Did the Holocaust save the Chareidi world from extinction?

YNet

מחקר חדש מעלה כי בתקופה שלפני מלחמת העולם השנייה היו רק אלפים בודדים של תלמידי ישיבה באירופה. החורבן העצום גרם לניצולי השואה להתגייסות חירום: "הם הבינו שזה 'להיות או לחדול'", אומרת החוקרת. "יתכן ואם לא הייתה שואה, לא היו חרדים". צפו

הם לא תמיד עומדים בצפירה, לא לוקחים חלק משמעותי בטקסי יום השואה, אבל החברה החרדית מקיימת בעצם קיומה מפעל הנצחה, שבו גם נשים לוקחות חלק משמעותי. מחקר שערכה ד"ר מיכל שאול על העולם החרדי והקשר לשואה, מגלה כי התעצמותו והתפתחותו בשישים השנים האחרונות הגיע דווקא בזכות השואה. את הנתונים הרבים שאספה במהלך הדוקטורט היא איגדה לספר חדש - "אפר תחת אפר "

ד"ר שאול קובעת כי עולם התורה הלך ונעלם עד לשואה, ולולא האסון הנורא שאירע לעם היהודי, ייתכן והחרדיוּת לא הייתה קיימת עוד בדורנו. "בתחילת המאה ה-20 היה עולם התורה נתון במשבר עמוק", היא אומרת. "החרדיות כמעט ונכחדה. תנועות ההשכלה, הציונות והסוציאליזם נגסו בה, והסחף היה אדיר. על פי הערכה, בתקופה שלפני המלחמה היו רק אלפים בודדים של תלמידי ישיבה, במזרח אירופה"

לדבריה, דווקא החורבן העצום גרם לניצולי השואה להתגייסות חירום. "הם הבינו שזה 'להיות או לחדול'", היא מסבירה. כאשר הניצולים ראו בסיום המלחמה כיצד כמעט כל עולם התורה עלה בלהבות, ועם קימומה של מדינת ישראל החילונית, הבינו מנהיגי עולם התורה, וכן אנשים ונשים מן השורה כי אין ברירה, יש לקום ולעשות מעשה - להילחם ולהקים את עולם התורה על תילו. "ישנה סבירות שלולא השואה, עולם התורה היה נכחד".[...]

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Court vindicates Beit Shemesh Charedim in conflict with Education Ministry

YNet   Members of the Beit Shemesh Haredi community arrived at the Safot V’Tarbuyot school Thursday night and dismantled a barrier that was serving as a partition between ultra-Orthodox and secular students amid a controversy that recently drove the Ministry of Education to postpone the school's opening.

The destruction of the partition came just hours after the Magistrates Court in Jerusalem effectively handed the Haredis a victory by rejecting a request from the Education Ministry to close classrooms that were organized specifically for ultra-Orthodox students, separating them from the secular students.  

"The fence was constructed at the request of the school, but it was taken out of proportion and used by parties with interests in creating conflict," said Beit Shemesh Mayor Moshe Abutbul. "As a gesture of reconciliation, I instructed the removal of the fence which has already managed to get the nickname "wall", and I hope that as a result, the wall between the sides will fall as well."

The judge in Jerusalem decided that the case didn't fall under the Magistrates jurisdiction and should be passed down to the Municipal Court in Beit Shemesh. As the indirect result of the legal decision, a wall that was constructed in the Safot V'Tarbuyot school to divide the Haredi classrooms from the secular ones, will remain for the time being.  [...]

"The ownership of school structures and the right to use them is subject to the municipality of Beit Shemesh," the judge explained. "Therefore, the plaintiff (the Education Ministry) has no claim to original ownership or use of the school."[...]

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Messianic Sex Cult - that required prostitution with Arabs - exposed

Arutz 7   A media gag order was lifted on Monday on the testimony of the main complainant against the extremist Messianic cult exposed the day before, which brain-washed Jewish women into taking drugs and having sex with Arab men in order to "bring the redemption."

The Lehava anti-assimilation organization led police in gathering evidence and exposing the cult, which has led to the arrest of at least six key figures on suspicion of pressuring women into prostitution, trafficking of women, rape, providing drugs and holding people in conditions of slavery.

"I was so captive, I didn't have the option to get out of there," revealed the main complainant in her chilling testimony. "I don't know how many (other women) were in my condition, I do know of two others. Not everyone can reach such places, to reach the situation I was in is to be completely erased." [...]

Recalling her experiences with the cult, the woman stated "one time I met someone and told him everything, and he told me 'you have no idea where you are, I've never seen anyone with brain-washing on this kind of level. I've seen everything in my life but I've never seen anything like this - when you get out you'll understand.'"

"Afterwards, a friend saw how G. treated me," said the victim, referring to the main suspect who headed the cult. "He wouldn't speak, instead he whistled at me, and when he whistled I'd come and (my friend) didn't know what was going on."

The woman lived with G. before escaping two years ago. In order to entrap her, she reports that G. promised to marry her, but said he would do so "only after you finish all the spiritual sparks" - namely having sex with Arab men to "purify the non-Jews" under the warped ideology he brain-washed her with.

At one point she recalls "I left, but I returned to live with him. My brain was trapped there. ...That a woman reaches a point where she's with eight Arabs she needs to be at a stage of serious (spiritual) deletion - that a man would whistle and I would come, that a man would sleep on the bed and I would sleep underneath the bed (on the floor)."

"I asked him (G.) 'why can't I sleep with you on the bed?' He answered 'your brain disturbs my holy brain, sleep on the floor.' When I asked 'why on the floor? I can sleep in the other room on the bed,' he answered that my brain helped him, and that I need to be near him," she recalled. "When I remember these little examples it's horrifying." [...]

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The story of Big History - What would a Jewish version look like?

NY Times   As Gates was working his way through the series, he stumbled upon a set of DVDs titled “Big History” — an unusual college course taught by a jovial, gesticulating professor from Australia named David Christian. Unlike the previous DVDs, “Big History” did not confine itself to any particular topic, or even to a single academic discipline. Instead, it put forward a synthesis of history, biology, chemistry, astronomy and other disparate fields, which Christian wove together into nothing less than a unifying narrative of life on earth. Standing inside a small “Mr. Rogers"-style set, flanked by an imitation ivy-covered brick wall, Christian explained to the camera that he was influenced by the Annales School, a group of early-20th-century French historians who insisted that history be explored on multiple scales of time and space. Christian had subsequently divided the history of the world into eight separate “thresholds,” beginning with the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago (Threshold 1), moving through to the origin of Homo sapiens (Threshold 6), the appearance of agriculture (Threshold 7) and, finally, the forces that gave birth to our modern world (Threshold 8).

Christian’s aim was not to offer discrete accounts of each period so much as to integrate them all into vertiginous conceptual narratives, sweeping through billions of years in the span of a single semester. A lecture on the Big Bang, for instance, offered a complete history of cosmology, starting with the ancient God-centered view of the universe and proceeding through Ptolemy’s Earth-based model, through the heliocentric versions advanced by thinkers from Copernicus to Galileo and eventually arriving at Hubble’s idea of an expanding universe. In the worldview of “Big History,” a discussion about the formation of stars cannot help including Einstein and the hydrogen bomb; a lesson on the rise of life will find its way to Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. “I hope by the end of this course, you will also have a much better sense of the underlying unity of modern knowledge,” Christian said at the close of the first lecture. “There is a unified account.”

As Gates sweated away on his treadmill, he found himself marveling at the class’s ability to connect complex concepts. “I just loved it,” he said. “It was very clarifying for me. I thought, God, everybody should watch this thing!” At the time, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to educational initiatives, but many of these were high-level policy projects, like the Common Core Standards Initiative, which the foundation was instrumental in pushing through. And Gates, who had recently decided to become a full-time philanthropist, seemed to pine for a project that was a little more tangible. He was frustrated with the state of interactive coursework and classroom technology since before he dropped out of Harvard in the mid-1970s; he yearned to experiment with entirely new approaches. “I wanted to explore how you did digital things,” he told me. “That was a big issue for me in terms of where education was going — taking my previous skills and applying them to education.” Soon after getting off the treadmill, he asked an assistant to set a meeting with Christian. [...]

Christian began wondering if he could apply this everything-is-connected idea to a larger scale: “I began thinking, Could I teach a course not of Russia but of humanity?” He soon became infatuated with the concept. “I remember the chain of thought,” he said. “I had to do prehistory, so I have to do some archaeology. But to do it seriously, I’m going to talk about how humans evolved, so, yikes, I’m in biology now. I thought: To do it seriously, I have to talk about how mammals evolved, how primates evolved. I have to go back to multicelled organisms, I have to go back to primeval slime. And then I thought: I have to talk about how life was created, how life appeared on earth! I have to talk geology, the history of the planet. And so you can see, this is pushing me back and back and back, until I realized there’s a stopping point — which is the Big Bang.” He paused. “I thought, Boy, would that be exciting to teach a course like this!” [...]

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NY Times coverage of Gaza war was biased against Israel (surprise?!)

Tablet Magazine    I am a lifelong Democrat, a political liberal, a Reform rabbi, and for four decades, until last week, a New York Times subscriber. What drove me away was the paper’s incessant denigration of Israel, a torrent of articles, photographs, and op-ed columns that consistently present the Jewish State in the worst possible light.

This phenomenon is not new. Knowledgeable observers have long assailed the Times lack of objectivity and absence of journalistic integrity in reporting on Israel. My chronic irritation finally morphed into alienation and then to visceral disgust this summer, after Hamas renewed its terrorist assaults upon Israel and the Times launched what can only be described as a campaign to delegitimize the Jewish State. 

The Middle East conflict is complex, but the root cause of Israel’s confrontation with Hamas is not. Committed by its charter to “obliterate” Israel and kill all Jews everywhere, Hamas is recognized as a terrorist organization by the U.S., Britain, and the European Union, a designation substantiated by its raining rockets down on Israel’s civilians and tunneling under its border to kill and kidnap, indisputable war crimes.

Renowned Israeli novelist, leftist, and self-declared “Israeli peacenik” Amos Oz captured the essence of the conflict in two questions he posed to a German radio audience. “What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap and starts shooting machine gun fire into your nursery? What would you do if your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?”

The answers are self-evident to everyone except the New York Times. Its obsessive focus is on Palestinian civilian casualties, especially children, publishing photos of their corpses and little else, as if they tell the whole story. The deaths of innocents in wartime are tragic and heartbreaking; they diminish us all. But a newspaper committed to balance and fairness would provide context and perspective. It would show traumatized Israeli children running to shelters, cowering, wetting their beds, and suffering nightmares. It would publish photos and accounts of militants launching rockets from the roofs of mosques, a church, and a media hotel, alongside schools, refugee shelters, clinics and hospitals, and of weapons concealed by Hamas in UN facilities. It would substantiate casualty figures from Hamas, which is known to have falsified them in the past, before reporting them as fact. It would highlight Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields, its urging civilians to ignore Israel’s advance warnings to depart, so that Gazans would be killed and inflict PR damage on Israel. Such a paper would cover the threats of death that inhibited reporters and photojournalists from telling the true, full story. But the Times did not.

What it did instead is revealed by a sample of headlines: “As Israel Hits Mosque and Clinic, Air Campaign’s Risks Come Home;” “Israelis Watch Bombs Drop on Gaza From Front-Row Seats;” “Questions About Tactics and Targets as Civilian Toll Climbs in Israeli Strikes;” “Foreign Correspondents in Israel Complain of Intimidation;” “Israeli Shells are Said to Hit UN School;” “Military Censorship in Israel;” “A Boy at Play in Gaza, a Renewal of War, A Family in Mourning;” “Israel’s Supporters Try to Come to Terms with the Killing of Children in Gaza;” “Israel Braces for War Crimes Inquiries on Gaza;” “Resisting Nazis, He Saw Need for Israel. Now He Is Its Critic.” [...]

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Appeals court upholds dismissal of lawsuit regarding sexaul abuse at Yeshiva University

NY Times     A federal appeals court panel ruled on Thursday that dozens of men who say Yeshiva University covered up their sexual abuse at the hands of rabbis cannot sue for damages because too many years had elapsed since the abuse took place.

In upholding the dismissal of the lawsuit, the three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, placed responsibility for pursuing signs of a cover-up sooner on the 34 men, who say they were abused from the 1970s through early 1990s by two rabbis at the university’s high school in Washington Heights.

At the time the students graduated from Yeshiva University High School, more than 20 years ago, their knowledge that the rabbis who abused them were still allowed to teach at the school “was sufficient to put them on at least inquiry notice as to the school’s awareness of and indifference to the abusive conduct by its teachers,” the judges wrote in their decision.

The plaintiffs argued that the clock did not start ticking on their case until Yeshiva’s role in hiding the rabbis’ conduct was revealed in a December 2012 article in The Daily Forward. But, the judges wrote, when “administrators rebuffed their complaints or otherwise failed to take remedial action” after some of the men reported their abuse, they should have realized that they could have filed suit against the school.

In a statement on Thursday, Yeshiva lauded its current sexual abuse policies for creating a “safe and inspiring” atmosphere, saying that “our thoughts remain with anyone who may have been harmed by actions that occurred many years ago.”

“Today’s decision concludes a legal proceeding that has been trying for all involved,” the statement said. [...]

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Rivky Stein & Yoel Weiss: Before Rosh HaShana all those who mistakenly believed Rivky and slandered Yoel should ask him for forgiveness

As everyone knows by now, Rivky perpetrated a massive fraud and chillul hashem. In particular she tried to destroy her husband by having a non-existent beis din issue a seruv and put him in cherem and "posken" that he was obligated to give her a Get. She has a $480 million dollar RICO claim against him. Even worse is the slander she spread in her public appearances and interviews with the news media - and her face book page.I think most people believed her claim until recently when Yoel produced an affidavit that showed the beis din was phony. You can see from the comments on her Facebook page that her followers have turned against her.

However because they believed her and sympathized with her - there was a massive campaign of lashon harah and slander against Yoel. He became one of the most hated people because of the campaign. His denials of the charges only made people angrier and spread more lashon harah about him.

I have been having a debate with myself. However many of the thousands of people who have slandered Yoel - are going to ask him for forgiveness before Rosh Hashanna? The answer I think is at most 5 people.  After all they were only being righteous people defending a helpless "aguna" - why should they have to apologize for showing mercy to what seemed like horrible domestic violence. After all she did have the documents from the beis din. She did have the legal papers. She did have many YouTube videos and she did seem that she was telling the truth.

I am giving all those who slandered Yoel the chance to ask him for forgiveness here on my blog. All it will take is to write a brief comment acknowledging that you slandered him and ask for forgiveness. It will take about 2 minutes.  Hopefully there will be more than 5 responses.

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