A Mandatory Listen - Nechumi Yaffe: An insider's dire prognosis for the Haredi world - and its cure

To The Supporters Of Full-Time Torah Study: You Are Being Scammed!

 https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/to-the-supporters-of-full-time-torah-study-you-are-being-scammed/

Antisemitism Taskforce Head Reveals How Trump Is Destroying Jew-Hating Groups In America!

 

The six-year-old girl at the children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas, burned with fever and struggled to breathe. Doctors soon put her on a ventilator, snaking a thick tube down the child’s throat so a machine could breathe for her; they placed IVs to rehydrate her tiny body and they prescribed antibiotics for any bacterial infections that may have taken hold in the weeks she had spent at home battling measles.

 

NOT THE BEST GUY IN LAKEWOOD

Anti-vaxxers target Texas measles doctors to cast doubt on deaths amid outbreak

Children’s Health Defense and RFK Jr publicly dispute recent measles deaths to ‘distract’ from damage caused and question vaccines, experts say

The six-year-old girl at the children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas, burned with fever and struggled to breathe. Doctors soon put her on a ventilator, snaking a thick tube down the child’s throat so a machine could breathe for her; they placed IVs to rehydrate her tiny body and they prescribed antibiotics for any bacterial infections that may have taken hold in the weeks she had spent at home battling measles.

But it was too late. Within a day of being ventilated, the child went into shock, her blood pressure crashed and she went into cardiac arrest. She could not be resuscitated. Her family, and the nation, mourned: she was the first child to die of measles in the US in a decade.

Yet some anti-vaccine activists soon began claiming that the girl died from medical malpractice, not measles, revealing a playbook that they are now running in Pennsylvania amid a growing outbreak – a message taken up by Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime anti-vaccine activist, as he publicly disputes the rising death toll.

The deaths in the US from measles – now numbering eight in less than two years – are a political minefield for Kennedy, centering him in a public backlash after years of his false claims about the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

The deflection campaign is already having real-world consequences beyond the rising body count. Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group previously led by Kennedy, claims to have sparked malpractice investigations into the doctors who treated the two young unvaccinated girls who died from measles amid last year’s outbreak in west Texas, which infected at least 762 people.

“At first they were going to throw out the complaints,” Brian Hooker, CHD’s chief scientific officer, announced in a recent video. “But they have, upon further review … decided that they’re going to let their own medical expert look at the records for those particular deaths. Because in each case, inappropriate antibiotics were prescribed, and that, I believe, led to both girls’ deaths.”

Paul Offit, an infectious diseases pediatrician and internationally recognized vaccine expert, said “it’s not a good look” for Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers for so many cases and deaths to rise. “So they’re trying to say, ‘Well, it wasn’t measles.’”

Katherine Wells, Lubbock Public Health’s director, agreed. “It’s their playbook,” she said. “It’s just another tactic by them to disrupt or to question vaccines and the safety of vaccines. The issue at hand is that we’re having these large measles outbreaks, and they’re not stopping.”

It’s not just the deaths – it’s also the severe disease, Wells said. The “massive” outbreaks affect “families and communities and disrupt lives”, Wells said. About one in five unvaccinated measles patients are hospitalized. Measles erases immunity to all other illnesses for years, putting patients at risk of other serious infections. And survivors may years later develop severe measles complications such as subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), which is fatal and untreatable.

Last year, Hooker traveled to Texas to interview the deceased six-year-old’s parents, who said they still would not have vaccinated their children. A second child, aged eight, soon died from measles at the same hospital.

Hooker asked to see the children’s medical records, and he shared them with Pierre Kory, a critical care physician with no pediatric training who lost his board certifications for promoting Covid misinformation, heavily promoted the anti-parasitic ivermectin as a Covid treatment, and claimed that polio paralysis is caused not by the virus but by pesticides. Kory, who himself escaped legal liability in a malpractice lawsuit brought by the estate of a Covid patient who died as a result of his treatment plan, concluded that the measles deaths were actually the result of medical error.

Kory claimed the first child was prescribed “a completely inappropriate antibiotic” for a bacterial infection she developed because of measles, adding that “she did not die of measles by any stretch of the imagination,” but rather she died of pneumonia and medical mismanagement. He also attributed the second child’s death to “medical malpractice” because of her antibiotic regime. Secondary bacteria infections are very common with measles, which can create a cascade of deadly complications.

Privately, Kory reportedly said that he suspected the two deaths in young girls in Texas were caused by a weaponized version of measles.

Hooker and a colleague both submitted complaints to the Texas medical board alleging that the antibiotics were given improperly to the sick children. In the video, he said the medical board is reviewing the complaints. The Guardian and Important Context were unable to confirm Hooker’s claims. The identities of the doctors are not public.

Anyone can file a complaint with a state medical board, and boards take complaints seriously. Several leading anti-vaccine figures have received medical board complaints about their own conduct.

“The physicians went above and beyond, and the hospitals went above and beyond,” Wells said. Pediatricians in hospitals work with the sickest children, with high stress and relatively low pay. “It’s so hard to be told that you either wanted to hurt them or didn’t want to give the best care you could,” Wells said. Now, with the CHD accusations and possible medical board reports, “I think it’s in the back of everybody’s minds,” she said.

Hooker’s remarks about the Texas complaints followed the measles deaths of two unvaccinated infants in Pennsylvania. Hooker vowed to “get boots on the ground” in the state to “make sure that if it was a hospital error that it doesn’t happen again”.

Other anti-vaccine activists are helping to fuel the narrative. Peter McCullough, a former cardiologist whose board certification were revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine, noted on X that there was “no mention of antivirals, antibiotics, or steroids” in the case of the third measles death in Pennsylvania, an unvaccinated 40-year-old woman. Yet the county coroner said the woman was not able to seek healthcare before she took a turn for the worse, so she would not have received medications for her illness.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/12/anti-vaxxers-measles-doctors-texas-deaths

The day after Oct. 7, he issued a brief statement that said nothing about Hamas but immediately denounced Israel. Put simply, this is a mayor who first condemned Israel as guilty and then went about collecting evidence.

 

Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity

By Bret Stephens

Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, set off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”

In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.”  

In fact, it’s a moral obscenity. Let me count the ways.

It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is obscene because many of the Jews murdered on Oct. 7, living in kibbutzim with conspicuously left-leaning politics, had been at the forefront of the peace movement, volunteering, for example, to drive sick Palestinians for treatment at nearby Israeli hospitals. Hamas wasn’t just killing and terrorizing the innocent; it was eliminating the good.

It is obscene because Hamas didn’t just kill its victims in pursuit of a strategic objective. It tormented and slaughtered them like an army of serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims. Corpses of Israeli women were described by one coroner as “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others appeared to have been raped so violently that their pelvises were broken. Parents were killed in front of their children; children were murdered in their beds. A fieldworker was beheaded with a garden hoe. I know this because Hamas filmed itself doing this and I forced myself to watch the film. I know because that same month, I visited the bedrooms where the kids had been murdered, their mattresses still soaked in blood.

It is obscene because, whatever else you may think of the war in Gaza, on the eve of Oct. 7 the border of Israel and Gaza was governed by a cease-fire. It was Hamas that chose to kick off the violence, just as the Japanese did in 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Whether in fistfights between people or wars between states, whoever throws the first punch forfeits the right to throw the last.

 

It is obscene because Mamdani is being misleading when he speaks as if his prime objection to Israel is what it did after Oct. 7. In fact, the mayor has been an anti-Israel zealot at least since his college days, when, as a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, he broke off collaboration with the left-leaning Jewish group J Street, which advocates a Palestinian state, because it also recognizes the rights of a Jewish state. He’s written a rap professing “love” for five men convicted in a U.S. court of funneling money to Hamas. The day after Oct. 7, he issued a brief statement that said nothing about Hamas but immediately denounced Israel. Put simply, this is a mayor who first condemned Israel as guilty and then went about collecting evidence.

It is obscene because, however much the genocide allegation against Israel is mindlessly repeated by people too lazy or prejudiced to understand the difference between war and genocide, that allegation is as false as it is sinister. False, because genocide is about killing whole classes of people for who they are rather than for what they did — and if Israel wanted to kill Palestinians as Palestinians it never would have bothered mobilizing hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers for the war, and losing hundreds in high-intensity urban warfare. Sinister, because the political purpose of the genocide allegation is to trivialize, if not erase, the attacks of Oct. 7 by making them seem minor in comparison to the Palestinian casualties that tragically, but all-but inevitably, followed.

It is obscene because Hamas’s intentions toward Israel really are genocidal. Its leaders have often and publicly vowed to perpetrate future Oct. 7s. Had the group not been stopped by force that day, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have kept up its orgy of slaughter on its way to Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. Yet one searches in vain for anything from the mayor except perfunctory, pro forma condemnations of Hamas.

It is obscene because there’s an even more wretched purpose to the genocide charge against Israel, which long predates the recent war in Gaza. It is a specimen of Holocaust erasure: not the dumb kind, which seeks to deny Nazi Germany’s murder of six million Jews, but a more sophisticated version that accuses living Jews of genocide as a way of ending the historical Jewish claim to a long and ongoing history of persecution and near-annihilation that accounts for its need for a sovereign state capable of defending its people.

 

 

Finally, it is obscene because Mamdani is the mayor for about one million Jewish New Yorkers, many with close relatives in Israel, who deserve better on a day of grief than to be offered the equivalent of an “All Lives Matter” homily. This is yet another of the double standards through which modern-day Jew hatred manifests itself: Whenever antisemitism is mentioned in progressive circles, it is inevitably accompanied by nods about Islamophobia or other bigotries.

It would be better to have a mayor who, if only on Oct. 7, can say: Jewish Lives Matter. Israeli Lives Matter. Full stop. The lectures about Gaza can come some other day.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/opinion/zohran-mamdani-israel-gaza.html

 

*UOJ'S RESPONSE TO RABBI EIDENSOHN ON THE MEANING OF AUTHENTIC TORAH-TRUE JUDAISM*

  *"Chassid"ism" is not Judaism"*

THE UOJ ARCHIVES - FEBRUARY 2007:

Chassidic movements today, regardless of the value it may or may not have had at the time of the Besht, are for the most part today, meaningless to Jews of intellect. The Rebbe today is a fraud capitalizing on the very essence of human weakness. Look around, save some good chesed organizations, the rest of it is like rotten stinking meat. The smartest of the chassidic kids are leaving physically, and much of the rest are trapped, and have left emotionally. But the chassidim are Jews, certainly not ones that we should be proud of.....

 

READ MORE: 

 https://theunorthodoxjew.blogspot.com/2012/08/uojs-response-to-rabbi-eidensohn-on.html

 

Hasidic Rabbis (Zera Kodesh) and succession disputes | Samuel Heilman

To The Well-Intentioned Supporters of Olam HaTorah: You Are Being Scammed!

 

To the well-intentioned supporters of  Olam HaTorah, consider what you are actually being asked to finance. You are not merely being asked to support Torah learning. You are being asked to sustain an entire economic and educational system, one whose consequences extend far beyond the walls of the beit midrash and into the lives of parents and children. Yet the fundraising appeal rarely invites you to examine those consequences. Instead, it presents a simple moral proposition: give generously, because Torah depends upon you. The implication is unmistakable. Question the appeal, reduce your contribution, or demand accountability, and you risk becoming the person who stood by while Torah was supposedly weakened.

That is an extraordinarily effective way to raise money. It is also precisely why donors should slow down and think.

The question is not whether Torah learning is valuable. It is priceless. The question is whether every institution operating under the banner of Torah is automatically entitled to communal financial support without demonstrating financial responsibility, transparency, and measurable results. One can believe passionately in Torah while demanding accountability from Torah institutions. One can respect great rabbis while recognizing that rabbinic authority does not eliminate the need for accounting, governance, economic expertise, or independent oversight.

And there is a question that should be impossible to avoid: what happens to the children?

A child does not choose the economic circumstances into which he is born. He does not choose his parents' educational decisions, his family's income, or the structure of the community around him. Yet children can end up carrying the consequences of decisions made by adults in the name of ideology. When families are struggling to provide basic necessities, when parents are forced to depend heavily on communal assistance, and when young people lack the educational or professional preparation necessary to build independent lives, the appropriate response cannot simply be another fundraising appeal.

The children deserve more than rescue. They deserve opportunity.

This is where the community must distinguish between tzedakah and structural dependency. Charity is a sacred obligation, but charity should not become an excuse for never examining why the same needs continue to appear. The Jewish tradition understood the dignity of work, self-sufficiency, and teaching children the skills necessary to earn a living. The Rambam's hierarchy of tzedakah famously places helping a person become self-supporting among its highest forms. That principle should be at the center of this conversation.

So where is the comparable urgency for education that produces economic opportunity? Where is the communal investment in professional training, vocational education, mathematics, science, technology, accounting, healthcare, engineering, and the trades? Where is the serious conversation about ensuring that young people can combine Torah with the ability to support a family?

These are not anti-Torah questions. They are Jewish questions.

Indeed, the Jewish people have never historically understood Torah and productive work as mutually exclusive. Jewish communities produced scholars and merchants, rabbis and physicians, teachers and craftsmen, businessmen and scientists. The assumption that economic productivity is somehow inherently opposed to spiritual greatness is neither inevitable nor self-evidently Jewish.

The modern fundraising system risks creating the opposite incentive. Instead of asking how the community can gradually increase independence, it can encourage donors to assume greater responsibility for maintaining dependence. The donor is repeatedly asked to absorb the financial consequences, while the underlying model receives comparatively little scrutiny.

That is not a sustainable communal philosophy.

And this is where Olam HaTorah's supporters should be asking for specifics. What is the long-term plan? What percentage of funds reaches the intended beneficiaries? How are recipients selected? What oversight exists? What safeguards prevent waste, duplication, favoritism, or conflicts of interest? What outcomes are being measured? How does the organization determine whether its assistance is actually strengthening the future rather than merely financing the present?

These should be ordinary questions. If the answers are good, transparency should strengthen the organization. If the answers are uncomfortable, donors deserve to know that too.

Instead, the phrase "the gedolim have decided" can sometimes be deployed as though it ends the conversation. It does not. Great rabbis deserve respect, but respect is not the same as infallibility, and rabbinic scholarship is not identical to expertise in accounting, economics, organizational management, education policy, or labor markets. A serious Torah community should be mature enough to recognize those distinctions.

There is also a deeper ideological problem. When an institution tells donors that its financial survival is synonymous with the survival of Torah itself, it leaves no room for legitimate disagreement about how Torah should be supported. But there is a vast difference between defending Torah and defending one particular institutional arrangement for sustaining Torah.

Those two things must not be confused.

A donor can believe that Torah learning should occupy a central place in Jewish life and still conclude that the community needs a different economic model. He can believe that yeshivot deserve generous support while insisting that students also receive the tools necessary to function in the wider economy. He can honor rabbinic leadership while demanding financial transparency. He can give generously while refusing to be manipulated by fear.

That is not rebellion. That is responsible citizenship.

The most troubling part of the present culture is that the donor's generosity can itself become a mechanism for avoiding difficult reform. If every structural problem can be answered with another emergency campaign, why would the underlying system ever have to change? If every shortage produces another appeal, the community can remain permanently in crisis mode. The donor becomes the shock absorber for a system that has never adequately answered the question of long-term sustainability.

And the children are left waiting for adults to have that conversation.

We should not shame families who need assistance. We should not romanticize their hardship either. There is nothing inherently holy about a child growing up without opportunities that could have been provided. There is nothing spiritually superior about parents being permanently dependent upon charity. Poverty is not a mitzvah. Economic hardship is not evidence of greater faith. And a community that genuinely loves its children should want them to inherit more choices, not fewer.

The ultimate question, therefore, is not whether Torah deserves our support. It unquestionably does. The question is whether every dollar given in the name of Torah is necessarily advancing the Torah future we claim to want.

That requires honesty. It requires numbers. It requires transparency. It requires the courage to distinguish reverence for Torah from reverence for institutions. And it requires donors to understand that saying "no" to one fundraising model is not the same thing as saying "no" to Torah.

So what should a donor actually do?

First, do not respond to the appeal immediately. Put the checkbook away. Refuse to make a major financial decision while being subjected to an artificially created spiritual emergency. A legitimate organization should still be there tomorrow.

Second, ask for documentation. Ask for a clear explanation of how the money is distributed, who controls the funds, what percentage reaches the intended recipients, what administrative costs are incurred, and what independent oversight exists. Do not accept "the gedolim approved it" as a substitute for financial information.

Third, ask the uncomfortable question about outcomes. How does this money change the lives of the people receiving it? Does it merely cover another month's shortfall, or does it help families become more stable? Does it provide children with greater educational opportunity? Does it create pathways toward employment and self-sufficiency? If there are no meaningful answers, the donor should think twice before assuming that another check is the solution.

Fourth, separate your Torah giving from your institutional loyalty. You do not have to choose between supporting Torah and demanding reform. Continue supporting causes you trust. Support individual families in genuine need. Support scholarships, education, vocational training, healthcare, and organizations that demonstrably improve people's ability to build stable lives. But do not let anyone convince you that one particular institution has a monopoly on your religious obligation to give.

Fifth, organize with other donors. One donor can be dismissed as difficult. One hundred donors asking the same reasonable questions constitute a constituency. Major contributors should insist on regular financial reporting, independent audits, clear governance, conflict-of-interest policies, and measurable goals. Religious organizations should be held to a higher standard precisely because donors are entrusting them with money given for sacred purposes.

Sixth, make your contribution conditional when appropriate. Tell the organization that you are prepared to support Torah, but that continued support depends upon meaningful transparency and evidence that the money is being used responsibly. A donor's signature should not be treated as a blank check simply because the appeal is religious.

And finally, do not be intimidated by the accusation that asking questions demonstrates weak emunah. Genuine emunah does not require financial blindness. A Jew can respect Torah, honor rabbis, love yeshivot, support scholars, and still say: show me the numbers.

That is not an act of rebellion. It is an act of responsibility.

The ultimate scam would not necessarily be stealing money. It would be convincing decent people that endlessly financing the consequences of a flawed system is the same thing as fixing the system.

It is not.

If Olam HaTorah wants the confidence of the Jewish people, it should embrace transparency, accountability, educational opportunity, economic responsibility, and measurable results. It should demonstrate that its mission is not simply to preserve an institution, but to build a Jewish future in which Torah flourishes, families retain their dignity, and children have the tools to create lives of both spiritual and economic strength.

Until then, donors should think carefully before responding to another emergency appeal. The question is no longer simply, "How much should I give?"

The question is: What kind of Jewish future am I financing?

And that is a question no fundraising campaign, no slogan, and no appeal to fear should ever prevent a Jew from asking.

 

REPUBLISHED

 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/to-the-supporters-of-full-time-torah-study-you-are-being-scammed/

October 7 did not create this process. It exposed it, accelerated it, and transformed a long-term haredi dilemma into an immediate Israeli one.

 

Israel’s Haredim Confront the Burdens of Jewish Self-Government

After decades devoted to survival, a new generation is asking what it owes the Jewish state.

By Yehoshua Pfeffer

October 7 shattered a great many Israeli preconceptions. The word konseptzia—the “conception”—has haunted Israeli public discourse since the Yom Kippur War, when deeply entrenched assumptions blinded political and military leaders to evidence before their eyes. After October 7, the term returned with a vengeance. Hamas had been deterred. Economic opportunity in Gaza would create an interest in stability. Superior intelligence, air power, sophisticated border defenses, and a small technologically advanced army could manage the threats surrounding Israel. These assumptions, and the policies built upon them, have been subjected to relentless scrutiny ever since.

But the shattered preconceptions were not only military. In the months and years before October 7, Israeli society had become consumed by struggles of extraordinary intensity—over judicial reform, religion and state, constitutional authority, and the basic character of Israel itself. Political opponents increasingly appeared not as fellow citizens with whom one disagreed but as existential threats. Perhaps we had begun to assume that a prosperous and powerful Jewish state could afford endless internal fragmentation: that each community could fortify its own identity without weakening the Jewish whole, and that questions of common responsibility could always be postponed.

October 7 and its aftermath saw these assumptions crumble one by one. The Israelis murdered at Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Ofakim, and Nova were killed as Israelis and Jews; the soldiers who raced south to save them did not first inquire how they had voted. The international reaction supplied another sobering lesson. Responsibility for Jewish existence, we were rudely reminded, cannot be outsourced.

This does not mean a new era of civic harmony is about to emerge. Quite the opposite, as the current election season has demonstrated. Fierce arguments over religion, law, territory, economics, morality, and the nature of public life will continue to rage within a Jewish state. The question is whether those arguments occur within a prior consciousness of a common fate and mission—or whether our narrower identities become so complete that there is no meaningful Jewish “we” beneath them.

Every part of Israeli society therefore must conduct its own reckoning. The same earthquake reaches different buildings differently. This essay concerns how it reaches the Haredim.

Often described as ultra-Orthodoxy in English, haredi Judaism presently exercises immense influence over Israel and the Jewish people, and given its demographic trajectories, that influence is certain to grow. Israel’s haredi population numbered approximately 1.45 million at the end of 2025, around 14.3 percent of the country’s population; close to 60 percent of Haredim are under twenty, and current projections place the community at roughly 16 percent of Israel’s population by 2030. The question of how Haredim understand their relationship with Israel is therefore no longer an internal haredi question. It is one of the great questions concerning Israel’s future.

Nor is that future distant. Haredi conscription is already among the defining questions of Israeli politics. In a September 2026 survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute, a party’s position on the issue ranked third among the factors Jewish voters said would most influence their vote, behind only “foreign affairs and security” and “the economy and cost of living.” The same survey found that 68 percent of Jewish respondents regarded the events of October 7 as a central consideration in deciding how to vote. Among Haredim, however, only around one quarter said the same, while 64 percent regarded October 7 as a non-central consideration. The divergence is striking. Most of Jewish Israel is entering this election with October 7 close to the center of its political consciousness, while that is much less the case for the haredi electorate. The question is whether haredi politics can remain untouched by an event that transformed the society in which Haredim live.

Haredim must ask whether assumptions underlying their social and political order were fashioned for conditions that no longer exist: whether a rapidly growing population can continue to understand itself principally as a protected minority; whether the burdens of Jewish sovereignty can indefinitely remain somebody else’s; whether political success can continue to be measured primarily by what we preserve and receive rather than by what we contribute; and whether a society built so successfully around separation can widen its radius of responsibility without sacrificing what the separation was created to protect.

I write from inside haredi society. I live in a haredi Jerusalem neighborhood, and my children were educated and continue to be educated within Israel’s haredi educational system. Yet my primary identity isn’t haredi, but Jewish. This was not always obvious to me. There was a period in which articles in the Hebrew-language haredi daily Yated Ne’eman describing Haredim as the exclusive bearers of the Jewish torch resonated deeply. But this period of my life did not last especially long. It became obvious to me that numerous groups carry the Jewish torch, each imperfectly and each in its own way. More importantly, I have come to believe that our fundamental identity as Jews precedes the narrower communal identities into which Jewish history has divided us.

More than any other consideration, this realization led me to become involved in HaTzibbur HaCharedi, the Haredi Public, a new political party running in the present election. I should state plainly that I chair its rabbinic council, and its founder, Moti Leitner, is a friend and former student. The party seeks to preserve the integrity of haredi religious life while confronting questions that concern growing numbers of Haredim: employment, education, youth dropout, military service for those not genuinely engaged in full-time Torah study, and the broader relationship between Haredim and Israeli society.

This essay is not intended as a campaign manifesto, nor will it predict the party’s electoral fortunes. It will instead address the underlying questions: why has this party appeared now, and what are the sociological and political factors behind its emergence? Political parties sometimes reflect little more than personalities or temporary grievances. At other times they are symptoms: institutional expressions of transformations already taking place beneath the surface.

My argument is that October 7 did not create this process. It exposed it, accelerated it, and transformed a long-term haredi dilemma into an immediate Israeli one. To understand those contradictions, we need to begin with one of the towering architects of contemporary haredi society: Rabbi Elazar Menachem Shach, or Rav Shach, as he is known to his followers......

 READ MORE:

https://ideas.tikvah.org/mosaic/essays/haredi-politics-have-become-israeli-politics?

About the Author

Yehoshua Pfeffer, a rabbi and rabbinical judge, holds a law degree from the Hebrew University, and clerked at the Israeli Supreme Court. He has taught at a number of yeshivas and published widely on Jewish law and thought. He is the editor-in-chief of Tzarich Iyun, and chairs the rabbinic council of HaTzibur HaCharedi.

 

Rabbi Dov Lando: “it would have been quite good if the Arabs ruled here today,” and says Zionism “brought the physical disasters – not just the spiritual ones – upon the Jewish people.”

 

"Disturbed & Confused" Haredi rabbi says Zionism brought ‘disasters’ upon Jewish people, ‘made Arabs hate us’

 

Lando In His Younger Years

 Dov Lando Recording - https://twitter.com/i/status/2107160575294026119

Newly released footage shows Rabbi Dov Lando, spiritual leader of the Degel HaTorah faction of the United Torah Judaism party, launching into a tirade against Zionism, saying Israel might have been better off had it never been established and that “Zionism made Arabs hate us.”

‘Distorted Torah’: Haredi leader's harsh attack on religious Zionists | Israel National News

Rabbi Dov Lando, the leader of the Slobodka Yeshiva and a senior leader of the non-Hasidic Haredi community, was heard in a recording of a private conversation in his home in Bnei Brak leveling strong criticism against the religious Zionists.

The conversation, which was republished, addressed, among other issues, the question of how young haredi men should relate to the service and sacrifice of members of the Religious Zionist community, who combine Torah study with IDF service and combat.

"The confused people with the knitted kippot, we won't talk about them. They have their own theories, and it's difficult with them," Rabbi Lando said.

“I don’t know what would have happened if there had been no state,” Lando says in a recording of a conversation with several rabbis at his home about a year and a half ago, published by Channel 12. “If there had been a state and the UN had ruled here, the situation would have been excellent.”

He adds that “it would have been quite good if the Arabs ruled here today,” and says Zionism “brought the physical disasters – not just the spiritual ones – upon the Jewish people.”

Lando also sharply criticizes religious Zionists, many of whom serve in the IDF as opposed to ultra-Orthodox men, saying, “They go and get killed for what they call the defense of the people and the land.” He argues that their rabbis teach them “a distorted Torah.”

Of secular Israelis, he says, “They have no connection to Judaism at all. It’s terrible.

He later tied the killing of soldiers to his perception of Torah study. "Those who are killed, they were killed because we don't learn enough. We could save even more," he said. "They are killed because their rabbis teach them a distorted Torah. And they do a lot of what they do not to save people, but for the glory of the state. They kill people for glory."

Rabbi Lando later portrayed Torah students as the ones who defend the residents of Israel. "There is no explanation why Arabs don't join together to flood the entire land, and G-d forbid, annihilate us all. There is no explanation," he said, referring to the protection provided by Torah study.

A significant portion of his remarks focused on the very establishment of the State of Israel. Rabbi Lando argued that Jewish life in the Land of Israel could have existed even without an independent state and even raised the possibility of international or Arab rule.

“I don’t know what would have happened if, at the beginning, there had been no state and they had established some kind of UN rule here - the situation would have been excellent," he said. “It is possible to live without a state, to live well with the Arabs... It was quite good when Arabs ruled here; that was the best situation. The Arabs ruled, they were respected, and people did not interfere with them. Money was brought into the country, and Arabs like money."

Rabbi Lando also accused the Zionist movement of intensifying Arab hostility toward Jews. “They caused the Arabs to hate us. The Arabs were never good, but they had to be respected," he said. According to him, Zionism, which he said sought “to save the Jewish people," brought “the physical disasters, not only the spiritual ones, upon the Jewish people."

Alongside the fundamental opposition he expressed toward the state and Zionism, Rabbi Lando also addressed the current reality and the dependence of the haredi public on state institutions and the security forces. “What difference does that make now? What are we supposed to do now? If we live among robbers and the robbers are saving us, what can we do? It is a problem, a very big problem," he said.

Addressing the conflict with the Palestinians, he said he no longer believes their commitments, but added that in the past it may have been possible to make certain concessions. “To say that one day they will stop? It is no longer possible to believe them. But perhaps certain permissible concessions could have been made," he said.

Toward the end of the conversation, Rabbi Lando also criticized Israel’s secular public. “The problem is that today’s secular people are not the secular people I remember," he said. “These are people who have no connection whatsoever to Judaism, nothing. It is terrible and awful. In my opinion, this is a very great desecration of G-d’s name."

He concluded with further criticism of the nature of the state: “The fact that the people of Israel, who are G-d’s people, established a state of apostasy and heresy - this is a very serious lesson."

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/top-haredi-rabbi-says-zionism-brought-disasters-upon-jewish-people-made-arabs-hate-us/

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/434156

Kotler, Kamenetsky, Kennedy: The Ignoramuses KKK Trio Of Medical Science!

New Poll on Vaccines and Autism: Here's Where Americans Stand

— Meanwhile, percentage with "very unfavorable" views of Health Secretary Kennedy is rising

 

 

Most Americans don't agree with claims that vaccines cause autism, and half view Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unfavorably, according to a national survey.

In the August survey of 1,904 U.S. adults from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, most respondents didn't agree with repeated false claims by Kennedy and President Trump linking vaccines and autism. More than two-thirds of respondents (68%) said it's false to state that childhood vaccines like those against measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) cause autism; 13% said that vaccines cause autism and 19% weren't sure.

These findings are unchanged since 2022 but do represent a drop from the 74% who'd said it was false to claim a vaccine-autism link in June 2021.

In the latest survey, just over half of the respondents said fully vaccinated children are "about as likely" as those who aren't to show signs of autism. While 12% of people in February 2026 said fully vaccinated children were more likely to show autism signs, that percentage slipped to 9% in this survey.

A majority of respondents (55%) said they agreed with a statement from the the American Academy of Pediatrics that "Studies have repeatedly found no credible link between life-saving childhood vaccines and autism," while 18% said their views aligned with new language that now appears on CDC's website since Kennedy -- a prominent anti-vaccine activist before joining government -- became the nation's top health official: "The claim 'vaccines do not cause autism' is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism."

Unfavorable Views of RFK Jr. Deepen

Half of respondents said their opinion of Kennedy was unfavorable, with the percentage describing their view as "very unfavorable" climbing from 37% last August to 42% in August 2026. The percentage of people who viewing Kennedy as favorably held steady in the last year, at 23%.

Kennedy's conflicting messages on measles were mirrored in Americans' own confusion about where he stands on the MMR vaccine. Nearly one-third of survey respondents (31%) said they believed Kennedy recommended that children be vaccinated against measles. That's up from the same period last year, when 25% said he did. But many respondents still said that either he doesn't recommend vaccination (29%) or that they weren't sure what he recommended (40%), the survey found.

"As measles cases rise and the U.S. is poised to lose its measles elimination status, this country is paying the price for skepticism about vaccination against measles that RFK Jr. played a central role in promoting," Kathleen Hall Jamieson, PhD, director emerita at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said in a statement. "His ability to address the current U.S. measles outbreaks is hampered by the fact that most adults are either unsure about his stand on childhood vaccination against measles or believe that he does not recommend it."

Vaccine Policy's Artful Dodger?

Kennedy's tenure as health secretary is pockmarked with tepid vaccine endorsements and tendentious vaccine-skeptical pronouncements, even falsely suggesting last year that the MMR vaccine causes deaths each year.

During a 2025 Texas measles outbreak, Kennedy declared, "The federal government's position, my position, is people should get the measles vaccine, but the government should not be mandating those." He's followed such statements with assertions, like the one at an August White House executive order signing ceremony, that childhood vaccines may play a role in causing autism. The secretary also questioned whether recent deaths in Pennsylvania's current measles outbreak were "fabricated" for political gain.

At a September meeting of the Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy, the health secretary questioned whether vaccines were linked with chronic diseases and repeated false claims that most vaccines haven't been tested for safety.

"He gives mixed messages," Paul Offit, MD, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told MedPage Today. "Although I would say largely they're not mixed -- largely they're just anti-vaccine. He never says a vaccine is safe."

Ultimately, Kennedy is "an anti-vaccine activist, and he believes he's doing good," Offit said. "He thinks that these infections are a small price to pay for what he believes will be an overall decrease in chronic disease because people aren't vaccinated."

The public's confusion about Kennedy's measles stance comes as the U.S. grapples with its largest tally of measles cases since 1991. As of Sept. 24, the nation already has seen 3,659 reported measles cases, outstripping last year's total of 2,289 reported cases -- a number that had been a post-1991 record until this year.

Controversy is also growing over the number of U.S. measles deaths in 2026, with the CDC reporting only two -- with an asterisk indicating this as a number "subject to change" -- while Pennsylvania alone has reported five measles-associated deaths amid a statewide measles outbreak that's reached 943 cases.

Measles is one of the most contagious infectious diseases, and the CDC's website still cites the MMR vaccine as "the best way to protect against measles."

Nevertheless, U.S. MMR vaccination rates have been dropping. While the nation's MMR vaccination rate among kindergartners was 95.2% in the 2019-2020 school year, it slipped to 92.4% in 2025-2026. Vaccine exemptions among U.S. kindergartners climbed from 3.6% in 2024-2025 to 4.2% in 2025-2026, and 24 states have exemption rates above 5%, according to the CDC.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/vaccines/123258?

Baruch Dayan HaEmet - R' Chaim Adler Z"L - From The Greats Of This Generation! He took the art of chazzonus to the levels of the previous generation's greatest chazzonim…Rosenblatt, Schorr, Glantz, Kwartin, Koussevitzky brothers.

 

Half of Airline Pilots Who Crashed Planes Were Muslim A troubling pattern that raises serious questions Daniel Greenfield   READ IN APP   Passenger airline crashes are unusual, intentional ones are rare and intentional pilot crashes are virtually unheard of. Passenger planes are generally flown by highly trained airline pilots, many of them are veterans of their respective air forces, and they remain calm in a crisis. That’s why there hasn’t been a single case of an American airline pilot deliberately crashing a plane and only one case of an airline pilot taking down a western plane with all onboard and that took place in 2015 when a suicidal first officer crashed Lufthansa’s Germanwings Flight 9525. The only other case involving a western pilot, but not a western airline, was the crash of Mozambique Airlines Flight TM470 in Africa by a Portuguese pilot. Every other case has involved non-western pilots with two Asian pilots and four Muslim pilots deliberately crashing or trying to crash planes: including the first known deliberate crash of a passenger plane by an airline pilot that took place in 1994 when Captain Younes Khayati deliberately disabled the autopilot on Royal Air Maroc Flight 630 and crashed the plane into a mountain. The list of Muslim suicide pilots also includes EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999 where the first officer kept shouting “Allahu Akbar” while downing the plane as well as Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, the subject of endless fantastic conspiracy theories ranging from UFOs to black holes, but that was actually likely the work of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah. After the FlyDubai incident in which an Omani Muslim pilot stabbed an Indian pilot in a reported attempt to hijack Flight FZ1073 bound for Israel and possibly crash the plane, the list of Muslim pilots who tried to bring down airplanes is up to 4. And that means that 44% of pilots who deliberately crashed tried to crash planes were Muslim. These statistics are all the more startling since Muslim pilots and airlines make up a very limited percentage of the airline travel sector. The Asian and North American market together account for 66% of flights, Europe adds another 23%, Africa comes in at only around 3% and the Middle East only accounts for 5%. Despite that, the Middle East and Africa account for a disproportionate number of deliberate pilot crashes when they represent a tiny minority of flights. The troubling statistic that nearly half of pilots attempting to crash their own planes were Muslim does not take into account Muslim hijackings, including the Islamic terror attacks of September 11, or any other hijacking attempts, but is limited only to pilots crashing passenger airline planes. If we were to count hijackings, 9/11 alone would ensure a much worse track record for Muslims flying planes since these were by far the deadliest cases of pilots, however illegal and illegitimate, weaponizing jet airplanes to cause as much damage and loss of life as possible. The latest incident raises serious questions about the risk entailed by both Muslim pilots and Muslim airlines operating in the United States of America and other known terror targets. The EgyptAir Flight 990 crash off Nantucket led to claims of Islamophobia when investigators flagged the shouts about Allah on the cockpit recording as concerning even though the crash predated 9/11. The Egyptians initially refused to cede control of the investigation and experts were dispatched to explain Muslim theology to Americans. We were firmly told that when First Officer Gameel Al-Batouti took the opportunity to seize control of the plane while the captain was in the bathroom and sent the plane diving while shouting about “Allah”, this was normal. It turned out that Al-Batouti had deliberately crashed the plane. The Egyptians refused to admit it and it took extensive work and an attempt by another Egyptian pilot to defector before we got anywhere close to the truth. Even then there were suspicions that it had been a terrorist act that were never proven, confirmed or even discussed because of the political sensitivity of the crash. A similar cover-up would likely have ensued had the FlyDubai takeover ended in a crash. But instead the Israeli passengers stormed the cockpit, disabled the attacking pilot and allowed the relief pilots to take control of the aircraft. But it is unlikely that the authorities on the ground, currently the Saudis, will allow the truth about what really happened in the air to come out. It’s unknown how many of the deliberate Muslim airline crashes were due to pilot terrorism because the Muslim countries involved tended to avoid any discussion of the motives involved. Some of these crashes by Muslim pilots have been attributed to personal issues, ranging from workplace frustration to a failed love affair, while others, notably EgyptAir Flight 990, were falsely attributed to mechanical failure, but western investigators have rarely had direct access to family members, friends and local officials making it very difficult for them to learn anything. There have been red flags in some of those crashes that raise the possibility of terrorism. Is it really a coincidence that intentional pilot crashes began in 1994, two years after the first Al Qaeda attack and a year after the World Trade Center bombing, and further crashes have roughly paralleled an upsurge in Islamic terrorist activity? The passengers on the Royal Air Maroc Flight 630, apart from a Kuwaiti prince, were mostly Europeans while the passengers on the EgyptAir Flight 990 were a mix of Americans and Egyptians, but notably included 33 Egyptian military officers who would have been seen as targets by the Muslim Brotherhood and its various splinter groups including Al Qaeda. A plane full of Israelis flying to Israel would be viewed as a golden ticket to Islamic ‘paradise’ for any devout Muslim. Especially when that plane could have also crashed into an Israeli building or facility on the way down. The death toll from such an attack could have been extremely severe and also tempting enough to explain what happened on Flight FZ1073. The troubling statistic that nearly half of deliberate pilot crashes were carried out by Muslim pilots should make us think about where we fly, who we fly with and whom we allow to fly into America.