Sunday, April 30, 2023

New Square Bans * All * Intelligence!

 

These Advanced-Intelligent Crackpots Are The Ones That Created Separate Sidewalks For Men & Women


Hassidic sect bans AI tools: 'Open to all abominations, heresy, and heathenry'

 

Rabbinical leaders of the Skver Hassidic sect issued a letter prohibiting the use of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT.

Artificial Intelligence

With the world abuzz over artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT, even the more secluded sects of orthodox Judaism are left with no choice but to address the new technology. More than a dozen rabbis from the Skver Hassidic sect on Thursday released a letter banning the use of AI tools.

"We must warn about the obstacle and the terrible danger of the new service 'OpenAI' and the like," the letter opened. It proceeds to warn that although not everyone has yet recognized the danger, the technology poses "a trap for all of us, young and old."

The letter continues, stating: "We are declaring that this is like internet without a filter, and is open to all abominations, heresy, and heathenry without limits, and brings to all the prohibitions which are considered, 'You shall not stray after your heart and after your eyes,' and it is obvious that it is considered a severe crime."

Therefore, the letter concludes, "The use of AI is prohibited in any form, even using a telephone.

The Skver Hassidic sect, originally from Eastern Europe, is now based in New Square, a small, all-Hassidic village northwest of New York City. The community is led by Rabbi David Twersky and is considered to be more conservative and secluded, even by Hassidic standards.




Thursday, April 27, 2023

Former Jewish girls school principal and now convicted sex offender Malka Leifer was ordered on Wednesday to appear in an Australian court in June for a two-day sentencing hearing.

 

Malka Leifer in Australian court as judge weighs sentence after sex abuse conviction

 

Judge Mark Gamble sets June 28-29 for sentencing following Israeli principal’s conviction on 18 charges relating to sexual abuse of sisters Dassi Erlich and Elly Sapper

 

 

Former principal Malka Leifer, wanted in Australia for child sex abuse crimes, seen at the Jerusalem District Court, on February 14, 2018. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Former principal Malka Leifer, 
 

MELBOURNE, Australia — Former Jewish girls school principal and now convicted sex offender Malka Leifer was ordered on Wednesday to appear in an Australian court in June for a two-day sentencing hearing.

A Victoria state County Court jury convicted the 56-year-old Israeli citizen and mother of eight early this month on 18 charges relating to the sexual abuse of sisters Dassi Erlich and Elly Sapper when they were students and student teachers at Adass Israel School in Melbourne from 2003 until 2007.

Leifer faced a procedural hearing via a video link from prison on Wednesday during which Judge Mark Gamble set a timetable for her sentencing hearing on June 28-29

A Victoria state County Court jury convicted the 56-year-old Israeli citizen and mother of eight early this month on 18 charges relating to the sexual abuse of sisters Dassi Erlich and Elly Sapper when they were students and student teachers at Adass Israel School in Melbourne from 2003 until 2007.

Leifer faced a procedural hearing via a video link from prison on Wednesday during which Judge Mark Gamble set a timetable for her sentencing hearing on June 28-29.

Gamble said there were significant matters he wanted addressed by prosecutor Justin Lewis and Leifer’s lawyer Ian Hill in the hearing, including details of the time Leifer spent in police or correctional custody in Israel.

That includes time in “quasi-custody” such as home detention, Gamble said.

The convictions include rape, indecent assault and sexual penetration of a child aged 16 or 17.


Sisters Elly Sapper (L), Nicole Meyer (C) and Dassi Erlich (R) speak to the media outside the County Court in Melbourne on April 3, 2023 after the trial of former school principal Malka Leifer
 

Abuse allegations were first raised with the Adass Israel School board in 2008 and Leifer was stood down.

Within days, she fled to Israel. She was charged in 2014 and spent years fighting extradition to Australia, which was granted in 2020. She left Israel in early 2021.

Meyer, Erlich and Sapper were in court for Wednesday’s brief hearing. The Associated Press does not usually identify victims and alleged victims of sexual abuse, but the sisters have chosen to identify themselves in the media.

They said the verdicts marked a time to start looking forward.

“The sentence will protect her from hurting others, but she has been found guilty — the whole world will know that now,” Meyer told reporters.

Lawyers have until June 5 to file written submissions on sentencing.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/malka-leifer-in-australian-court-as-judge-weighs-sentence-after-sex-abuse-conviction/

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers

 

The Importance of E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuit Against Donald Trump


Photo of a woman carrying a sign that says “hashtag Believe Survivors.”


Amid several investigations into purported misconduct connected to his presidency and to his business, Donald Trump faces a different sort of accusation in a civil trial set to begin on Tuesday in Manhattan: that he raped a woman in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, the elegant Fifth Avenue department store, in the mid-1990s.

Mr. Trump has denied the claim. But power and wealth like his have often protected abusers from accountability.

Countless people are victims of sexual assault and harassment. Rarely do they see justice done. That narrative has begun to change, though much too slowly. And that is why the lawsuit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll against Mr. Trump is among the most significant developments of the post-#MeToo era.

Ms. Carroll filed her lawsuit under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul in May 2022. It allowed those who claimed they were victims of sexual assault a period of one year beginning last November to sue for damages regardless of when the abuse was said to have occurred. In the same suit, Ms. Carroll accuses him of defamation for what the complaint says are a “slew of false, insulting claims.” (Mr. Trump called Ms. Carroll’s rape allegation a “hoax and a lie,” referred to her as a “nut job” and suggested that he could not have raped her because “This woman is not my type!”)

To many women, Mr. Trump has come to represent male sexual entitlement. I heard this repeatedly as I researched my book about why accusers are often doubted. One woman I spoke with, Marissa Ross, who has written about sexual assault and harassment in the wine industry, explained her quite typical reaction to the notorious “Access Hollywood” videotape that surfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign, in which Mr. Trump brags: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” including “grab” women’s genitals. When she heard the tape, Ms. Ross told me, “I didn’t just hear Donald Trump. I heard every man that’s ever hurt me. It was those boys in high school, it was my ex-boyfriend, it was all those men. For me, and I imagine for many other survivors, it was not just hearing Trump. It was everyone that violated me.”

Mr. Trump’s election, which followed a campaign in which several women accused him of sexual misconduct, helped catalyze #MeToo. Ms. Carroll credits that movement with empowering her own decision to step forward. In the civil complaint, she recounts watching the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s accusers, and then many others, tell their stories of harassment and rape. As her complaint put it, she “saw how women had at last changed the public conversation by saying ‘Me Too’ and by demanding accountability.”

Now a jury must resolve what the judge in the case, Lewis A. Kaplan of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, described in an earlier ruling as “a ‘he said, she said’ case.” Ms. Carroll’s version of events is likely to be corroborated by two friends to whom she says she promptly turned after the assault. Her depiction of Mr. Trump may also be bolstered by the “Access Hollywood” tape, which the judge has allowed as evidence along with the testimony of two women who have accused Mr. Trump of nonconsensual sex acts, allegations that Mr. Trump has denied.

The testimony of a rape accuser alone seldom persuades a jury, so this bolstering can be helpful, if not essential, in surmounting what I call the credibility discount. Like most accusers, Ms. Carroll will need to overcome formidable barriers to belief. Even in a civil case like this, where the evidentiary standard of proof is much lower than in a criminal prosecution, accusers confront an uphill battle.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers will deploy strategies that are at this point familiar — because they are often effective despite capitalizing on myths about abuse. Since Mr. Trump is anticipated not to testify at trial, his case is likely to hinge on attacking Ms. Carroll’s own account. The defense may insist that she welcomed the bantering exchange that led the two to the dressing room, and Ms. Carroll’s recollection in her complaint that she “kept laughing” after the incident may be used to support this consensual version of events.

As an alternative, the defense might argue that the entire encounter was invented, noting that Ms. Carroll opted not to report the alleged rape to the police at the time or to seek medical attention. All this can be used against her as evidence she’s lying.

As to why she would supposedly lie, Mr. Trump’s legal team may harness his own explanations. In his 2022 deposition, he suggested that Ms. Carroll is a political pawn, an attention-seeker, a woman out to profit from her allegation. These are standard portrayals of rape accusers. The trial will test their ongoing power.

The outcome takes on heightened significance because Mr. Trump has embraced the role of avenger on behalf of men accused of sexual misconduct. In 2016, responding to the allegations of sexual misconduct against him, Mr. Trump asserted that “every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign” and added, “If they can fight somebody like me, who has unlimited resources to fight back, just look at what they can do to you.”

In her complaint, Ms. Carroll says she kept quiet about what happened for decades in no small part because she feared that Mr. Trump would “bury her in threats and lawsuits.” She also says that she was convinced no one would believe her, that she blamed herself for what happened, and that she thought strong women minimize their suffering and move forward. What Ms. Carroll relates are normal ways that victims cope with the aftermath of abuse. After many years of conversations with survivors, I view her account as unexceptional.

What is unusual is that Ms. Carroll became willing to level a public accusation and to pursue legal accountability. Most women lack the platform, the privilege and the resources to do what she has done. While it might be tempting to dismiss the importance of one lawsuit, this would ignore the long, continuing arc of #MeToo.

 

Ms. Tuerkheimer is a professor of law at Northwestern University and the author of “Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers.”

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/opinion/trump-metoo-sexual-assault-lawsuit.html

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Yeshiva University's High-Wire Act!

 

Yeshiva University says it’s committed to women’s Talmud study amid uproar over canceled courses

(JTA) — The future of Talmud study for women at Yeshiva University remains uncertain after a dean told the student newspaper that the school would not replace a beloved teacher and that too few students were signing up for some courses to keep offering them.

More than 1,400 people have signed a petition calling on the university to preserve Talmud courses at Stern College for Women, Y.U.’s women’s division. The signers include prominent Talmud teachers, current and former Y.U. faculty members, a slew of graduates and students at Modern Orthodox high schools.

The petition calls on the university to partner with the signers to endow a teaching position in honor of Rabbi Moshe Kahn, who taught advanced Talmud classes before his death from lung cancer in January, at 71. It also argues that courses for students at all levels of Talmud proficiency are essential for the Modern Orthodox college to offer.

“Not hiring a full-time professor dedicated to teaching Talmud at diverse levels will close the pipeline of access to Gemara for all students and ultimately lead to a decline in enrollment in the advanced level course,” said the petition. “The world of Torah study for women as we now know it would indeed be שָׁמֵם [shamem], utterly desolate.”

In a letter published online on Friday and set to go to students this week, Stern administrators have made their first comment on the situation, noting that advanced courses are still being offered, affirming support for women’s Talmud study and inviting those who are concerned to help the school cover its cost.

“We have been planning a number of new initiatives,” Stern faculty said in the letter. “We would be delighted if those who support women’s advanced Torah study and the students, friends and supporters of Rabbi Kahn would endow a Rabbi Moshe Kahn Chair of Talmud Studies for Women. We are also seeking to create a new cohort program of Matmidot Scholars for young women to learn Tanach and Talmud on the highest levels.”

Stern College administrators did not respond to questions, including about which courses will be offered and whether the school would permit undersized Talmud classes in the future. Registration for the fall semester opens in early May.

Yeshiva University is the only address in North America for Orthodox women to access advanced, intensive secular and Judaic studies at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Any scaling back of Talmud courses there would diminish scholarship around one of Judaism’s most fundamental texts at the country’s flagship Modern Orthodox university. It also would make Y.U. an outlier in Modern Orthodoxy amid expanding opportunities for women to study Talmud, after centuries during which it was considered the exclusive province of men.

In the past few years, a growing number of women have formed asynchronous communities around studying a page of Talmud a day, a practice called daf yomi. The increasing number of programs offering ordination to Orthodox women also place a heavy focus on Talmud study.

Students who learned from Kahn said he had been a vital force for women who wanted to study traditional Jewish texts.

“He said, ‘Any woman who comes to my class is welcome.’ It wasn’t just lip service,” said Tamar Beer Horowitz, who studied with Kahn for five years and helped write the petition. “He genuinely made us all feel welcome.”

But while Kahn’s courses sometimes drew up to 20 students, lower-level Talmud classes sometimes had much smaller rosters, according to students and administrators. Many fell below Stern’s threshold to offer a class, eight students.

“We can continue low enrolled courses for a few semesters to see if the numbers pick up,” Karen Bacon, dean of Stern’s Undergraduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences, told The Commentator, the student newspaper, earlier this month. “When they don’t, we cannot justify the course unless it is a requirement for a particular major.”

Y.U. has made multiple changes to its Jewish studies offerings for both women and men in recent years. In 2021, the school announced that it would end its in-person Hebrew courses indefinitely, offering asynchronous classes online. That year, the undergraduate men’s college also dissolved its Jewish Studies division, combining multiple departments into a Bible, Hebrew and Near Eastern studies department. Before its dissolution, Jewish studies was the largest department at Yeshiva College.

The scaling back has come amid ongoing financial strain for Y.U., which survived a financial crisis more than a decade ago but now faces renewed litigation over its handling of child sex abuse allegations as well as the prospect of curtailed state funding depending on the outcome of a battle over its decision not to recognize an LGBTQ student group.

The changes in course offerings also come amid a national decline in the number of students studying the humanities. That trend has caused colleges and universities across the country to change their course offerings.

Y.U. appears to be hoping that the conversation spurred by the viral petition could cause more students to choose Talmud classes.

“We are pleased to share that Rabbi David Nachbar, an esteemed member of our Torah faculty, will be teaching a number of Rabbi Kahn’s classes,” the letter to students said. “We hope that recent discussions will inspire stronger enrollment, especially in our Talmud classes.”

But more than just offering courses will be needed, according to some Stern College students and graduates who say scheduling roadblocks can make it difficult to enroll in Talmud classes even when there is interest.

Multiple Stern students said that the school’s schedule meant registering for Talmud courses would have required them to sign up for two classes that met at the same time — making it impossible to complete the required coursework. Meanwhile, on the men’s campus, which offers more scheduling options for Talmud courses, the same conflicts do not occur, they said. Rabbi Ezra Schwartz, a leader in the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, was installed Monday morning as the men’s division’s full-time chair of Talmud and Jewish law.

“The claim that there’s no interest is — personally, I don’t think it’s true,” said Beer Horowitz, who is the founder of Bnot Sinai, an intensive women’s text study program in New York.

But she said even if there were low interest, canceling classes isn’t the best option, she said.

“I think that there may be dips in and rises in interest over time, but there’s also different things that cause that and we have to look critically at those,” she said. “You need to have that consistent offering to get it back to that place where it’s big and it’s popular and people are doing it.”

 

https://www.jta.org/2023/04/24/religion/yeshiva-university-says-its-committed-to-womens-talmud-study-amid-amid-uproar-over-canceled-courses?utm_source=JTA_Maropost&utm_campaign=JTA_DB&utm_medium=email&mpweb=1161-56737-25499

Monday, April 24, 2023

Israel is Fighting the World’s War ---- Memorial Day in Israel has important lessons for all of us!

 

[Editor’s note: The piece below is to mark Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, and Yom Haatzmaut, Independence Day – a somber day followed by a day of great celebration held every year in late April or early May on the day (in the Hebrew calendar) which, in 1948, Israel declared its independence. This year, Yom Hazikaron will be commemorated from the evening of Monday, April 24th, and Yom Haatzmaut will be celebrated from the evening of Tuesday, April 25 to the evening of Wednesday, April 26.]
 
 

 

None of the 18 people murdered in Israel by Islamic terrorists so far this year were soldiers.

The dead included a 6-year-old boy and his 8-year-old brother killed in a car ramming attack in Jerusalem, a British mother and daughters gunned down on the road, a 27-year-old from Connecticut traveling to a wedding, and an Italian tourist run over on the beach.

In some countries, the soldiers fight wars, in Israel, they fight to stop a genocide.

Islamic massacres are often defended with some variation of “the occupied have the right to resist”. The Muslim occupiers keep resisting the indigenous Jewish population by killing women and children, and random foreigners whose only crime is being non-Muslim in a land that the terrorists want to reclaim for Islam.

Ever since the “throw the Jews into the sea” era, the agenda has never changed.

After the shooting of two brothers driving through the occupied village of Huwara, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted a poll asking the Arab Muslim settlers if they approved of the terrorist attack. 71% of them supported the killings.

When Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, arrives on Monday evening, it finds a nation at war against a genocidal enemy that has half the world under siege.

In the past several weeks, five terrorists were arrested in Sweden, four in France in yet another plot to carry out an attack the Champs-Elysées, a teenager in the UK will be tried for plotting an attack at the Isle of Wight Festival and an Islamic terrorist leader in Australia was sentenced to 15 years in prison for planning to behead a non-Muslim and drape his body in the ISIS flag.

Stories like these have become so routine and overshadowed that we no longer pay any attention to them. Islamic terrorism unites us all. Its victims include America and Europe, India, China and Russia. It crosses the world from Africa to Asia and ends up on our doorstep.

With so much of the world under siege, it is a wonder that a tiny country so narrow you could walk its width has been the finger in the dike, holding out against a tide of death flooding the world.

The Jihad did not begin in Israel, but it was a warning to the world of what was to come. The prediction that we would one day all be Israelis, that Islamic terrorism would become a part of our everyday lives and we would go on while trying to ignore it, has long since come to pass.

But, as Israel enters its memorial day and red poppies known as the ‘blood of the maccabees’  mark the fallen, followed by Yom HaAtzamut, its independence day, there are still things, both good and bad, that we can learn from the Jewish State. The connection between the two Israeli commemorations, memorial day on Monday night and independence day on Tuesday night, is a powerful reminder that independence can only be maintained through a willingness to fight.

Surrender is not an option, but it has never been an option in a country where it would mean the mass murder, with occasional side mass rape, of the population. Israel has retreated, it has negotiated, but it has never surrendered. The terrorist attacks serve as a constant reminder of an enemy that obsessively kills women and children because its mission is total extermination.

Only 38% of the Israelis killed in Islamic terrorist attacks in 2023 were military age men. 27% were female and 22% were children. The murdered included 6-year-old and 8-year-old boys run down in the street, a 14-year-old boy on the way to synagogue and a 15-year-old British girl traveling with her family.

This is why the Israeli soldier serves. He is there to put his body on the line between Islamic terrorists and the most vulnerable and innocent children whose lives they lust to take.

Islamic terrorists don’t kill children by accident, they see it as their highest calling.

House Democrats recently protested the arrest of Sheikh Rashid Ghannouchi, of Tunisia’s Islamist Ennahda Movement, who had called for “unceasing war against the Americans”.

“There are no civilians in Israel. The population—males, females and children—are the army reserve soldiers, and thus can be killed,” Ghannouchi had also declared.

The Islamic cleric has often been described as a “moderate” by the media. Moderate Muslim clerics believe in exterminating all the women and children. What do the “extremists” believe?

Despite Israel’s turbulent politics, Yom HaZikaron, the commemoration of the fallen, briefly clarifies the stakes.

And the stakes are the children. And the world.

The Muslim world convinced the international community to pressure Israel by promising that the Jihad would stop there. “Give us Israel and it will end,” they urged. Despite all those promises, the Islamic war against civilization has spread across the world. Most of the world’s major nations and some of the minor ones have their own Islamic insurgency that plays by the same rules: alternating political demands with brutal massacres in the name of Islamic rule.

Generations of Israelis have gone to an endless war, sacrificed sons and daughters, to hold back the tide. They did it in defiance of the ignorance, hostility and pressures of the world.

They did it because they believed, they did it because they refused to die and they did it because surrendering to an enemy that gleefully butchers children was unthinkable.

Despite everything that has happened in the last generation, the world has learned little. But the Israelis have learned that peace is an illusion and that all they can do is hold the line.

When the torches are lit and loved ones weep, when the ‘blood of the maccabees’ blooms, a nation reckons again with the price that it pays for survival. Whatever myths pacifists may harbor and anti-war activists preach, there is no escape for any nation from paying that price.

Some nations have it paid by others, as the United States of America has done for so much of the globe, but in a world where evil is a reality writ in the black ink of the Koran, there can only be temporary refuges from the reckoning.

Israel still relies on a draft army. The price paid for war is a shared burden, but so is the price paid for appeasement. The fallen and their families come from all walks of life. These men and women, grandmothers, sisters, sons and nephews, have paid the world’s price in tears. They did not do it for the world, but their nation’s memorial day is nonetheless a lesson for the world.

Paying the price for freedom has long since become a cliche. Israelis do not pay the price for freedom. They pay it so that their children, their loved ones and their people are not eradicated from the earth by a brutal enemy that has no concept of mercy and worships barbarism.

The Israelis have come up against a choice that we will all have to make sooner or later. They chose not to die. The day will come when we may face that choice as starkly as they do.

Let us hope and pray that we choose well.

 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israel-is-fighting-the-worlds-war/

Thursday, April 20, 2023

Chabad To The Rescue --- Or A Catalyst To The Long Term Problem?

 

Hebrew school enrollment across US down by nearly half since 2006, report says

(JTA) — Living in Brooklyn, surrounded by synagogues and Jewish schools, Rachel Weinstein White and her husband hoped to find a place where their children could receive a Jewish education for a few hours each week.

But they knew they didn’t want to enroll at a traditional Hebrew school associated with a local synagogue. For one thing, White wasn’t interested at the time in participating in prayer services, the main offering of most congregations. Plus, her husband is Black and not Jewish, and they were not sure how well he or their children would be welcomed.

So about eight years ago, she started her own program together with a few families, setting up a cooperative and hiring a teacher in an early version of the “learning pods” that would become a pandemic fad.

“It was just this incredible, magical year,” White said. “So many people started hearing about our little class and asked to join that it became necessary to create a second class. … It just kind of grew organically from there.”

Today, the school, Fig Tree, enrolls about 350 children across three locations and plans are underway to expand further. In hour-long classes on Sundays and weekday afternoons, children learn about Jewish holidays and history, engage in art and creative play, explore their local Jewish communities and learn basic Hebrew, in a program that culminates in a b’nai mitzvah year. It overlaps significantly with traditional Hebrew schools, but outside the usual setting — a synagogue classroom — that has become a cultural shorthand among American Jews for rote, uninspiring Jewish education. 

That dynamic may be why Fig Tree is an outlier in a stark trend revealed in a new report: Enrollment in supplemental Jewish schools — those that students attend in addition to regular schooling in public or secular private schools — is down by nearly half over the last 15 years. 

Even as the estimated number of Jewish children in the United States rose by 17% between 2000 and 2020, enrollment in Hebrew schools fell by at least 45% between 2006 and 2020, according to the report by the Jewish Education Project, a nonprofit that promotes educational innovation and supports Jewish educators in a wide array of settings. 

The report identifies pockets of growth, mostly in the small number of programs like Fig Tree that operate outside of or adjacent to synagogues, and in schools operated by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement. But overall, according to the report, just 141,000 children attend supplemental Jewish schools in the United States and Canada, down from more than 230,000 in 2006 and 280,000 in 1987.

Some of the decline in Hebrew school enrollment is countered by increasing enrollment in Jewish day schools, where students study Jewish topics for at least part of every day. The number of U.S. children attending Jewish day schools has risen by roughly the same amount, 90,000, that Hebrew school enrollment has fallen since 2006, according to the report, though a significant portion of the increase stems from population growth in Orthodox communities, where the vast majority of students attend day schools.

Miriam Heller Stern, a professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion who was tapped to help design the study, said the results suggest that, as with many aspects of religious life today, Hebrew school enrollment cannot be counted on as an act of obligation or tradition.

“There’s this idea that parents send their kids to Hebrew school because they went to Hebrew school and that’s a rite of passage in North America, but that may be a myth,” she said. “People don’t want to push their kids to have to do the same thing they did, necessarily, anymore.”

The report speculates about what has fueled the enrollment decline — from demographic changes to shifts in how American Jews think about countering antisemitism to increased access to Jewish learning online — and also about what has allowed some schools to thrive. It notes that all of the supplemental schools that responded to its census said their schools help children feel connected to the Jewish people.

“We believe that many factors have led to the decline in enrollment of students in supplemental schools in the last decade,” said David Bryfman, the Jewish Education Project’s CEO. “However, it’s also a myth that all supplemental schools don’t work.”

The group is planning a series of online sessions with some of the dozens of researchers and practitioners involved in the report, with one goal the sharing of success stories identified by the survey. Of the six identified in the report, a common theme is urging experiential, community-based learning. Some of the promising models explicitly position themselves as infusing Jewish content into child care, filling a pressing need for American families.

Still, it may be hard to counter the demographic realities of contemporary American Jews: Just a third of U.S. Jews in a 2020 survey said someone in their household was a member of a synagogue. That was the case even for the majority of non-Orthodox Jews who said they identified with a particular denomination, a marker of traditional engagement. 

The waning of synagogue affiliation is borne out in the Jewish Education Project’s report, which found that more than 700 supplemental schools shuttered between 2006 and 2020 — most outright, though as many as 200 have survived in a new form after merging.

Temple Solel, a small Reform congregation in Fort Mill, South Carolina, shut down its Hebrew school in recent years. The volunteer-run program had up to eight students at a time, according to Russ Cobe, a lay leader.

“We sort of hit a point where we weren’t able to sustain it,” Cobe said. “We only had a couple of people teaching and students from a wide range of ages and they wouldn’t show up every week. Also, our wheelhouse seems to be retirement age and above. We don’t have a lot of young families.”

Hebrew school mergers offer one possible approach to countering the enrollment decline. Two synagogues, one Reform and one Conservative, located half a mile apart in Oak Park, Michigan, established a joint school about seven years ago and called it Yachad, which means “together” in Hebrew.

“One day a week we meet at the Conservative congregation and one day a week we meet at the Reform congregation, so we are keeping our kids involved in both,” said Gail Greenberg, Yachad’s director. “My goal is to make it at the highest common denominator. For example, all of our food is kosher so anyone who wants to eat here can.”

The arrangement appears to be working. Last year, about 90 students were enrolled, and this year, enrollment is at 128, including 26 new kindergarteners, with even larger numbers expected in the future. 

Another set of programs has grown dramatically in recent years: those affiliated with the Chabad movement, which tend to operate even when small and cost less than synagogue programs. Since 2006, the study says Chabad’s market share in terms of enrollment has grown from 4% to 10%, and in terms of the number of schools from 13% to 21%.

Those figures might represent an undercount, according to Zalman Loewenthal, director of CKids, the Chabad network of children’s programs. While the study says there are some 300 Chabad programs in the United States, Loewenthal said he is aware of at least 500 and perhaps as many as 600 — a number driven up in the last decade amid a push by Chabad to launch more Hebrew schools. His count is based on the number of customers purchasing the curriculum offered by his organization, which is also new in the last decade and in his view has contributed to improved quality among Chabad Hebrew schools.

In general, non-traditional approaches to Jewish education may be attractive at a time when American families have packed schedules and competing needs, according to Stern.

“People want to be able to have bite-sized pieces just like you sign up for a six-weeks art class, they might want a six-weeks Jewish class,” she said. “In this atmosphere, some communities are finding ways to be more modular and more flexible, and meet people’s needs in different ways.” 

Stern also said, referring to six programs highlighted in the study as success stories, that the future calls for programs to offer an “immersive” experience, meaning that children become part of a community.

“They are getting something beyond just knowledge,” Stern said. “They’re also getting connection and belonging, which provides the foundation for something bigger in their lives.”

Stern said she thought the report pointed to gaps in the way American Jewish communities allocate their resources. 

“Supplementary education really was abandoned as a communal priority,” she said. “Individual communities had to find ways to fund it on their own. And I think that is part of why we’re seeing a decline.”

Bryfman said he’s optimistic, both about the power of supplemental schools and the potential for them to generate new support from Jewish donors.

The Jewish Education Project had sought outside funding to pay for its study and failed, he said. But now that the numbers are clear, he is beginning to see interest from philanthropies.

“I don’t want to count the dollars before they’re granted,” Bryfman said. “But the study is already beginning to have the desired effect of bringing more resources to the field.”

Fig Tree isn’t set up to benefit in a possible future of increased charitable investments in Jewish education. That’s because the school is set up as a business — an expression of confidence in its growth and to insulate itself from the vagaries of philanthropy.

“It’s a very unusual model for the Jewish education and I would argue a self-sustaining one,” White said. “We don’t have to rely on fundraising… and we’re not beholden to some of the other requirements that a nonprofit would necessitate, which allows us to be nimble.”

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments In Sabbath Observance Case With Major Impact For Religious Jews, Experts Say

 



The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard oral arguments in Groff v. DeJoy, a religious accommodation in the workplace lawsuit with significant ramifications for observant Jews.

Gerald Groff, an evangelical Christian who observes a Sunday Sabbath during which he is not permitted to work according to his beliefs, sued his former employer, Louis DeJoy, the US Postmaster General, after Groff was forced to quit his job when the post office forced him to work on Sunday.  Groff was required to work on Sundays after the USPS signed a contract with Amazon that included Sunday deliveries. He launched his religious discrimination suit after two years of ad-hoc accommodations failed to meet his religious needs.

Under the existing standard in the 1977 case TWA v. Hardison, employers need only show that they are suffering a small, “de minimis cost”, like providing overtime pay for weekend shifts or having to reduce operations during a holiday, before any religious accommodation of an employee becomes an “undue hardship” that they are not legally required to meet. Groff’s lawyers argued that that standard should be overturned.

Nathan Diament, Executive Director for Public Policy at the Orthodox Union and one of the co-authors of an amicus brief in the case, told The Algemeiner that should Hardison be overturned, the impact would extend far beyond Evangelical Sunday Sabbatarians.

“Just think about Passover over the last two weeks,” Diament said. “If you were an observant Jew, the days of Passover fell on Thursday and Friday, and then on Wednesday and Thursday the following week. A lot of employers are accommodating, but if you’re working in a job where you don’t have an accommodating employer, and generally you’re assigned to work on specific days, on specific shifts, having four holidays where you can’t work in a two week period is really challenging.”

The Orthodox Union, which filed its amicus brief jointly with the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, was joined in its support of Groff by other Jewish groups including the American Jewish Committee, the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs, and The Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, as well as Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Sikh, and Islamic groups.

Kenneth Marcus, founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and another of the amici for Groff, said that despite the sympathies of the conservative majority on the court for religious liberty claims, today’s oral arguments sent mixed signals about how the court might ultimately rule.

“On the one hand, it is great to see that there is significant opposition to the awful de minimis rule, under which employers have been able to escape responsibility for protecting their religious employees if reasonable accommodations would cost any amount of money,” Marcus said. “The de minimis standard, which we have long opposed, seems to have very little support anymore, and I think we can anticipate that its days are numbered. That’s very good news for anyone who cares about religious freedoms. On the other hand, it was disappointing to see so little support on the court for the strong new standard of religious freedom that many of us had hoped for and expected. Some of the conservative justices were more skeptical of Mr. Groff’s position than many would have anticipated and that may not bode well for religious freedom.”

During the arguments, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the government, had an extended discussion about “common ground” between the parties and whether the court needed to issue an expansive ruling to resolve the question.

“I would just wonder whether the Court needs to get into that today,” Gorsuch asked. “If there is so much common ground here between the parties and Hardison that… some courts have taken this ‘de minimis’ language and run with it and say ‘anything more than a trifling will get the employer out of any concerns here’, and that’s wrong and we all agree that’s wrong, why can’t we just say that and be done with it and be silent as to the rest of it?”

The exchange was one of many that saw justices from both the left and right testing positions seemingly at odds with their ideological priors.

“It was jarring to see both the Biden administration and the Democratic-appointed justices argue so forcefully against a basic civil right, namely the right to religious freedom.” Marcus said. “That’s not something one would have expected a generation ago, but it increasingly reflects the polarization of support for religious freedom. It was surprising to hear progressive justices express so much concern for profit making motivations of corporations in the context of wanting to protect them against demands from religious minority employees. One would never hear that if the minority employees were racial or ethnic minorities.”

While the outcome of the case remains unknown, the OU’s Diament was confident that the changes would be positive.

“We would like as broad a decision as we can get,” he said. “But the bottom line will be whatever decision the court puts out unless it just totally rejects the appeal and sides with the government any change here is going to be significant and welcome.”

The court’s decision is expected to be announced before the conclusion of its term at the end of June.

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

"People Love Dead Jews"

 Yom Hashoah 2023

Where Holocaust commemoration succeeded and where it failed

 

Museums, archives of testimonies and educational efforts preserved the survivors’ legacy. Still, that won’t counter contemporary antisemitic hatred and disinformation.
 


 In the 1980s, as the generation of Holocaust survivors began to age, the Jewish world found itself pondering some relevant questions: What would happen after the last of the survivors were gone? Who would then bear witness to the greatest crime in history? And how could we ensure that their legacy did not die with them?

The organized Jewish world did its best to come up with answers. But now in 2023, as Jews around the world prepare to observe Yom Hashoah—the day set aside in the Hebrew calendar to remember the victims and heroes of the Holocaust—a different though related question must be addressed.

With most of the men and women who suffered through the Nazi war to exterminate European Jewry having passed away and even those who were child survivors reaching well into their 80s, the Jewish community faces a different dilemma. The preservation of their testimony and the institutions that have been set up to ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten is no longer in doubt. What remains tentative is whether the massive effort that has gone into Holocaust commemoration has done much to help combat the efforts of the current generation of antisemites who currently present a formidable threat to Jewish life. The work of those who have labored mightily to guarantee that the 6 million slain by the German Nazis and their collaborators aren’t forgotten is of great value. But not only has this effort failed to address contemporary perils to Jewish life, their success may actually be doing as much to hinder Jewish self-defense as helping it.

In the first years after the Holocaust, the work of memorialization was not at the top of the Jewish world’s “To Do” list. Yet by the 1960s, that began to change.

By this time, the natural reluctance on the part of many survivors to speak about their experiences began to be replaced by a determination to preserve the memory of those who were lost and of the crimes committed against them. The cause of Holocaust commemoration became, along with support for Israel, the twin pillars of Jewish communal life.

The ensuing decades would lead to a surge in the building of Holocaust museums throughout North America, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in addition to smaller ones in cities with significant Jewish populations. Also created were archives of survivor testimonies on film and video. Holocaust education became something of a growth industry, funded in large measure by a Jewish community that regarded the task as a sacred obligation.

This field produced legions of newly minted scholars for universities and colleges eager to offer courses on the subject and enough books to fill their libraries. Even more important, it also created curricula intended for schools that could fulfill the mandates for such courses that were established by many states.

The cause of commemorating the Holocaust succeeded in a way that may well have exceeded even the expectations of many survivors. Yearly ceremonies on both Yom Hashoah and International Holocaust Remembrance Day (established by the United Nations in 2005 and falling on Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945) are now staples of not just American life but throughout the West. Politicians of nearly all ideological stripes pay homage to the Six Million. The Holocaust has also been well-represented in films, theater and literature. Many children in the United States and other nations are now given at least some sort of rudimentary lesson about what happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945.

Yet in a twist that is as ironic as it is tragic, the emphasis on Holocaust education has done very little to combat or suppress the ever-present virus of antisemitism. Just as horrifying is that the focus on the Holocaust has to some extent served to distract people from contemporary threats to the Jews.

Part of the failure here is conceptual.

Integral to much of the campaign of memorialization was the worry that focusing solely on the fate of the Jews would not provide a lesson that might help prevent subsequent genocides. In that way, many in the Jewish community became committed to trying to universalize the Holocaust. They wanted Holocaust education to teach everyone to oppose all sorts of prejudice, intolerance and/or violence against minorities.

That was a noble goal but a disservice to both history and to the question of contemporary Jewish security.

Even on its own terms, this form of Holocaust commemoration has been a dismal failure. No amount of invocation of the Nazis’ crimes has served to mobilize the world against new genocides, which went on in places like Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan or today in Western China, amid the indifference of the West.

This was a misunderstanding of the nature of the antisemitism that produced the Holocaust.

Contrary to the universalizers, who feared that the Shoah would be marooned in history if it was not enlisted in the laudable cause of making everyone nicer to each other, Jew-hatred is not an ordinary form of prejudice. It is, as the Holocaust and the current campaign against Israel illustrate, a way of organizing intolerance for a political cause. Stripped of this context, Holocaust education becomes just one more anodyne call for civility. As such it not only fails to counter garden-variety bias but actually winds up ignoring actual antisemitism when it appears in the guise of appeals on behalf of “human rights” that deny Jewish rights and the right of Jews to defend themselves.

The popularization of Holocaust education became so embedded in Western culture that it morphed into more of a metaphor about something awful than a specific crime whose purpose was to rid the world of the Jews. The “anyone I don’t like is Hitler” rule even applied to many liberal Jews, who were quick to label American political opponents like former President Donald Trump as the moral equivalent of the Nazis. Some on the right are also willing to play the same game, comparing anything they don’t like to the Holocaust. Such analogies are always wrong even though few on either side of the political aisle are willing to condemn them when they are spread by their allies.

Even many of those who were contributing to the demonization of Israel and using the tropes of traditional antisemitic discourse to do so thought that they, too, were entitled to speak reverently about the Holocaust. Nothing illustrates the absurdity of this trend more than the devotion of a United Nations that is a cesspool of antisemitism to Holocaust memorialization. That Jew-haters like Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) have no shame talking about the need to remember the Shoah is shocking but nevertheless tolerated, even by many Jews who ought to know better. As writer Dara Horn memorably articulated it in the title of her book, People Love Dead Jews. It’s the living ones, especially those who are willing to defend themselves and the sole Jewish state on the planet, who are not so popular.

The attention on Holocaust memorialization also often failed to acknowledge the way Israel and its supporters had become the stand-in for traditional antisemitic scapegoats. Indeed, the resistance, even among some Jews on the left, to the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism centered on its acknowledgement of the way that falsely smearing Israel, especially by accusing it of Nazi-like crimes, had become one of the principal expressions of Jew-hatred in our era.

Those who labored to create and fund all the museums, archives and ceremonies deserve our gratitude. They are important in and of themselves. But it turns out they don’t do much to answer contemporary threats, even when it concerns issues like Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons to create a new Shoah.

The way many Jews view the Holocaust as the sum total of the Jewish experience in a way that ignores or downplays the richness, beauty and joy of our heritage, has had the unintended consequence of undermining communal life. This has also had the effect of legitimizing those who think that remembering the Shoah should have nothing to do with the fight to preserve today’s Jews.

This Yom Hashoah as we honor the victims, we need to remember that the only proper memorial to the Six Million is a thriving Jewish state that was created too late to save them. Now that we’ve ensured that the past is not forgotten, it’s time for Jews to concentrate their efforts on defending live Jews with as much fervor and dedication as was demonstrated on behalf of the memory of the Holocaust.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/where-holocaust-commemoration-succeeded-and-where-it-failed/?utm_source=sendinblue&utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%2004-17-2023&utm_medium=email

Monday, April 17, 2023

This church's negligence in reporting abuse, the lawsuit argues, allowed a father to continuing abusing the girl for as many as seven years, a time in which he also abused the girl’s infant sister.

 

Arizona court upholds clergy privilege in child abuse case

 

This church's negligence in reporting abuse, the lawsuit argues, allowed a father to continuing abusing the girl for as many as seven years, a time in which he also abused the girl’s infant sister.


(What are the exceptions to the clergy privilege?
 
Exceptions. Some statutes expressly provide exceptions when the clergy privilege will not apply. This may be the case in situations involving child abuse, child neglect, sexual abuse, notorious crimes or murder, depending on the specific wording of the statute.) PM

(AP) — The Arizona Supreme Court has ruled that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can refuse to answer questions or turn over documents under a state law that exempts religious officials from having to report child sex abuse if they learn of the crime during a confessional setting.

The ruling was issued April 7 but not released to the public until Tuesday. A lawsuit filed by child sex abuse victims accuses the church, widely known as the Mormon church, two of its bishops, and other church members of conspiracy and negligence in not reporting church member Paul Adams for abusing his older daughter as early as 2010. This negligence, the lawsuit argues, allowed Adams to continuing abusing the girl for as many as seven years, a time in which he also abused the girl’s infant sister.

Lynne Cadigan, an attorney for the Adams children who filed the lawsuit, criticized the court’s ruling.

“Unfortunately, this ruling expands the clergy privilege beyond what the legislature intended by allowing churches to conceal crimes against children,” she said.

In a statement, the church concurred with the court’s action.

“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints agrees with the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision,” the statement said. “We are deeply saddened by the abuse these children suffered. The Church has no tolerance of abuse of any kind.”

Adams had also posted videos of himself sexually abusing his daughters on the internet, boasted of the abuse on social media, and confessed to federal law enforcement agents, who arrested him in 2017 with no help from the church.

Those actions prompted Cochise County Superior Court Judge Laura Cardinal to rule on Aug. 8, 2022, that Adams had waived his right to keep his 2010 confession to Bishop John Herrod secret.

“Taken together, Adams’ overt acts demonstrate a lack of repentance and a profound disregard” for the principles of the church, Cardinal said in her ruling. “His acts can only be characterized as a waiver of the clergy penitent privilege.”

Clergy in Arizona, as in many other states, are required to report information about child sexual abuse or neglect to law enforcement or child welfare authorities. An exception to that law — known as the clergy-penitent privilege — allows members of the clergy who learn of the abuse through spiritual confessions to keep the information secret.

The church has based its defense in the lawsuit on the privilege, asserting that Herrod and a second bishop who learned of Adams’ confession, Robert “Kim” Mauzy, had no legal obligation to report him for abusing his older daughter and appealed Cardinal’s ruling.

On Dec. 15, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the church, saying it did not have to turn over disciplinary records for Adams, who was excommunicated in 2013. The Appeals Court also ruled that a church official who attended a church disciplinary hearing could refuse to answer questions from the plaintiff’s attorneys during pretrial testimony, based on the clergy-penitent privilege.

Lawyers representing the Adams girls and one of their brothers took the case to the Arizona Supreme Court, where they did not prevail, according to the April ruling.

In an unusual move, Cadigan said attorneys for the three Adams children intend to file a motion asking the Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling.

An Associated Press investigation of the clergy privilege shows it exists in 33 states and that the Mormon church, often joined by the Catholic Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other faiths, have successfully lobbied against attempts to reform or eliminate it.

 https://religionnews.com/2023/04/14/arizona-court-upholds-clergy-privilege-in-child-abuse-case/

Sunday, April 16, 2023

From Directions in Your Bedroom, to the Car You Drive...and The Importance Of Keeping Child Rapists Out Of Jail... The Danger That Is Gur Chassidus, and the Ignoramus that leads it...

Ger, also known as Gur, is the largest Hasidic court in Israel has unparalleled political and financial power, and its thousands of Hasidim are ruled with an iron fist. It's a community with branches across Israel and in the United States and Europe, but with the characteristics of a closed cult where the leader dictates the most intimate details of the lives of his followers, who are dependent on him for everything.

 The Gerer chasidic sect’s Communications Committee issued a declaration in the sect’s various shuls describing what it termed the “loopholes in multimedia systems in cars” and stressing that Tesla cars, which have systems which cannot be filtered, should not be purchased or used.


Entitled “Bal Yeraeh U’Bal Yimatze” [should not be seen of found] the declaration states that “after numerous incidents and tragedies which occurred, we are obligated to warn and issue an alarm that unfiltered appliances should not be seen or found in our camp in any way, both visible and hidden.

“Additionally it has become clear that in many vehicles the multimedia systems are open and exposed to the internet. Even in cases where the company claimed that it was filtered or the users believe that it has nothing untoward, in most cases the unfiltered internet can easily be reached with a number of damaging incidents occurring, may Hashem have mercy.”

The declaration placed responsibility on “each and every person not to bring such impediments to himself or to his children and not to maintain a dangerous phone appliance without a filter or supervision in his possession.”

The declaration recommended detaching the Waze application from every vehicle system and added that “Tesla vehicles cannot be detached at all from the internet system and therefore should not be purchased or used.”

Friday, April 14, 2023

Oy! Such A (big) Deal! When Normal Is The Exception!

 

In rare move, haredi magazine publishes photo of a woman — a forgotten donor to European yeshivas


Telz Yeshiva 1941 - Women In Class Photos Were The Norm (PM)

(JTA) — When readers of Mishpacha magazine opened up the Passover issue, they found two surprises. The first was the unsung, mysterious story of a prolific American philanthropist, Jennie Miller Faggen, who supported dozens of European yeshivas before World War II.

The second was a rarity in the world of haredi Orthodox publications: Miller’s photograph.

Mishpacha and other haredi magazines have long refrained from publishing photos of women, though some exceptions have been made. The publications’ editors cite traditional haredi mores regarding modesty and shielding women’s appearances. Feminist groups in the Orthodox world and elsewhere, however, say such policies demean women and aid in their erasure from the public sphere.

Mishpacha did not respond to requests for comment as to why and how it decided to include the picture of Miller, who donated tens of thousands of dollars to Orthodox educational institutions in the 1920s. Nor did Dovi Safier, who authored the article as well as a book about Miller called “Mother of all Yeshivos.”

But Orthodox feminists took notice of the photo, which depicts Miller wearing a hat and is shaded in blue. The cover of Safier’s book features the same image and design. The print version of the article also included a photograph with the face of another woman — Rebbetzin Temi Kamenetsky, the late wife of Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky, a prominent Lithuanian haredi rabbi who lives in Philadelphia.

“How wonderful to hear and see that @themishpacha included these images in this week’s edition,” Chochmat Nashim, an organization that fights extremism and sexism in the Orthodox community, posted on social media last week. “We CAN come back from the trend of erasing women and include the entire Jewish family & community in our visual depictions. Ken Yirbu [the more the better].”

Historian Rivka Press Schwartz tweeted, “I’m one of those Orthodox feminist nudniks who doesn’t buy your publication because of no pictures of women. Bought your Pesach issue because of @safier’s article about Jenny Miller Faggen–and because I saw you included pictures of her. Incredible.”

Safier uncovered Miller’s philanthropic pursuits through a three-year-long reporting effort that took him through archives, letters and a Rolodex of prominent rabbis. Miller Faggen, who was born in New York but spent much of her life in the Philadelphia area, funded dozens of yeshivas across Europe and the United States, and hosted prominent rabbis at her 18-room home in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood of Philadelphia. Widowed twice, she inherited the bulk of her wealth from her first husband’s business in the city’s booming textile and real estate industries. Many of her contributions were forgotten when the yeshivas she supported were destroyed during the Holocaust.

This is not the first time Mishpacha has published photos of women. Articles in 2021 about a turn-of-the-20th century Jewish nursing home in New York City, and about the Holocaust in Telz, Lithuania, each contained prewar photos of women. Responding to a tweet about the photo of Miller in his latest article, Safier wrote, “Far from the first time. But I guess because the story is about a women [sic] it’s getting more attention.”

Mishpacha attracted particular attention in November 2016, ahead of that year’s election, when its cover image included profile views of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton facing each other, both in negative exposure and both covered in collages of their campaign symbols. After the issue was published, an editorial from Hamodia, an Israeli haredi paper, denounced the decision, arguing that a “true” haredi publication would never show an image of a woman.

“There are no – there haven’t been, and there won’t be – any pictures of women in the true haredi press, not of those who have reached high positions of sovereignty and power in their countries, and also not pictures of women in Jewish life,” the editorial read. “These are our ways of life, these are the fences that surround them, and they don’t change, and aren’t connected to political circumstances.”

A contributing editor for Mishpacha, Sruli Besser, responded at the time that the magazine engaged in “hours of conversation and deliberation with real rabbanim,” or rabbis, before arriving at the decision to print a version of Clinton’s picture.