By Yaakov Menken, on November 30th, 2009 Nofrat Frenkel made the news two weeks ago — by getting herself arrested. In violation of an Israeli court order, she took out a Torah scroll in the area of the Western Wall consecrated for women’s prayer, and prepared to read it.
Why is such an apparently benign, religious act against the law, worthy of arrest? When it isn’t a religious act at all, but rather a political one, aimed to disrupt the prayers of those around her and to confront them with her agenda.
Frenkel begins her essay by speaking movingly, poetically, about the fervent religious sentiment of those praying at the Western Wall. She presents her case as if her wish were merely to join them. “The atmosphere at the Kotel, the feeling that all those women praying around me were also turning to G-d and pouring out their hearts to Him, inspires me with the joy of Jewish fraternity. Here is one place in which, shoulder to shoulder, all the hearts are calling to G-d.”
Eventually, though, she exposes her true colors. “The Kotel,” she writes, “is not a Haredi synagogue, and the Women of the Wall will not allow it to become such” [emphasis added]. In other … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on November 29th, 2009 Hiddush means something new, but there is nothing new at all in Hiddush, the organization. Even the dramatis personae are just warmed-over stock characters.
Hiddush is the latest in a series of attempts to bring the Orthodox community in Israel to its knees. The only thing different about this attempt seems to be the addition of a website, and a broadening of the agenda. Previously, the issues were Mi Yehudi (defining Jewishness), and participation (i.e. funding) of the non-Orthodox streams in Government-funded activity. For Hiddush, the very existence of a haredi world is now also an issue, as it tries to alter its lifestyle by curtailing government subsidies to large families and military exemptions for yeshiva students.
The new organization is born of an old device: joining an old ineffective Israeli voice to American money.
Uri Regev has a long record of success in saying nasty things about Orthodox Jews, while remaining unsuccessful in getting Israel to further erode its definition of Jewishness to include Reform conversions performed in Israel. Indeed, he must be particularly miffed in the singular lack of success of Reform to draw more adherents in a country that has very strong anti-haredi feelings. For most Israelis, the shul … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on November 25th, 2009 Everyone who knew the difference between a basketball and a watermelon talked about the impossible shot. At the end of the first quarter of Sunday night’s game between the Lakers and the Oklahoma City Thunder, Kobe Bryant simply ran out of room as he charged the end of the court. He was already past the net and had nowhere to go but out of bounds, when he managed to get the ball loose. Despite Kobe’s great control and aim, he had a small problem. Between him and the net was something that typically does not get in the way of a clean shot – the backboard. This proved to be no problem for Bryant, as he directed the ball over the backboard and into the net. Momentum had different plans for his body, which continued out of bounds.
The Rebbe Maharash, the fourth Lubavitcher Rebbe, might have approved. His epigram of choice was lechatchilah aribber. Loosely translated, it means that when an obstacle blocks you from getting where you have to go, refuse to be fazed. If you can’t go through it, simply go over it. Go over it with confidence and impunity. Don’t let a backboard get in the … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on November 20th, 2009 I’ve never experienced a pogrom or been pursued by an angry mob, thank G-d. And yet my genes seem to hold some residue – bequeathed in some Lamarckian way by less fortunate forebears – that discomforts me when a large crowd of people loudly expresses itself.
Like the one outside our offices on a recent Friday. Agudath Israel’s national headquarters are located on lower Broadway in Manhattan, on the “Canyon of Heroes” where the adulated New York Yankees are paraded when they win a World Series. Personally, I reserve the word “hero” for people in other pursuits than professional sports; but the estimated two million New Yorkers who turned out for the recent parade in the Yankees’ honor clearly disagree.
It was the powerful, swelling din of their joy when the floats drove slowly by, 13 floors below, that sent a shiver of nervousness, not excitement, down my spine. I was well aware that the clamor was celebratory, not predatory; but I couldn’t help but imagine what it must be like to see such a mob waving not flags and signs but clubs and knives.
I’m not afraid of heights or claustrophobic. I appreciate a good roller coaster … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on November 15th, 2009 I would be hard pressed to come up with two names in the recent public limelight that make my blood boil as much as Donald Bostrum and Richard Goldstone. They have both set off waves of anti-Israel activity and imperiled the lives of Jews around the globe. If given the chance, I would not hesitate to heap derision and contempt upon them, treating them as beyond any possibility of civil treatment. I would be utterly wrong, at least in one case.
Bostrum is the Swedish journalist who reported that the IDF might be stealing the organs of Palestinians and offering them for sale. He noted persistent claims of Palestinians that bodies came back from the Abu Kabir forensic institute with parts missing (a claim that would have resonated with many Israelis, including many in the Torah community, who have complained of its chief pathologistDr Yehudah Hiss and his disregard for the sanctity of the body). He conflated these claims with the recent arrest of a frum person charged with brokering the purchase and sale of human organs. Bostrum’s story in the Aftonbladet tabloid spread virally throughout the Muslim world, and morphed into a report that gangs of Jews kidnap … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on November 13th, 2009 How the Court squares itsjudgment of Jewish law as racially discriminatory with the fact that the very same law grants full Jewish status to anyone who accepts Jewish observance and undergoes conversion – regardless of color, national origin or ethnicity – is not known. … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on November 12th, 2009 Frum voters in New Jersey faced what was in many ways a wrenching decision in last week’s gubernatorial election. On the one hand, the incumbent Democratic governor John Corzine had proven to be highly responsive to the concerns of the Torah community in his first term in office, a fact attested to by Agudath Israel of America’s New Jersey representative and the endorsement of the Lakewood Vaad and senior figures in Bais Medrash Govoha in their private capacities.
Given Corzine’s record on matters of immediate concern to the Torah community, including school funding, there was a strong argument to be made that he deserved the community’s support as an expression of the basic Torah middah of hakaras hatov. Even leaving aside any ruchnios considerations, the Torah community has an important practical interest in being seen as a community that remembers its friends. And that consideration applied even though the Republican candidate Chris Christie led throughout the campaign. Those who are seen as fair weather friends will end up not being trusted by either party.
Once the Lakewood Vaad endorsed Corzine, there was yet another practical consideration in favor of supporting the incumbent. The more that community leaders are perceived as being able … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on November 12th, 2009 I envy the ability of my fiction-writing colleagues to sometimes get under the skin of readers in ways that mere “deah zoggers” rarely do. Recently, A.M. Amitz hit a sensitive chord with a story, “Goldmine,” about a family that chooses young women in high-earning fields for their sons, each an outstanding bochur. In one respect, things work out pretty much as planned. The wives are successful, the husbands do not have to work, money is even set aside for the next generation, and the husbands’ parents are spared immense financial strain.
But, as the great economist Milton Friedman used to say, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” Part of the package is that the young mothers are too tired from their high-pressure jobs to ever bring the grandchildren to visit; the grandchildren are raised by babysitters, and the major responsibility for nurturing, as well as housework and cooking, falls on the husbands. Rather than the husbands being left free to devote every moment to learning, all we get is an inversion of the traditional roles, with the woman as the breadwinner and the husband as the mainstay of the home. The story provoked a spate of letters arguing … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on November 6th, 2009 Most people, even those who readily profess belief in G-d if asked, don’t often dwell on that belief’s implications. It sits in their heads, a checked-off box filed away for … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on November 5th, 2009 Ever wonder where the report featured that Israeli soldiers kidnap and kill Palestinians in order to harvest their vital organs for transplants originated. Palestinian Media Watch provides the answer. It was lifted in toto from the December 24, 2001 edition of Al Hayat Al Jadida, the official Palestinian Authority newspaper.
Daniel Bostrum the intrepid reporter for Sweden’s largest circulation paper Aftonblandet who plagiarized this fabrication has said of his handiwork, “Whether it’s true or not, I have no idea. I have no clue.” Given his indifference to truth of his journalistic offerings, what further “scoops” can we anticipate from Bostrum? Again, Palestinian Media Watch provides the answer.
Here are just some of the charges one can read in the official Palestinian press or hear from leading Palestinian Authority officials. Israel will pay 4,500 shekels to any Palestinian who can prove he is a drug addict. Israel produced and distributed to Palestinians two hundred tons of drug-laced bubble-gum designed to destroy the genetic systems of Palestinian youth? It also distributes carcinogenic food and fruits for Palestinian consumption and children’s games that beam radioactive x-rays. Beautiful Israeli prostitutes are sent to infect Palestinians with HIV-virus. And don’t forget Suha Arafat’s accusation to … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on November 5th, 2009 Readers of Chananya Weissman’s piece “Shidduch crisis? What shidduch crisis?” (Jerusalem Post, October 21) will quickly discern that he does not think too highly of sixty American roshei yeshiva who recently published a public letter addressing the “shidduch crisis” in the Orthodox world. They are variously compared to Balaam’s donkey, accused of being “disconnected from logic and reality,” and described as attaching their names to “foolish words” comparable to declaring a chicken to be an ostrich.
As someone who runs an organization devoted to helping older Orthodox singles find a spouse, one might at least expect Weissman to express appreciation that the sixty roshei yeshiva publicly called attention to the fact that hundreds of girls from non-Chassidic haredi homes are failing to find a spouse. But no, they are castigated for having denied any such crisis until now, or for having said the phenomenon only existed in the Modern Orthodox world, or having claimed that it results exclusively from exposure to Internet or movies or television.
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on November 4th, 2009 Marriage is, well, so retro. All the latest research shows that it doesn’t make much sense for most people, so why bother trying? Read on.
The article (“Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off“) in August’s The Atlantic disturbed me like few others in memory. It also left me intensely proud to be a frum Jew.
Sandra Tsing Loh is a witty and engaging writer. Rummaging through the debris of her failed marriage, however, has its pitfalls, including the very human reaction of wanting to look good to others and to herself. In a manner reminiscent of Esav’s disparaging the birthright he had sold of his own free-will, Tsing Loh tries to convince us that the institution of marriage itself runs counter to our biological heritage and to our contemporary life styles. It may have worked in the past, but it is futile to live with the expectations of earlier generations.
She lets us know from the get-go that she terminated a long marriage with a rather decent chap after an extramarital amorous fling of hers. This fleeting affair left her desirous of the romance she once had experienced in her marriage. Trying to restore it, alas, would … Read More >>
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