The ultra-Orthodox self-segregate from Israeli society, but the Walder affair is revealing major cracks in the 'wall of holiness.' A day of reckoning is coming

 

שר התורה רוצה את העניבה שלי? תגיד כבר משהו משמעותי--- The Sar HaTorah wants my necktie? Say something significant already!

 

Black Ties Matter - That's It!

עניבות שחורות חשובות--זֶה הַכֹּל.

The Haredi leadership: Crime and its punishment 

 

'We believe victims' fliers placed on billboards of a Haredi neighborhood on December 31, 2021. 

 

 

The Chaim Walder affair is not “just” a shocking case of a prominent public figure, a Haredi educator, whose shame, hypocrisy, and wickedness were exposed — there are many such cases, in all sectors. Nor is it “just” a reminder of the extent of the life shattering phenomenon of sex offenses in the Haredi sector — these are, unfortunately, common everywhere. The affair has the real potential to effect fundamental change in the fabric of Haredi society.

The Haredi sector’s remarkable growth since the founding of the state is the result of a successful strategy adopted by its leaders. First, self-segregation from Israeli society on all levels of life and fortification behind “walls of holiness.” Second, providing an alternative to civic leadership through the glorification of a rabbinical leadership whose authority derives, ostensibly, from a heavenly source.

The meticulous self-segregation and stringent adherence to leadership directives that boast da’at Torah (infallible religious authority) have been a force multiplier vis-à-vis Israeli society. They have enabled the Haredim, against all odds, to preserve their unique identity, and, at the same time, become a major factor in Israeli society. But nothing lasts forever. The Haredi strategy, with its two components, is rapidly losing its power.

Self-segregation is made possible through control over the shaping of communal consciousness. In recent years, however, dictators of the hashkafa tehora or “pure view” in the community’s synagogues and yeshivot, in its sectoral press and street-posted broadsides, have encountered a formidable adversary — the Internet. This is a modern Tree of Knowledge, available to everyone. Haredim can choose whether to bite into the apple (or the device of a competing company). 

It turns out that they are gulping with gusto: about two-thirds of them are connected to the Internet. A mighty digital battering ram is striking the walls and undermining their stability.

And then comes the Chaim Walder affair, which puts the second component of the Haredi strategy — the leadership — to the test: The paragon of Haredi education, a figure known and admired by the entire community, turns out to be a sexual predator. The blood of his many victims is boiling. This was not an unconventional Haredi like Yehuda Meshi Zahav, the disgraced founder and chairman of ZAKA who was similarly accused of rape and sexual assault within the Haredi community, but rather a role model for the community — a decades-long spokesman for the “pure view” in the Lithuanian Haredi newspaper Yated Ne’eman. The crisis is huge. How will the leadership respond?

Some of the leadership looked this religious and moral evil in the eye, and averted its gaze. Yated Ne’eman has used the honorific acronym “zt”l” (his righteous memory should be a blessing) in regard to this man with blood on his hands. One of the most revered Lithuanian rabbis accuses those who revealed Walder’s wrongdoing of murder. This outrageous inversion of the truth is a sin that will bring its own punishment.

The sin is easy to identify: the Haredi leaders who are abandoning Walder’s victims are violating an explicit prohibition: lo ta’amod al dam re’echa — “Do not stand idly by while your brother’s blood is at stake.” The Torah sets a standard for the moral conduct of religious leadership in the case of the egla arufa — the decapitated calf. It says that if the corpse of a murdered person is found in a public area and it is not known who the killer is, the local leadership — the “elders” of the nearest city — are responsible for conducting an atonement ritual and declaring “Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it.” The Sages ask: “Would it ever enter our minds that the elders of the Beit Din (tribunal) were murderers?” However, because the crime took place “on their watch,” they are required to perform an educational and moral act of purification. Such measures are called for all the more in the Walder affair when the criminal’s identity is known and when he himself is regarded as a leader of that community.

And now for the punishment: the Haredi public recognizes the sin. The fraudulent crime of some of the Haredi leadership, having surrendered to their fears, is clear to its adherents. Brave glimmers of this recognition can be seen everywhere – Mishpacha Magazine and Radio Kol Chai are especially worthy examples.

Rabbi Saadia Gaon (in the 10th century), explaining the responsibility placed on the elders of the nearby city, states that “just as it is proper to castigate one for doing what he ought not have done, so should he be castigated for neglecting to do what should have been done.” The elders described in the Bible neglected their duty to safeguard the murder victim. Today’s elders are neglecting their duty to protect the victims.

The Haredi public is shaken; many understand, and strongly support, what is written here. It may be that, alongside the suicide of Chaim Walder, we are witnessing the “suicide” of some of the Haredi leadership. 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-haredi-leadership-crime-and-its-punishment/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2022-01-05&utm_medium=email

 

Silence obscured the truth in Ukraine for decades, but 75 years later the details of the genocide have emerged..

 

---

HISTORY

The WWII Massacres at Drobitsky Yar Were the Result of Years of Scapegoating Jews

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The Drobitsky Yar menorah commemorates the genocide that happened in Kharkov, and across Ukraine.

 

In the winter of 1941, silence fell across the Jewish communities of Ukraine, as one by one, they were snuffed out. “This silence is more horrifying than tears and curses; it is a silence more terrifying than moans and piercing lamentations,” wrote Soviet-Jewish journalist Vassily Grossman in 1943, after the Ukraine had been liberated by the Red Army. “In Ukraine there are no Jews. Nowhere—Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Bristol, Yagotin… A people has been murdered.”  In the following years the quietude would be amplified as the Soviet Union, recovering from the ravages of war, disappeared the disappeared, never acknowledging the Jewish lives taken from its lands.

When the Germans began their occupation of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, around 2.5 million Jews were trapped in the region. After the Nazi invasion, which was expedited by local collaborators, only 100,000 to 120,000 survived. But for more than 50 years, the details of this brutal tragedy remained largely unknown beyond the Iron Curtain. Little information was shared with the outside world, and inside the Soviet Union, the truth was suppressed. Instead of death by the Nazi system of concentration camps, the genocide of the Soviet Union’s Jews was committed via a barrage of bullets. Among the numerous massacre sites is Drobitsky Yar, a ravine outside the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov where some 15,000 Jews were shot or forced into mass graves to die of exposure. The horrific murders began December 15, 1941 and continued through January 1942—all in sight of Kharkov’s non-Jewish residents.

“People died basically just outside their homes, in pits and forests,” says Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar at the Kennan Institute, a part of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “They were killed in full view of their neighbors. If their neighbors did not directly murder them, they certainly witnessed them.”

The conditions that led to Ukrainians supporting such violent action against their countrymen began decades earlier, a tangled knot of prejudice and conspiracies. According to Tabarovsky, the legacy of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Holodomor (a forced famine that resulted in the deaths of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33) created enormous strife and instability. The conditions were almost like a 20th-century version of the Thirty Years’ War (a series of religious wars that spread across Europe and resulted in millions of deaths), she says.

Although Jewish residents of the Ukraine experienced long stretches of peaceful coexistence with their neighbors, they were also the most systematically oppressed minority. In 1919 alone, around 1,300 pogroms took place in the Ukrainian territories, resulting in 50,000 to 60,000 deaths and 1 million displaced people, Tabarovsky says. When the Bolsheviks instituted programs to promote minority culture and representation in government, some Jews rose out of poverty and into relatively stable careers. There were Jewish books and theater, Jews in government positions. The sudden increase in visibility led to further suspicion and unhappiness, which quickly spiraled into a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theory linking Jews with the communist government that enacted murderous policies including the Holodomor. 

By the time World War II had begun, some Ukrainians initially looked to the Germans as liberators. They welcomed the destruction of the Jews, who represented all the ills that had befallen them since the country was subsumed into the Soviet Union. By October 24, 1941, the German soldiers had crossed Ukraine and captured the eastern city of Kharkov. The Germans latched onto the Jews-as-Communists narrative, ordering the deaths of anyone who fit either of those categories.

In the occupied city of Kharkov, a decree was posted on December 14 ordering that all Jews be evacuated or shot on the spot if they resisted. Jewish citizens were identified by their neighbors, stripped of their clothing and valuables, and forced to a factory where they were held for weeks. Starting from the beginning, groups of Jews were periodically marched out to the Drobitsky Yar ravine and murdered. Men, women and children of all ages were killed.

Engineer S. S. Krivoruchko, one of the few survivors of the Drobitsky Yar massacre, described being marched to the ravine, which was “strewn with bits of rags and the remains of torn clothing… On the edge of the ravine stood a truck with machine guns. Terrible scenes erupted when people understood that they had been brought here to be slaughtered.”

Decades later, forensic experts uncovered 13 grave-pits around Kharkov. The corpses in these mass graves lay “in extreme disorder, fantastically intertwined, forming tangles of human bodies defying description.” Their work showed that the Germans had used bullets and carbon monoxide poisoning and fire to kill thousands of Jews, horrible acts of murder that would have been known to Kharkov’s residents. As historian Timothy Snyder writes, “The Judeo-Bolshevik myth separated Jews from Soviet citizens and many Soviet citizens from their own pasts. The murder of Jews and the transfer of property eliminated the sense of responsibility for the past.”

This forced distancing from the past and the truth continued even after the Ukraine was recaptured by the Soviet army. Stalin erected monuments, but only recognized the victims as peaceful Soviet citizens; their Jewish ethnicity was completely ignored. Part of this was undoubtedly due to anti-Semitism. Stalin once told Franklin D. Roosevelt that Jews were “middlemen, profiteers, and parasites.” But another part of this suppression had to do with creating the myth of a singular, national identity for all members of the Soviet Union. They needed stability and unity, or the nation would fracture.

Tabarovsky, who grew up in Russia during the Soviet period, never even learned about the Holocaust in school, though she later grew to be a scholar on the subject.

“Cities [in the Ukraine] used to be 70 percent Jewish, 80 percent Jewish,” Tabarovsky says. “You come to the remnants of a Jewish cemetery and kids wander there and have no idea what it is. That is like the memory of an entire people is erased.”

And Tabarovsky says that although modern Ukraine is very supportive of Israel, they aren’t taking the time to go back through the past and understand what it means today. Tabarovsky says the only way to heal from this history of silence and suppression is for Ukraine to revisit the past. She believes the country could look to Germany as a model for reconciliation, even though it will mean unearthing old, painful problems.

“The way you deal with the past determines what kind of society you have in the moment,” Tabarovsky says. “If you don’t address the root causes of what happened in the past, then what’s to prevent you from recreating that in the future?”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/wwii-massacres-drobitsky-yar-were-result-years-scapegoating-jews-180961466/

I Truly Hesitate To Put This Video Up - However, Miriam Is a Self-Proclaimed Victim Of Sexual Abuse, Left Observant Judaism Because Of It - I will Give Her the latitude I Would Afford No Other - Turn On Closed Caption - Wait For It!

 

And Good For The Jews, Especially The Miami Jews -- און גוט פאר די אידן, בפרט די מיאמי אידן

 

What can eating 10 prunes a day do for you?

 

The amazing thing that eating 10 prunes a day does for your body.

Many people think prunes are a sure cure for constipation, yet they have several other important benefits, especially for postmenopausal women. How many prunes should be eaten every day?

Prunes, which are dried plums, sound like something you eat on Tu Bishvat or when constipated, but researchers at Penn State University suggest older menopausal women should consider eating several prunes daily. Their study found that prunes can help prevent or delay bone loss in older women.

The authors of the study published in the journal Advances in Nutrition claim that prunes can reduce physical inflammation and oxidative damage, both of which contribute to bone loss. "In postmenopausal women, lower levels of estrogen can trigger a rise of oxidative stress and inflammation, increasing the risk of weakening bones that may lead to fractures," said Dr. Connie Rogers, a professor of nutritional sciences and physiologist who conducted the study. "Incorporating prunes into the diet may help protect bones by slowing or reversing this process."

Osteoporosis, a condition in which the bones become brittle and weak, is quite common in women over the age of 50. Estimates show that about 200 million women worldwide live with osteoporosis, with the condition causing nearly 9,000,000 bone fractures annually. Several medications for osteoporosis are now available, but researchers believe that more and more women are looking for holistic ways to treat or completely avoid the condition, especially through diet.

Prunes contain essential nutrients

The human body works to maintain its bone health through an ongoing process which constantly builds new bone cells while removing old bone cells. However, around the age of 40, the breakdown of old bone cells begins to surpass the production of new bone cells in the aging body. This imbalance may result from various factors including inflammation and oxidative stress.

It’s important to clarify that oxidative stress isn’t connected to feelings of stress or pressure. Oxidative stress refers to the imbalance between the levels of free radicals and antioxidants in cells. Prunes are full of minerals, dietary fiber, vitamin K and phenolic compounds and all of these nutritional benefits may help fight the harmful effects of inflammation and oxidative damage.

Ten prunes daily can strengthen bones

The team analyzed data from 16 preclinical studies conducted in rodents – for this study, ten preclinical studies and two human clinical trials. In all these studies, the results remained almost the same. Eating prunes led to two positive benefits: less oxidative stress/inflammation and stronger bones.

Specifically, clinical trials found that eating about ten prunes (100 grams) daily for an entire year improved bone mineral density within the forearms and lower spine.

Similarly, consumption of between 50 and 100 grams of prunes daily for six months prevented major bone density loss and lowered inflammation levels significantly compared to other older women who didn’t eat prunes.

The research team assumes that prunes cause healthier changes within the gut microbiome, and subsequently lowers inflammation in the colon. Such developments probably reduce the levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines as well as oxidative damage markers. Further research is already planned to more thoroughly investigate how eating prunes consistently over the course of a year affects bone health, inflammation and intestinal function.

https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-698313?_ga=2.102825792.1353864315.1645640985-1866855919.1617831228&utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Israel+supports+Ukraine+s+sovereignty+-+without+mentioning+Russia&utm_campaign=February+23%2C+2022+Night&vgo_ee=Jn367jKILnpErXAAhCpdDovy7T5YEJ8ohjC9vauJg30%3D

Ignoring Chaim Walder’s alleged victims, Chief Rabbi David Lau visited the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) author’s home on Tuesday night ....

Chief Rabbi Lau visits shiva of alleged rapist Chaim Walder -  Haim Walder was a suspected  child rapist and serial sex offender who killed himself to avoid investigation and trial. 

Rabbi Lau should be fired today from his government job which is financed by taxpayers. This is just the latest example of the moral bankruptcy of the chief rabbinate.

 

Lau was photographed in a tent that was set up outside the Walder home for the shiva. 

Ignoring Chaim Walder’s alleged victims, Chief Rabbi David Lau visited the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) author’s home on Tuesday night to comfort his family, who are sitting shiva.

 

Walder was found dead in a cemetery on Monday in what is suspected to have been a suicide. He was facing multiple allegations of rape and sexual assault of minors since a Haaretz expose last month.

Walder was a well-known author of children’s and young adults’ books in the haredi world. His series Kids Speak (in Hebrew, Yeladim Mesaprim al Atzmam) has sold more than two million copies in communities across Israel and the Diaspora. 

 

 

WALDER RECEIVED A HERO'S FUNERAL BY THE HAREDI COMMUNITY

 

He was accused of raping minors and young adults, all of whom he met in his line of work as a therapist and children’s author. 

 

Lau was photographed in a tent that was set up outside the Walder home for the shiva. 

 

Lau’s visit to the shiva drew condemnations across social media particularly due to his silence on the Walder affair and not saying anything about the author’s alleged victims. So far, more than 20 testimonies have been brought to the rabbinical court in Safed that had convened to hear the accusations. 

Stop the חילול השם. Morally and ethically, Israel can ill afford hereditary taxpayer-funded sinecures for clerics. Do away with the State Rabbinate. End divisive parochial control of Judaism in Israel. It would be a blessing. Amen. https://t.co/fZhyxc6wie

— Elliot Jager אליוט ג'גר (@JAGERFILE) December 29, 2021

Yaakov Katz

@yaakovkatz

 

Haim Walder was a suspected rapist and serial sex offender who killed himself to avoid investigation and trial. Rabbi Lau should be fired today from his government job which is financed by taxpayers. This is just the latest example of the moral bankruptcy of the chief rabbinate.

 

The haredi media also ignored the victims and reported on the death of “Rabbi Haim Walder” without mentioning the severe allegations that were brought against him.  

 

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-690052?_ga=2.160523262.234342231.1640543200-1969581575.1579377799&utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=A-G+indicts+Aeronautics+drone-maker%2C+case+details+under+gag+order&utm_campaign=December+29%2C+2021+Night&vgo_ee=Jn367jKILnpErXAAhCpdDovy7T5YEJ8ohjC9vauJg30%3D

The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States.

 

COVID Won’t End Up Like the Flu. It Will Be Like Smoking.

 

Hundreds of thousands of deaths, from either tobacco or the pandemic, could be prevented with a single behavioral change.

It’s suddenly become acceptable to say that COVID is—or will soon be—like the flu. Such analogies have long been the preserve of pandemic minimizers, but lately they’ve been creeping into more enlightened circles. 

Last month the dean of a medical school wrote an open letter to his students suggesting that for a vaccinated person, the risk of death from COVID-19 is “in the same realm, or even lower, as the average American’s risk from flu.” A few days later, David Leonhardt said as much to his millions of readers in the The New York Times’ morning newsletter. And three prominent public-health experts have called for the government to recognize a “new normal” in which the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus “is but one of several circulating respiratory viruses that include influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and more.”

The end state of this pandemic may indeed be one where COVID comes to look something like the flu. Both diseases, after all, are caused by a dangerous respiratory virus that ebbs and flows in seasonal cycles. But I’d propose a different metaphor to help us think about our tenuous moment: The “new normal” will arrive when we acknowledge that COVID’s risks have become more in line with those of smoking cigarettes—and that many COVID deaths, like many smoking-related deaths, could be prevented with a single intervention.

The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States. Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at UC Irvine, told me that if COVID continues to account for a few hundred thousand American deaths every year—“a realistic worst-case scenario,” he calls it—that would wipe out all of the life-expectancy gains we’ve accrued from the past two decades’ worth of smoking-prevention efforts.

The COVID vaccines are, without exaggeration, among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine. An unvaccinated adult is an astonishing 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one. Yet widespread vaccine hesitancy in the United States has caused more than 163,000 preventable deaths and counting. Because too few people are vaccinated, COVID surges still overwhelm hospitals—interfering with routine medical services and leading to thousands of lives lost from other conditions. If everyone who is eligible were triply vaccinated, our health-care system would be functioning normally again. (We do have other methods of protection—antiviral pills and monoclonal antibodies—but these remain in short supply and often fail to make their way to the highest-risk patients.) Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already declared themselves broken up with COVID. They are confidently doing so not because the virus is no longer circulating or because they’ve achieved mythical herd immunity from natural infection; they’ve simply inoculated enough people.

President Joe Biden said in January that “this continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and vaccine holdouts are indeed prolonging our crisis. The data suggest that most of the unvaccinated hold that status voluntarily at this point. Last month, only 1 percent of adults told the Kaiser Family Foundation that they wanted to get vaccinated soon, and just 4 percent suggested that they were taking a “wait-and-see” approach. Seventeen percent of respondents, however, said they definitely don’t want to get vaccinated or would do so only if required (and 41 percent of vaccinated adults say the same thing about boosters). Among the vaccine-hesitant, a mere 2 percent say it would be hard for them to access the shots if they wanted them. We can acknowledge that some people have faced structural barriers to getting immunized while also listening to the many others who have simply told us how they feel, sometimes from the very beginning.

The same arguments apply to tobacco: Smokers are 15 to 30 times more likely to develop lung cancer. Quitting the habit is akin to receiving a staggeringly powerful medicine, one that wipes out most of this excess risk. Yet smokers, like those who now refuse vaccines, often continue their dangerous lifestyle in the face of aggressive attempts to persuade them otherwise. Even in absolute numbers, America’s unvaccinated and current-smoker populations seem to match up rather well: Right now, the CDC pegs them at 13 percent and 14 percent of all U.S. adults, respectively, and both groups are likely to be poorer and less educated.

In either context, public-health campaigns must reckon with the very difficult task of changing people’s behavior. Anti-smoking efforts, for example, have tried to incentivize good health choices and disincentivize bad ones, whether through cash payments to people who quit, gruesome visual warnings on cigarette packs, taxes, smoke-free zones, or employer smoking bans. Over the past 50 years, this crusade has very slowly but consistently driven change: Nearly half of Americans used to smoke; now only about one in seven does. Hundreds of thousands of lung-cancer deaths have been averted in the process.

With COVID, too, we’ve haphazardly pursued behavioral nudges to turn the hesitant into the inoculated. Governments and businesses have given lotteries and free beers a chance. Some corporations, universities, health-care systems, and local jurisdictions implemented mandates. But many good ideas have turned out to be of little benefit: A randomized trial in nursing homes published in January, for example, found that an intensive information-and-persuasion campaign from community leaders had failed to budge vaccination rates among the predominantly disadvantaged and low-income staff. Despite the altruistic efforts of public-health professionals and physicians, it’s becoming harder by the day to reach immunological holdouts. Booster uptake is also lagging far behind.

This is where the “new normal” of COVID might come to resemble our decades-long battle with tobacco. We should neither expect that every stubbornly unvaccinated person will get jabbed before next winter nor despair that none of them will ever change their mind. Let’s accept instead that we may make headway slowly, and with considerable effort. This plausible outcome has important, if uncomfortable, policy implications. With a vaccination timeline that stretches over years, our patience for restrictions, especially on the already vaccinated, will be very limited. But there is middle ground. We haven’t banned tobacco outright—in fact, most states protect smokers from job discrimination—but we have embarked on a permanent, society-wide campaign of disincentivizing its use. Long-term actions for COVID might include charging the unvaccinated a premium on their health insurance, just as we do for smokers, or distributing frightening health warnings about the perils of remaining uninoculated. And once the political furor dies down, COVID shots will probably be added to the lists of required vaccinations for many more schools and workplaces.

To compare vaccine resistance and smoking seems to overlook an obvious and important difference: COVID is an infectious disease and tobacco use isn’t. (Tobacco is also addictive in a physiological sense, while vaccine resistance isn’t.) Many pandemic restrictions are based on the idea that any individual’s behavior may pose a direct health risk to everyone else. People who get vaccinated don’t just protect themselves from COVID; they reduce their risk of passing on the disease to those around them, at least for some limited period of time. Even during the Omicron wave, that protective effect has appeared significant: A person who has received a booster is 67 percent less likely to test positive for the virus than an unvaccinated person.

But the harms of tobacco can also be passed along from smokers to their peers. Secondhand-smoke inhalation causes more than 41,000 deaths annually in the U.S. (a higher mortality rate than some flu seasons’). Yet despite smoking’s well-known risks, many states don’t completely ban the practice in public venues; secondhand-smoke exposure in private homes and cars—affecting 25 percent of U.S. middle- and high-school children—remains largely unregulated. The general acceptance of these bleak outcomes, for smokers and nonsmokers alike, may hint at another aspect of where we’re headed with COVID. Tobacco is lethal enough that we are willing to restrict smokers’ personal freedoms—but only to a degree. As deadly as COVID is, some people won’t get vaccinated, no matter what, and both the vaccinated and unvaccinated will spread disease to others. A large number of excess deaths could end up being tolerated or even explicitly permitted. Noel Brewer, a public-health professor at the University of North Carolina, told me that anti-COVID actions, much like anti-smoking policies, will be limited not by their effectiveness but by the degree to which they are politically palatable.

Without greater vaccination, living with COVID could mean enduring a yearly death toll that is an order of magnitude higher than the one from flu. And yet this, too, might come to feel like its own sort of ending. Endemic tobacco use causes hundreds of thousands of casualties, year after year after year, while fierce public-health efforts to reduce its toll continue in the background. Yet tobacco doesn’t really feel like a catastrophe for the average person. Noymer, of UC Irvine, said that the effects of endemic COVID, even in the context of persistent gaps in vaccination, would hardly be noticeable. Losing a year or two from average life expectancy only bumps us back to where we were in … 2000.

Chronic problems eventually yield to acclimation, rendering them relatively imperceptible. We still care for smokers when they get sick, of course, and we reduce harm whenever possible. The health-care system makes $225 billion every year for doing so—paid out of all of our tax dollars and insurance premiums. I have no doubt that the system will adapt in this way, too, if the coronavirus continues to devastate the unvaccinated. Hospitals have a well-honed talent for transforming any terrible situation into a marketable “center of excellence.”

COVID is likely to remain a leading killer for a while, and some academics have suggested that pandemics end only when the public stops caring. But we shouldn’t forget the most important reason that the coronavirus isn’t like the flu: We’ve never had vaccines this effective in the midst of prior influenza outbreaks, which means we didn’t have a simple, clear approach to saving quite so many lives. Compassionate conversations, community outreach, insurance surcharges, even mandates—I’ll take them all. Now is not the time to quit.

Benjamin Mazer is a physician specializing in laboratory medicine.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/covid-anti-vaccine-smoking/622819/

Cases Are Dropping Globally, but Omicron Subvariant Is Spreading, W.H.O. Says --- Nu --- So WHO's on First!?

 

The Omicron surge seems to be slowing in much of the world, but a subvariant that scientists believe is even more contagious is on the rise, and a decline in testing has muddled the global picture, the World Health Organization said.

New cases worldwide dropped 19 percent from Feb. 7 to Feb. 13, compared with the week before, according to the agency.

The W.H.O. also said that the subvariant of Omicron, BA.2 appeared to be “steadily increasing” in prevalence and that BA.2 had now become dominant in several Asian countries, including China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines. Denmark was the first nation to report that BA.2 had overtaken BA.1, the version of Omicron that first swept through the world.

Scientists have said there is no evidence that BA.2 is more lethal than BA.1, though BA.2 could slow Omicron’s decline. Vaccines appear to be just as effective against BA.2 as they are against other forms of Omicron.

The Omicron wave has yet to crest in what the agency calls the Western Pacific region, which includes Oceania, the Pacific islands and East Asian countries like China and South Korea that recently celebrated the Lunar New Year, a holiday period that typically involves large family gatherings. Cases in the region rose 19 percent last week, the W.H.O. reported.

In the Pacific, two island nations that had no confirmed cases until recently are now grappling with the arrival of the virus. In Tonga, an outbreak began after ships brought aid to help the country recover from a volcanic eruption and tsunami in January. And the Cook Islands reported its first case last week.

The W.H.O. said caseloads were falling in the other regions. But cases are still rising in parts of Europe, including in Slovakia, Latvia and Belarus. And in Russia, new cases have increased by 79 percent over the past two weeks, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

On Wednesday, Maria Van Kerkhove, the W.H.O.’s Covid-19 technical lead, cautioned that a drop in testing rates around the world has meant the reported global case numbers might not reflect the true spread of the virus.

“We need to be careful about interpreting too much this downward trend,” she said. She said the bigger concern was the increase in reported deaths from Covid-19 for the sixth week in a row.

The W.H.O’s Eastern Mediterranean region, which includes the Middle East, reported the most fatalities, and the Western Pacific region reported the second-most, according to the W.H.O.

In the Americas, many countries did not move fast enough to slow the transmission of BA.1, W.H.O. officials said on Wednesday, and they must be better prepared for whatever version of the coronavirus comes next.

“This will not be the last variant, and the future of the pandemic is still extremely uncertain,” said Dr. Carissa F. Etienne, the director of the W.H.O.’s Pan American Health Organization, adding that “a new variant could emerge at any time.”

 

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/17/world/covid-19-tests-cases-vaccine

at the subvariant of OmicronThe Omicron surge seems to be slowing in much of the world, but a subvariant that scientists believe is even more contagious is on the rise, and a decline in testing has muddled the global picture, the World Health Organization said.New cases worldwide dropped 19 percent from Feb. 7 to Feb. 13, compared with the week before, according to the agency.The W.H.O. also said that the subvariant of Omicron, BA.2 appeared to be “steadily increasing” in prevalence and that BA.2 had now become dominant in several Asian countries, including China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines. Denmark was the first nation to report that BA.2 had overtaken BA.1, the version of Omicron that first swept through the woScientists have said there is no evidence that BA.2 is more lethal than BA.1, though BA.2 could slow Omicron’s decline. Vaccines appear to be just as effective against BA.2 as they are against other forms of Omicrohttps://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/17/world/covid-19-tests-cases-vaccine

Although The Present Tensions Are Much Larger & More Complex Than Ukraine Itself - The Ukranians Were Complicit In The Murder of 1.5 Million Jews! Not Much Sympathy From This Jew!

 Ukraine’s part in the Holocaust

 

In this July 16, 2007, photograph, French priest Patrick Desbois, front, and members of his team walk to what used to be a well where many Jews were thrown dead or still alive, in Bogdanivka, Ukraine, during World War II.

 

 

 

Carl Gershman’s May 28 op-ed, “Ukraine must confront its Holocaust history,” drew attention to the fact that, of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, 1.5 million were murdered on Ukrainian soil.

It was not only the involvement of large numbers of Ukrainian nationals in the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads that was responsible for this result but also the official comprehensive involvement of the Ukrainian Police in assisting the Nazis’ roundup of Jews for the more mechanized efficient killing fields of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Belzec.

Mr. Gershman referenced the Ukrainian town of Rava-Ruska as an example of what happened. But it would be useful to note what a U.S. federal court found in 1981 in the case of U.S. v. Osidach, in which it upheld the Justice Department’s stripping of the defendant’s U.S. citizenship. He had been charged with having served as police chief in Rava-Ruska, where he was responsible for rounding up the town’s 18,000 Jews.

The court had concluded that a careful review of the record shows “that what occurred in that town was not an isolated instance of conduct but totally consistent with the general pattern of persecutorial conduct by the Ukrainian police throughout the Galacia region.”

During the Germans' census of December 1941, local officials in Kharkiv played a crucial role in identifying Jews, evicting them from their apartments, and forcing them into a temporary ghetto in the barracks of the Kharkiv Machine-Tool Factory and the Kharkiv Tractor Factory. The tenth district council was particularly closely involved in ghettoization, and formed a security team to help German soldiers prevent escapes. Employees of that council, along with former ghetto guards, looted the possessions of the Jews after the Germans and, with other indigenous accomplices, helped murder them and dispose of the bodies. The behavior of these local actors sheds new light on the “Ordinary Men” debate.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ukraines-part-in-the-holocaust/2019/05/31/9922ad8e-8259-11e9-b585-e36b16a531aa_story.html

Queer V. Queer

 

Court Bars Mother from Exposing "Child to an Activity That Violates" "Child's Orthodox Jewish Chasidic Faith";

 

N.Y. appellate court reverses the order.

 

Eugene Volokh |

From Weichman v. Weichman, decided in November by the N.Y. Appellate Division (in an opinion by Judges Mark C. Dillon, Sylvia O. Hinds–Radix, Linda Christopher, and Joseph A. Zayas):

The parties were married in 2005. There is one child of the marriage, born in 2006. The child was raised in accordance with the parties' Orthodox Jewish Chasidic faith and attended an Orthodox Chasidic yeshiva from the age of two. In March 2015, the plaintiff commenced this action for a divorce ….

The plaintiff identifies as a member of the LGBTQ community, and considers herself an Orthodox Jew. Following a trial on the issues of custody and parental access, the Supreme Court issued a decision awarding the defendant sole custody of the child, with the plaintiff to have specified periods of parental access. The court imposed certain restrictions on the plaintiff's periods of parental access, including a requirement that: "The [plaintiff] shall not take the child to a place or expose the child to an activity that violates rules, practices, traditions and culture of the child's Orthodox Jewish Chasidic Faith. Thus, the [plaintiff] shall ensure that the child is able to abide by the laws and rules of the Shabbat, Jewish Holidays, Kosher Chasidic and Glatt Kosher food requirement, and the rules of the Mosdos Chasidic Square." …

Ordinarily, absent an agreement, the custodial parent has the right to make educational decisions for a child. Nevertheless, "it may be appropriate, depending upon the particular circumstances of the case, to award some custodial decision-making authority to the noncustodial parent." Here, there was a sound and substantial basis for the Supreme Court's determination to award the defendant decision-making authority on the issue of the child's education. The child had been enrolled in the same yeshiva since he was two years old, where he was doing well socially and academically, and the plaintiff failed to establish that her desired plan of enrolling the child in a different type of yeshiva or a public school would be in the child's best.

However, we agree with the plaintiff that the Supreme Court's direction that, during her periods of parental access, she "shall not take the child to a place or expose the child to an activity that violates rules, practices, traditions and culture of the child's Orthodox Jewish Chasidic Faith" must be vacated.

In the absence of a written agreement, the custodial parent may determine the religious training of a child. Consistent with the children's best interests, courts may properly direct noncustodial parents, during periods of parental access, to respect the children's religious beliefs and practices and make reasonable efforts to ensure the children's compliance with their religious requirements. However, … a court oversteps constitutional limitations when it purports to compel a parent to adopt a particular religious lifestyle.

"To the contrary, '[i]t is beyond dispute that, at a minimum, the Constitution guarantees that government may not coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise.'" A religious upbringing provision "should not, and cannot, be enforced to the extent that it violates a parent's legitimate due process right to express oneself and live freely." Thus, where the effect of a religious upbringing provision is to compel a parent to himself or herself practice a religion, rather than merely directing the parent to provide the child with a religious upbringing, the provision must be stricken.

Here, the challenged restriction does not expressly require the plaintiff to herself comply with the rules of the child's Orthodox Jewish Chasidic faith during periods of parental access. Nonetheless, we agree with the plaintiff that the breadth of the provision in forbidding her to "expose" the child to any activities which violate the child's Orthodox Jewish Chasidic faith has the same effect as the provisions this Court struck down in [two prior cases]. The only way for the plaintiff to ensure her compliance with the restriction is for her to comply with all religious requirements of the child's faith during her periods of parental access, lest she "expose" the child to activities not in keeping with those religious requirements.

The defendant's testimony at the trial supports this conclusion and demonstrates that he expected the plaintiff to "conduct herself in [the child's] presence according to the rules" of the child's faith. The defendant was especially concerned that the child would be exposed to people involved in a "gay lifestyle" and testified that, if the plaintiff became involved in a relationship with or married a woman, he would request that the partner not be present during periods of parental access because same-sex relationships are inconsistent with Chasidic religious principles. Such restrictions on a parent's ability to "express oneself and live freely" go beyond requiring a noncustodial parent to support and enable the child's religious practices, and impermissibly infringe on the noncustodial parent's rights.

The plaintiff does not challenge the Supreme Court's direction that, during periods of parental access, she "shall ensure that the child is able to abide by the laws and rules of the Shabbat, Jewish Holidays, Kosher Chasidic and Glatt Kosher food requirement, and the rules of the Mosdos Chasidic Square." That provision effectively addresses the plaintiff's obligation to ensure the child's compliance with his religious requirements during her periods of parental access….

For much more on this, see Parent-Child Speech and Child Custody Speech Restrictions.

 

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/02/14/court-bars-mother-from-exposing-child-to-an-activity-that-violates-childs-orthodox-jewish-chasidic-faith/?post_type=volokh-post&utm_medium=email

The Rebbe & The 12 Year Old!

 

Malka Leifer’s father-in-law, a Jerusalem rabbi, suspected of child sex assault

 

Baruch Leifer, a senior rabbi in the Khust Hasidic dynasty

Baruch Leifer, 70, was arrested last month but his name barred from publication; suspected of molesting a family member when she was 12; more accusations said too old to prosecute

Baruch Leifer was named Monday as the Jerusalem rabbi who was arrested last month on suspicion of molesting children several years ago.

A gag order barring publication of Leifer’s name was lifted Monday at the request of the Kan public broadcaster.

Leifer’s daughter-in-law Malka Leifer is currently awaiting trial in Australia on suspicion of dozens of incidents of molesting students when she was a school principal in Melbourne.

Baruch Leifer, a senior rabbi in the Khust Hasidic dynasty, is suspected of multiple indecent acts against a family member when she was 12 years old, according to Kan.

Additional complaints have been lodged against him, but in those, the alleged acts occurred too long ago to be prosecuted, the report said.

An investigation began following recent complaints received at the Beit Shemesh police station.

Police said last month — without naming Leifer — that the suspect committed indecent acts against minors in separate cases several years ago.

In September, a Melbourne court ruled that Malka Leifer must stand trial on 70 charges of child sex abuse at a Jewish ultra-Orthodox school where she worked.

Malka Leifer, a dual Israeli-Australian citizen who was extradited to Australia in January 2021, denies dozens of charges, including rape, indecent assault and child sexual abuse. The crimes allegedly took place between 2004 and 2008.

Leifer, 55, had fled Australia for Israel after the allegations against her surfaced in 2008, moving with her family to the Emmanuel settlement in the West Bank. Australian authorities pressed charges in 2012 and requested her extradition two years later.

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community has been shaken by sexual abuse allegations against several leading figures.

In December last year, prominent children’s author and rabbi Chaim Walder died by suicide after the Haaretz newspaper published a story accusing him of sexually assaulting nearly two dozen people, including children — allegations he had denied.

The Walder story has been hailed as a potential turning point in the approach to sexual abuse cases within the very insular community.

Then in January, news broke that Dudi Shwamenfeld, a popular Haredi radio host, was accused by multiple women of sexual abuse, including one who said she was 16 when the abuse began.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/malka-leifers-father-in-law-named-as-rabbi-suspected-of-child-sex-assault/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2022-02-14&utm_medium=email

Is it rational to ignore the high communal viral load in American society and to not do more to lower it so that fewer people are exposed, become sick, transmit onwards and possibly die?

 

There Is Nothing Normal about One Million People Dead from COVID

 

Mass media and policy makers are pushing for a return to pre‐COVID times while trying to normalize a staggering death toll

A woman watches white flags on the National Mall in September 2021 in Washington, D.C. Over 660,000 white flags were installed here to honor Americans who have lost their lives to COVID-19 epidemic.

Sometime in the next few weeks, the official death toll for the two-year COVID pandemic in the U.S. will reach one million. Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, the U.S. has continued to have the most COVID infections and deaths per country, by far, and it has the highest per capita death rate of any wealthy nation.

This is an unfathomable number of people dead, yet, mass media are downplaying it. This is despite an empathetic New York Times headline in May 2020 of “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss,” and using its entire front page to print names of some of the deceased. As Luppe B. Luppen noted on Twitter, the newspaper’s more recent headline was the cruel and callous “900,000 Dead, but Many Americans Move On.”

The Times is not alone; several large mainstream publications, in complicity with politicians of both major political parties, have been beating a death knell of a drum for getting “back to normal” for months. The effect is the manufactured consent to normalize mass death and suffering—to subtly suggest to Americans that they want to move on.

News media are helping to shape public opinion in order for business to return to the very circumstances that have created this ongoing crisis. A return to normal will allow profits to be reaped by people working relatively safely from their homes (the target audience of many news organizations’ advertisers) at the expense of people working or studying in person who are more vulnerable.

A few weeks ago, David Leonhardt, the writer of the Times’ newsletter “The Morning,” asked Michael Barbaro, the host of the company’s podcast “The Daily”: “If [COVID] is starting to look like a regular respiratory virus, is it rational [emphasis by the Times] to treat it like something completely different— to disrupt all our lives in all these big and consequential ways[?]”

I was dismayed. That rhetorical move is a familiar one to me: Two white men frame what they think is rational, deeming any questioning of their stand as irrational.

Meanwhile, some 140,000 children in the U.S. have lost a caregiver—about one in every 500 children. That is a big and consequential loss, and those children are probably not among the many who are ready to “move on” (another nearly one million Americans can’t move on because they’re already dead). During this pandemic, Black people have been disproportionately killed by this virus. About 50,000 people have died each month of COVID, meaning several Black children are being orphaned by SARS-CoV-2 this month, as you read this.

So is it rational? To be calling for the end of life-saving mitigation efforts and saying they harm children when so many have been orphaned here and worldwide?

Is it rational for Democrats, Republicans and much of the news media to press on towards what writer Tom Scocca calls a policy of “unlimited” COVID? The Democratically controlled state governments of California, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut all moved to drop indoor mask mandates just days after a near-record 3,958 people died of COVID on a single day, February 4. Even the White House reportedly has “begun hinting at an impending ‘new normal,’ in a conscious messaging shift meant to get people comfortable with a scenario where the virus remains widespread yet at more manageable levels.”

Is it rational, when as many people who died of AIDS in its worst year (near 50,000 in 1995) are dying every month of COVID, to think of the novel coronavirus as a “regular respiratory virus”—and to think that the big and consequential disruptions to worry about are mask wearing and ventilation, and not death and debilitation?

Is it rational to ignore the high communal viral load in American society and to not do more to lower it so that fewer people are exposed, become sick, transmit onwards and possibly die?

Is it rational for the Times to be advertising an event happening in March hosted by Leonhardt called “The New Normal, a Virtual Event on Life and Love After Omicron,” which might just coincide with the timing of the millionth American officially dying of COVID?

Well, it depends on what it is you are trying to rationalize.

If you’re trying to get people to accept that what the nation is doing right now is okay, and 50,000 deaths per month should be normalized, then it’s rational.

If you don’t want people to wonder why in just two years, the U.S. death toll for COVID is about 130 percent the size of the death toll of four decades of HIV—while global COVID deaths are less than 20 percent of the world’s AIDS deaths—then it’s rational.

If you want to manufacture consent for looser pandemic measures in the U.S. rather than more comprehensive ones as the communal viral rate demands, then making these claims is rational.

But it’s not ethical to manufacture what I call a viral underclass, and it’s incorrect to pretend as though the news media have no role in creating it nor in persuading the public that so many deaths are inevitable.

It’s a shame that major news outlets are talking more about moving on and returning to normal, and not running more pieces calling for an increase in government-funded mitigation efforts (more free high-quality masks and tests, upgraded ventilation in worksites and schools) to stem the tide of death. 

American norms (rampant incarceration, eviction, homelessness, lack of health care, poor ventilation and economic inequality) are fairly deadly as is.

Rushing for the “urgency of normal” is “wishful thinking,” epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves wrote in the Nation. Intentionally or unintentionally, “the urgency of normal”—a phrase cropping up a lot lately.

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. 

Procrastination is still the thief of time.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-nothing-normal-about-one-million-people-dead-from-covid1/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=today-in-science&utm_content=link&utm_term=2022-02-10_featured-this-week&spMailingID=71228507&spUserID=NTQwMDkwNTkwNDU4S0&spJobID=2233374821&spReportId=MjIzMzM3NDgyMQS2

Five Orthodox Jews join petition, claiming the city’s COVID-19 vaccine requirement for indoor spaces is a ‘form of slavery’ - that “violates numerous commandments in the Torah that require one to remember and internalize the great Exodus from slavery in ancient Egypt.”

 

‘Torah violation’: Citing religious beliefs, lawsuit challenges NYC vaccine mandate

 

Five Orthodox Jews join petition, claiming the city’s COVID-19 vaccine requirement for indoor spaces is a ‘form of slavery’

 

Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, New York City

 

New York Jewish Week via JTA – Five Orthodox Jewish New Yorkers have joined a suit challenging the city’s vaccine requirements for indoor spaces.

Two of the plaintiffs are rabbis at yeshivas. The suit, filed Feb. 7 in New York, challenges the “Key to NYC” program and a recent COVID vaccination mandate for religious and private school employees. The mandate was opposed by many haredi Orthodox yeshivas and groups representing them, including Agudath Israel of America.

Three of the Jewish plaintiffs are parents suing on behalf of a total of 12 of their children, all minors, whose COVID vaccination they oppose on what they claim are religious grounds.

The unnamed plaintiffs allege an “unprecedented abuse of power” in regard to COVID vaccine requirements for indoor spaces in the city. The plaintiffs, who also include a Catholic resident of New York, object to the vaccine on religious and constitutional grounds.

The Catholic and Orthodox Jewish plaintiffs say the vaccines are derived from research into fetal cell lines from abortions in the 1970s and ’80s, a technology they oppose on religious grounds. Another religious ground cited by the Orthodox Jewish plaintiffs is that “[s]ubmitting to a government dictate that conditions freedom on vaccination is a form of slavery and subjugation” that “violates numerous commandments in the Torah that require one to remember and internalize the great Exodus from slavery in ancient Egypt.”

Groups representing the major Jewish denominations, including the Orthodox Union and the Rabbinical Council of America, have all released statements endorsing vaccines, and many rabbis in the haredi Orthodox community have participated in campaigns to increase vaccination rates in their communities. Still, Orthodox health professionals and communal leaders note that a vocal minority of their community won’t heed their guidance.

 

The ‘Key to NYC’ program introduced by former mayor Bill De Blasio requires proof of vaccination for a variety of indoor activities including dining, gyms and entertainment

 

The suit was filed by the Thomas More Society, a conservative Catholic nonprofit that earlier in the pandemic represented Orthodox Jews in New York in a lawsuit opposing caps on the number of attendees able to attend houses of worship. In that case, a judge blocked the state from imposing stricter rules on houses of worship than on other businesses.

In November 2020, in a case brought by Agudath Israel, the Supreme Court ruled that occupancy restrictions and mandates unfairly discriminated against religious institutions.

The Thomas More Society has filed a number of lawsuits across the country opposing vaccine requirements, including representing health care workers in New York State who have been denied an exemption from the vaccine on religious grounds.

If successful, the suit would allow yeshiva employees to remain or return to work without a vaccine, as well as gather indoors and gain access to the same spaces as vaccinated New Yorkers without discrimination.

Named in the suit are New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Dr. Dave Choski, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

The suit asserts that the Key to NYC program is creating a two-tiered society within the city, where unvaccinated residents are unable to participate in daily life or institutions, and that the program violates rights to due process, equal protection, privacy, freedom of assembly and free exercise of religion.

Members of the Orthodox community speak with NYPD officers in the Borough Park neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York

“Never in the history of this country, nor in the history of pandemics generally, has any government declared an entire class of citizens personae non gratae based on refusal to be vaccinated,” wrote Thomas More Society Special Counsel Christopher Ferrara in a press release. “What we see here is the sad corruption of public health policy by power politics.”

The complaint also alleges that Key to NYC offers exemptions to secular activities and discriminates against religious activities, and discriminates against those who hold that COVID-19 vaccinations violate their religion.

Marc Stern, the chief legal officer for the American Jewish Committee, does not see sufficient evidence for the religious freedom claim, and said several of the lawsuit’s other claims, including that the Key to NYC program infringes on a person’s right to privacy, are baseless.

“I can’t say the suit is completely frivolous, and there are certainly disturbing aspects to the accommodation guidelines, where some of the lines aren’t neat and clean,” Stern said. However, “the court has ruled many times that in cases of an epidemic, the government has great latitude for what they can do to balance public health guidelines with what will benefit the economy. I’m reasonably certain this case will not see a sympathetic response, and those lines will prevail.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/lawsuit-challenges-new-yorks-covid-19-vaccine-mandate-citing-religious-beliefs/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2022-02-10&utm_medium=email