraw its lawsuit challenging the 164-acre annexation if voters approve the town creation. As part of that same agreement, Kiryas Joel officials would drop their own court case to try to claim an even larger area - the 507-acre annexation request that the Monroe Town Board rejected in 2015.

That would leave still pending - but moot - a separate lawsuit that eight towns and villages and Orange County brought to challenge the 164-acre annexation. Both that case and the one United Monroe brought through its nonprofit arm, Preserve Hudson Valley, are pending in the Appellate Division, following the state Supreme Court’s dismissal of the lawsuits last year. The municipal case would be moot if Palm Tree is approved because the new town’s territory includes the annexation area.

The agreement with United Monroe stipulates that neither Kiryas Joel nor Palm Tree would entertain any annexation requests from property owners in the towns of Monroe and Blooming Grove for at least 10 years after Palm Tree comes into existence. Woodbury, which also abuts Kiryas Joel, was not covered by that provision.

http://www.recordonline.com/news/20171028/kjs-formation-of-new-town-up-to-monroe-voters
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A kosher Shabbat (Sabbath) dinner at a backpacker’s lodge in Dalat, Vietnam, a 9,000 women-strong challah-baking event in Buenos Aires, and a glow-in-the-dark challah event in Costa Rica are just a few of the remarkable events taking place this year as part of the 5th annual Shabbat Project on October 27-28.

The Shabbat Project is a global grassroots movement that brings Jews from across the world together to keep a single Shabbat (Sabbath), transcending religious denomination, political persuasion and other divides such as age, language and lifestyle.

The initiative was introduced in South Africa in 2013, before going global the following year. Now in its fifth year, the Shabbat Project is firmly established as an anticipated annual highlight of the international Jewish calendar.

“Over the past few years, it has been nothing short of thrilling and deeply inspiring to witness Jews come together across every conceivable divide – language, culture, ethnicity, geography, observance,” says South African Chief Rabbi Dr. Warren Goldstein, the founder and director of the Shabbat Project. “This is real Jewish unity – built from the ground up.”

The Shabbat Project is the conduit of all the gatherings, acting as a portal and resource for every event and interested participant, and providing comprehensive Shabbat materials and support. Crucially, while many of the events are coordinated and managed through formal communal organizations, the initiative is essentially a social movement driven by volunteers on the ground.

“Jews across the spectrum are receptive to the Shabbat Project precisely because it isn’t associated with any particular movement or body,” says Goldstein.

Lome (Togo) and Maputo (Mozambique) are hosting events this year for the first time, as are Larnaca (Cyprus), Asuncion (Paraguay) and Venezuela. They are joined by nearly 160 cities in Israel, over 500 cities in the US, and a combined one million Jews in 1,152 cities in 95 countries around the world.

Sydney will be one of the first cities to usher in Shabbat at an open-air musical event overlooking the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge. In Brazil, Recife’s famous Kahal Zur Israel synagogue – erected in 1636, the oldest synagogue in the Americas – is creaking opening its doors to host a series of events, Cape Town and Johannesburg are hosting a “dark tisch” – a Friday night celebration held in total darkness. And in the UK, an estimated 100,000 Brits are taking part in hundreds of events across the country.

Meanwhile, a dedicated fund has been set up to help participating communities who are battling uncommon challenges, such as a synagogue in southern Texas devastated by Hurricane Harvey and a community in Uganda who are weathering a nation-wide famine.

“There is a real thirst worldwide for true Jewish unity and for a genuine connection to Judaism. And people really resonate with the way Shabbat carves out a sacred space of tranquility and togetherness amidst the frenzy of modern life,” Goldstein added.

Many of today’s leading behavioral scientists, neurologists, psychologists and social commentators point to a “crisis of attention” in the digital age – a world that has become a constant feed of information and entertainment, a procession of beeps and pings and pop-ups doing battle for our attention. “A world in which we are so besieged by distractions,” says Goldstein, “we’ve forgotten how to live.”

“Shabbat enables us to momentarily set aside the distractions, demands and pressures of daily life – offering us the time and space to renew our inner selves, and to revisit and reinvigorate our most important relationships.

“Shabbat can hold us together in a society where everything seems to be pulling us apart.”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/237322
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Heidi Ewing is a director, producer, and writer of documentary films, including One of Us, which chronicles the lives of three ex-Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn.

Recently interviewed about this film on the Charlie Rose Show with guest host Jeff Glor, Ewing has made the outrageous claim that their refusal to blend in was partly responsible for their murder in the Holocaust.

I am speechless. Jews of all stripes, whether proudly Jewish or hiding it, were slaughtered in the Holocaust. The suggestion the ones who were proud were partly at fault for their fate is hideous.

http://www.israellycool.com/2017/10/22/watch-writer-director-heidi-ewing-says-hasidic-jews-killed-in-holocaust-partly-because-refused-to-blend-in/
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On a neglected stretch of road not far from the compound housing the bulk of Oradea’s Jewish infrastructure lies a dull brick building. Above the entrance is a small sign in stereotypical “Jewish” typeface. “Kosher,” it reads meekly, and below that, “Wine. Coffee. Jazz.”

With its graffiti-covered facade, the place hardly resembles a jazz club — but neither does it look like an old Vizhnitz synagogue. And though it’s still labeled as such on Google Maps, the building hasn’t been prayed in for over 80 years.

The city of Oradea, with a Jewish population hovering somewhere around 400, might not have the numbers to necessitate a kosher jazz bar, or to keep one afloat, but Jews don’t seem to be its niche audience: The handful of grungy-looking hipsters lounging in the courtyard are likely not familiar with the ancient dietary laws.

On a sunny day in early autumn, they recline easily beneath umbrellas on oversized chairs that look more like mattresses as ambient trance music drifts from the bar inside. A young couple talks quietly while the barman lounges nearby smoking a cigarette.

The bar’s owner, Andris Sella, says that the property which he now rents from the Jewish community has a troubling history, and has changed hands more times than the city itself. A mean feat: Oradea was in turns ruled by Turks, the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the Soviets, among others, before becoming part of modern-day Romania.

“This was originally a synagogue built by the Vizhnitz Hasidic sect in 1933,” he says, “though they only used it for three years before fleeing due to the rising anti-Semitism prior to World War II.”

Sella says that when Oradea was taken over by the Nazis, the fascist Hungarian Arrow Cross militia used the building to torture the city’s Jews in an attempt to root out any hidden valuables. Shortly thereafter, it was converted into a hospital for the remainder of the war.

“When I got it, the building was a furniture factory,” Sella says. “It had been a manufacturing place since the late ‘40s.”

Sella says that it wasn’t initially his intention to have a jazz club here, but things just sort of fell into place.

“I’ve been importing wines from Israel since 2007,” says the 40-year-old Jewish Oradean. “At first, I just used the large empty space where the synagogue used to be as a warehouse to store the wines.”

“Where the bar is now, we used to just sell coffee, but then we wanted a place where people could sample the wines,” he says, “so they started gathering in there for tastings.”

Sella says that he used to own a popular club in the city’s center, which he sold in 2013. After the front of the synagogue started being used for wine sampling, it was soon converted into a full-time watering hole.

“I guess I just had it in my DNA to have a bar,” he says. “And from there it went from wine to jazz — I like jazz music, and wine and jazz always go together, so that part was natural.”

Equally natural was Sella’s decision to enter the Israeli wine market — the distributor of Israeli and kosher wines throughout Eastern Europe moved to Israel in 1997 at age 19, and holds Israeli citizenship.

He had to return to Romania three years later when his mother suffered a terminal illness, but he says he still visits Israel two or three times a year, and has family in Safed.

“I wanted to move there because I’m a Jew,” Sella says.

“I had visited Israel when I was a kid with my parents, and I was familiar with it. And growing up, my family was active in the Jewish community, we’d celebrate the holidays — I was even in the choir as a kid, even though I have no voice. So you know, I love Israel and I’m connected to it. I’m drawn to our ‘aretz,’” he says, using the Hebrew word for land.

After introducing the live music, Sella decided to open up his business to other creatives as well. He began storing his wines elsewhere and turned the larger space into a place for artists to display their work.

“I wanted the place to be dedicated to culture. So first we started with photo expos, and after that painters slowly started to come to display their works, and then we had piano nights and violin nights. And then the young actors wanted a place to work besides the State Theater,” he says.

Sella let the artists, and later on, the theater performers, use the venue for free — a gesture that was more than symbolic.

“I had to pay the rent, and of course the other bills: heating in the winter, electricity, water. It was expensive, but I think it was worth it,” he says.

The move paid off in the end. The space eventually came to be used exclusively for acting, and is now a nationally-known venue and draws thespians from all over the country.

“The independent theater helped put the place on the map,” says Sella. “I don’t think the jazz bar would have made it on its own.”

These days the artists pay a small percentage of their nightly take to help cover overhead. Still, Sella says that whatever costs aren’t covered he pays out of pocket — though he doesn’t seem regretful. He’s quick to kvell about the current project taking place, the theme of the young actors and directors revolving this year around the difficult relationship between Romania and neighboring Hungary, as well as life under Communism in the not-so-distant past.

Sella would like to tell more Romanian Jewish stories, and is planning a Jewish theater festival this upcoming Passover if he can get funding.

He says that the city has an incredibly rich Jewish history, and that before the Holocaust over one-third of the city’s 90,000 residents were Jewish.

“We built this city,” he says.

He also describes the difficulty with which the Jewish community recovered their stolen property, many decades after the war.

“It was very hard work to get it back, and they gave it very late, so many people had died by then, or moved elsewhere, and never got their property back,” he says.

With national attention on the studio and the work coming out of it, Sella has a grand vision for the venue’s future, and would like to see the space developed into a full cultural center hosting multidisciplinary expositions that would include music, sculpture, painting, and more.

“I want to attract European funds to do something like that — it’s a challenge, and will take a lot of money to renovate the place, but the Jewish community is on my side,” he says.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/an-abandoned-pre-wwii-hasidic-synagogue-gets-a-second-life-as-a-kosher-jazz-club/
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