Guest post by RaP
An urgent appeal to parents of frum girls in the English-speaking world:
HOW ATTENDING SEMINARIES IN ISRAEL BY FRUM GIRLS CONTRIBUTES TO THEIR 'SHIDDUCH CRISIS' OR, WHY YOU MUST STOP SUPPORTING SEMINARISTAN!
Dear parents, you are being taken for the rides of your lives by the owners of seminaries in Israel who treat them as pure cash-cows rather than getting real jobs for themselves, and by unscrupulous rabbis who need to breed and brainwash innocent frum girls into thinking that they "need" to become ultra-frum zombies in order to marry and support full-time Torah learning boys which most of the girls will never do!
Think of this: Do your fellow frum parents in Israel ever dream of sending their daughters away from home to far away America, which surely lots of the girls would love as fully-paid one year vacations in American seminaries as some sort of "higher" preparation in life for some "higher" calling of getting to know the world in order to know how to better live in it?
Obviously NOT!!!
So why have you dear English-speaking parents fallen into this trap and craze of offering up your daughters on altars of tourism and fun-seeking, which is all that the year in Israel will amount to for your daughter at the end of the day, when the same type of parents like yourselves in Israel would never in a thousand years even dream in the middle of the night to pack up all their daughters as they graduate high school and ship them off the equal distance you do but in reverse, to America, where they could after all learn about the special Torah-lifestyle of American religious Jews which so many admire and speak so highly of in Israel?!
So you will say, there is the Kosel and the Kever Rochel over there! Great! But there is also big city life, traffic, shopping malls, and the same or better level of technology there. It's a concrete jungle like anywhere else. You think there aren't holy places and graves of holy people to visit in America? There are plenty of famous righteous roshei yeshiva and rebbes buried in America! There are plenty of holy sites in USA Jewish cities and cemeteries in New York, Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, Los Angeles, etc!
What? All of a sudden Boro Park, Lakewood, Monroe, Monsey, Flatbush, Golders Green etc are not "holy" enough for you? You think Bnai Brak, Meah Shearim, Bayit Vegan, Har Nof etc are better for your daughter? Sure Eretz Yisrael is the true Holy Land. If it is so important then YOU go live there! When your daughter gets married let her move there with her husband as a couple. Why does she need to be there as a single girl as if in a movie of a "Roman Holiday" as if she was an "Audrey Hepburn" lehavdil having a ball!
You know why the Israeli parents don't send their daughters, or their sons, to learn in the good old USA??
Because they are NOT STUPID!! They are not idiots about money! Do you know what Israeli Charedi Jews of all kinds do for their daughters instead?? You know quite well if you think about it... they don't ship them off anywhere, they keep their precious blood and flesh virgins at home, but they do go about RAISING MONEY FROM YOU to make sure they can buy a new apartment ("dira") for their daughter/s when she gets married, they raise and save money to make sure that the apartment/s their daughter's will live in soon enough as they get married at 17, 18 or 19, 20 the latest, will have furniture, linens, dishes, pots and pans and all the appliances like washing machines and ovens and refrigerators and all that's needed by a young newly-wed couple to get going in life. Most importantly they make sure that their daughters will be mentally and practically prepared for the hard chores and realities of marriage!!!
No chalomos only tachlis!
Because they are NOT STUPID!! They are not idiots about money! Do you know what Israeli Charedi Jews of all kinds do for their daughters instead?? You know quite well if you think about it... they don't ship them off anywhere, they keep their precious blood and flesh virgins at home, but they do go about RAISING MONEY FROM YOU to make sure they can buy a new apartment ("dira") for their daughter/s when she gets married, they raise and save money to make sure that the apartment/s their daughter's will live in soon enough as they get married at 17, 18 or 19, 20 the latest, will have furniture, linens, dishes, pots and pans and all the appliances like washing machines and ovens and refrigerators and all that's needed by a young newly-wed couple to get going in life. Most importantly they make sure that their daughters will be mentally and practically prepared for the hard chores and realities of marriage!!!
No chalomos only tachlis!
Not so you and your daughter as you prepare to send her off to Israel for a year. First you put your daughters' minds out of commission by getting them all hyped up about a fancy all-expenses-paid-year-vacation-and-tour in far off Israel. You spend your money on travel agents and tickets, on massive deposits and tuitions to the greedy and rapacious (in more than one sense) owners of the seminaries, you waste your money on buying your daughter fall wardrobes, winter wardrobes, and then for the spring and next summer, after all she cannot wear just two or three dresses that Yerushalmi girls wear because those Yerushalmi girls are neither spoiled nor stupid, they know that if their parents are smart and able they are saving every penny up to buy her an apartment that costs a few hundred thousand dollars in Israel.
Let's face it, any girl is at her physical prime when she turns 17, 18, 19. By the time she turns 20 she is already a young woman and no longer a child. Parents like yourself in Israel of frum girls KNOW this. They know that because for MARRIAGE to be the real goal it is important to get your daughter into shidduchim EARLIER and NOT later!! By you sending her off to Israel at 18, and prior to that at 17 she is already day-dreaming about going to Israel, then getting all that baloney stuffed into her brain when she is 18 or 19, she then comes home to the USA at 20 and is ready ...for...what?... exactly???
She needs another year to DE-PROGRAM from Israel if she can even do that. If she wants to stay on in Israel and make Aliyah then kol hakavod to her! But you won't let her, right?
So it's all a big tease for her and a self-made disaster for you! So let's say she spends her eighteenth or nineteenth year in Israel, which means she has to then spend her subsequent nineteenth or twentieth year depressurizing from the high she is on to get back to real life in America. During all this time she has taken herself out of the shidduch market when she could be using the best years of her life, with your help of course, to find her bashert, but because you have enabled her to become a high-roller she is not prepared for life or marriage. Her first "encounter" with life is that she got a one year vacation in Israel that is NOT a preparation for marriage, motherhood, running a home, facing childbirth and children, managing a budget, shopping and on top of that maybe even take a job.
So no wonder many girls fear marriage! They don't want the responsibilities of real-life in the real-world because they have been programmed for something else to be in space where all the idealism in the world doesn't help anyone run a day to day home with its regular humdrum routines.
So no wonder so many girls are single, or in massive new numbers now they get divorced because they don't have a clue about marriage and real responsibility and self-sacrifice. And sadly many of their husbands, bochurim and singles in yeshivas are also clueless and spoiled by the unreality of their upbringing and lifestyle!
More and more of your daughters are opting to remain single and are not finding good dates, into their late 20s, 30s and even 40s, just read all the Jewish magazines like Mishpacha and AMI for all the stories about this stuff that everyone is shouting about but not solving! Some become lesbians (she may have been inducted into this by her "FRUM" girlfriends in the seminaries!), some drop out of formal Yiddishkeit and some, well it's just a nightmare that goes under the heading of "SHIDDUCH CRISIS" and the related "OFF THE DERECH" (OTD) plague, all from good intentions by nice people like YOU who enabled it!
More and more of your daughters are opting to remain single and are not finding good dates, into their late 20s, 30s and even 40s, just read all the Jewish magazines like Mishpacha and AMI for all the stories about this stuff that everyone is shouting about but not solving! Some become lesbians (she may have been inducted into this by her "FRUM" girlfriends in the seminaries!), some drop out of formal Yiddishkeit and some, well it's just a nightmare that goes under the heading of "SHIDDUCH CRISIS" and the related "OFF THE DERECH" (OTD) plague, all from good intentions by nice people like YOU who enabled it!
Before your daughter flies off to Israel on that shiny El Al plane, you will have to buy fancy new suitcases for the princess's trip to Israel, she can't travel or be seen with your or her old worn-out travel bags. She will then pack her bags with every last hairconditioner, shampoo, makeup, fancy lingerie, expensive shoes, stockings, and even lots of foods and toiletries that she has heard are not to be had in the Holy Land or are just too inferior for her royal highness's royal derriere! Can you imagine Israeli frum parents doing this for THEIR daughters? Never in a million years! All your Israeli counterparts and their daughters are thinking is "A dira (apartment), A dira, A dira" every penny must be saved for the Chasuna and the all important Dira!
What kind of preparation is it for life that your daughters start out with the expectation that you "owe" them a year in Israel for fun and games? What have they done to deserve this? And why do they deserve or need this year in Israel experience? Have you wasted all your tuition money on the twelve years of schooling your daughter should have had until now? What was missing from the chinuch and Torah education she received from her local bais yaakov and Jewish day school that she still "needs" a year in Israel? How come the same type of girls in Israel don't "need" or get or are entitled to a free year of study in America? Don't you get what a rip-off you are being subjected to?
Not just that but with the current sexual abuse scandal in the four seminaries owned by Elimelech Meisels a veil of lies and hypocrisy have been ripped from this whole seminary charade, that there are plenty of sexual predators and their enablers who own, man and prowl the seminaries. They can be anyone from the head honcho rabbi like Elimelech Meisels, his co-rabbis, his lady employees and even fellow-students who because they are under an evil spell become typical groupies as if they were in a "Charles Manson" cult and will at times join in the cult-leader's depravities, protect the cult-leader from outside accusations out of a sense of false loyalty, and cover up for him as if they were protecting a mafia don.
This is where you want to send your daughters?
And in Israel the people who run seminaries and "inspire" the girls are all ideological nut-jobs that would never get such jobs in the USA where parents can and should supervise their kids, and even then it's not failsafe, but if you are a good parent and your daughter lives at home and is loyal to you and the family you should be able to have a better handle to prevent and stop any trouble. If you can't do it at home, then oy, how will you do it or how will it get done five thousand plus miles away in far off Seminaristan!
But you poor dear parents have become slaves to an idea that you do not need, that you do subscribe to really and that in the end works quickly against you as your daughter with her idealistic American energy and idealism is viewed as a lump of clay to be over-written and over-ridden (in other senses sometimes as well) and have her true personality erased and an artificial crazy persona installed that says like a dummy "I want a Kollel guy, I want a Kollel, I want a Kollel guy" as if she was now in need of life-support and an elixir of life. Just how crazy is that?
But you poor dear parents have become slaves to an idea that you do not need, that you do subscribe to really and that in the end works quickly against you as your daughter with her idealistic American energy and idealism is viewed as a lump of clay to be over-written and over-ridden (in other senses sometimes as well) and have her true personality erased and an artificial crazy persona installed that says like a dummy "I want a Kollel guy, I want a Kollel, I want a Kollel guy" as if she was now in need of life-support and an elixir of life. Just how crazy is that?
P.S.
In case you think that the latest seminary scandal has died down, it has not, if anything it has moved into an even more serious phase as lawyers have gotten involved in addition to all the rabbis and dayanim and batei din. See this quote from recent correspondence that has been published on the Internet:
"SPECIAL BEIS DIN
Chicago, IL
September 4, 2014
Re: Pninim, Binas Bais Yaakov, Chedvas Bais Yaakov, & Keser Chaya
Dear Aron Twersky Esq:
Dear Aron Twersky Esq:
We write in response to the questions that you, as attorney for the seminaries identified above...Between mid-April and mid-May 2014, former students of seminaries associated with Elimelech Meisels...alleged, and subsequently testified before the Beis Din, that she had been the victim of inappropriate conduct including unwanted physical contact of a sexual nature, by Meisels.
The Beis Din then summoned Meisels to appear, which he did. Meisels ultimately confessed before the Beis Din to the victims allegations of misconduct. He also confessed to having engaged in other misconduct, and prepared...a list of multiple additional victims. Some of the misconduct to which he confessed constitutes to our understanding 'sexual violence' as that term is understood in the context of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 ('Title IX'), 20 U.S.C. 1681 et seq.
The Beis Din also received evidence...that some staff members (i) were aware of both specific instances of misconduct and, more generally, gross violations of the norms of behavior in seminaries, and (ii) enabled this behavior by failing to take action to stop it...
Sincerely,
Rabbi Gedalia Dov Shwartz
Senior Dayan
cc:
Touro College
Hebrew Theological College"
The above is just a small fraction from a lengthy four page letter that details the horrors of the four seminaries fiasco under (ha!) Elimelech Meisels!
These seminaries, and no doubt many if not all the others are actually more like stealthy hushed up frat houses and no better than a covert covered up coed dorm at secular colleges where there are NO real barriers between sexual interactions between the male and female students be it heterosexual or homosexual.
So please dear parents, think it over, and ask yourselves how you came to buy into such a destructive and sick system?
It's time to put the covert wild west culture of the Seminaristans out of action.
Build schools and programs for your daughters in your home cities! You can then sit on the board of directors. Watch your daughters' progress first hand. SAVE MONEY FOR WEDDINGS and APARTMENTS for your daughters LIKE THE ISRAELI FRUM PARENTS DO (they're not stupid!) and get her to start dating earlier that will save her and you lots of years of tears and agony in the long run!
Remember:
The road to hell is paved with good intentions !