Friday, April 30, 2021

אתה לא צריך להיות פיזיקאי כדי לדעת שאתה לא יכול להכניס 100,000 אנשים למרחב שיכול להכיל רק 10,000 איש מקסימום------For more than a decade there have been concerns and warnings that the religious site on Mount Meron in northern Israel was not equipped to handle tens of thousands of pilgrims. In 2008 and 2011, reports by the state comptroller at the time warned of the potential for calamity there.

 שוב, הטיפשים בהנהגה מעמידים את חסידיהם בדרך המוות

Israel Mourns After a Religious Festival Turns Into Disaster

There were warnings for years that the venue on Mount Meron, where 45 people died in a stampede, could not handle tens of thousands of pilgrims.

 

Israeli security officials and rescuers carrying the bodies of victims who died during a festival on Mount Meron in northern Israel on Friday.
Credit...Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press

JERUSALEM — As Israelis mourned on Friday the 45 people trampled to death during a pilgrimage that drew tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews, questions were already arising about poor planning and possible negligence.

For more than a decade there have been concerns and warnings that the religious site on Mount Meron in northern Israel was not equipped to handle tens of thousands of pilgrims. In 2008 and 2011, reports by the state comptroller at the time warned of the potential for calamity there.

“We will conduct a thorough, serious and deep investigation to ensure such a disaster does not happen again,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged on a visit to the site on Friday. He called for a national day of mourning on Sunday.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews looking at belongings left behind at the site of the crush on Friday.
Credit...Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press

Even for a country accustomed to the trauma of wars and terrorist attacks, this counted as one of the worst disasters in Israeli history.

Israel has been wracked by religious-secular tensions, particularly over the last year during the pandemic, amid widespread anger over what many here viewed as a disregard for regulations and displays of autonomy by parts of the ultra-Orthodox community. The disaster early Friday largely united the country in shock and grief, but it also underlined some of the divisions plaguing this society.

Up to 100,000 people were crammed onto the mountain late Thursday, most having arrived on organized buses to celebrate the holiday. The festivities turned to horror about an hour after midnight, when scores of adults and children were crushed and suffocated in an overcrowded, narrow passageway that turned into a death trap, according to witnesses.

The crush occurred after celebrants poured out of one section of the mountainside compound, down some steps and into the passageway, which had a sloping metal floor. Some people at the front fainted or slipped, causing a bottleneck, witnesses said, and setting off what witnesses described as a “human avalanche.”

One of the injured, Chaim Vertheimer, said that the passageway was slippery from spilled water and grape juice.

“For some reason, there was sudden pressure at this point and people stopped. But more people kept coming down,” Mr. Vertheimer told the Hebrew news site Ynet, speaking from his hospital bed. “People were not breathing. I remember hundreds of people screaming ‘I can’t breathe’.”

Another of the injured, Dvir Cohen, said a large number of people were trying to leave at once.

“There was a staircase where the first people tripped and everyone just trampled them. I was in the second row of people,” he said. “People trampled on me, hundreds of them.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the site on Friday.
Credit...Pool photo by Ronen Zvulun

Minutes earlier, thousands of men had been bobbing and swaying on the bleachers in time to music. The Israeli authorities had placed no restrictions on the number of attendees, despite warnings by some health officials about the risk of Covid-19 transmission.

Though the sight of so many people gathered together and unmasked may be jarring to most of the world, life in Israel has returned almost to normal in recent weeks after a successful national vaccination drive.

The majority of the adult population is fully vaccinated. But many in the crowds were under the age of 16 and not yet eligible for vaccination.

It was the largest single gathering in Israel since the start of the pandemic.

By Friday afternoon, many of the dead had been identified and families were rushing to bury them before the start of the Sabbath at sundown. According to Israeli news media, at least two of the victims came from the United States and one from Canada.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews attend a ceremony by Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai’s grave on Friday on Mount Meron, Israel.
Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

The compound on Mount Meron includes several large gathering grounds with bleachers and stages, connected by a series of alleyways and paths.

The 2008 comptroller report said that all building additions and changes made to the pilgrimage site had been done without the approval of the local and district planning and building committees.

“There are no grounds for permitting the current situation to continue,” one comptroller report said.

The comptroller’s office said that special danger was posed by the access roads and paths, which “are narrow and not appropriate to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of people who visit the site.” It was along one of those paths where witnesses said the crush of people began.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews gathering at Mount Meron on Thursday.
Credit...Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mount Meron is near the Sea of Galilee and the mystical city of Safed. The annual gathering there comes on a holiday, Lag b’Omer, that is linked in Jewish tradition to the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans in the second century A.D., and for many ultra-Orthodox Jews, it is a highlight of the Hebrew calendar.

But the celebrations were strictly curtailed last year because of the pandemic, with few people allowed to attend.

Large numbers of ultra-Orthodox and traditional Jews make the pilgrimage to the mountain for days of festivities. They light bonfires around the grave site of a second-century sage, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, in the hope that they will receive his blessings on the anniversary of his death.

Despite the warnings that the infrastructure could not safely bear large crowds, one former official, Shlomo Levy, who had chaired the Upper Galilee Regional Council, said he had come under political pressure to cancel a warrant he had issued in 2008 to close the tomb compound because of safety concerns.

Mr. Levy told Kan, Israel’s public radio, that the public security minister at the time told him he was afraid to touch the site and that it was a “hot potato.”

That wariness stems from the disproportionate political power long held by ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel’s coalition system. The ultra-Orthodox have been crucial members of successive Netanyahu-led governing coalitions.

Yossi Elituv, the editor of the ultra-Orthodox Mishpacha magazine, said on Twitter that the ultra-Orthodox community needed “to learn some lessons.” The compound should be taken out of the hands of private religious trusts and associations, he said, and should be run by official state authorities.

Relations between the ultra-Orthodox community and the Israeli mainstream have come under particular strain during the pandemic, as parts of the religious public flouted lockdown regulations and the government and police were often lax in enforcing them.

But in a show of national unity on Friday, Israelis across the nation lined up to donate blood for the injured in response to a call by the emergency services.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/world/middleeast/israel-stampede.html

And now a lesson in Dikduk - Hebrew Grammar....


What's the Reason for Hebrew's Mixed-Up Genders?

Quite a few masculine and feminine Hebrew words, when pluralized, take the form of the opposite gender. Why?

 

From “Angelus Novus” by Paul Klee, 1920.

From “Angelus Novus” by Paul Klee, 1920.


“All inflected languages have irregularly declined nouns; that’s quite common. But I wonder if in Hebrew there is an idea that is embedded in particular irregularities. For instance, why is so essentially masculine a word as avot [fathers] pluralized in a feminine way, or so essentially feminine a word as nashim [women] pluralized in a masculine way? Is there a reason for this?”

The gender and the plural forms of Hebrew nouns, and the relation between the two things, can indeed be both puzzling and exasperating. The two examples cited demonstrate why. The Hebrew word for “father” is av and the Hebrew word for “woman” is ishah; the Hebrew masculine plural ending is –im and the feminine plural ending is –ot; logically speaking, therefore, “fathers” should be avim and “women” should be ishot. And yet, as Silver observes, it’s exactly the other way around. (The plural transformation of the first syllable of ishah from i- to na- is a different sort of anomaly that will be dealt with further on.) What’s going on? And why is it that these exceptions should occur precisely in words whose meanings actively include maleness and femaleness?

Gender itself can be unpredictable in most or all of the languages of which it is a central feature. (In many languages, such as English, it is of little or no importance.) Why is the sun, le soleil, masculine in French while the moon, la lune, is feminine? It cannot be because there is, to the human mind, something inherently male about the one and female about the other, because in German, die Sonne, the sun, is feminine and der Mond, the moon, is masculine. And although there are formal criteria that may determine the gender of French nouns—most ending with an “e,” like lune, are feminine while most ending with a consonant, like soleil, are masculine—there are plenty of counterexamples, such as feminine mer, sea, and masculine nuage, cloud. In both French and German, the gender of many nouns has no obvious relationship to their meaning, sound, or structure and must simply be learned, whether by the college student or the prattling infant.

Hebrew, which is even more heavily gendered than German or French, since its verbs also come in masculine and feminine forms, is no different in this respect. Although it does, like French and German, exhibit certain regular patterns, the gender of many of its nouns appears to be arbitrary. There is no discernible reason why a word like ḥerev, “sword,” should be feminine while its rhyme-word erev, “evening,” is masculine, or why tsinor, “pipe,” should be masculine when tsipor, “bird,” is feminine. Moreover, Hebrew nouns have an additional complication not found in French or German, which is that their plural forms are gendered, too. Thus, pluralized ḥerev. besides undergoing an internal vowel shift, takes the feminine suffix of –ot, so that “swords” is ḥaravot, while erev takes the masculine suffix of –im and “evenings” is aravim.

Brockelmann’s theory, stripped down here to its barest essentials, is but one; there are others. All have their strengths and weaknesses, their challengers and defenders; all draw their evidence from morphological and grammatical details in half-a-dozen or more Semitic languages, and none enjoys wide scholarly acceptance. Meanwhile, you’ll just have to learn these things by heart. And if you’re wondering what is the plural of the masculine Hebrew noun for “heart,” lev, it happens to be l’vavot.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/arts-culture/2021/04/whats-the-reason-for-hebrews-mixed-up-genders/?utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter%20Segment&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter%202021-04-28%20%28SrUEwy%29&_ke=eyJrbF9jb21wYW55X2lkIjogIkw4N0NHaCIsICJrbF9lbWFpbCI6ICJjZW9AZGlhbW9uZGNhcmQubmV0In0%3D

Thursday, April 29, 2021

Eli Weisel's Family Very Short Memory --- “My father’s faith was a tremendous part of who he was,” Wiesel’s son, Elisha Wiesel, told The Algemeiner. “I hope those attending the various faith-based services at the National Cathedral will remember him as both a passionately proud American and as a man whose faith drove him to champion human rights and the telling of stories that need to be told. Our family is deeply appreciative to the Cathedral for making him part of their institutional consciousness.”


‘A Man Whose Faith Drove Him to Champion Human Rights’: Stone Carving of Elie Wiesel Added to Washington National Cathedral


The stone carving of Elie Wiesel that has been added to at

 Washington National Cathedral.


A stone carving of the late Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel has been added to the Washington National Cathedral’s Human Rights Porch to honor Wiesel’s “legacy as a lifelong human rights defender dedicated to combating indifference and intolerance,” the house of worship announced on Wednesday.

The Human Rights Porch features carvings of historical human rights-defenders, including Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks, Jonathan Daniels and Eleanor Roosevelt. While there are many representations of Jewish biblical figures in the Cathedral,  Wiesel is the first person from the modern-day Jewish community to featured in the house of prayer. The hand-carved sculpture was put in place by the Cathedral’s stonemasons and created with the involvement of the Wiesel family.

“My father’s faith was a tremendous part of who he was,” Wiesel’s son, Elisha Wiesel, told The Algemeiner. “I hope those attending the various faith-based services at the National Cathedral will remember him as both a passionately proud American and as a man whose faith drove him to champion human rights and the telling of stories that need to be told. Our family is deeply appreciative to the Cathedral for making him part of their institutional consciousness.”

The announcement was made in conjunction with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.

A team of US envoys is traveling to the Middle East this week for talks with key allies, a senior...

Born in Romania in 1928, Wiesel was a survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. His father, mother and sister were killed in the camps, and he detailed the horrors of the Holocaust in his autobiographical novel “Night.” He authored 57 books, was a vocal advocate for human rights causes around the world, and served as a professor at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was the founding chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and received numerous prestigious awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal. He died in 2016 of natural causes.

The Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, dean of Washington National Cathedral, said, “From the depths of cruelty inflicted on him, his family, and so many millions of Jews and others during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel went on to dedicate his life to the pursuit of human rights, and to heed the lessons of history. We are humbled to welcome his likeness to the Cathedral, and pray that his example and legacy will be a blessing and an inspiration to all who enter.”

“Throughout his life, Elie devoted himself tirelessly to preserving the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and working to ensure that other communities do not suffer the same fate,” said Marion Wiesel, Wiesel’s widow and vice president of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. “Not only does his presence in the National Cathedral memorialize his life and honor his commitment to human rights; it also ensures that new generations will learn from his teachings and carry the lessons of his life forward into the future.”

The Wiesel carving was sculpted by North Carolina artist Chas Fagan, a member of the US Commission on Fine Arts whose other works include the official White House portrait of First Lady Barbara Bush; statues of Ronald Reagan and Billy Graham at the US Capitol; and a statue of Pope John Paul II at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington.

A dedication of the bust will take place in fall 2021 as part of a program the Cathedral will launch — in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity — to celebrate Wiesel’s legacy.

The cathedral is part of the Episcopal Church but aims to be “a house of prayer for all people and a sacred space for the nation to gather,” it said in a statement.

****************************************************

What We Believe

We Episcopalians believe in a loving, liberating, and life-giving God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As constituent members of the Anglican Communion in the United States, we are descendants of and partners with the Church of England and the Scottish Episcopal Church, and are part of the third largest group of Christians in the world.

We believe in following the teachings of Jesus Christ, whose life, death, and resurrection saved the world.

We have a legacy of inclusion, aspiring to tell and exemplify God’s love for every human being; women and men serve as bishops, priests, and deacons in our church. Laypeople and clergy cooperate as leaders at all levels of our church. Leadership is a gift from God, and can be expressed by all people in our church, regardless of sexual identity or orientation.

We believe that God loves you – no exceptions.

 

The Role of the Churches in Nazi Germany

Compliance and Confrontation

Churches throughout Europe were mostly silent while Jews were persecuted, deported and murdered by the Nazis.  Churches, especially those  in Nazi Germany, sought to act, as institutions tend to do, in their own best interests -- narrowly defined, short-sighted interests.

The list of "bystanders" -- those who declined to challenge the Third Reich in any way -- that emerges from any study of the Holocaust is long and depressing. Few organizations, in or outside Nazi Germany, did much to resist Nazism or aid its victims.

[I]t has become abundantly clear that [the Churches'] failure to respond to the horrid events...was not due to ignorance; they knew what was happening. Ultimately, the Churches' lapses during the Nazi era were lapses of vision and determination.

Assisting European Jews was not a high priority of the Allied governments as they sought to defeat Hitler militarily. The courageous acts of individual rescuers and resistance members proved to be the exception, not the norm.

To a great extent, this inertia defined the organized Christian community as well. Churches throughout Europe were mostly silent while Jews were persecuted, deported and murdered. In Nazi Germany in September 1935, there were a few Christians in the Protestant Confessing Church who demanded that their Church take a public stand in defense of the Jews. Their efforts, however, were overruled by Church leaders who wanted to avoid any conflict with the Nazi regime. Internationally, some Church leaders in Europe and North America did condemn the Nazis' measures against the Jews, and there were many debates about how Christians outside Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied territory should best respond to Hitler's brutal policies. These discussions, however, tended to become focused more on secondary strategic considerations -- like maintaining good relations with colleagues in the German Churches -- than on the central humanitarian issues that were really at stake.

 READ MORE:

https://www.adl.org/news/op-ed/role-of-churches-nazi-germany

Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Oy Vey! Now The Reform Giant? Gedolim Aint What It Used To Be...No Kidding!

 

Reform rabbinic giant disciplined for inappropriate relationships now accused of ‘sexually predatory behavior’

A senior leader of the Reform movement whose rabbinic privileges were briefly suspended two decades ago for “personal relationships” that violated ethical codes in fact sexually harassed or assaulted at least three women, including one who was a minor when the misconduct began, an independent investigation by Manhattan’s Central Synagogue has found.

Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, who was senior rabbi at Central from 1972 to 1985, resigned his position as president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 2000 after the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis ruled that his relationships had broken its rules. But neither CCAR or HUC provided details of the misconduct at the time, leaving the impression that Zimmerman had simply had consensual affairs, and he went on to serve as vice president of the Birthright Israel program and rabbi of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons.

Now, lawyers hired by Central have found credible evidence that Zimmerman engaged in “sexually predatory” behavior and used the philosopher Martin Buber’s I/Thou theology, which describes the relationship between man and the divine, as a way to justify his sexual behavior, according to a letter sent to congregants Tuesday afternoon.

“We are devastated that a member of our clergy could abuse our (or any) pulpit and position of power within our community the way that Rabbi Zimmerman did,” said the letter, which is signed by Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, Central’s senior rabbi, as well as its executive director and board president. “This was a gross manipulation of his spiritual authority.”

Nancy Levy, who taught at Central Synagogue’s youth program in 1974, told the Forward in an interview that she was manipulated into a sexual relationship with Zimmerman, who was her boss.

“How could he have done this as a rabbi? How could he have trapped us with the ‘I/Thou?’” Levy, now 74, said in an emotional phone interview. “He so misused Buber’s words,” she added. “He told me he was looking to get to God through me.

“It’s just like the Catholic priests — he used religion to justify his predation and tore down Judaism and a part of me in the process.”

The lead investigator hired by Central Synagogue confirmed that a second victim was 15 years old and a member of Central Synagogue’s youth group when Zimmerman first struck up a relationship with her in 1970. According to the investigator, the woman was 17 when Zimmerman first began to fondle and kiss her.

Central’s letter to congregants said that it would continue to investigate any new allegations of women who come forward, review its policies and procedures around sexual misconduct, and, in the next two months ”make necessary adjustment” to ensure that Rabbi Zimmerman’s tenure in the community not be “lauded” in its building, archives or website.

“We have to challenge ourselves as a congregation to speak the truth and to never let any of us be bystanders,” the letter said. “May we walk forward with humility, repentance, and a determination to never allow the leadership positions of our community to be perverted or misused.”

Rabbi Zimmerman now lives outside Dallas, where he was senior rabbi of Temple Emanuel from 1985 to 1996, and where he is listed on the website as teaching a Kabbalah course. He did not respond to requests for comment.

The revelations about Rabbi Zimmerman have prompted a review of policies around sexual misconduct not only at Central but also at HUC and CCAR. They come amid a broader reckoning over sexual harassment and assault at HUC and the world of Jewish Studies after some scholars attempted earlier this year to help the sociologist Steven M. Cohen, who was shunned by the Jewish world after five women accused him of misconduct in 2018, re-enter academic discussion circles.

CCAR, the Reform movement’s rabbinical organization and the body that originally sanctioned Zimmerman in 2000, said in a statement on Tuesday that it had moved five months ago to conduct “an audit and assessment of our ethics system” and promised that review would “result in meaningful change.” The statement called the revelations about Zimmerman “devastating” and said it sparked “institutional self-reflection” over the group’s original investigation of his behavior.

“When a rabbi misuses the power and trust of their title, we are all harmed,” said the statement, signed by the organization’s president and chief executive. “We know that we are at an inflection point. We know, too, that our commitment to real change means that there is difficult but necessary work ahead. The road in front of us will not be easy, but the safety and well-being of the communities our rabbis serve is a priority.

An HUC spokesperson said the rabbinical college had decided this month to engage an independent law firm to conduct a review and analysis of allegations relating to sexual misconduct and gender bias. This follows the creation in January 2020 of a presidential task force to address instances of harassment and bias.

Andrew Rehfeld, president of HUC, wrote in an April 23 email to faculty, staff, students, alumni and board members that the new investigation would be “thorough,” “impartial” and “undertaken with thoughtfulness and urgency,” promising more specific details “in the weeks ahead.”

“Our board and administration is really distressed by the accounts coming forward,” Jeanie Rosensaft, the HUC spokesperson, said in an interview. “We’re committed to ensuring the wellbeing, dignity and respect of every individual in our community,” she added. We are seeking to hear people’s truths and we are seeking teshuva with thoughtfulness and urgency.”

Levy, telling her story publicly for the first time, said in the interview that the inappropriate relationship with Rabbi Zimmerman began in 1974 and took a turn one day in the fall of 1975 when he called her and said he was coming over to her apartment after dropping his wife off at the airport.

“Then, I knew he was going to ask me to have sex — that he intended to consummate what had been going on,” she recalled. When Zimmerman arrived, Levy said, the two of them got undressed but did not have sex because Zimmerman was unable to have an erection.

“He told me then that I was the only person he’d ever done this with before aside from a nun,” she recalled. “In my mind, I was like, this is really weird.”

Levy said Zimmerman continued to try and reach out to her after the incident in her apartment, but she declined his overtures, quit her teaching position at the synagogue and parted ways with Reform Judaism, working instead as an educator at a church in Manhattan.

“I would be seriously surprised if I could ever affiliate with the institution of Judaism again after what happened,” she said. “I can go there for my mother’s yahrtzeit and for all the members of my family whose names are on those plaques,” she said, referring to Central Synagogue. “But after being made to feel so unsafe in that place, my relationship with that synagogue and my Judaism is permanently damaged.”

Levy spurred Central’s investigation last fall when she decided to come forward with her never-before-heard allegations against Zimmerman after happening upon a Rosh Hashanah Zoom service led by Buchdahl. “In her drasha, Rabbi Buchdahl spoke about confronting racism in our community,” Levy recalled. “Even though I hadn’t thought about Shelly for years — decades — it all came rushing to the surface. I realized it was my turn to confront the injustice that I had experienced, as our nation confronts its own legacy of slavery and racism.”

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism said he was “profoundly saddened to learn of the painful violations endured” by members of the movement.

“Sexual misconduct has no place in our houses of worship, where our holiest ethical teachings should be lived by all especially by our clergy who care for us at the most vulnerable moments in our lives,” Jacobs said in an emailed statement.

“Our Jewish tradition is unyielding in holding all of us responsible to create safe environments where the culture of respect prevails and where there is openness to hear - and address - the failings of our leaders,” he added. “We will not rest until every space within the Reform Movement is safe and those culpable are held accountable.”

Rabbi Buchdahl said in an interview that she felt “morally compelled” to investigate after Levy came forward, followed by two other women who shared their experiences and what she described as “the lasting harm.”

“Their stories were devastating and our investigation deemed their accounts to be credible,” she noted. “We asked these women directly what could bring any measure of closure or healing, and they shared how important it would be for us to make the past public so there is no sense that a transgression this serious can be swept under the rug by the wider Jewish community.”

Part of that reckoning will include “amending” Rabbi Zimmerman’s legacy at Central “to reflect the entire truth of his rabbinate,” said Rabbi Buchdahl.

“As painful as the reckoning may be, it is necessary for any religious institution to face its history in full. As our tradition teaches, we cannot shape our future if we ignore our past. For serious sexual misconduct, no one should want to cover up the abuse, no matter how long ago it occurred,” she said.

https://forward.com/news/468535/reform-cover-up-rabbi-sheldon-zimmerman-sexually-predatory-behavior/

Tuesday, April 27, 2021

Seriously --- How Many Holocaust Museums Does The World Need ? The Pathetic Race To Create Museum Disneyland Judaism!

 

 


After years of delays and strife, Jerusalem Tolerance Museum nears completion

 

The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s building, slated to be 4 times larger than Yad Vashem, is already an imposing presence as it readies to open next year. But is it also an imposition?

 

In addition, there will be two theaters, an international conference center, a grand hall, an indoor/outdoor café, a gift shop, a library (including a display of special archival letters), classrooms, a public plaza, a sunken 1,200-seat outdoor amphitheater built around the remains of a Roman aqueduct, and underground parking.

Inside the exhibit spaces, the museum’s backers promise a new, cutting-edge museum experience, along with a lavish sprinkling of Hollywood style.

The center prizes its place as part of the Tinseltown ecosystem, hosting movie stars and other celebrities. Photographs supplied by the center for this article featured well-known actors and other VIPs, and Hier, like many fundraisers, is no stranger to hobnobbing with celebrities. ....

 READ:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/after-years-of-delays-and-strife-jerusalem-tolerance-museum-nears-completion/

Monday, April 26, 2021

The Only "Hoax" Is the Guy Who Called It One!


‘Albert Sabin’ isn’t a household name, like ‘Jonas Salk,’ but maybe it should be 


Jonas Salk is rightfully credited with developing the first safe and effective polio vaccine, yet his inoculation was not the one that ultimately brought about the near total eradication of the terrible infectious disease known as “poliomyelitis” or “infantile paralysis.” 

 

Signed photo of Jonas Salk, which the famous researcher donated to Jerusalem’s Jewish National and University Library (today’s National Library of Israel) in 1958. From the National Library of Israel archives

Superseding Jonas

Salk’s vaccine, administered by injection, was first approved and widely distributed in the United States in 1955.

Around the same time, another Jewish medical researcher named Albert Sabin was busy developing a different type of polio vaccine — one that could be administered orally and provide significant benefits over Salk’s, including cheaper production costs and longer-lasting immunity from polio without the need for “boosters.”

An oral vaccine, as opposed to an injected one, also meant that it would be much easier and more practical to use for massive inoculation drives, especially in poorer countries and regions where sterile syringes were not readily available.

Sabin’s vaccine used a weakened “live” polio virus, as opposed to the “dead” virus used by Salk. This made it theoretically more risky, yet with the benefits far outweighing the risks, the Sabin vaccine largely replaced the Salk vaccine worldwide from the early 1960s.

Salk’s vaccine has remained in use and was certainly a critical breakthrough in terms of dramatically reducing the debilitating infectious disease’s prevalence, yet for most of the second half of the 20th century, the oral vaccine developed by Sabin is what facilitated the nearly complete global eradication of polio.

Neither of the men ever attempted to patent their discoveries, seeing it as their privilege and purpose in life to help save millions of people from polio and other ailments.

On the day his vaccine was declared safe and effective for use, Salk was asked who owned the patent. He famously retorted, “Well, the people, I would say… There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

Sabin once quipped, “A scientist who is also a human being cannot rest while knowledge which might be used to reduce suffering rests on the shelf.”

From immigrant to global hero

Born in Bialystock in 1906, Albert Sabin moved with his family to the United States in 1921, fleeing the poverty and violent anti-Semitism of their native Poland. Shortly after receiving his medical degree ten years later, Sabin became specifically interested in studying polio.

His research into polio and other ailments continued throughout the 1930s and 1940s. As a high-ranking officer in the US Army Medical Corps during World War II, Sabin traveled the globe studying viral diseases, even developing vaccines for some, including dengue fever and encephalitis.

Sabin receiving an award from Shaare Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem, presented by a 10 year-old girl “representing a generation freed from the fear of polio.” Published in the B’nai B’rith Messenger⁩⁩, December 15, 1972. From the National Library of Israel Digital Collection    
 

After the war, he settled back into civilian life and his research on polio. Determined to better understand the polio virus, Sabin and his colleagues performed autopsies on everyone who died of poliomyelitis within a 400 mile (650 km) radius of his home in Cincinnati. Sabin and his team discovered that the poliovirus was found in the intestinal tract — meaning that an oral vaccine could theoretically be developed for it.

Ultimately one was......

 READ ENTIRE ARTICLE:

https://blog.nli.org.il/en/his-sugar-cube-vaccine-beat-polio-then-he-took-a-shot-at-middle-east-peace/

Friday, April 23, 2021

Yaakov Litzman - A Real Piece of Work!

 

A-G leaning toward indicting UTJ MK Ya’acov Litzman

 

If the accusations are true, Litzman’s meeting with a key witness in the Malka Leifer extradition case would constitute witness tampering.

 

Malka Liefer - United Torah Judaism MK and Construction and Housing Minister Ya’acov Litzman

 Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit is leaning toward indicting top United Torah Judaism MK and Construction and Housing Minister Ya’acov Litzman for fraud, witness tampering and breach of public trust for allegedly interfering in the extradition of alleged pedophile Malka Leifer, subject to a pre-indictment hearing.

Officials would not confirm the leak, though there was a clear sense that the decision was impending.

In August 2019, police recommended indicting then-deputy health minister Litzman.In a second case, the police had recommended indicting Litzman for bribery, while police had closed a third case against Litzman due to a combination of insufficient evidence and charges which had expired due to the statute of limitations for when a case could be brought.Despite police recommendations, Mandelblit makes the final decision about whether or not to accept the prosecution’s and the police recommendations.In 2019, the police said that they found sufficient evidence to charge Litzman with trying to influence the opinion of psychiatrists appointed by the Ministry of Health in order to aid Leifer and prevent her extradition to Australia where she was wanted for dozens of cases of sexual abuse that she is accused of committing while serving as a head of school in Melbourne.In a statement, the police said that Litzman, a Gur hassid, attempted to pressure the Jerusalem district psychiatrist into falsely stating that Leifer was mentally unfit to be extradited to Australia to stand trial.

The same psychiatrist who originally filed an opinion stating that Leifer was competent to stand trial, allegedly switched his opinion completely after pressure by Litzman.If true, Litzman’s meeting with the key witness in the extradition case would constitute witness tampering.

He also is accused of threatening other medical professionals at the ministry if they did not write reports in a way favorable to Leifer.Leifer fled to Israel in 2008 amid allegations that she had sexually abused students at the Adass Yisroel school in Melbourne.She is wanted on 74 charges of child sexual abuse.Leifer was arrested in Israel in 2014, but was released after being deemed mentally unfit for the legal proceedings. She was later rearrested after an undercover investigation found that she lived a normal life and was mentally fit to face extradition.In January, Leifer was finally extradited.

A second case investigated by police was about Litzman’s alleged involvement in trying to influence officials in the ministry to work on behalf of a food establishment whose owner is close to the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) politician.Litzman allegedly frequented the establishment during the period in dispute and allegedly tried to prevent the closure of the company, which had been found to pose a health hazard to the public after several people became sick by consuming its products.After health ministry inspectors initially closed the establishment, Litzman ordered a new on-site tour including both him and the officials who had closed it.

As part of the tour he told the officials that it should be reopened and that he personally had been eating the food and was fine.Allegedly Litzman even asked about the officials’ salaries in order to probe whether they could be bribed.Though the officials did not go for this offer, Litzman could still be indicted for attempted bribery.The police said that the investigation found sufficient evidence against Litzman to charge him with bribery, fraud, obstruction of justice and breach of trust.

The third case, which was closed by police, included potential charges that Litzman tried to influence officials in the health and other ministries to help various prisoners, especially those with sex-crime convictions, to get early releases.While many convicts get early releases, ministers are prohibited from involvement in the process which is based on a series of recommendations by professionals about different issues coming from different ministries.Multiple officials on Litzman’s staff who were also suspects in some of the above cases will also reportedly get off.After the 2019 police recommendation, Litzman’s office responded, “[Deputy] Minister Litzman has worked throughout his years for the benefit of Israeli citizens, with complete transparency and by law. The office of Litzman has a clear, open-door policy to assist the public. This is without discrimination against anyone, and without clarifying the status of those who call for assistance, except under the law and [with] integrity.”

 

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/ag-leaning-toward-indicting-utj-mk-yaacov-litzman-666080?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=President+Reuven+Rivlin+set+to+give+Yair+Lapid+next+mandate&utm_campaign=April+22%2C+2021+Night&vgo_ee=Jn367jKILnpErXAAhCpdDovy7T5YEJ8ohjC9vauJg30%3D

 

Thursday, April 22, 2021

If You Don't Succeed at First, Try, Try Again!

Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, former ZAKA head, attempts suicide

 

 SUICIDE NOTE - "I am sorry.
My punishment I have received already.
Try to remember the good that I did;
try to always remember what I forgot:
'There is an Eye that sees, an Ear that hears, and all your deeds are written in a Book.'

My love always,
and I am very humiliated,
Yehuda."

 

 


 


Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, accused sex offender and former ZAKA head, attempted to commit suicide Thursday morning.Medical reports from Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem indicate that he is currently in critical condition, but doctors have managed to stabilize him.

Shaare Zedek head Ofer Merin said that the outcome of the situation will only be understood within the next day, and only then we "can ask what damage was caused and to what extent."His son reportedly called for emergency services after he found his father at home where he had hung himself.

 Medics evacuated him to the hospital after performing life-saving treatments at the scene.Police found a suicide note in his house. Meshi-Zahav's sons have been starkly divided about it, with one of them saying it is written in his father's handwriting, and another saying it isn't. His sons are also claiming that the letter is actually forged. Meshi-Zahav's lawyer said that he is planning on suing for the "severe act," N12 reported. A neighbor told Channel 12 that Meshi-Zahav looked forlorn on Wednesday and that although he had met him in synagogue on Saturday, weeks after police interrogations, he would not leave the house. 

Israeli police officers and paramedics are seen outside the house of the former Chairman Israel's Zaka rescue unit, Yehuda Meshi Zahav,in Givaat Zeev. (Credit: Yonatan Sindel/Flash 90) 

Israeli police officers and paramedics are seen outside the house of the former Chairman Israel's Zaka rescue unit, Yehuda Meshi Zahav,in Givaat Zeev


Meshi-Zahav, 59, had been accused of sexually assaulting women and children over a period of decades from his position of power, using tactics of fear and intimidation to silence his victims.
 

In March, a police investigation was officially launched, after an initial report opened a floodgate of abusive accusations against him, from men, women, and teenage boys and girls of all ages.ZAKA Special Units Director Haim Otmezgin claimed Thursday morning that many of the allegations against Meshi-Zahav came from sources who had tried to blackmail him. "There needed to be a trial; people didn't have to base things on rumors," Otmezgin said, adding that he himself had witnessed threats that the former ZAKA head had received: "If you don't agree to let us fundraise for the organization, we will bury you and destroy your family."The man who threatened Meshi-Zahav, according to Otmezgin, was attempting to fundraise for ZAKA, but pocket some of the money himself. Meshi-Zahav apparently knew of the scheme, and was threatened for it. "Whoever knows Meshi-Zahav knows that he could never hurt a soul," he insisted, "I've known him for 25 years."

 Channel 12 was preparing an in-depth investigative article for the Thursday night news about the sexual assault allegations facing Meshi-Zahav when the news broke of his attempted suicide, telling The Jerusalem Post that it has yet to make a decision as to whether or not it will run the program as planned.Rabbi Yuval Sherlow, head of the Ethics Center at the Tzohar Rabbinical Organization, called on Channel 12 to cancel the program in light of today's developments."Investigations about injustices are an essential action designed to increase the moral path of society," he said. "But the broadcasting of Uvda [Fact] tonight, while the person the interrogation is about is fighting for his life, would be an immoral and insensitive step, and therefore should not be broadcast."Following the investigation, Meshi-Zahav stepped down as head of the organization he had founded in 1989 and forfeited the Israel Prize he was set to receive this year.Two months ago, in January, he lost his parents to the coronavirus, just a month after having lost his brother to the same disease.

He lost his father, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Meshi-Zahav, while sitting shiva (the weeklong mourning period) for his mother Sara Zisl Meshi-Zahav, who had passed away only three days prior – all this within 30 days of the passing of his brother, Moshe.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/zaka-head-meshi-zahav-committed-suicide-665991?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Syrian+missile+lands+near+Dimona+nuclear+reactor%2C+interception+fails&utm_campaign=April+22%2C+2021+Day&vgo_ee=Jn367jKILnpErXAAhCpdDovy7T5YEJ8ohjC9vauJg30%3D

 

ZAKA founder, an alleged serial rapist, rushed to hospital after suicide attempt

Yehuda Meshi-Zahav tries to hang himself less than 2 months after bombshell reports of allegations against him

 

https://www.timesofisrael.com/zaka-founder-alleged-serial-rapist-rushed-to-hospital-after-suicide-attempt/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2021-04-22&utm_medium=email

Wednesday, April 21, 2021

The Yeshiva & The Shiksa.... Zeidy Yossel Kushner Would Be Proud...Hershel Schachter's Slippery Slope...

 

Israeli yeshiva leaks name of model Karlie Kloss' baby

 

Yeshivat Reishit, where Jared Kushner's brother Josh studied, leaked name of baby born to Josh Kushner and his wife, Karlie Kloss.


Karlie Kloss
Karlie Kloss

It’s common practice in Jewish circles to wait until eight days after a baby boy is born before publicly sharing the baby’s name at the time of circumcision.

Josh Kushner and Karlie Kloss, the brother and sister-in-law of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, wanted to wait even longer than that to make the baby’s name, Levi Joseph, public.

But Kushner’s Israeli yeshiva had other plans.

Yeshivat Reishit, where Kushner was a student in 2003, congratulated the couple in an alumni email, announcing the baby’s name in the process. The yeshiva, located in Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh, runs a Modern Orthodox post-high school gap year program for American boys.

When the New York Post, which first reported on the leak, asked Kushner and Kloss for comment, Kloss posted the name to Instagram herself on Saturday.

Born in March, the baby may be named for Kushner’s grandfather, real estate scion and philanthropist Joseph Kushner, who died in 1985. The Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in Livingston, New Jersey, is named for him.

Kushner, who founded the Oscar Health insurance company, and Kloss, a supermodel and TV star, married in 2018.

 


 

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/304670




Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Having a book of complaints is a good idea for everyone. It releases tensions and provides a touch of lightheadedness to matters which can be unnecessarily weighty. And, if we read the book of complaints often, it will give us a clear indication of the pettiness of most of the issues that are revealed and obvious.

 

The book of complaints



Notebook

Israelis are said to have a tendency to complain - but maybe it is Jews who have that habit.

When our children reached the age and stage of life when they were ready to get married, my wife and I were privileged to organize and participate in four weddings in a rather short space of years. Being a congregational rabbi, I naturally had to invite all the members of my congregation to the wedding ceremony and dinner.

My wife and I labored long and hard over the invitation list and over the seating arrangements for the wedding dinner. We invested a great deal of effort and energy in trying to make sure that, to the best of our ability, everyone would be satisfied, and no one would be unduly disappointed.

Nevertheless, people being people, there were those who felt that they were not seated in a manner appropriate to their standing and social status. Or, they wanted to be seated with certain friends of theirs and somehow my wife and I were unaware of these relationships. There also were some people who were unhappy because they were too close to the band while others were not so happy because they were too distant from the dance floor itself.

Because of these occurrences, we developed a family tradition. We kept a book of complaints and we dutifully wrote down everyone's complaint in that book so that it would be preserved for posterity. Naturally, since our awareness of these problems were not apparent until after the wedding had already taken place, there was nothing that we could do to redress the situation, but since we noted it in our book of complaints, we felt that we had addressed the situation to the best of our abilities.

There are people who are, because of their very nature, complainers. I will admit that there is much to complain about in our daily lives and in our social circumstances. However, complaining and carping about the frustrations that confront us daily, is of little avail and the cause of much damage in society at large and to the complainers particularly.

We read in the Book of Eicha, a book of sadness and tragedy, that human beings should not complain regarding their lot in life and circumstance that befalls them – as is it not sufficient for them that they are still alive?

This is a strong statement and is meant to bring us up short when we start complaining about matters in life and society that, in most cases, are unimportant. Nevertheless, one must always be provided with an outlet for one's frustrations and not to keep them permanently bottled up.

If we do so, then we corrode the entire structure of our personality and will always have a jaundiced view of life and of others. Having a book of complaints is a good idea for everyone. It releases tensions and provides a touch of lightheadedness to matters which can be unnecessarily weighty. And, if we read the book of complaints often, it will give us a clear indication of the pettiness of most of the issues that are revealed and obvious.

We have passed through a very bitter year due to the Corona pandemic and its deleterious effects on society and our personal lives. As we emerge from it now, with the effectiveness of the vaccines being proven daily, people looking back on what has occurred, naturally have different reactions.

A great deal of this is dependent upon how severely we were impacted in our families, physically, economically, and psychologically. I notice that there are those who are given to complaining, even bitter complaints over what they deem to be a lost year of opportunity and, for some, of income. I notice also that there are others who somehow, almost cheerfully, pick up the pieces and put their lives, businesses, and families back together again without complaint or bitterness.

I have come to realize that there are many for whom even having a book of complaints to release their tensions, refused to do so and would prefer to nurture their hurts and frustrations rather than moving on in life.

But what is clear, is that we proceed with our lives and our mission. As such, keeping a book of complaints can sometimes be a valuable asset in this task.

Rabbi Berel Wein is a noted scholar, historian, speaker and educator, admired the world over for his audio tapes/CDs, videos and books, particularly on Jewish history. After many years serving as a community rabbi in Monsey, NY, he made aliya and is rabbi of Beit Knesset Hanassi in Jerusalem.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/304195

Monday, April 19, 2021

Science Versus Fundamentalism --- “That’s what science is — it’s a process of abandoning your old hypotheses in favor of a better hypothesis,” she said. Many initially promising drugs fail in clinical trials. “That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.”

 

The Covid-19 Plasma Boom Is Over. What Did We Learn From It?

 


The U.S. government invested $800 million in plasma when the country was desperate for Covid-19 treatments. A year later, the program has fizzled.

By the fall, accumulating evidence was showing that plasma was not the miracle that some early boosters had believed it to be. In September, the Infectious Diseases Society of America recommended that plasma not be used in hospitalized patients outside of a clinical trial. (On Wednesday, the society restricted its advice further, saying plasma should not be used at all in hospitalized patients.) In January, a highly anticipated trial in Britain was halted early because there was not strong evidence of a benefit in hospitalized patients.

In February, the F.D.A. narrowed the authorization for plasma so that it applied only to people who were early in the course of their disease or who couldn’t make their own antibodies.

Dr. Marks, the F.D.A. regulator, said that in retrospect, scientists had been too slow to adapt to those recommendations. They had known from previous disease outbreaks that plasma treatment is likely to work best when given early, and when it contained high levels of antibodies, he said.

“Somehow we didn’t really take that as seriously as perhaps we should have,” he said. “If there was a lesson in this, it’s that history actually can teach you something.”

 

READ ARTICLE:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/health/covid-convalescent-plasma.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Health

Friday, April 16, 2021

"These People & Their F***** Sickness" --- Defacing images of women and girls by haredi men is now a common occurrence. While it is tempting to say that it is the work of a few extremists, the fact is that this destruction is now so expected that ad companies refuse to show women’s pictures in certain areas knowing that they will be destroyed, and that the police are unlikely to chase the perpetrators.

 

Erased: Why the removal of female faces in the haredi world is a problem

 

“Wanton destruction of property is a sin... Yet certain individuals have decided, against all halachic literature, that vandalism is excusable when it makes women disappear.”

A father shows his son how to pull a woman's face off an anti-abortion organization's bus ad (photo credit: ISRAEL COHEN ON TWITTER)
A father shows his son how to pull a woman's face off an anti-abortion organization's bus ad


The image of a father holding his child’s hand has always been touching to me. Perhaps it makes me think of my own childhood, walking with my father, as he explained how the world works, telling me silly stories, or letting me explore the rough ocean waves while making sure I was safe.
 
There is something so loving and right about seeing a child’s small hand tucked in the grip of a father’s stronger one. And there is something about a father’s love and guidance that can be so influential on a child.
 
I suppose that is why this image is so painful for me to see.
 
In it, a religious man holds his child with one hand while using the other to rip an advertisement off the side of a bus. On a public street. In broad daylight.
 
Why? Because it has a woman’s face on it.
 
Defacing images of women and girls by haredi men is now a common occurrence. While it is tempting to say that it is the work of a few extremists, the fact is that this destruction is now so expected that ad companies refuse to show women’s pictures in certain areas knowing that they will be destroyed, and that the police are unlikely to chase the perpetrators. The Knesset even convened a committee meeting to discuss the horrific vandalization of a billboard campaign to raise awareness of violence against women.
 
“Wanton destruction of property is a sin. That’s a basic tenet of civilized society and fundamental in Jewish law. Yet certain individuals have decided, against all halachic literature, that vandalism is excusable when it makes women disappear,” says Rabbi Scott Kahn, host of the Orthodox Conundrum podcast.  
 
How did we get to the point that religious Jewish men destroy personal and public property, without shame, in broad daylight, while educating their small boys to do the same? What inspires this horrific behavior and what else may it be causing that we cannot see?
 
IN THE past few years, the Jewish community has experienced a lightning fast slide toward extreme notions of shmirat eynaim, or “guarding one’s eyes” from seeing things that may lead them to sin. The concept, meant to help men avoid situations that may lead to sexual thoughts and thus sin, has been recrafted as total segregation of the sexes outside of marriage and the erasure of anything female, anywhere.
 
Events such as weddings, which were once prime opportunities for people to meet and form their own marriages, are now strictly segregated. Printed depictions of Jewish life are devoid of Jewish women and girls. Even higher education and places of employment are segregated to fit this new demand.
 
This extreme segregation has led to magazines, school books, dinner ads, charity brochures, illustrated megillot and Shabbat books that show only men and boys. Cartoons and comic strips leave women out with the occasional mother represented by the back of her head. Even Artscroll has adopted this approach and made influencer Daniella Renov remove her image from her own cookbook.
 
While insular hassidic communities have had this policy in place for some time, the phenomenon of erasing women in the greater Orthodox community has existed for only 15 years or so. By not forcefully rejecting this practice, the Orthodox community has tacitly accepted that women should not be seen and that men are entitled to a female-free environment.
 
In 2015, in these pages, we discussed the trend and how it was being enforced with mafia-like tactics in some places in Israel. Since then, many articles have delineated the impact the erasure has on women’s financial, physical, and representative health. The lack of images of women coupled with the dearth of information on women’s health plus cultural norms has created a reality where haredi women’s health was ranked eighth vs. haredi men’s second place.
 
Female business owners have a distinct disadvantage when they cannot advertise with their faces or with real life models. The lack of women’s images as part and parcel of the average Jewish family and community leads to a lack of women’s voices being heard and directly to policies that are detrimental to them. Erasing women removes our humanity and redefines us as objects, sexual objects, to be hidden.
The impact of being seen mainly as a sexual object has been defined by many girls as traumatic. 
 
 R. from New York says, “I internalized the message I was inherently, in my essence, temptation first and foremost. I associated my being and my body with being an object for others’ sexual gratification, sins and fantasies. Before I could develop a healthy sense of self in being female, my identity became shame. I was told I was responsible for men. Their sins were my sins. And their thoughts were my sins. 
 
And I would be held accountable one day. As a young girl it was a burden too suffocating and too shameful for me to carry day to day and as I reached my teens I developed an eating disorder in an effort to change my body and to just be seen less. It took me a long time to recover from this.”
Despite the evidence of the damage done to women and girls, increasing numbers of institutions, charities, and publications censor images of females, aged six or older.
 
 
Original ad for plastic dolls (left) and in 'AMI' magazine, with mother and daughters removed (Canva.com) 
Original ad for plastic dolls (left) and in 'AMI' magazine, with mother and daughters removed 
 
 
TO UNDERSTAND how this erasure and increased segregation affects Jewish men and the Jewish family, The Magazine spoke to a number of men and therapists.
 
Most requested anonymity due to the personal nature of the subject matter and for patient confidentiality.
 
“Moshe,” 19, is from a Modern Orthodox community. “By redefining women as nothing more than the object of male desire, men have become forcefully hypersexualized. This puts men in a very uncomfortable position in which we are reduced to little more than our base desires and not allowed any emotional depth. The insinuation that I have no agency over my own sexual urges is insulting and this apparent lack of control is used to explain away any actual issues I may be struggling with. The effect religious guilt has on men and its contribution to the growing men’s mental health crisis cannot be understated.
 
“When men are told that sexualizing women is both inherent in their nature and also incredibly sinful, we internalize that... when we do something that, in our minds, constitutes engaging with our sexuality, which thanks to the culture of erasure can mean even seeing the image of a woman, the religious guilt crashes down full force. The desire to avoid this guilt causes more anxiety, which makes every interaction more guilt-inducing.”
 
“Aaron,” in his early 20’s, spoke candidly about his struggles.”I’m married and have struggled with a pornography addiction for over a decade. It’s unfortunately extremely common for young men, and in my personal experience it’s been entirely due to the frum societal culture of extreme separation of the sexes.” He acknowledged the importance of halachic boundaries but says, “the social creation of separation is what creates toxic relationships, unhealthy marriages, warped senses of oneself, and sadly, pornography addictions.”
 
Shlomo Lieberman, a clinical social worker in New York, has worked with the frum community for over 30 years. He says that in his experience the extreme segregation and erasure has “turned women, literally, into the forbidden fruit and has contributed significantly to the sex-addiction I see in my patients.”
 
Additionally, he says, it deeply impacts the marital dynamic. “Men aren’t learning what women’s needs are. They don’t even recognize that they have needs. It’s not out of maliciousness, it’s simply that they haven’t learned to see them as whole beings with needs. Where do they interact with them? Girls’ and boys’ schools now have different vacations, brothers and sisters don’t spend much time together. Where will they learn to speak to girls, to understand them or to value their opinions? Not in school, not via books or magazines, and now not in the family.”
 
He says that the majority of a person’s learning is passive learning, “If they don’t see women represented in society, in magazines, in the family... they learn very clearly that their opinions simply aren’t that important.”
 
Elementary school educators see the results of this in their students. Rabbi Moshe Nachbar says that the erasure of all things female in frum publications normalizes something that isn’t normal: the idea that women can’t succeed or achieve. In his role as an educator in a Modern Orthodox school in Florida, he feels it “breeds a dismissiveness in boys’ attitudes towards girls, their intelligence and achievements.”
 
Another school administrator of an elementary school in the New York area that has both girls and boys (separately) agrees, “males exposed to a segregated gender system compounded by a lack of female representation in publications lose the ability to identify the real value of women, often overlooking or devaluing their qualities. Worse, this leads to men stripping themselves of the unique human feature of forming interdependent relationships to combine forces and reach levels beyond their own.
 
 Lack of empathy and selfishness are just a few of the many issues I see as a result.” He sees that it causes girls to lack confidence in their own opinions and abilities. It is something he works actively to counter.
 
Liebermen says that as the extremism gets worse, the issue gets worse and he sees more and more couples ready for divorce mere months after getting married. Lieberman says he helps men unlearn what they have passively acquired and to learn that women’s needs, opinions and perspectives matter.
 
A hassidic husband and father who grew up in the hassidic world, where segregation and erasure are an ingrained part of the culture, says, “Even when you’re living on the margins of the community – doing things that make you a rebel, the female aspect of worldview stays with you. Wives were part of the system, something that had to be done, dealt with.”
 
He says, “Girls were to be chased, manipulated and experienced, not dated or thought of as a partner. It wasn’t possible to think of women as anything other than a function to be managed/exploited. We simply aren’t trained to see the female experience or to consider her perspective. It takes a long time to unlearn this and realize that there is an entire other experience that women have – I’m actually embarrassed to say that this conversation has made me aware of the fact that while I am active in helping boys deal with the system, I haven’t even thought of how much worse it must be for the girls.”
 
Talli Rosenbaum, individual and couples therapist and certified sex therapist, explains why erasure carries into marriage in this way. “Creating intimacy requires seeing a person as a human being and not an object. Complete gender separation creates an environment where women and men are mysterious to one another, and that makes the experience of understanding one another very difficult and often requires skill building after the fact. The erasure of women acts to perpetuate the idea of a woman as an object. This actually detracts from the authentic goal of Jewish marriage as two people who are reim ahuvim who connect with mutual respect and love.”
 
Another therapist who works in the yeshivish world says, “I grew up with hassidim who called women a ‘dus.’ A dus is a ‘thing.’ What’s the effect? Erasure of women means literally seeing a woman as a nobody, a thing. Opinionless. Someone who serves my needs of being holy and superior.”
 
“Yosef,” a hassidic man from New York described a painful marriage dynamic where, despite being in terrible physical pain during intimate relations, his wife insisted they continue, “because she was taught that men need sex and it was her job to provide it.” He had to insist that she see a doctor.
 
“She had no sense of self, of her own worth.” He says it took them years of therapy to get to a place where they communicated fully, expressed their needs and unlearned the damaging results of severe segregation. “We are human. We need emotional connection to our spouses.”
 
When asked if it’s truly important for women to be seen in depictions of society for a healthy community, Liebermen says, “If we want our boys to see women as people, not as sexual objects – and that’s how we treat women when we erase them, as sexual objects that need to be hidden lest we sin or until we marry them – then we cannot treat them as such.”
 
IN THIS Rofeh Cholim Cancer Society illustrated ad, all patients and medical staff are male. (Courtesy) 
IN THIS Rofeh Cholim Cancer Society illustrated ad, all patients and medical staff are male. 
 
 
SOME CLAIM that not showing women and girls protects them. A haredi social worker in Israel says his wife does not allow her picture to be shown to prevent it from being used by groups which share images of religious women’s faces, taken from their social media accounts and photoshopped onto other women’s – often nude – bodies. “The groups are almost certainly religious,” he says. “There are Hebrew groups, English groups and Yiddish groups. Some require that you prove you’re religious before you get accepted. Once a single person creates the image, it will be viewed by thousands.”
 
There are also channels and accounts dedicated to what is called “frum porn” where images of women are shared unbeknownst to them. He believes it is very possible that those who most loudly insist on the erasure of women do so to cover up this deviant behavior – “just as some of the most vehemently homophobic people are themselves homosexual.”
 
Rabbi Efrem Goldberg of Boca Raton, on a recent Headlines podcast, told host David Lichtenstein of the policy of erasure, “I think it’s a mistake. If we want the young women in our community to grow up to see images of role models... They need to not be erased. They need to know that they matter and they need to know that the Torah doesn’t demand that they hide in the shadows or that their faces be blotted out.”
 
Mishpacha magazine prints in Hebrew and English and is arguably the flagship monthly publication of the Orthodox world with a global readership of over 250,000. It shows no images of women or girls above the age of six in its publications, Mishpacha and Family First, but does on the online version of Mishpacha.
 
According to its publisher, Eli Paley, the main role of the magazine is to unify and elevate Jewish society.
 
In an interview with Rabbi Efrem Goldberg, on his podcast Behind the Bima, Paley stated that according to rabbis, there is no halachic basis for not showing women’s images. He says that he chooses to censor women and girls in order to enable the magazine to influence as many people as possible, including those with the most extreme views.
 
 As Mishpacha gained popularity, it set the trend for smaller publications and institutions – even women’s health organizations – that cater to the Orthodox world. Now, Torah websites have replaced women with images of chairs and flowers. In advertisements for breast cancer screening, women are replaced with lettuce, and in depictions of health clinics, men run the office, are all of the healthcare givers and indeed, all of the patients. Women do not exist even in caricatures of Jewish life.
 
Numerous emails requesting a conversation with Paley, prior to the writing of this article to discuss concerns for the community went unanswered and Mishpacha declined to comment for this article. It would seem that in attempting to moderate the extreme, Mishpacha has unwittingly brought extremism to the moderate – to the detriment of us all.
 
The Jewish family has always been the strength of the Jewish community. And it is this strength that is being torn asunder with the erasure of women and girls. Extreme segregation and erasure of women harms us. It dehumanizes our girls, hypersexualizes our boys, leads our fathers to destroy, and removes the influence of our mothers. The erasure of women upends the balance placed into the world.
 
Extremism can’t be fought with extremism and intolerance can’t be beaten by intolerance. To unify and elevate Jewish society, to help men and women have healthy notions of self, and of how to deal with the opposite sex, we must honor the place of both women and men in the community. It is time to realize that the erasure of women was a failed experiment and bring the gantza misphacha, the entire Jewish family, back into the picture.