THE VIEWS EXPRESSSED HERE ARE NOT THE VIEWS OF UOJ AND ARE NOT ANALOGOUS TO JUDAISM PER SE, AND MY PERSONAL BELIEFS! BUT I DO BELIEVE EDITING OUT SO MUCH OF THE NONSENSE AND FRIVOLOUS --- MAN-MADE RITUALS AND FABRICATED MEANINGLESS TRADITIONS - THAT IS TODAY'S HAREDI JUDAISM; - THAT IS DESTROYING THE VERY INTENT OF THE BEAUTY THAT IS OUR TORAH & MESORAH --- IS SOMETHING WE NEED TO THINK ABOUT - SERIOUSLY!
This article in the L.A. Times has been edited by me - as not to offend the idiots among us - who would have a problem understanding my true intent!
Jefferson Bible reveals Founding Father's view of God, faith
SCHOLAR: Robert C. Ritchie says many people would consider it desecration to take a scissors to the Bible. "Yet, it gives a reading into Jefferson's take on the Bible, which was not as divine word put into print, but as a book that can be cut up," he says.
By Louis Sahagun, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 5, 2008
Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper -- alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.
In a letter sent from Monticello to John Adams in 1813, Jefferson said his "wee little book" of 46 pages was based on a lifetime of inquiry and reflection and contained "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."
He called the book "The Life and Morals of J." Friends dubbed it the Jefferson Bible. It remains perhaps the most comprehensive expression of what the nation's third president and principal author of the Declaration of Independence found ethically interesting about the Gospels and their depiction of J.
"I have performed the operation for my own use," he continued, "by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter, which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dunghill."
The little leather-bound tome, several facsimiles of which are kept at the Huntington Library in San Marino, continues to fascinate scholars exploring the powerful and varied relationships between the Founding Fathers and the most sacred book of the Western World.
The big question now, said Lori Anne Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University, is this:
"Can you imagine the reaction if word got out that a president of the United States cut out Bible passages with scissors, glued them onto paper and said, 'I only believe these parts?' "
"He was a product of his age," said Ferrell, whose upcoming book, "The Bible and the People," includes a chapter on the Jefferson Bible. "Yet, he is the least likely person I'd want to pray with. He was more skeptical about religion than the other Founding Fathers."
In Jefferson's version of the Gospels, for example, J. is still wrapped in swaddling clothes after his birth in Bethlehem. But there's no angel telling shepherds watching their flocks by night that a savior has been born. Jefferson retains J's. death but ends the text with his burial, not with the resurrection.
Stripping miracles from the story of J. was among the ambitious projects of a man with a famously restless mind. At 71, he read Plato's "Republic" in the original Greek and found it lackluster.
Ever the scientist, he inoculated his wife, children and many of his slaves against smallpox with fresh pus drawn from infected domestic farm animals, according to Robert C. Ritchie, W.M. Keck Foundation director of research at the Huntington Library.
"For a lot of people, taking scissors to the Bible would be such an act of desecration they wouldn't do it," Ritchie said. "Yet, it gives a reading into Jefferson's take on the Bible, which was not as divine word put into print, but as a book that can be cut up."
Jefferson, a tall vigorous man who preferred Thucydides and Cicero to the newspapers of his day, was not the only 18th century leader who questioned traditional Christian teachings.
Like many other upper-class, educated citizens of the new republic, including George Washington, Jefferson was a deist.
Deists differed from traditional Christians by rejecting miraculous occurrences and prophecies and embracing the notion of a well-ordered universe created by a God who withdrew into detached transcendence...(Bechira-like).
Critics of the time regarded deism as an ill-conceived attempt to reconcile religion with scientific discoveries. For rationalists in the Age of Enlightenment, deism was one of many efforts to liberate humankind from what the deists viewed as superstitious beliefs.
Jefferson was a particular fan of Joseph Priestley, a scientist, ordained minister and one of Jefferson's friends. Priestley -- who discovered oxygen and invented carbonated water and the rubber eraser -- published books that infamously cast a critical eye upon biblical miracles. Jefferson was particularly fond of Preistley's comparison of the lives and teachings of Socrates and J.
Discussions and letters between Jefferson and another friend, Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, led Jefferson to compile his "wee little book." In a letter to Rush on April 21, 1803, Jefferson said his editing experiment aimed to see whether the ethical teachings could be separated from elements he believed were attached to religion over the centuries.
"To the corruption of Christianity I am indeed opposed," he wrote to Rush, "but not to the genuine moral precepts."
Therefore, Ritchie said, "for Jefferson, the Bible was a book that could be made and unmade."
The Jefferson Bible remained largely unknown beyond a close circle of relatives and friends until 1904, when its publication was ordered by Congress. About 9,000 copies were issued and distributed in the Senate and the House.
Today several editions of the Jefferson Bible are available through booksellers. A few online versions exist, including one on the website of the Jefferson Monticello, www.monticello.org/library/links/jefferson.html.
It is hard to say whether Jefferson would have objected to publication of the book.
"Say nothing of my religion," Jefferson once said. "It is known to myself and my God alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."
louis.sahagun@latimes.com
There are two new exceptional essays on "UOJGROUP.BLOGSPOT.COM" - Yankee Doodle Jew and one from The Wolf (posted by Ahavah).
ReplyDeleteR' Thomas Jefferson was from a previous generation.
ReplyDeleteFor those of you keeping score, it hit $145 a barrel before July 4th.
ReplyDeleteOf course there are those who will cast Jefferson as a "Reform"er. He was, in actuality, just that a reformer. Jefferson was not out of step with his peers, just the masses of a**es who wouldn't look past their noses and doctrinal thoughts. Jefferson got into plenty of trouble for his views and was not roundly applauded for them. He was a great thinker - oh and that tells a lot about what we deal with today - not a knee jerk reactionary. Jefferson would be appalled by the liberalization of democracy. Much was learned, when learning was in vogue, about the Jeffersonian versus Hamiltonian view of the republic in it's infancy. Would be well worth it for those who are moderately literate and own a library card to read some of what qualified historians have written about the feud between Jefferson and Hamilton regarding government - it's as entertaining as Eibschutz versus Emden.
ReplyDeleteProbe of growing outbreak intensifies
ReplyDelete943 fall sick despite efforts to track culprit in salmonella cases
Associated Press
10:36 PM CDT, July 5, 2008
WASHINGTON — The government on Saturday increased to 943 the number of people reported being sickened in a record salmonella outbreak, in which tomatoes are the leading suspect.
The Food and Drug Administration also said it had begun looking at serrano and jalapeno peppers and cilantro —ingredients used to make salsa—as possible causes of the outbreak. Tomatoes continue to be investigated as well, spokeswoman Stephanie Kwisnek said.
The 943 reported cases are nationwide, requiring at least 130 hospitalizations since mid-April after the first salmonella illnesses appeared, the FDA said Saturday. That compares with 922 cases two days earlier and 869 reported in the previous week. There have been 225 cases reported since June 1—evidence that the source likely has not been contained.
On Tuesday, the government said it would test other kinds of fresh produce commonly served with fresh tomatoes.
The U.S. tomato industry has taken a $100 million hit as restaurants temporarily dropped tomatoes from their menus, and farmers have had to plow under their fields or leave crops to rot in packinghouses.
Mexico has not calculated its losses.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080702/NEWS/807020370/1001
ReplyDeleteIowans will eventually see more severe flooding every few years because of new flood risks, including rain patterns altered by climate change, the National Wildlife Federation said Tuesday.
http://www.insurancenewsnet.com/article.asp?a=top_pc&id=95896
ReplyDeleteSon of 'Tort King' to Spend 14 Months in Prison
Menachem Lubinsky will be penning a column in Hamodia that this article and pictures of factories under water are lies made up by the media.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080703/BUSINESS/807030369/0/contact
An Iowa State University survey shows about 435 Iowa manufacturers experienced business disruptions because of flooding - from supply, work force and power interruptions to blocked roads and flood-affected customers.
Manufacturers reported flood damage that ranged in cost from several thousands to millions of dollars, said Ron Cox, director of ISU's Center for Industrial Research and Service.
"A small company could easily have $1 million in damage. But we have some of the larger companies, literally making millions of dollars a day in sales, that are shut down," Cox said.
Cox said Iowa manufacturers often rely on each other for parts, supplies and equipment. "The Iowa manufacturing supply chain, there are a lot of pieces to it," he said. "When one company is down, it affects many other companies."
Iowa manufacturers said the No. 1 disruption involved the work force. Among other challenges: transportation, flood-affected customers, access to supplies, utilities disruptions, and damage to buildings and equipment.
"Most of the comments we are getting relate to lost labor hours from employees who could not get to work or who had lost their own homes," said Rudy Pruszko, a center project manager.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080705/NEWS/807050322
ReplyDeleteTaxpayers' cost to keep arrested workers in jails: $590,000 a month
Jesus Reyes is a typical case.
"Why don't they send me back? I just want to go back," Reyes said in Spanish.
Reyes spoke in an interview last month at the Linn County Jail, where he was held until flooding forced the transfer of prisoners from the Cedar Rapids facility.
I do not believe in any type of editing or cutting and pasting, whether it's the written law or the oral law. What I do object to is the gross misinterpretations and misapplications of these laws. Perfect examples are the laws of lashon hara, rechilus, messira and pidyon shvuyim. I've posted about these laws ad nauseum and how the chassidim shotim amongst us use these laws to protect the most evil criminals. Our Torah and our massoret is pure, whole and perfect. Nothing needs to be changed or should ever be changed. It needs to be learnt and taught properly without perverting its meaning, which some unfortunately do in order to further their agendas.
ReplyDeleteMany years ago, while a rabbi in Atlanta, I answered a knock on my door one Shabbat afternoon. Standing in front of me was a fine-looking couple - obviously non-Jewish.
ReplyDelete“Shabbat Shalom, rabbi,” they said, and asked to have a word with me.
I sensed that they were missionaries and asked them what the subject was. They replied that they wanted to talk to me about the “Son of God.”
I suggested that while I respected their personal beliefs, in Judaism there is no such thing as a son or mother of God, that ours is a very strict monotheistic faith, and that our God is one, not two, and not three. I added that before attempting to convert Jews, they should consider converting Christians to Christian teachings, because throughout history, Jews had seen very little of Christian love and of turning the other cheek.
End of conversation.
WELL, AT least they were honest. Today, missionaries are much more subtle.
For one thing, they often pose as Jews themselves. And, most significantly, they do not initially ask Jews to accept Jesus as the son of God, nor mention that in Christianity, Jesus is worshipped as a divine being.
Contemporary missionaries realize that Jews - even secular, non-religious Jews - have a visceral revulsion at the idea of a human being as divine. They also realize that, for Jews, the figure of Jesus symbolizes a church that has for millennia condemned Jews to purgatory and eternal damnation; that the church, in the name of Christian love, has been responsible for oceans of Jewish blood because of the Jewish refusal to accept Jesus as a divine being; and for the belief that Jews deserve to suffer because of this refusal.
Aware of all this, many contemporary missionaries have apparently altered their strategy. They are now appealing to Jews from a pseudo-Jewish perspective. In order to entrap Jews, in other words, much missionary activity has been Judaized. Jesus is no longer Jesus; he is now “Yeshua,” a nice, Jewish-sounding name - as seen in recent missionary ad campaigns on Jerusalem’s buses.
A close reading of some of today’s missionary material shows that the central belief in the divinity of Jesus and his role as “lord and savior” is hardly mentioned. Today’s emphasis is on his supposed role as messiah. Further, many missionaries themselves now refer to themselves not as Christians but as “messianic Jews.” They wear yarmulkes, don a tallit, and even have their own “rabbis.”
The State of Israel is a crucial target for such missionaries, and many so-called messianic Jews are actually born Christians who have given themselves Jewish names and moved to Israel for one reason: to proselytize Jews.
THIS NEW strategy is illustrated by several recent media articles. The Washington Post ran a news article on June 21, picked up from the Associated Press, about “messianic Jews” who claim that they are discriminated against in Israel - a questionable accusation. The article’s description of messianic Jews made not a single reference to the divinity of Jesus. It slavishly followed the news release of the missionary group that issued it - which was careful not to mention the fact that so-called messianic Jews believe Jesus is the son of God.
Even The Jerusalem Post made no mention of the divinity of Jesus in its article last Thursday about the three-day messianic conference taking place that weekend.
An innocent reader comes away from such articles with the impression that “messianic Jews” are simply another group within Judaism. There are Orthodox Jews, hassidic Jews, haredi Jews, and there are messianic Jews - all part of one big, happy Jewish family
WHAT WE see here, in effect, is a renewed assault on the fundamentals of Judaism - not the traditional frontal assault, but, in a shift in tactics, one that attempts to infiltrate through indirect means by blurring the Jesus-as-God aspect of Christianity and stressing the Jesus-as-messiah aspect. Many missionaries feel this roundabout approach is less threatening to Jews, more “Jewish-friendly.”
In view of this renewed offensive against the basic beliefs of Judaism, some obvious truths must be reiterated:
First and foremost is the cornerstone belief of Judaism: God is a pure and unadulterated One. He is singular, the unity of all unities, alone, unique, and indivisible. He cannot be transformed into two or into three - and certainly not into statues or figures. He is not and never was human, and he has no physicality, no father or mother.
Millions of Jews have gone to their deaths proclaiming Shema Yisrael - Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. Over and over again the Hebrew Bible prophetically warns against the inevitable attempts to dilute and distort this unity (see Deut. 13).
Further truths follow from this cardinal principle:
1. It is a distortion to claim that one can be a Jew and at the same time believe in Jesus as a god or as a messiah, or a prophet or savior.
2. It follows, therefore, that terms such as “Jews for Jesus,” or “Jewish Christians” are grotesque perversions. Such terms are misleading, misguided, misconceived, and ultimately a miscarriage of truth - for no Jew can believe in any divinity other than the One God, and no Jew can view Jesus as anything other than a teacher of another faith system.
AS FOR the true identity of the Messiah, we have no specific knowledge, as Maimonides states in his Code, in Hilchot Melachim. In Judaism, the Messiah will not be a divine creature but a man born of a man and woman; he will inaugurate an era of universal peace, spirituality and enlightenment, and will gather in all Jewish exiles to the land of Israel, as outlined in Isaiah 11.
Jesus has not fulfilled any of these prophecies. Furthermore, he is worshipped as a deity by another faith. For converts to Christianity to claim that they are “messianic Jews” is thus another pathetic distortion.
Having said this, it is important to state that Judaism has no quarrel with those who choose not to follow the pure monotheism of our faith.
We are not a missionary religion, and the benevolent behavior of the modern State of Israel toward non-Jewish religious minorities demonstrates Jewish magnanimity to those who do not follow Jewish ways. We have only respect for those who wish to worship their own deity in their own way, and to live ethically and lovingly with all people. We condemn those who would demean or use violence against believers of another religion.
AT THE same time, missionaries should know that Judaism disdains those who would entrap unlettered Jews through deception and falsehoods. To try to persuade innocent Jews that there is no real difference between Judaism and Christianity - even when these attempts stem from “love and friendship” for the Jewish people - is an example of such deception.
We welcome genuine evangelical love and friendship and cherish evangelical support for the State of Israel. But evangelicals must realize that words like “love and friendship” are very hollow when they come at the price of apostasy and betrayal of the millennia-old faith of the Jewish people.
Jews understand that the conversion of the Jews to Christianity is a central tenet of many Christian sects. We know that missionary societies around the world budget many millions of dollars annually in order to “save” Jews. If this is a basic teaching of evangelicals, so be it. But Jews can learn from them. We too should be budgeting millions to save fellow Jews around the world, and especially in Israel, from ignorance and Jewish illiteracy.
The old secular Zionist order, in its haste to be accepted by the outside world, deprived entire generations of Israeli Jews of even elementary knowledge of our Jewish heritage - with the result that too many Jews have no idea of what Judaism stands for, or of the deep chasms that separate Judaism from Christianity.
We must become missionaries to ourselves. It is long past time for us to deliver serious Jewish learning to our people. This is particularly needed for newcomers to Israel from lands like Russia and Ethiopia, who are particularly vulnerable to the artful blandishments of clever missionaries. They, together with all Jews, need to know how to reply when the doorbell rings.
Printed in the Jerusalem Post, July 3.
The Origins of Power: Jean Bethke Elshtain's 'Sovereignty'
ReplyDeleteBooks | Review of: Sovereignty: God, State, and Self
By ADAM KIRSCH
June 18, 2008
As Prime Minister Putin consolidates his authoritarian rule in Russia, he has introduced a new term in the language of propaganda: "sovereign democracy." Anyone who follows the news from Russia can see that sovereign democracy is about as close to actual democracy as the old "people's democracy" of the Soviet period. A sovereign democracy is one that puts political dissidents in jail, murders journalists, expropriates private industry, and makes threatening nationalist pronouncements. The word "democracy" may be preserved as a nod to world opinion, but the weight falls entirely on the adjective, "sovereign," which in this case is clearly a euphemism for "we'll do things our own way, and don't butt in."
ASCENSION Napoleon I presents a crown to his wife Josephine in a detail of Jacques Louis David's 'The Coronation of Napoleon,' from 1805-07.
If Mr. Putin were to read Jean Bethke Elshtain's "Sovereignty: God, State, and Self" (Basic Books, 334 pages, $35), he could congratulate himself on picking precisely the right term for his regime. For the idea of sovereignty, Ms. Elshtain argues in this book based on her 2006 Gifford Lectures, has been associated with the most ominous developments in the modern West.
To be sovereign means to exercise absolute power over one's self and one's fate. But another way of putting this is that the sovereign — whether it is a god, a king, a state, or a mere self — cannot be held answerable to anyone. When push comes to shove, sovereignty always trumps law and morals. To Thomas Hobbes, who helped define the modern conception of sovereignty in "Leviathan," the sovereign ruler is by definition above the law, since, as Ms. Elshtain writes, "laws take the form of his untrammelled will."
Sovereignty in this sense is quite alien to the American tradition, and indeed the word itself does not appear in the Constitution. To Hannah Arendt, who came to America as a refugee from Nazism, it was precisely the absence of a sovereign that made the American system of government the best in the world. The power of the presidency may be much greater now than the Founding Fathers envisioned, but as the Supreme Court's recent Boumediene decision shows, even today the executive is "answerable" to the judiciary. No single office or branch of government has the power that King James I, an ardent believer in the divine right of kings, claimed for himself in a striking metaphor: "to exalt low things, and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men at the Chesse."
It is no coincidence, Ms. Elshtain writes, that King James justified this definition of sovereignty by analogy with God, who similarly "hath power to create, or destroy, make, or unmake at his pleasure." To say that God is the sovereign of the universe might seem like a commonplace, for by definition God cannot be answerable to any higher power. But in the first and best section of her book, Ms. Elshtain argues that even God was not always conceived of as sovereign in this sense. On the contrary, the first step in what she portrays as a centuries-long expansion of the concept of sovereignty began with a radical redefinition of God himself, by theologians in the 12th and 13th centuries.
For Ms. Elshtain, an eminent political philosopher who teaches at the University of Chicago Divinity School, it is the Catholic teaching of Augustine and Aquinas that is the real lost paradise of political thought — a Garden of Eden into which the serpent of sovereignty had not yet slithered. For these saints, God created the universe in accordance with the spirit of love and the principles of justice. Even God's omnipotence was not "sovereign" or arbitrary, but bound by His benevolence to a structure of laws.
But if Aquinas "retained the inner connection between God's reason, justice, and love, and the manner in which God wills," laterthinkers such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham began to think about God's power in a new way, not in terms of law but in terms of will. If God was omnipotent, they reasoned, he could will absolutely anything: He could change the past (say, by restoring a woman's virginity, to use a favorite medieval debating point), or he could make good evil and evil good. Indeed, good is only good because God wills it so; goodness is not a matter of law and love but of command and obedience. (Oddly, but in keeping with her exclusive focus on the Christian tradition, Ms. Elshtain does not mention that Plato had addressed the same problem long before, in the Euthyphro, in which Socrates says: "The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.")
To Ms. Elshtain, this is the original sin of Western thought. For if God was an arbitrary ruler, it followed that worldly sovereignty, too, was a mere matter of asserting one's will. Ms. Elshtain traces the migration of this concept from theology to politics in the first modern philosophers, Machiavelli and Hobbes, who explicitly divorced sovereignty from morality. Later thinkers, from Locke to Hegel, attributed sovereignty to the people or the state, rather than the king, but they did not challenge its arbitrary, all-powerful nature. Nor was this simply a matter of abstract theorizing. "The catastrophe attendant upon the French Revolution," Ms. Elshtain writes, "demonstrates what a monistic version of sovereignty that exempts nothing, including the secrets of the human heart, looks like in practice."
In her book's last third, Ms. Elshtain expands her theological and political critique to contemporary culture, where she believes the self has been exalted to its own kind of sovereignty. If a sovereign God is potentially untrustworthy and a sovereign state totalitarian, a sovereign self — a self conceived in terms of total autonomy and absolute will — is a monster of egotism. The expressions of this egotism, in Ms. Elshtain's view, include radical feminism, sexual license, abortion rights, eugenics, stem cell research, and cloning. All of these modern phenomena, she writes, flow from a "world shorn of transcendence," where nothing — not nature, God, or other people — can stand in the way of the self and its sovereignty.
Yet the familiarity of Ms. Elshtain's targets makes this section of her book the weakest. Rather than offer genuine philosophical arguments against the sovereignty of the individual, she offers polemics and homilies: "One wonders what ever happens to the insistence that we learn to love one another," she writes, with a sort of plangent irritability. Nor is the reason for this evasiveness far to seek. For natural law, history shows, has an unsettling malleability: It tends to become an honorific for prejudice and custom. Our sense of the natural is constantly evolving — slavery and patriarchy once seemed natural, while in some quarters gay marriage is still stigmatized as unnatural.
Reason, on the other hand, can offer convincing arguments why we should not enslave one another, or prevent one another from loving as we see fit — arguments that depend on and support the principle that we are in fact sovereign over ourselves. Finally, the problem with Ms. Elshtain's intuitions about what is natural and dignified is that, because they are intuitions, they are not amenable to rational debate.
In retrospect, the same is true of her historical arguments, as well. Her dark portrait of the modern sovereign state depends on a gleaming idealization of medieval Christendom. Reading "Sovereignty," one never gains a sense of the reasons why the West came to prefer the sovereignty of the individual to the sovereignty of a God whose will is never obvious, but has to be interpreted by human beings with their own failings and selfish interests. Only if you believe that God actually does govern the universe can you excuse human beings from the responsibility, and privilege, of governing themselves.
akirsch@nysun.com
Quoted from another blog site
ReplyDeleteIt's been 14 years since that fateful day - many of us never thought we'd see - came and went. The sun came up the East next day and went down in the West just as always, yet for many of us the world was never the same. Despite being without the Rebbe for 14 years the love is there just as always - sorry, much stronger. We pass it on to our children too, and very often the love the children have is even stronger than those who saw and heard. Try and explain that to someone who has never had a relationship with a Rebbe, - any Rebbe - and you get blank stares; they cannot relate to it, and they jump to conclusions about you. I can sit here and talk about the rebbe's greatness in this field or in that field, but all that just hurts the "cause" I may be trying to further. All I can see is that it's shame on every Yid who didn't have a shaychus with the Rebbe, either through the Rebbe's Torah or by some other means. We have such a good thing, we have a Rebbe, and we'd like to tell all our friends about it so that they too can have it.
I'm curious, does anyone know 'The unorthodox Jew's real name?
ReplyDeleteRubashkin is the poster child for a great many problems.
ReplyDeleteBut on the micro level there is a much more immediate problem for the Jewish community and specifically the kosher consumer. That problem is the Chillul HaShem that has gone on, and from all accounts, continues to go on at this plant. Trying to get readers to focus on the macro issues and ignore the specifics at Agriprocessors won’t work.
Read the ICE affidavit and you will learn what has gone on inside this "medieval" operation. It is nothing short of OSHEK. I also recommend an article in the American Jewish World “The Economics of Oppression“. The author describes the indentured servitude endured by these unfortunate people.
While many in the haredi community look down their noses at unions, it is clear that these workers could not, and can not count on the OU, or Rav Wiesmandl, and certainly not on the Rubashkin's to uphold Jewish law regarding the treatment of workers. So the sooner these workers are organized the better.
Given the flailing about that Rubashkin supporters have been doing since the raid, it is clear they realize they don't have a moral leg to stand on. And, the window of opportunity for the owners to sell this place to someone who knows what they are doing is quickly closing. Soon there will be nothing much left of the place worth buying. I say this with some degree of sadness.
Think about it.
The Rabbonim who work there cannot admit their last place of employment was the Postville dump -- no will want to hire them. Agriprocessors cannot attract stam poalim, much less skilled labor and supervisors – again for the same reason. No professional in their right mind would ever want their name associated with Postville. (Workers who were not picked up during the raid and who fled to neighboring states have had a difficult time finding jobs. When people ask where they came from and they say Postville, they’re turned away. No one wants to inherit an employee whose experience may only be a collection of bad habits.)
Only a large or well established corporations, who could “reassign” staff from other facilities around the country, would be able to move quickly and salvage the business before it implodes. And even these folks would want to replace the existing management base if for no other reason then to signal a change. Do you think they would want to hold onto employees who may be guilty – even if just by association - of crimes?
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/06/esmin.funeral/index.html
ReplyDeleteNEW YORK (CNN) -- Esmin Green died in a drab hospital gown, facedown on a waiting room floor, apparently ignored by hospital staff for more than an hour.
Surveillance tape, later broadcast around the world, showed the 49-year-old mother of six sliding off of a chair in the waiting room of the hospital's psychiatric emergency department, eventually lying face-down on the floor, convulsing.
Nearly 24 hours after her arrival, the camera recorded hospital workers looking at her body and appearing to ignore her. Finally, a hospital employee nudges her lifeless body with his foot and summons help. But it's too late.
Green is pronounced dead.
Seven people have been fired or suspended for their alleged involvement in the incident: the chief of psychiatry, chief of security, a doctor, two nurses and two security guards, according to the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which oversees Kings County Hospital.
Last week, the corporation said it was "shocked and distressed by this situation. It is clear that some of our employees failed to act based on our compassionate standards of care."
New York Civil Liberties Union said last week that the hospital staff falsified Green's records to cover up the time Green went without assistance.
A federal investigation of the hospital was under way when the incident involving Green happened. The probe was sparked by abuse allegations at Kings County detailed in a May 2007 lawsuit filed by the NYCLU and the Mental Hygiene Legal Service, which alleged conditions at the facility are filthy.
Patients are often forced to sleep in plastic chairs or on floors covered in urine, feces and blood while waiting for beds, and often go without basic hygiene such as showers, clean linens and clean clothes, the suit states.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1820358,00.html
ReplyDeleteMost Obnoxious Tourists? The French
Friday, Jul. 04, 2008
A poll reveals that the French are now considered the most obnoxious tourists
http://www.ajn.com.au/news/news.asp?pgID=5735
ReplyDeleteTHE principal of Melbourne’s largest Jewish school has said that a looming increase in teachers’ salaries is about to force the community to rethink the way it provides Jewish education.
Rabbi James Kennard, principal of Mount Scopus College, said that a recently negotiated deal between the State Government and the teachers’ union had increased wages by up to 34 per cent.
In addition, he said, many independent schools paid well above the award rate in order to attract the best teachers. Melbourne’s Jewish schools also provided millions of dollars out of their budgets to subsidise students who would otherwise not receive a Jewish education.
Rabbi Kennard said he was “delighted that teachers are getting salaries that are closer to what they are really worth”, but the decision was going to put immense pressure on Jewish school budgets.
“It [the salary increase] is going to significantly add to our costs and this will make it even more of a challenge to provide Jewish education in a way that is acceptable to as many families as possible,” Rabbi Kennard said this week.
Rabbi Kennard suggested that raising fees might not be the most sustainable model for Melbourne’s Jewish schools.
“I think the community needs to consider two things: one is its funding priorities. Number two, whether the current model of so many schools competing against each other is sustainable and is in the best interests of the community,” Rabbi Kennard said.
Johnny Baker, former long-time president of Mount Scopus and outspoken critic of the current structure of Melbourne’s Jewish education system, said that Rabbi Kennard’s comments vindicated his long-held view.
“The status quo in Jewish education is no longer sustainable,” Baker said. “In the current economic climate, the ability of families to pay school fees will be even more difficult.
http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/34487
ReplyDeleteSome of those workers have since sued the company, alleging abuse, fraud and sexual coercion.
Abe Bistritzky, a Rubashkin family friend and spokesman ... dismisses most of the worst accusations as fabrications.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,376848,00.html
ReplyDeleteForecasters Warn Bertha to get Bigger, Could Become Season’s First Hurricane
Post-9/11 Dragnet Turns Up Surprises
ReplyDeleteBiometrics Link Foreign Detainees To Arrests in U.S.
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 6, 2008; A01
In the six-and-a-half years that the U.S. government has been fingerprinting insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials said. They have criminal arrest records in the United States.
There was the suspected militant fleeing Somalia who had been arrested on a drug charge in New Jersey. And the man stopped at a checkpoint in Tikrit who claimed to be a dirt farmer but had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon.
The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here, officials said. The matches also reflect the power of sharing data across agencies and even countries, data that links an identity to a distinguishing human characteristic such as a fingerprint.
"I found the number stunning," said Frances Fragos Townsend, a security consultant and former assistant to the president for homeland security. "It suggested to me that this was going to give us far greater insight into the relationships between individuals fighting against U.S. forces in the theater and potential U.S. cells or support networks here in the United States."
The fingerprinting of detainees overseas began as ad-hoc FBI and U.S. military efforts shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has since grown into a government-wide push to build the world's largest database of known or suspected terrorist fingerprints. The effort is being boosted by a presidential directive signed June 5, which gave the U.S. attorney general and other cabinet officials 90 days to come up with a plan to expand the use of biometrics by, among other things, recommending categories of people to be screened beyond "known or suspected" terrorists.
Fingerprints are being beamed in via satellite from places as far-flung as the jungles of Zamboanga in the southern Philippines; Bogota, Colombia; Iraq; and Afghanistan. Other allies, such as Sweden, have contributed prints. The database can be queried by U.S. government agencies and by other countries through Interpol, the international police agency.
The very first match was on the man who claimed to be a poor dirt farmer. Among his many charges were misdemeanors for theft and public drunkenness in Chicago and Utah, a criminal record that ran from 1993 to 2001, said Herb Richardson, who serves as operations manager for the military's Automated Biometric Identification System
In a separate data-sharing program, 365 Iraqis who have applied to the Department of Homeland Security for refugee status have been denied because their fingerprints turned up in the Defense Department's database of known or suspected terrorists, Richardson said.
If Iraq and Afghanistan were a proving ground of sorts for biometric watch-listing, the U.S. government is moving quickly to try to build a domestic version. Since September 2006, Homeland Security and the FBI have been operating a pilot program in which police officers in Boston, Dallas and Houston run prints of arrestees against a Homeland Security database of immigration law violators and a State Department database of people refused visas. Federal job applicants' prints also are run against the databases. To date, some 500 people have been found in the database and thus are of interest to Homeland Security officials.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3565207,00.html
ReplyDeleteMazuz: Rabbi Metzger unfit for office
AG files High Court brief following social group's demand Metzger be ordered to step down; asserts chief Ashkenazi rabbi 'unfit,' but stipulates court has no jurisdiction in case
Efrat Weiss
Attorney General Menachem Mazuz presented the High Court with a brief Monday, stating that Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel Yona Metzger "is unfit to be chief rabbi and his tenure should be terminated."
Rabbi Metzger has been under investigation for allegedly receiving illicit benefits, after it was found that he and he family stayed in various Jerusalem hotels, paying little-to-nothing for their stay. Mazuz decided there was not enough evidence to indict Metzger on criminal charges, but did recommend he be dismissed.
Five months ago, the religious judges' election committee – headed by Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann – decided not to terminate Metzger's tenure, prompting the OMETS group: Citizens for Proper Administration, Social Justice and Moral Strength, to petition the High Court in order to make him step down.
Mazuz did, however, note in his brief that only the religious judges' election committee has the authority to terminate Metzger's tenure; and even though the Attorney General's Office did not support the committee's decision, it has the full authority to make it and therefore the High Court has no real say in the matter.
Rabbi Metzger communications' director, Amir Dan said in response that "the attorney general stipulated that the High Court cannot intervene in the religious judges' election committee's decision not to impeach Rabbi Metzger.
"The attorney general further stipulated that the committee is the only body authorized to make any such a decision," he added.
Deja vu. When UOJ wrote about scandals involving Young Israel lawyers Steve Mostofsky & Martin Samson, Blogger's parent company Google was threatened with legal action if they did not remove the entry.
ReplyDeleteDoing this right before a holiday is a stunt used by Kolko's lawyers.
http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=618
Edge Exclusive
YouTube Pulls Pastor Hagee Videos After Church Copyright Lawyers Demand Removal
Sam Orez
July 7th 2008
YouTube.com, the popular website for uploading videos, has pulled numerous videos of Pastor John Hagee Ministries after the minister’s copyright attorneys requested their removal, The Cutting Edge News has learned. The attorneys asserted the videos constituted copyright infringement, and were otherwise deemed to be private property, ministry sources said. Lawyers quietly contacted YouTube during the days and hours before the July 4 holiday to attract as little attention as possible, it was learned.
This prompt YouTube action comes at a time when the giant Google enterprise is fighting Viacom’s one billion dollar lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement as a result of content uploaded by YouTube users. In February 2007, Viacom obtained a court order compelling YouTube to delete some 160,000 videos which apparently infringed on copyrights. Viacom owns network and cable programming, and digital images such as seen on MTV and Comedy Central are frequently chosen as digital content for YouTube uploaders. Earlier in July, a judge also ordered Google to deliver YouTube user data to Viacom. The court-ordered files encompass 12 terabytes of data. That sweeping order was stayed in an emergency protective order, but YouTube is doing all it can to demonstrate that it respects copyright.
Sources say that Hagee, probably motivated by the recent series of news attacks regarding past statements on the Hitler and the Holocaust, used the Viacom example to demand its own videos be respected.
In a statement to The Cutting Edge News on Independence Day, Hagee spokesperson Juda Engelmayer confirmed, "John Hagee Ministries, through its copyright attorneys, issued a request that YouTube remove any and all copyrighted materials belonging to John Hagee copyrights." He added, "The request was accepted."
Over the past few months several of Hagee’s comments, quotes, and sermons have been posted to various websites and have been used to stir controversy surrounding Hagee’s endorsement of Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Beginning with Hagee’s condemnations of Catholicism, which mired Hagee and McCain’s campaign in a media frenzy, the latest postings depicted an old sermon of Hagee's speaking of God’s hand in Hitler’s evil to bring Jews to Israel.
Hagee and McCain mutually severed ties when the videos and theological viewpoints became a campaign issue and a basis for media headlines.
According to information obtained by The Cutting Edge News, Hagee’s attorneys set forth criteria for videos to be removed by YouTube. These included: "1) Any and all pre-recorded material garnered from works owned and distributed by JHM or John Hagee Copyrights; 2) Any material depicting a JHM or John Hagee copyrighted service or performance of the service or sermon, and 3) Any material that is no longer free use material by having been effectively made into a derivative work using materials mentioned above."
Hagee is holding his annual conference for his organization, Christians United for Israel, later this month in Washington DC. This action to remove his YouTube content may be an effort to stem any more surprises prior to the event.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c36_a12821/News/New_York.html
ReplyDeleteHis newspaper calls Norman Finkelstein the "Pariah of Ocean Parkway" when Margo should be first.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/crime/ny-nytala025749113jul02,0,2213322.story
ReplyDeleteKoolTech sues Morris Talansky claiming breach of duty
BY ANTHONY M. DESTEFANO
anthony.destefano@newsday.com
July 2, 2008
Morris Talansky, the Woodmere businessman at the center of an Israeli political scandal, seems to keep attracting legal problems.
The 75-year-old Talansky, an ordained Orthodox rabbi, was thrust into the spotlight this year after his name surfaced in an Israeli probe into bribery allegations surrounding Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Around the time he was making his revelations of payments in Israel, Talansky was being sued in New York by KoolTech, a company with which he has long been affiliated. The complaint filed on May 22 in State Supreme Court in Manhattan alleges Talansky, identified as an equity owner of KoolTech, disparaged the company and engaged in a scheme to undercut its business.
The suit was filed amid what court papers said was a bitter dispute with David Friedland, the other owner of KoolTech, over the firm's ownership and management.
KoolTech supplies computerized minibars for guest rooms in hotels. In its lawsuit, KoolTech alleged that last November Talansky started secretly contacting an official at a rival company and offered his services to solicit hotels to use its minibar services rather than KoolTech's.
KoolTech is suing Talansky alleging slander and a breach of fiduciary duty. The company is asking for at least $4 million in damages. "Morris Talansky is a very complex person," is all attorney William J. Davis, who represents KoolTech, would say when asked about Talansky's alleged actions.
Talansky has yet to file a response to KoolTech's complaint. But both he and the company were on the same side in another recent dispute involving the minibar business.
Ira Matetsky, the attorney defending Talansky in that lawsuit, said he wasn't representing him in the KoolTech litigation.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1215330876710&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
ReplyDeleteTeddy Kollek, the legendary mayor of Jerusalem, may have lived in a modest apartment, but his fondness for good cigars and fine food was well known. A major overseas donor to many of Kollek's projects once told me about the time he invited Kollek to lunch at the restaurant at Mishkenot Sha'ananim, which more or less functioned as Kollek's second office. After they had ordered the food, the manager came over asked the mayor which wine he would like with his food. Without hesitation, Kollek chose an extremely expensive French vintage.
The donor, who was paying for the meal, was shocked at the extravagance, but was too polite to mention it. When the bill came, he was shocked this time to find that no charge had been made for the wine. After Kollek had left, the donor pointed out the missing item on the bill to the restaurant manager. Not at all, replied the manager. The wine, he explained, belonged to Kollek, who regularly received a crate of top quality wine from overseas friends, but because Kollek had nowhere to store it, the restaurant's wine cellar also served as the mayor's. One wonders what today's state comptroller would make of such a cozy arrangement.
Binyamin Netanyahu is another politician who knows how to travel in style. His trip to London, with his wife Sara, at the height of the Second Lebanon War came in for intense scrutiny after it transpired that his six days in the British capital cost a staggering 15,000 pounds. But galling as it may be for the average Israeli, for whom a holiday in London or New York can mean going into the red at the bank, this amount of money is small change for the wealthy Jews who want to host leading Israeli politicians at their functions.
But if one is serious about reducing MKs' foreign freeloading, an examination of the necessity for the continued existence of the Israel Bonds is called for. The scandal here is not, as a recent newspaper investigation reported, that the Israel Bonds is treated by some MKs (again, Netanyahu's name crops up here) as a means of providing a speaking engagement to coincide with a family holiday abroad and thus help cover the vacation expenses, but the fact that the Israel Bonds is a very inefficient and expensive means of raising money for the state of Israel. When Israel Bonds was founded in the early years of the state, it was a way of raising much-needed cash for the fledgling country. But today Israel can raise the money it needs far more cheaply on the open capital markets than through the Israel Bonds, to which the government pays an annual $40 million, on top of the higher-than-the market interest rate it pays back on the bonds.
However, the chances of our MKs deciding to abolish an institution that provides them with plenty of foreign travel for very little work are probably the same as our prime minister coming up with a convincing explanation as to why he received envelopes stuffed with cash from Moshe Talansky.
http://www.forest-blade.com/articles/2008/07/02/news/doc486b83708b7e5605927055.txt
ReplyDeleteIn other notes, the Swainsboro Police Department answered a call that a local business had failed to double bag a large jar of kosher pickles and in the ensuing “accident” the jar of pickles was a total loss.
Herscu v Herscu: father and son in battle to the death
ReplyDeleteDavid Nason, New York correspondent | July 03, 2008
GEORGE Herscu has always known what it's like to be in dark places.
Interred in Jewish labour camps in his native Romania during World War II, he somehow managed to survive the Nazi Holocaust - an ordeal, he later said, that prepared him well for the prison sentence he served in Australia in the 1990s for bribing corrupt Queensland National Party minister Russ Hinze.
But now, at 80, Herscu has been swept into a new and deeply personal darkness in Los Angeles, the city that has been his home and his refuge since leaving Australia in 1997. The once high-flying Hooker Corporation shopping centre mogul, who made and lost $500million and was one of the big-name scalps of Queensland's Fitzgerald inquiry into corruption, is facing off against his second-eldest son, Robert, in a bitter US civil court dispute.
The case, reported here for the first time, reveals the tragic breakdown of a father-son relationship that was once extremely close and, to many, uplifting.
In 1990, Robert Herscu was the loyal young son who was proudly at his father's side for every day of the four-week bribery trial in Brisbane. When the guilty verdict was delivered, the son was so distraught he had to be comforted by the father.
Today, those memories are long gone, and the bad blood in the family is all-pervasive.
According to the allegations levelled in the case of Herscu v Herscu in the California Superior Court, Robert Herscu, 44, and his Los Angeles business associates have been systematically fleecing George Herscu for years.
Not only that - George Herscu's lawyers claim the defendants are now trying to escape justice by subjecting the frail and elderly plaintiff to so much pressure in the deposition process that he will die, an outcome that would prevent the case going to trial.
"Your clients' continued insistence on trying to push an 80-year-old man with hypertension, a heart condition, failing hearing and many other health problems into a deposition room - having already deposed him for 27 hours - is shocking and wrong," George Herscu's lawyer, Anton Jensen, wrote on April 22.
"The only conclusion one can reasonably draw from your clients' posture is that their litigation strategy involves attempting to subject George Herscu to so much stress and pressure he simply dies.
"To use the tools of discovery for this purpose is reprehensible, and indeed revolting."
Robert Herscu has branded the allegations of elder abuse false and deeply offensive.
"While George and I obviously have our differences, the fact remains that George is my father," he says in a May 1 filing.
But Robert Herscu will not let his father off the deposition hook.
George Herscu has now done 30 hours of deposition, and no end is in sight. The matters canvassed have included claims he once used to water down the beer in an Australian pub.
At another point, co-defendant Robert Ozell, Robert Herscu's business manager, allegedly placed Fitzgerald-era newspaper clippings in the plaintiff's line of sight to cause him distress.
Herscu v Herscu has been raging for nearly a year. The conflict centres on property developments the protagonists have put together since 2003.
At one level, the case is the normal fare of the civil courts - money, ego and power.
In the court documents, Robert Herscu paints his father as a meddlesome and vindictive control freak, always demanding "accountings" and ready to spend whatever is needed to "crush anyone that stands in his way".
George Herscu says his son ignores his experience in property development, and has cheated him out of millions of dollars.
Whatever the truth, many in Australia's Jewish community, especially those who feel strongly about honouring Holocaust survivors, will be troubled by the spectre of Herscu v Herscu as a fight to the death.
According to medical reports put before the court, George Herscu, who once claimed to have a 200-year contract with the Almighty, is so gravely ill he could drop dead at any time. His doctors give him virtually no chance of making it to 81.
But despite the medical testimony, Robert Herscu insists his father is fit and well. In a May 20 filing, he says: "Based on my own observations and conversations with my sister (Michelle Levine), I believe George's health at the present time has had no measurable or material impact on his activities."
The younger Herscu has accused his father of being a liar, a perjurer and a bully, and has raised at every opportunity the subject of the Fitzgerald inquiry and the conviction that George Herscu still maintains was an injustice.
Robert Herscu has even claimed his father tried to physically assault him in February 2006, over a loan dispute. "The police were summoned and I found the whole matter very upsetting, as did my staff," he said.
Culver City police records confirm a "disturbance" but nothing that warranted a report.
One matter beyond doubt is that serious money is at stake.
The court file reveals that George Herscu, supposedly penniless when he went to jail in 1990, has done an Alan Bond, rebuilding his wealth in spectacular fashion.
Today he lives in a luxury condominium and his assets total tens of millions of dollars, something that will not sit well with those who took a bath when the Herscu-controlled Hooker Corporation collapsed in 1990 in what was then the biggest corporate bankruptcy in Australian history.
George Herscu was a millionaire by the age of 30 - his fortune built through the development of shopping centres and the 1985 acquisition of the giant Hooker group for $450 million. Two years later, BRW magazine listed him as the nation's third-richest person, with a fortune of $500 million, behind Robert Holmes a Court and Kerry Packer and one place ahead of Bond, who also went to jail. He lived in a $3 million mansion in the exclusive Melbourne suburb of Toorak, and his horse Hyperno won the 1979 Melbourne Cup.
But when the banking bubble burst in the late 1990s and lenders called in their loans, the Hooker empire collapsed around him.
George Herscu's first brush with the law came in 1983 when he was put on a 12-month good behaviour bond and fined $5000 after pleading guilty to 19 counts of giving secret commissions to Builders Labourers Federation officials between 1977 and 1981. And in 1988, the Fitzgerald inquiry heard that in 1983 Herscu paid Hinze, then local government minister, $100,000 to resolve traffic difficulties associated with a shopping centre Hooker was building in Brisbane's south.
At his 1990 trial, his unsuccessful defence was that Hinze was to have used the money to buy racehorses on his behalf. Hinze died before he could be prosecuted, while Herscu has always maintained his innocence.
Herscu v Herscu has embroiled Westfield's Peter Lowy, the son of another Holocaust-surviving shopping centre developer in Frank Lowy, who was one of George Herscu's biggest moral and financial supporters in 1990.
Court documents say Peter Lowy, who heads Westfield's US operations, accompanied Robert Herscu to a meeting at George Herscu's office last year.
According to George Herscu, that makes Mr Lowy a material witness to an alleged fraud.
Mr Lowy and Robert Herscu have been doing business together for the best part of a decade, and both sit on the board of the prestigious American Jewish University. It remains to be seen whether Mr Herscu's tenure on the board can be sustained, given the nature of the allegations against him.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23986291-5006786,00.html
ReplyDeleteAUTHORITIES have asked residents not to run convicted pedophile Dennis Ferguson out of another house after he was relocated southeast of Brisbane.
The Queensland Government admits it has nowhere else to send the serial offender.
Ferguson last night was holed up on a rural property at Carbrook, 35km southeast of Brisbane, as the Government revealed it would spend $1000 a day to support his transition from prisoner to a life back in the community.
And that doesn't include the cost of police who yesterday guarded the property while residents vented their anger that Ferguson had been moved to their neighbourhood.
Ferguson fled the southwest Queensland town of Miles on Thursday following protests by furious residents.
Police Minister Judy Spence said yesterday: "I'm asking Queenslanders not to repeat the kind of scenes that we saw.
"I know that no one wants Dennis Ferguson in their community, but people have to reflect that he has to live somewhere.
"If he is hounded out of this residence, we don't have any other options to offer him."
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23988687-2703,00.html
ReplyDeleteNazi hunters seek 'Dr Death' in Chile
July 08, 2008
NAZI hunters have arrived in Chile on the trail of Aribert Heim, nicknamed Dr Death for killing hundreds of inmates at an Austrian concentration camp during World War II, who they believe may be lurking in picturesque Patagonia.
Heim, who kept the skull of a man he decapitated as a paperweight, is the most wanted Nazi war criminal still thought to be alive. He would be 94 and his family says he died in 1993.
“We are not here thinking that his capture is imminent, but we have to bolster a campaign that we launched a few months ago,” Sergio Widder, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Buenos Aires, said on his arrival in Santiago today.
Widder was accompanying Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff, who heads the Wiesenthal Centre's Jerusalem office. The centre is offering a bounty of around $US450,000 ($468,000) for Heim as part of a new drive to catch aged Nazi fugitives before they die unpunished.
Heim, an Austrian who killed hundreds of inmates at the Mauthausen concentration camp by injecting petrol or poison in their hearts, has been on the run for 46 years since evading police in Germany in 1962 prior to a planned prosecution.
A doctor with Adolf Hitler's SS, Heim removed organs from victims without anaesthetic.
Holocaust survivors remember him relishing the fear of death in his victims' eyes. After administering lethal injections, he timed death with a stopwatch.
The centre believes Heim is likely in Chilean or Argentine Patagonia, the region between the Andes and south Atlantic.
Heim's daughter lives in the scenic southern Chilean town of Puerto Montt, 1,058km south of the capital Santiago.
Hundreds of Nazis sought refuge in Latin America after World War II, many lured to Argentina thanks to the open-door policies of General Juan Domingo Peron, as well as to Chile and Brazil.
Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz, escaped to Argentina and also lived in Paraguay before he died in Brazil in 1979.
Rabbi Nochum Rosenberg
ReplyDeleteTo his honor, the great Rabbi, R’ Yitzchak Tuvia Weiss, leader of the bet din of the Edah Charedit in Yerushalayim, and the Rabbis of the BADATZ and the charedi community in Yerushalayim,
I wish to enlighten you to a story that is awesome and terrible, that in our terrible sinful state…..
It is well known that I travel the globe to fix and prepare mikvaos in order that people should be able to purify themselves for the sake of heaven. ………
I would like to testify in front of a beis din that in my sinful state, I stumbled and entered into a “gay bath house” on Friday, erev shabbos parshas metzorah….
Even though I did not do anything, rather I just saw things, it still made a gaping wound in my neshomah and I needed to travel to the mikvaos in German, Cologne, Worms etc, that have been around since the time of the rishonim, and I dipped myself in the cold water in order to remove the filth from my memory so that it shouldn’t haunt me, yet it still haunts me.
And if you wonder, how could I have done such a terrible thing, to visit a place like that, does it not say in the pasuk that ……(stay far away)and especially, me, who is involved in the purification of jews?
The answer is, this abomination was in the mikvah of Yerushaliyim the holy city, and this was the first time in 30 years that I was in Yerushalayim on shabbos, because I always go to Meiron for shabbos, And even worse, the mikvah is in the midst of the charedi communityof Geulah, in the sauna room of the mikvah, in the mikvah of Zupnik, and I didn’t know that there was there a gay bath house, rather, I thought it was a a holy mikvah, to purify the holy nation. And not, god forbid, in my stumbles, I went to be tovel my body and my spirit and I made the terrible mistake of opening the door to the sauna of the mikvah, and I saw what I saw…woe is to my eyes for the horrors that they have seen.
And this is what I saw in the sauna room of the “gay bath house”
1. 2 large darkened rooms, with meavrim tzarim
2. Sinful people, sitting there on two levels, one on top of the other, kneeling on a stone floor, and massaging one another.
3. on the lower level, …..
4. I saw many sinful people giving a hand…..
5.
I saw with my own eyes that there were small children, age seven or eight, that don’t know the taste of sin, and the sinful people would sit them on their laps, and sin with them the bitter, abominable sin of homosexuality(Molesting the children). The sin that is punished by kares and ariri, (Excummunication and early death) and they would rub the “os bris kodesh” of the children until it was hard and when I shouted in protest, they gave me a whack with…..
And this, is what I saw in the actual room of tevilah:
In the mikvah pit, they were acting with little children in a way that would even embarrass those sinners from from Sodom and Gemorah. A house of ill repute like this doesn’t exist by the Jews in any other locale in the world. (There was once a sauna in a mikvah in Williamsburg, and I fought with them until they closed it, but even there, there wasn’t depravity like there is here)
In the last 20 years, amongst the goyim, there had been a growth in the Gay bath houses of the disease of AIDS. Since then, they have shut these places down. If this place would be in America, all the participants would be in jail, and even according to the laws of the Zionist government, such a place would be closed down. But here, in the holy city of Yerushalayim, in beis zupnik, the mikvah remains open and everything is permissible.
And because of this, we are worse than the non jewish nations, even Pharoe and billam knew that god hates sexual depravity, and I fear that god will strike Jerusalem, In order that god shouldn’t have to ask forgiveness from Sodom and Gemorah, because some of the Jews in Yerushaliyim are far worse. ……
When I brought this up with many rabbis and communal activists, they told me that they knew of this sick happening, but what could they do, since it is under the hashgachah of the bedatz of the eidah charedis.
When I brought it up with the eidah charedis, they told me “what can we do, these people subsidize the mikvah for women and for actual talmidei chachamim” woe to my ears.
I answered them that you are purifying the daughters of Israel on the backs of the abominable actions of the sons of Israel…….
I begged them to close it down. I threatened that if they do not close it in the next 3 weeks, I will go to the following 3 places to complain:
1. I will go to the police, I will testify to all that I saw. I have also collected affidavits from many boys and avrechim that have been sacrificed at this sick altar. (Been abused)
2. I will go to the child abuse authorities
3. I will go to the press and tell them that there is a gay bath house that molest children in yerushalayim with the consent of the bedatz, and I will fight with all of my strength to get it closed.
And don’t try to just put a guard there, that will not suffice, such a terrible place must be closed immediately.
He then carries on in his letter about how the Gabai of Skver was raping young boys, and the rebbe knew about it, but he did nothing to stop it, because the gabai knew all of their secrets ETC….
The letter that follows, from the Bedatz, simply states, they will apoint a gaurd (Only on erev shabbos and yom tov) to make sure it doesn't happen again.
This was posted by Chaptzem last year, well before Marvin Schick attacked Hella Winston for mentioning, briefly, that haredi boys told her they had been abused in mikvas. Schick claimed this was impossible, mikvas are too public, and that Winston was, in effect, an antisemite.
Schick is a bully and a coward. If he were not, he would dedicate one of his "columns" (really paid ads in the Jewish Week) to the issue of pedophilia in the Orthodox world, and would use his bully pulpit to force the rabbis – many of them gedolim, many of them Schick's friends – to stop covering up this abuse. He could also use that forum ot apologize to Winston and to Robert Kolker, the New York Magazine journalist Schick attacked after Kolker broke the story of Rabbi Yehuda Kolko's thirty-year run of allegedly sexually abusing boys.
But, again, Schick is both a bully and a coward. He won't have the guts or the honesty to this.
I'm curious, does anyone know 'The unorthodox Jew's real name?
ReplyDelete---------------------------
I do!
Jonathan Tuttle?
ReplyDeleteA UOJ PUBLIC SERVICE MESSAGE!
ReplyDelete----------------------------
Not a Moment Too Soon, I Thought of Tim Russert
By MICHAEL BICKS
Published: July 8, 2008
Most Saturday mornings, I bicycle with a group of men, mostly in their 50s, whom I affectionately call the Cheat Death group. We are all in pretty good shape, competitive but supportive, and convinced that hard-core exercise is our ticket to postponing the inevitable.
Have you experienced a turning point that was critical to the future of your health?
The ride a few Saturdays back was a tough one. At 6:30 a.m., the pack took off fast and immediately headed for the hills near Durham, N.H. The first few climbs felt pretty good, but by the third hill I started to feel nauseated.
Figuring that was probably a result of the four beers and large Chinese dinner the night before, I kept going. Twenty-five miles into the ride, I had fallen to the back of the pack. I was short of breath and wondering how I was going to make it much farther.
I am someone who hates to quit. But after the third time the group had to stop and wait for me, I decided I had no choice. I watched them pedal away, then lay down in the grass.
I was angry and scared. For the first time my body had given out on me, and I had no clue what was going on. Besides the nausea, my only symptoms were a persistent cough and an overwhelming feeling that something was not right.
I called my wife and got a ride home.
After showering, I lay down in bed and started thinking. Though I am a 50-year-old guy with a stressful job and a little too much around the middle, I had a clean bill of health. I had good cholesterol numbers and a great doctor, and recently I had passed a cardiac stress test.
That’s when Tim Russert popped into my head. In the last couple of weeks, like almost every middle-age man, I had taken a very personal interest in every detail of his story. Yes, he was overweight. But hadn’t he just passed a stress test?
That’s when the light went on. I bolted out of bed, went to the computer and Googled “How do you know you are having a heart attack?” The first Web site that popped up was a list of warning signs from the American Heart Association. As I read on, I started to sweat.
“Nausea.” Check.
“Shortness of breath.” Check.
“Chest discomfort.” Perhaps, though it really didn’t feel like much.
Ignoring the Web site’s advice to call 911 (I was too vain to have an ambulance pull up to my house), I drove to the hospital.
When I stepped up to admissions desk the nurse asked why I was there. “Mild chest pains,” I said. “How old?” she asked. “Fifty,” I replied.
She nonchalantly turned to the orderly and said, “Hey, Lenny, we got another one.” I guess many men, stunned by Mr. Russert’s sudden death, were doing just the same thing I was.
A doctor attached some wires to my body and conducted a quick EKG. “Mr. Bicks,” he said minutes later, “you are suffering a heart attack.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he answered, then produced those squiggly lines on the graph paper. I swore. Then I called my wife and I started to cry.
This is one of those times that defines your life, like the death of a parent or the birth of a child. In a split-second, you cross the invisible “before and after” line and realize that nothing is ever going to be the same. For that moment my life had been removed from my hands. But I kept thinking, I’m supposed to be invulnerable. I’d passed a stress test, drank red wine, used a lot of olive oil, exercised like an insane person. This could not possibly be happening to me.
The doctor took out a large needle full of a sedative. The rest is a blur: a trip in an ambulance to a larger hospital, sirens blaring, an hour on the table in a cath lab, a stent implanted to open the blocked artery, my wife crawling tearfully into my bed to give me a hug, a doctor showing me before-and-after pictures of my artery, and losing his temper when I asked when I might return to work.
As in Tim Russert’s case, there were no warning signs. No sign I was suffering from coronary artery disease. A piece of plaque in one of my arteries just broke off and created a massive blood clot. When it did, I suffered a severe heart attack. If I had not gone to the hospital, I might very well have died.
Because at the right moment I thought of Tim Russert, I am one of the lucky ones. I get to hug my wife and my kids, understand how wonderful my friends are and realize exactly how much I love my life. It is a debt I can never repay.
Michael Bicks produces documentaries for ABC News.
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteUOJ's real name is EMES. So that you will know why you are having such agita over his words.
Arthur,
Have you seen the articles on the slab from pre-Yoshke times. It's true, all fiction has some basis in fact.
"Arthur,
ReplyDeleteHave you seen the articles on the slab from pre-Yoshke times. It's true, all fiction has some basis in fact."
Please enlighten me about the above statement.I really have no idea what your referring to.
Anon 10:51
ReplyDeleteThat's very funny...I guess there aren't too many M*A*S*H* fans reading UOJ.
We can just keep it between us then.