Shanda Vs. Past Nischt ... I Say Both Words Need To Be Kept Alive.... A people that has a covenant with God should know better, be better and act better.

 

The Jewish word that no one uses anymore ...

 

 (I'll Add One -  (Shanda Far Der Yidden!)

A word that comes straight out of the Jewish moral vocabulary list. Sometimes, it is about our own families. 

 

 

 

(RNS) — There is a Yiddish word that our grandparents used that has fallen out of use.
The word is shanda — shame.

Some would say: Good riddance.

For several generations, the idea and living reality of shanda served as fuel in our personal and communal Jewish engines.

Consider the way that we used that word.

If something was a shanda fur die goyim — what did that mean?

It meant that whatever it was — it was something that would bring shame, disrepute or embarrassment to the Jews — and it was something that we should not let the gentiles see.

Why?

Because we feared antisemitism. Shanda was our internalized sense of powerlessness.

We screamed shanda about any number of people:

• Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the atomic bomb spies.
• Their nemesis, the attorney Roy Cohn (who my parents believed was a life form somewhat lower than algae).
• The disgraced arbitrager and inside trader, Ivan Boesky, who so greatly understood that he was a shanda that he asked that the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York remove his name from their library.
• Bernie Madoff, of the Ponzi scheme — a man who targeted his fellow Jews and Jewish organizations, and whose criminality left serious and enduring wreckage in its wake.
• And, most recently, the wealthy sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

These were all Jews who brought disrepute to the Jewish people. Hence, shanda!

A new book by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the feminist author and activist (co-founder of Ms. magazine) takes the idea of shanda to a new, deeper level. The book is, appropriately, “Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy.”

The best term I can invent for what Letty does is “family archaeology.” She digs into her family stories, generation by generation, level by level. She discerns the layers of fables and outright fictions that undergird her narrative — all as a way of getting real, getting clear and getting whole.

She writes: “Every family has its underbelly. Mine was fat with pretense, the denied, the obscured, the unsaid.” Hiding is my heritage, she says.

There is something very Jewish about hiding and secrecy. Over the years, I have ruminated on the essential Jewish nature of the superhero with a secret identity — superheroes invented by Depression-era Jews who wanted to assimilate, who understood secrecy and hidden identities. 

Letty reminds us that biblical figures often disguised themselves. The entire Book of Genesis is one long masquerade party — for example, Jacob disguises himself as Esau, Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute, and Joseph disguises himself as an Egyptian overlord. On the holiday of Purim, masks have a starring role.

Letty embarks on a journey into her family’s past, which includes her own past.

Among the things she unearths and confesses:

• Her own abortion.
• Her encounter with a drunken Irish author that almost ended up in rape.
• A divorce from two generations ago.
• Her own bout with cancer. (How did our parents speak of that illness? In hushed tones that you would normally reserve for a public library or a synagogue. The “C-word.” “The big C.”)
• A cousin who is gay.
• A child who died in infancy.
• Her parents’ previous marriages.
• Mothers who died in childbirth.
• Siblings who showed up unexpectedly, whom she never knew she had.
• Unhappy marriages.

In particular, and most poignantly, there are the stories about Letty’s father, Jack Cottin. He was a communal leader, apparently successful, dashingly handsome.

But, it turns out that Jack Cottin was hiding something. Beneath the façade, under the masks, he was a financial failure. All of his outward success turned out to be mere posturing, a mirage.

Was it possible that my father’s unilateral decision to sell our house and relegate me to a daybed in his new apartment’s entry hall was not born of selfishness and insensitivity to my feelings of loss and abandonment, but of shame and his refusal to admit that he was unable to afford an apartment with a second bedroom?

Could it be that the reason he didn’t give me any spending money in college was not to teach me financial independence but because he didn’t have a dollar to spare? What a great relief it would be, even these many years later, were I able to believe that his actions sprang from a paucity of resources, not of love. Was he performing prosperity to save face? If so, I would sympathize with him retroactively and forgive him posthumously.

Few things could shame a husband or father more than being unmasked as an inadequate provider. I knew that. But I never imagined my self-assured dad would wear any kind of mask in the first place. Looking back, I recognize now that compelling social forces in his upwardly mobile Jewish community — namely masculine pride and the loom of the shanda — were enough to make my father, or any man of his generation, lie about his finances.

As Letty put it, knowingly: “In the Jewish world of the 1950s, a man who couldn’t support his family was not a man.”

What gets me about this wonderful, lyrically written book is that it proves something we all know: The more personal a story, the more universal it is. Every reader will find themselves in these pages. These are all of our stories.

But, this leaves me with a question about the future of Jewish identity.

Once upon a time, our parents and grandparents could, and would, complete the following sentence: “Jews don’t (fill in the blank).”

We had our list of answers:

• “Jews don’t buy retail.”
• “Jews don’t make racist jokes.”
• “Jews don’t play or enjoy violent sports.”
• “Jews don’t hunt.” (Because of the prohibition against cruelty to animals, and also because the biblical Esau was a hunter — which was, by the way, a shanda).

I once gave a sermon on that last statement — “Jews don’t hunt” — in a Southern congregation.

During the oneg Shabbat, a few congregants approached me to tell me, in no uncertain terms, that Jews do, in fact, hunt.

Is it still possible to make the statement: “Jews don’t … “? 

I wonder.

And, I wonder what happens to a culture when there are no longer taboos.

I believe the era of shanda has vanished — if only because our children and grandchildren will lack the ethnic Velcro to see Jewish bad actors as somehow inextricably linked to them. 

While shanda has evaporated, another Yiddish word might be experiencing a renaissance — though perhaps not in the original Yiddish.

I am talking about past nischt — that there are things Jews should not do.

Shanda was about what others might think. The Other has the power to define you and evaluate you.

Past nischt is about what we — in the form of Jewish history, Jewish values, and we might even dare to say, God — might think. We, or our surrogates, have the power.

I feel that sense of past nischt all over the place, and I suspect Letty would agree with me.

In particular, I feel that sense of past nischt not only in an ethical sense, but increasingly in the sense of what is going on in our world today.

I know Letty knows this, because of her leftward leanings on Israel. She might think Benjamin Netanyahu was a shanda, but a more concise critic of Israeli policies might hope a people that has been powerless would say, about the gratuitous use of power: Past nischt.

Sometimes, I agree with her.

I will go beyond that.

When I encounter Jews who behave badly, it is not only a case of shanda; it is a case of past nischt.

As in: They should know better and be better and act better.

As in: A people that has a covenant with God should know better, be better and act better. 

In the words of my friend, colleague and teacher, Rabbi Lauren Berkun of the Shalom Hartman Institute, in her interpretation of the teachings of Rabbi Donniel Hartman (whose father, the late Rabbi David Hartman, Letty cites in this book):

We answer to a higher authority, we answer to a higher standard, and that is the standard that’s worthy of who we perceive we ought to be. A standard that embraces exceptionalism, not in any sense of arrogance, but in the sense that “you shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” This is what you must work to become. If we fail to do so, we are failing to live up to our mission as a nation charged to be God’s covenantal partners and consequently to be a light that sanctifies God’s name and enables God to be the God of the world.

If we fail in doing that — well, that would be a shanda.

I love this book, and I suspect I will be returning to it frequently.

You will love it as well — probably because you will see yourself, and your family, and your own complicated narrative in its pages.

With that, may we all live in such a way that our names appear in the Book of Life.

https://religionnews.com/2022/09/28/shanda-letty-cottin-pogrebin/

UOJ Gets More Results --- The No Surprises for Survivors Act would require private insurers to provide coverage, without cost-sharing, for forensic medical exams regardless of where they are administered according to its co-sponsors. It would also require the exams to be covered under the emergency services protections of the No Surprises Act, regardless of where they are performed.

 

New Bill Would Help Survivors of Sexual Assault Avoid Surprise Costs

 

— The No Surprises for Survivors Act was introduced to help with surprise bills for forensic exams

Survivors of sexual assault often receive unexpected medical bills for critical care, but lawmakers and physicians are pushing for new ways to address this staggering problem.

On Monday, a group of bipartisan lawmakers introduced a bill called the No Surprises for Survivors Act, which is designed to ensure that patients with private health insurance do not have to pay out-of-pocket costs or surprise medical bills for forensic medical exams, commonly known as rape kits.

In announcing the introduction of the bill, Reps. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.), Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), and Carol Miller (R-W.Va.) said that while the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994 authorized federal funds to be used for services that support survivors of sexual assault, independent analyses have found that some survivors continue to receive surprise bills and can be left to pay for them out of pocket.

In a correspondence recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), a group of physicians and public health experts detailed the thousands of dollars in costs that are still faced by many survivors of sexual assault.

"The VAWA allows health care facilities to bill for diagnostic testing, laceration repair, counseling, prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV infection, and emergency contraception -- a provision of the law that is especially worrisome, especially since many states have outlawed abortion," the authors of the correspondence wrote.

They further noted that, in 2019, sexual violence was a coded diagnosis for an estimated 112,844 emergency department visits. Most patients (88.3%) were female, 38.2% were 17 years old or younger, and 52.7% were between the ages of 18 and 44.

Of these patients, 36.2% had Medicaid and 22.1% had private insurance, while 16% were expected to pay out of pocket. Overall, emergency department charges averaged $3,551, and victims of sexual abuse during pregnancy incurred the highest charges ($4,553). Charges for self-pay patients -- which some hospitals may discount -- averaged $3,673.

However, it isn't just the financial costs that are detrimental, the authors noted, pointing out that emergency department charges may discourage survivors of sexual assault from reporting rape and seeking medical care in both the short and long term. Such charges may disclose "potentially stigmatizing events" to family members or employers, they added, and charges may "further traumatize survivors by suggesting that they are personally responsible for their assault."

Co-author Samuel Dickman, MD, of Planned Parenthood of Montana, told MedPage Today that while previously working as a doctor in Texas, "I would routinely see patients who had been victims of rape, and some of them told me that they were dealing with medical bills after going to the emergency room, or that they hadn't even wanted to go to the emergency room because they knew they would be hit with medical bills." In discussing the piece, he noted that he was not speaking on behalf of his organization.

"It's just an incredibly tragic way that our healthcare system fails survivors of rape and abuse, which is that they are often asked to pay thousands of dollars for this medical issue," Dickman said.

The No Surprises for Survivors Act would require private insurers to provide coverage, without cost-sharing, for forensic medical exams regardless of where they are administered (unless reimbursed by the state under VAWA), according to its co-sponsors. It would also require the exams to be covered under the emergency services protections of the No Surprises Act, regardless of where they are performed.

The bill further states that if an individual receives a forensic medical exam where the state is responsible for the out-of-pocket costs associated with the exam, "private insurers must provide appropriate notice to help victims avoid bills and streamline the reimbursement process."

Dickman noted that, however staggering, the numbers included in the NEJM correspondence were "certainly an underestimate" of the actual number of patients expected to pay out of pocket for services. Furthermore, those most likely to be victims of sexual violence -- young women from low-income communities -- are also those most likely to not have health insurance, especially in states that haven't expanded Medicaid, he said.

In order to have access to VAWA protection, a survivor of sexual assault needs to be able to disclose that information, and for many reasons, that often doesn't happen, Dickman added. In addition to expanding VAWA, he proposed broader reforms, such as universal healthcare coverage, that would further protect survivors of sexual assault, regardless of whether they are able to disclose what had happened to them when they seek care.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/features/100875?xid=nl_mpt_investigative2022-09-28&eun=g2011045d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=InvestigativeMD_092822&utm_term=NL_Gen_Int_InvestigateMD_Active

UOJ Gets Results :-)

 

New California Law: Docs Who Sexually Abuse Patients Can't Get Their Licenses Back

 

— Statute bars medical board from restoring licenses revoked from sex offenders

 

Disgraced Doctor Predator Larry Nassar

 

A new California law prohibits the state's medical board from granting a license to clinicians whose credentials were previously surrendered or revoked on grounds of sexual misconduct with patients, with no chance of winning an appeal.

Prior to the new law -- which appears to be the only of its kind in the nation -- a clinician whose license was revoked or surrendered because of earlier sexual misconduct violations could reapply after 2 or 3 years and return to practice if approved.

What's more, the wording of the new law leaves open the possibility that it could apply to as many as 18 other health licensing agencies that are asked to grant or renew the license for a clinician who engaged in sexual misconduct, acknowledged Carlos Villatoro, spokesperson for the Medical Board of California (MBC).

While the MBC licenses some 145,000 physicians, other boards license hundreds of thousands of health professionals such as nurses, physician assistants, dentists, podiatrists, psychologists, acupuncturists, chiropractors, optometrists, and pharmacists.

Asked to clarify, Matt Woodcheke, spokesman for the Department of Consumer Affairs which oversees all licensing boards in the state, said the new law will apply only to the MBC and the Osteopathic Medical Board of California (OMB), which licenses more than 10,000 osteopathic physicians and surgeons. However, the OMB is not mentioned in the law.

The legislation was prompted by a 2021 investigation by the Los Angeles Times, which found that the MBC approved restoration applications from 10 of 17 physicians who had lost their licenses because of sexual misconduct with patients and sought to get them back.

As of January 1, 2023, when the new law takes effect, the agency will have no discretion in these cases; these physicians would never get their licenses back.

The law will "prohibit the board from reinstating a person's certificate that has been surrendered because the person committed an act of sexual abuse, misconduct, or relations with a patient or sexual exploitation, as specified, or the person's certificate has been revoked based on a finding by the board that the person committed one of those acts," the statute says.

Robert Wailes, MD, president of the California Medical Association, which sponsored the bill, applauded Gov. Gavin Newsom for his September 22 signature. In a news release, he said the law ensures that the licensing board "has the tools they need to protect patients and keep any physician who violates a patient's trust from practicing medicine."

Assemblymember Akilah Weber, MD, a San Diego-based ob/gyn and the bill's author, added that the "heinous behavior of abusing patients goes against everything physicians stand for and should not be tolerated. This legislation is essential to protect patients and the sanctity of the physician-patient relationship."

The California legislation appears to be the only such law in the nation prohibiting the granting of medical licenses to applicants who have a history of sexual misconduct or are registered sex offenders, said Joe Knickrehm, spokesperson for the Federation of State Medical Boards, who mentioned a handful of state bills or statutes.

Michigan lawmakers passed two bills (HB 4372 and 4373) that would have revoked the license of any health professional convicted of sexual misconduct under the pretext of medical treatment, but they did not pass the corresponding house.

Michigan (HB 4858 and 4857), Georgia (HB 458), and Florida introduced several pieces of legislation in an effort to discipline any physicians like Larry Nassar, DO, the former team doctor for the U.S. women's national gymnastics team who was convicted of rape and other sexual assaults on children and young women.

The two Michigan bills died after they failed to win approval in their corresponding house.

Although the Georgia legislation passed, it appears to "provide for the refusal, suspension or revocation of the license of a physician who has committed a sexual assault on a patient," but doesn't require it as California's new law will.

The Florida bill passed in June of 2021, but is more narrow in that it is focused on a physician's sexual acts involving children or those with mental illness or intellectual disability, as well as actions related to sex trafficking and deriving profits from prostitution.

Consumer groups' reactions were mixed. Eric Andrist of the Patient Safety League, a frequent critic of the MBC, said the new law only applies to physicians in the context of their relationships with their patients. It "turns a blind eye" to doctors who get in trouble for sexual misconduct with non-patients, including fellow staff members, he said.

"I mean, what difference does it make who the misconduct was with?" he said. "Yes, it's an even worse breach of the doctor patient relationship when it's a patient, but sexual misconduct is wrong across the board."

On Andrist's point, in a June letter to Weber, the MBC's executive director William Prasifka said the board supported the bill but suggested it could go farther.

"As currently drafted, the restrictions on licensure reinstatement and application denials do not apply to those who have engaged in sexual criminal or professional misconduct against a colleague, employee, family member, or others who have never been the offender's patient/client," the letter stated. "Offenses against these victims also represent a serious breach of a current, or aspiring, physician's ethical obligations and display a critical lack of judgment."

Prasifka added that the licenses of "physicians who are guilty of sexual crimes ... should be automatically revoked and, further, that this behavior should disqualify them from both applying for an initial license and from seeking reinstatement of a revoked license. Closing this gap in the bill will protect consumers from the individuals who have committed sexual offenses, regardless of their relationship to the victim."

Marian Hollingsworth, also of the Patient Safety League, said there are physicians like Narayana Ambati, MD, who received a mere reprimand for allegedly engaging in sexual misconduct against his sonographer as she performed an ultrasound on a patient, according to the agency's accusation.

"There's no world in which sexual abusers should be doctors," said Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog.

Balber also noted that while the law is a good first step, it doesn't go far enough. It doesn't apply to the licensee who is put on probation numerous times for sexual assault, nor to physicians who lose their license for reasons other than sexual misconduct, such as causing a patient's death, she said.

"There's a lot more that this medical board and the legislature need to do," she said.

Asked if the MBC will now revoke the restored licenses of physician sex offenders, Villatoro said it would not. The new law "does not call for retroactive enforcement," he said.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/100935?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2022-09-27&eun=g2011045d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%20Evening%202022-09-27&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_dual-gmail-definition

After her family arranged her marriage at the age of 17, Romi was still having panic attacks from her childhood trauma. Her husband tried to help by arranging therapy sessions with Walder.

 

Israel: Is this an ultra-Orthodox MeToo moment?

Shayli Tevel says he was abused throughout his teens by a leading member of the community

 

When senior ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel tried to silence or blame victims of sexual abuse who had been allegedly attacked by high-profile men in the community, young people expressed their anger. Some likened the furious response by young haredi Jews - for whom talk of sex is taboo and reaching out to police is often not an option - to the #MeToo movement.

Shayli Tevel weeps as he prays, calling out to God: "Father, I've no energy left to absorb all this."

The former ultra-Orthodox Jew is wearing a white prayer shawl and tefillin - long leather straps with small boxes attached, containing scrolls with verses from the Torah.

After a decade of silence, Shayli, now in his early 30s, has recently broken strict religious conventions and spoken publicly about being groomed and sexually abused between the ages of 12 and 19, by a leading ultra-Orthodox - or haredi - figure.

The man Shayli accuses of abusing him is Yehuda Meshi Zahav, famous in Israel as a social activist and the founder of an emergency rescue service.

"Everyone gave him respect and I wanted to be around him," Shayli says. One of 13 children, Shayli often craved attention and felt flattered to be singled out by Meshi Zahav.

Then, one day, Meshi Zahav offered him a free T-shirt. "When he put [it] on, he put his hand inside my pants."

There is no sex education at Jewish seminaries called yeshivas - like the ones where Shayli received all his schooling - and he found it hard to articulate the abuse to others.

He thought about harming himself. "I didn't want life anymore," he says.

In his early 20s, Shayli did go to the police, but their first investigation of Meshi Zahav was soon closed. "Everywhere I mentioned his name, the door was shut," he says.

But that changed in 2021, just after it was announced that Zahav had won the esteemed Israel Prize - regarded as the country's highest cultural honour. A newspaper published accusations of how since the 1980s, Zahav had been using his status and power to assault women and children.

One of the flyers Avigayl Heilbronn is circulating to her haredi community

Meshi Zahav denied it and after police opened an investigation, he tried to kill himself, ending up in a coma.

But the Meshi Zahav case hasn't been the only recent high-profile sex abuse scandal to have come to light among haredi Jews - who make up about 12% of Israel's population.

Romi Schwartz, now 40, was sexually abused as a child and later raped by children's book author, therapist, and media personality Rabbi Chaim Walder to whom she had turned for help.

"He was like a mentor, a guru. The kids' whisperer," Romi says of Walder. His children's books were found in almost every ultra-Orthodox home.

After her family arranged her marriage at the age of 17, Romi was still having panic attacks from her childhood trauma. Her husband tried to help by arranging therapy sessions with Walder.

Romi says she felt reassured at first. "He said I'm going to be there for you."

But after a year, he took advantage of her trust and the fact she had led a sheltered life. He sexually assaulted her in his book storeroom and later tricked her into going to a hotel, where he raped her.

Despite her ultra-Orthodox upbringing, Romi now considers herself a secular Jew. She says reporting such abuse to the police would be considered unthinkable by many in the haredi community.

"You don't go to the secular world's authorities, it's forbidden."

It was only late last year, after another newspaper investigation, that a special rabbinical court acted against Walder. The religious court found him guilty of sexually assaulting or raping more than 20 women and girls over decades.

He protested his innocence, but as police began an investigation, he shot himself dead.

It was the subsequent defensive reaction from some senior haredi Jews which drew a furious backlash from others in the community.

Some rabbis and religious media reacted with silence or even by criticising the victims. They accused those who had spoken out against Walder of the sin of slander, even murder. One abuse survivor then killed herself.

Religious activist, Shoshana Keats Jaskoll, says she and others couldn't believe that Walder was still being defended, and that it was his victims who were being blamed.

She said their reaction prompted an "explosion" of anger and "an absolute revolution in the haredi community".

Avigayl Heilbronn, who describes herself as a modern haredi, is one of a growing number of women trying to raise awareness in a community which shuns the internet.

She and others have been leafleting ultra-Orthodox households across Israel - more than a million flyers have been put through letterboxes. "These are instructions for parents [on] how to talk to their children about sexual abuse," says Avigayl. "We're not only making noise."

The activists liken what is happening to the #MeToo movement. They say it has had a similar domino effect - "with adults and children speaking out about historic and recent abuse by powerful figures - both men and women".

Questions remain, though, about how effectively the most conservative haredi authorities can act against sexual abusers.

"Because a lot of it is the culture of how the haredi community thinks and no matter what you say or do, the rabbi is everything"

But Rabbi Aharon Boymel - who considered himself a friend of both Zahav and Walder - insists things are changing.

He says rabbinical leaders did not know about abuse by the two men but admits that a culture of shame and secrecy has been "a big problem".

"Once we used to brush this stuff under the carpet. Today there is no such thing. If someone abuses a young boy or girl, immediately we call the police," he says.

Rabbi Aharon Boymel and Yehuda Meshi Zahav

 

"Today I know another story like that of Chaim Walder and Yehuda Meshi Zahav. Big names, important people, they've stopped [the abuse] and gone to get treatment thanks to this story," he says.

Such comments have raised concerns among victims who believe some abusers are still being offered treatment rather than reported directly to the police.

After more than a year in a coma, news broke in June that Yehuda Meshi Zahav - the man who had long tormented Shayli Tevel - had died.

Days later, Shayli searches for his grave in the vast, centuries-old Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. He finds it in a corner reserved for those who killed themselves - seen as a violation of Jewish beliefs.

Shayli prays there alone for a short time. He leaves tearful but relieved.

"It's behind me," he says. "It's painful, but now it's over."

"For everyone who's passed something like that, don't be afraid, whatever happened to you, whatever happened to your child, speak about it," he says.

"It heals you."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-62984847

And The Good News is? ------ No Jews Involved :-) (I Hope)

Justice Dept. Charges 47 in Brazen Pandemic Aid Fraud in Minnesota

 

The defendants were charged with stealing $240 million intended to feed children, in what appears to be the largest theft so far from a pandemic-era program.

 

The indictments said the defendants had pulled in millions of dollars a week by taking money from federal anti-hunger programs for meals they never served.

 

 

MINNEAPOLIS — The Justice Department said on Tuesday that it had charged 47 people with running a brazen fraud against anti-hunger programs during the coronavirus pandemic, stealing $240 million by billing the government for meals they did not serve to children who did not exist.

The case, in Minnesota, is the largest fraud uncovered in any pandemic-relief program, prosecutors said, standing out even in a period when heavy federal spending and lax oversight allowed a spree of scams with few recent parallels.

The Minnesota operation, prosecutors said, involved faked receipts for 125 million meals. At times, it was especially bold: One accused conspirator told the government he had fed 5,000 children a day in a second-story apartment.

Other defendants in the case seemed to put minimal effort into disguising what they were doing, using the website listofrandomnames.com to create a fake list of children they could charge for feeding. Others used a number-generating program to produce ages for the children they were supposedly feeding, which led the ages to fluctuate wildly each time the group updated its list of those nonexistent children, court papers said.

But their scheme — details of which were reported in The New York Times in March — still pulled in millions of dollars per week, prosecutors said in court papers, because government officials had relaxed oversight of the feeding program during the pandemic and because the other defendants had help from a trusted insider.

That insider was Aimee Bock, the founder of a nonprofit group, Feeding Our Future, that the State of Minnesota relied on as a watchdog to stop fraud at feeding sites. But Ms. Bock did the opposite, the indictments said: When pandemic-relief programs flooded the programs with money, she exploited her position to bring in nearly 200 new feeding operations she knew were submitting fake or inflated invoices.

Even when the government of Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, raised questions, Ms. Bock rebuffed them by filing a lawsuit and accusing state officials of discriminating against her group’s largely East African clientele.

“In effect, Feeding Our Future operated a pay-to-play scheme in which individuals seeking to operate fraudulent sites under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future had to kick back a portion of their fraudulent proceeds,” one indictment said, according to a copy obtained by The Times.

“The subjects in this case weren’t interested in feeding our future,” Michael Paul, a special agent for the F.B.I., said at a news conference on Tuesday, when the charges were announced. “They were interested in feeding their own gluttony.”

Ms. Bock was indicted on charges of wire fraud and bribery involving federal programs. Other defendants were also charged with money laundering, for allegedly routing the funds they stole through a web of shell companies.

The case is the largest brought by the Justice Department as it scrambles to address waves of fraud involving pandemic-era programs that sent billions of dollars of aid into the economy, often with few strings attached and little oversight.

The Labor Department’s inspector general’s office has opened 39,000 investigations. At the Small Business Administration, about 50 agents have been sorting through two million potentially fraudulent loan applications. And while the sheer volume of cases all but ensures that some cases will go unaddressed, the prosecutions in Minnesota signal that the Justice Department is moving aggressively on others.

The indictments said the defendants spent their money on real estate in the United States, Kenya and Turkey, as well as on cars and luxury goods. The Justice Department is seeking to seize many of those purchases, including more than 20 cars, more than 40 properties, guns, cryptocurrency and a Louis Vuitton duffel bag.

Prosecutors said on Tuesday that many defendants had been arrested or had turned themselves in. They said some had left the country, but declined to say how many.

The indictments are accusations, and many of those who were charged have said they did nothing wrong. After a series of F.B.I. searches in January revealed the existence of the investigation, Ms. Bock told The Times that she had put in place strong antifraud measures and did not believe anyone in her system had broken the rules.

If there was fraud, Ms. Bock said then, “every test we have in place and every protection we have in place didn’t catch it. Is it possible? Absolutely. And if they got one over on us, I will help hold them accountable.”

On Tuesday, Ms. Bock, accompanied by her lawyer, was seen walking into the Minneapolis federal courthouse. Her lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.

Prosecutors said that those indicted included Sharmarke Issa, the former chairman of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, and Abdi Nur Salah, a former aide to Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, a Democrat. Both men were publicly connected to this case earlier in the year, because of their ties to a property that prosecutors said was bought with stolen money.

Also among the 44 people indicted was a Feeding Our Future employee, Abdikerm Abdelahi Eidleh, who was accused of taking kickbacks from people involved in the scheme. Three other defendants — including another of the nonprofit’s employees, Hadith Yusuf Ahmed — were charged via “criminal information” rather than a grand jury indictment.

The state blocked Feeding Our Future from receiving more aid money after the F.B.I. served search warrants in the case in January. The nonprofit group sought to dissolve at the time, but Attorney General Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a Democrat, blocked the move. Mr. Ellison asked a judge to supervise the group while he investigated whether it broke state charity laws. That investigation appears to be continuing.

As described by prosecutors, the participants targeted two federal food-aid programs, which were administered through state governments. They were intended to feed children in after-school programs and summer camps. But when the pandemic hit, Congress rejiggered the programs to reach millions of children stuck at home, pouring in billions of dollars more and changing the rules to let families pick up meals to go.

As funding went up, however, oversight went down: State officials, for instance, no longer had to check on feeding sites in person.

That left one last line of defense: the so-called watchdog sponsors, like Feeding Our Future. Those nonprofit groups served as conduits for money, from the states to individual feeding sites, and they were supposed to be on guard against fraud.

But the system also gave those watchdogs a reason not to bark: They could keep 10 to 15 percent of the money that flowed through them.

In this case, the indictments said, Ms. Bock’s group kept the money flowing to increase its own cut.

“The defendants exploited the Covid-19 pandemic — and the resulting program changes — to enrich themselves,” the indictments say.

Feeding Our Future had started before the pandemic as a small sponsor overseeing $3.5 million in funding. It never had an accountant on staff and sometimes struggled with basic governance, even allowing its nonprofit status to expire for a time.

But by 2021, Feeding Our Future was handling $197 million in annual funding.

Under its umbrella, the indictments said, six different groups began to operate similar frauds. The conspirators would often register new companies or nonprofits, then quickly sign them up as feeding operations under the supervision of Feeding Our Future.

Then, the indictments said, the new groups would soon report that they were feeding thousands of children per day — numbers that put them among the biggest feeding operations in the state — and began reaping thousands or millions of dollars in federal payments. In Minneapolis, for instance, a man named Guhaad Hashi Said told the state that he was serving 5,000 meals, twice a day, at a new facility called Advance Youth Athletic Development.

The site he listed was an unlikely place for anyone to feed children en masse: The address was a second-story apartment.

Mr. Said was one of those indicted; the indictment said he was paid $2.9 million out of federal money routed through the state and Feeding Our Future. But the indictment said that Mr. Said provided “only a fraction” of the meals he claimed. In an interview this year, Mr. Said said that he had never claimed to serve 5,000 meals a day in the first place.

In other cases, prosecutors said, feeding sites submitted invoices that were suspiciously consistent, with thousands of children listed as attending, day after day with no variation.

“No one got sick. No one missed a meal. No one was away,” said Andrew M. Luger, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota. “Same children. Every single day. Every single week.”

In 2020, Minnesota officials grew concerned by the speed at which Feeding Our Future was creating new distribution sites and began giving them more scrutiny.

In November of that year, the nonprofit responded defiantly, filing a lawsuit that accused state officials of discrimination. The suit said the state was harming children by delaying the start of Feeding Our Future’s new operations. “Every day that goes by, hundreds of the state’s most vulnerable children are going without much needed meals,” it said.

Several of the sites where the state had sought to delay operations later became centers of fraud, according to the indictments.

In response to Feeding Our Future’s lawsuit, a state court judge ruled that Minnesota had not taken the steps necessary to block the payments. After that, in April 2021, frustrated state officials turned to the F.B.I. — and continued paying Feeding Our Future and its partners while federal agents investigated.

The state “moved quickly and repeatedly raised the issue to federal authorities until we were able to find someone who would take the troubling spending as seriously as we were,” said Kevin Burns, a spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Education, which handled the food-aid money.

Republicans in the State Senate released a report this month, before the indictments were made public, accusing the state’s Education Department of “dereliction of duty” for failing to stop Feeding Our Future sooner.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/us/politics/pandemic-aid-fraud-minnesota.html

The Hasidim We Should All Be Proud Of!

 

Hasidic nonprofit brings shoes to greet asylum-seekers arriving in NYC from Texas

 

'It’s like a little pop-up Ellis Island,' said Alexander Rapaport, whose Jewish nonprofit volunteers at a triage center at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. 

 

Masbia Relief Team members, in green, distribute shoes and other aid to asylum-seekers arriving at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan, New York, on Aug. 19, 2022. 

 

(RNS) — On any given day, the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown Manhattan is crammed with commuters and tourists off to the office or to Broadway’s “The Lion King.” But since August, the world’s largest bus station has also welcomed thousands of asylum-seekers arriving on unscheduled buses from Texas.

“It’s like a little pop-up Ellis Island where people are meeting volunteers with clothes, shoes and socks and other items,” Alexander Rapaport, CEO of a Jewish nonprofit called Masbia (which in Hebrew means “to satiate”), told RNS in a phone call. “There are volunteers telling them where they can go, where bathrooms are, how they can get more help.”

Just before dawn on Monday (Sept. 19), four Masbia volunteers with a truckload of donations arrived at the triage center, set up by the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA), the Port Authority and the governor’s office. They joined a handful of other nonprofits to greet three busloads of migrants (most of whom came to the U.S. from Venezuela), handing them new shoes, deodorant and tote bags labeled “With Love from the Jewish Community

Masbia, a Hasidic Jewish organization, is a New York City-based soup kitchen network whose relief team has been distributing shoes at the triage center since mid-August. Rapaport estimates they’ve donated 3,000 pairs of shoes worth tens of thousands of dollars and says many asylum-seekers arrive without shoes or in flip flops.

Masbia CEO Alexander Rapaport.

 

“The people, some of them went through so much horror, they are so broken, all we want to do is give them their humanity back,” said Rapaport.

Ruben Diaz, a chef who oversees the food distribution at Masbia, told RNS he’s given away shoes at the Port Authority roughly a dozen times.

“After being in a bus for two days, without food, shower, you can see they are a little desperate,” he told RNS. “Today there was an older lady, maybe 60 years old, and it was tough seeing somebody at that age coming to find a new opportunity at this time of their life. After she left the Port Authority, what is she going to do? Where is she going to find a job? The language is a barrier. It’s hard that you can’t do much more for them.”

Those arriving on the buses are coming from El Paso, Texas, where Mayor Oscar Leeser is filling buses with migrants, as well as from other Texas towns on buses sponsored by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Shaina Coronel, director of communications at MOIA, told RNS that the migrants are asylum-seekers who have a legal right to be in the United States. While some come to New York trying to connect with local friends or family, she said many were unaware of the buses’ destination and have family or court hearings in places like Miami or Chicago. Neither Leeser nor Abbott returned requests for comment in time for publication.

Coronel said lawyers at the triage center can assist the migrants with changing the location for their hearings, while medical staff can intervene for those who’ve been stuck on a bus for 50-plus hours. “Last week, a 2-year-old child came severely dehydrated, and our EMTs were there to transport him to the hospital. We are seeing folks in dire need of medical attention.”

Asylum-seekers exit a bus arriving from Texas at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan, New York, on Aug. 19, 2022.

For asylum-seekers who don’t have family nearby and aren’t being transported elsewhere, New York City is ramping up its sheltering capacity. Coronel says the city doesn’t always know when the buses of asylum-seekers will arrive.

“We’ve reached out to Abbott’s office to try to coordinate, and he refuses to coordinate with us. He actually had the bus companies he’s using sign a nondisclosure agreement to also not coordinate with us,” she said.

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At this point, buses are arriving nearly every day.

“It’s almost nonstop,” said Rapaport. “There’s about 50 people on a bus. In the beginning it was less than 100 people per day, and it was only three times a week. Now it’s close to 300 people a day, almost every day of the week.”

Despite the tense circumstances, Rapaport says the volunteers try to be cheerful when the buses arrive, greeting the asylum-seekers with smiles, signs in Spanish and even a model Statue of Liberty as a symbol of welcome. Rapaport says for him, it’s all an extension of his faith.

 

Masbia Relief Team members distribute aid to asylum-seekers

 

“In Scripture, in the Bible, there is so much about welcoming the stranger, talking about immigrants. You were an immigrant to Egypt, and bringing bread and water to the passer-by. To me it’s an opportunity to put all that into action.”

New York City estimates that over 11,000 asylum-seekers have entered the city in the last few months. As politicians continue to ship asylum-seekers to sanctuary cities and vacation destinations, Rapaport hopes the real lives of the asylum-seekers involved aren’t forgotten.

“The humanity gets overshadowed by all the political chatter,” said Rapaport. “There is a political element, but that shouldn’t be the only element. It’s not a game.”

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https://religionnews.com/2022/09/19/hasidic-nonprofit-in-nyc-greets-asylum-seekers-from-texas-with-shoes/

R. Aaron Teitelbaum, one of the two Satmar rebbes, is quoted as having said back in 2018: “The truth is, we either had very little secular studies or none at all. We will not comply, and we will not follow the state education commissioner under any circumstances.”

 

Critics of Hasidic Schools Exposé Missed the Point: It Wasn’t Antisemitic or the Product of Secular Bias — It’s a Story of Corruption

 

 

by Shaul Magid

 

When I was in yeshiva in Boro Park in the early 80s, I was asked by my Rosh Yeshiva, a Satmar Hasid, to go to Downtown Brooklyn to sign a few documents for state funds for the yeshiva. When I got there, I was told the money was for a summer program run by the yeshiva to teach English to new Russian immigrants. I knew nothing about this program and didn’t sign the forms. 

When I returned and the Rosh Yeshiva asked why I’d refused to sign the forms I asked him about the program. He told me no such program existed. When I asked, “How can we take public money for a program that doesn’t exist?” he smiled and looked at me as though I’d landed from another planet.

I was reminded of this incident as I read the recent feature in the Sunday New York Times on public funding of hasidic schools in New York City which has raised an enormous backlash on social media and among many American Jews. Accusations of bias, unfairness, and even antisemitism, have floated across social media and Jewish journalism.

It seems to me that there are a variety of issues here that have become mashed into one large set of accusations based on various interrelated but not identical components. 

• First, that it was unfair to accuse the school systems in haredi communities of failing to prepare students to attain the basics of citizenship and educational skills. This is hardly new. 
• Second, that this became a featured story in the Sunday New York Times in the first place. Here, suspicion of antisemitism raises its head—as seems to be the case whenever Jews are written about these days. 
• Finally, that the very accusation is based on chauvinistic assumptions about what constitutes “knowledge” given that haredi education is certainly intense and rigorous, albeit in matters that arguably fail to provide its students with basic 21st century life skills. This is especially true if they choose to live outside their enclaves which, in some ways, is precisely the point.  

Regarding the educational curricula and policies of haredi schools, much of what appeared in the Times has been a source of controversy for decades. Naftuli Moster and his “Young Activists For Fair Education” (a.k.a. YAFFED) have been working tirelessly on this issue, while numerous essays in law journals have addressed these matters, including a recent 57-page scientific essay by Matty Lichtenstein published in the American Journal of Sociology. This is clearly not the creation of a bunch of editors at the New York Times.

What almost none of the article’s critics appears to mention is that this story is really about corruption; it’s about the city and state political figures and yeshiva deans who have duplicitously taken money from state coffers without abiding by state regulations, and the politicians who’ve looked the other way to insure a haredi voting bloc. As much as a Hasidic story, this is also a New York story of political malfeasance. 

The nature of haredi education is a matter that’s largely internal to the Jewish community, even as legal issues sometimes extend to the courts. Private schools in general have great latitude in curricula so long as they abide by certain very broad procedural mandates. One can think of the Amish schools and Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) where the Supreme Court ruled that the Amish are not bound to put their children in compulsory education past 8th grade. 

For the Amish, what we generally call “knowledge” is considered hubris and counter to the “plain life” to which they aspire. But the Amish refuse state funding for schools as a matter of religious principle while these haredi yeshivas take state funds yet fail to comply with educational regulations. And the state seems to look the other way. So this report isn’t merely an indictment of “Jews” (that is, the haredi schools in question) but equally of the state. It’s a case of collusion in which students are the victims.

The haredi schools are taking money from the state, and thus American taxpayers, without abiding by the dictates of state educational procedures. In fact, according to the article, R. Aaron Teitelbaum, one of the two Satmar rebbes, is quoted as having said back in 2018: 

“The truth is, we either had very little secular studies or none at all. We will not comply, and we will not follow the state education commissioner under any circumstances.” 

And yet his schools readily accept state funding. It is this corruption that merits a feature essay in the Times. Teitelbaum can certainly refuse to comply with state mandates and suffer whatever consequences may come his way. But if he takes money and doesn’t comply, that is corruption.

*

But let’s review some of the criticism and accusations against the Times. Two essays, one by Liel Leibovitz in Tablet and one by Avi Shafran in Religion News Service, are worth noting. Neither focuses on corruption, with Leibovitz ignoring it entirely and Shafran dismissing it as “a few dollars per child…for things like school safety and nutritious meals.”

Leibovitz asks us to consider the unwarranted hegemony about how we define “knowledge”—that is, secular knowledge—and how that definition doesn’t produce healthy adults overall, but a society riddled with drugs, abuse, and unhappiness. In other words, Leibovitz wants us to determine educational value by output and not input. While a legitimate concern for which I have some sympathy, his assessment of the “happiness” of the haredi world is purely speculative. He has never lived in it (I have) and his judgment is a purely romantic, or more likely opportunistic, view of one gazing in from the outside. 

Setting that aside, he falsely suggests—again with no knowledge whatsoever—that yeshiva students must know math because a medieval glossator on the Talmud in the 13th century (known as Tosafot) discusses a rudimentary notion of Pi and thus the student must know enough math to understand that. What he fails to mention is that those cherry-picked medieval comments on mathematical calculations from the Middle Ages are most often glossed over in yeshiva classrooms—in part because the teacher doesn’t have the requisite knowledge to figure them out in any detail either. But how would Leibovitz know, he never studied Tosafot in a haredi yeshiva? 

Leibovitz proceeds to note that yeshiva students know of the Sasanian Queen Shushandukht while public school kids would be scratching their heads. Really? First of all, not one in a thousand haredi yeshiva students would know what the word “Sasanian” even means (it’s the term for a pre-Islamic middle Persian empire). And secondly, I would wager that most yeshiva students who study the Bavli (Babylonian Talmud) all day, couldn’t find Bavel on a map, let alone know anything about how the Babylonian sages lived their lives.

In the end, Leibovitz simply wants to use the Times essay to weaponize the “liberal” media’s latent antisemitism. The problem is that his understanding and experience of that world is so scant that it fails miserably, almost comically.

Shafran’s response is more standardly apologetic, minimizing the cases of abuse and malfeasance (“a few bad apples”); yet, unlike Leibovitz, he openly states that the Times piece is not antisemitic at all. Shafran focuses on the productive nature of haredi society, noting that people become storeowners, plumbers, therapists, “yes, even candlestick makers.” (His haredi readers will not get that reference.) This is true. The haredi world is a fully functioning subculture where Torah study is accompanied by professions that do not require a secular education (this is true of the Amish as well). 

But that does not mean that some secular education doesn’t contribute mightily to good citizenship (even if some, or many, citizens lead unhappy lives for all kinds of reasons). Unlike Leibovitz, Shafran actually lives in the haredi world, and thus while he apologizes for it, he doesn’t romanticize, or overly distort it. His reading is thus contestable, but not comical. 

He does overemphasize the old argument that Talmud study sharpens one’s critical thinking, which it does, but that’s no substitute for knowing how to write a cogent sentence in English if you live in America, or to decipher instructions on how to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture (ok, I agree, that’s exceedingly difficult regardless). As Matty Lichtenstein argues in her essay, the skills acquired through Talmud study only substitute for secular knowledge if they are transferred into a different register, which haredi yeshiva education intentionally and in principle does not do.

Maligning the many for the few is always an argument used to deflect social ills (most citizens are not, contra Leibovitz, abused, unhappy drug addicts). But how many students need to be traumatized, underserved, marginalized, or basically illiterate for something to constitute a serious social problem? That’s a serious question. Shafran defends his community’s behavior at great peril—certainly for the sake of the children ill-equipped to function if they choose to leave the enclave in which they were raised.

*

But again, neither Leibovitz nor Shafran addresses the reason this made it to the front page of the Sunday New York Times: malfeasance and corruption. I leave the reader with one more personal anecdote. 

In 2016 I was hired as an expert consultant for a case being brought by the ACLU against a large (non-Hasidic) yeshiva in New Jersey that had taken $10 million of state funds to build a new dormitory and library. In order to get the state funds, the yeshiva claimed it was a non-sectarian institution. I read through hundreds of pages of yeshiva documents arguing that its classes were “secular,” taught secular skills, and that it didn’t discriminate against race or creed in its admission policies. It was, of course, absurd. After months of consultation, two days before the trial the yeshiva relented and eventually returned the money. They knew they had no case in court.

Are my experiences exceptional? I will let the reader decide. Taking money from state coffers while openly claiming “We will not comply” is both illegal and egregious (and, unless you hold by the halakhic (Jewish legal) opinion that theft is only a transgression if it’s theft against a Jew, it’s also forbidden and transgressive). If there is any antisemitism being fostered here, it’s not by the New York Times but by the yeshiva deans who engage in such activity and those who defend them.

 

https://religiondispatches.org/critics-of-hasidic-schools-expose-missed-the-point-it-wasnt-a-case-of-antisemitism-or-of-who-defines-knowledge-but-there-is-a-word-for-it/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=critics-of-hasidic-schools-expose-missed-the-point-it-wasnt-a-case-of-antisemitism-or-of-who-defines-knowledge-but-there-is-a-word-for-it&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=critics-of-hasidic-schools-expose-missed-the-point-it-wasnt-a-case-of-antisemitism-or-of-who-defines-knowledge-but-there-is-a-word-for-it

Biden signs bill eliminating civil statute of limitations for child sex abuse victims --- No federal statute of limitations was in place for criminal claims regarding child sex abuse.

ונקה ינקה

 

President Biden on Friday signed a bill that will eliminate the statute of limitations for people who were sexually abused as minors to file civil claims.

The Eliminating Limits to Justice for Child Sex Abuse Victims Act was passed by the House by voice vote on Tuesday after passing the Senate by unanimous consent in March.

The bill eliminates time constraints for survivors to file civil claims related to sex abuse crimes against minors, including forced labor, sex trafficking, sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children.

Previously, minors who survived such abuse were able to file federal claims until they reached the age of 28 or until a decade after the violation or injury was discovered.

No federal statute of limitations was in place for criminal claims regarding child sex abuse.

The bill was initially introduced by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and co-sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

“The science of trauma is clear: it often takes years for victims to come forward,” Durbin said in a statement after the House passed the bill. “Our bipartisan bill honors the basic notions of justice for survivors, and I was proud to work with Senator Blackburn and our colleagues in the House to lead it across the finish line. By signing this legislation into law, we can finally help survivors have their day in court and a moment of healing—when they are ready.”

 

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3647958-biden-signs-bill-eliminating-civil-statute-of-limitations-for-child-sex-abuse-victims/