'Vanished' Millionaire Guma Aguiar's Estate Divided among Heirs

Warning letter from his lawyer

 

Arutz 7    Two years after Aguiar mysteriously disappeared, 9 Jerusalem properties worth $44 million to be split between his mother, sisters and wife.

The estate of Guma Aguiar, the Jewish philanthropist who disappeared off Fort Lauderdale in June, 2012, has been divided among his heirs by a Florida court, reports Yediot Aharonot.

The court approved a compromise agreed upon by Aguiar's wife, Jamie, and his mother, Ellen, along with his sisters Adriana and Angelika.

The sides had been in conflict over the estate, with each side claiming all of the estate for itself, and Jamie insisting at first that her husband was still alive. Jamie accused her mother-in-law of wanting to drive a wedge between her and Guma, while Ellen said that the reason Guma went out to sea on the day he disappeared was that he was distraught after Jamie told him she wants to divorce him. Jamie completely denies this version of events.

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Rav Belsky as a teacher of Torah and as a role model after a series of problematic events?

For many of us, Rav Belsky has been a role model for many years. He is a giant in Torah knowledge. He has been selflessly and readily available for halachic questions and advice. He is one of the leading experts on kashrus in the world and the basis for the reputation of OU Kashrus. He is also an independent thinker - even going against the accepted wisdom for that which he views as true.

Unfortunately events in recent years have raised major question about his judgment. His strong defense of Kolko of Torah Temima, Kolko of New Jersey where he also strongly attacked the abuse victim's father and falsely accused him of being a moser and a molester. The revelation of his role in the torture of husbands in get cases. Gedolim have denounced him in other divorce cases for questionable tactics. What does that mean about his being a role model and gadol? Why does the OU continue to employ him when his values clearly are inconsistent with theirs?

I have received enough emails that have convinced me that I am not the only one who is strongly bothered by the question. More importantly why this is the elephant in the room that everybody tries not to see? Is he simply too big to fail? See Chazon Ish: Lashon Harah about gedolim

RCA acknowledges R Belsky's views on abuse are problematic

R Belsky's contradictory statements about not going to police for abuse 

Rabbi Goldin president of RCA discusses Rav Belsky's views

Rav Aharaon Schecter and Rav Miller criticize Rav Belsky

Rav Belsky, Mendel Epstein and torturing husbands

Abduction and torture of Rabbi Rubin

Rav Belsky accuses father of being a moser and molester

Torture of Rabbi Avraham Rubin to give a get

Rav Belsky's support of child molesters

Support for Lakewood Kolko

Rav Sternbuch's psak to report Kolko to police

Involvement in the Friedman Epstein divorce case

Friedman case - See page 3 of Rav Gestetner bitul seruv
 

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Burying objects with the deceased - what is the source of the practice?

Someone just asked me about the appropriateness of burying objects with the deceased. Below is a description of the Lubavitcher Rebbe's wife being buried with a ring. Similarly Rabbi Shlomo Freifeld was buried with some of the wood of his dining room table as a zechus for the tremendous kiruv work he accomplished at his Shabbos table. Does anyone have a source for the practice?



 From Telushkin, Joseph (2014-06-10). Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History (Kindle Locations 6683-6687). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Per Chabad custom, no eulogies were delivered. A twenty-member motorcycle police guard escorted the procession from Crown Heights. Also accompanying the Rebbetzin was a ring given to her by her sister Sheina, who was murdered in Treblinka; the Rebbe instructed that the ring be interred with her. The last line on the Rebbetzin’s matzevah (monument), after various honorifics about Chaya Mushka and her parents, mentions her sister, “the righteous Rebbetzin Sheina.

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Multiple Personality Hoax - or How psychiatrists messed up the lives of thousands

NY Times   The notion that a person might embody several personalities, each of them distinct, is hardly new. The ancient Romans had a sense of this and came up with Janus, a two-faced god. In the 1880s, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a novella that provided us with an enduring metaphor for good and evil corporeally bound. Modern comic books are awash in divided personalities like the Hulk and Two-Face in the Batman series. Even heroic Superman has his alternating personas.

But few instances of the phenomenon captured Americans’ collective imagination quite like “Sybil,” the study of a woman said to have had not two, not three (like the troubled figure in the 1950s’ “Three Faces of Eve”), but 16 different personalities. Alters, psychiatrists call them, short for alternates. As a mass-market book published in 1973, “Sybil” sold in the millions. Tens of millions watched a 1976 television movie version. The story had enough juice left in it for still another television film in 2007.

Sybil Dorsett, a pseudonym, became the paradigm of a psychiatric diagnosis once known as multiple personality disorder. These days, it goes by a more anodyne label: dissociative identity disorder. Either way, the strange case of the woman whose real name was Shirley Ardell Mason made itself felt in psychiatrists’ offices across the country. Pre-"Sybil,” the diagnosis was rare, with only about 100 cases ever having been reported in medical journals. Less than a decade after “Sybil” made its appearance, in 1980, the American Psychiatric Association formally recognized the disorder, and the numbers soared into the thousands. [...]

As retold in this latest video documentary from Retro Report, part of a series exploring past news stories and their consequences, the phenomenon burned most intensely for roughly a decade, from the mid-1980s to the mid-'90s. Then it faded from public view, partly the result of lawsuits brought successfully against some psychiatrists, who were found by the courts to have used dubious methods to lead their patients down the path of false memories.[...]

Dr. Wilbur did not write up her findings in some dry professional journal. Instead, she went looking for a large audience, and enlisted a writer, Flora Rheta Schreiber, to produce what became a blockbuster. But as the years passed, challengers began to speak up. One was Herbert Spiegel, a New York psychiatrist who said that he had treated Ms. Mason when Dr. Wilbur was on vacation. Dr. Spiegel described his patient not as a sufferer of multiple personality disorder but, rather, as a readily suggestible “hysteric.” A harsher judgment was rendered in the 1990s by Robert Rieber, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a New York City school where Ms. Schreiber taught English. After listening to tape recordings that he said Ms. Schreiber had given him, he concluded that “it is clear from Wilbur’s own words that she was not exploring the truth but rather planting the truth as she wanted it to be.” Debbie Nathan, a writer interviewed for this Retro Report documentary, piled on still more skepticism in her 2011 book, “Sybil Exposed.” Perhaps inevitably in a dispute of this sort, counter-revisionists then emerged to denounce the doubters and to defend “Sybil” as rooted in reality.

Overwhelmingly, those receiving a diagnosis of the disorder have been women. They typically had rough childhoods. A pattern to their stories — Ms. Mason fell squarely within it — was that they endured horrific physical and sexual abuse when they were little. More than a few claimed to have been the victims of torture at the hands of satanic cults. In many cases, their memories were brought to the surface through hypnotism or with injections of so-called truth serums like sodium pentothal. But were those recollections real? The “Sybil” phenomenon went arm in arm with a reassessment of certain psychiatric techniques. Some studies concluded that people may have become less inhibited with pharmacological intervention, but not necessarily more truthful. Other research found that hypnosis sometimes creates false memories. Those who dismiss Dr. Wilbur’s work as hokum say that induced false memories lay at the heart of her work with Ms. Mason. [...]

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Har Nof Massacre: Survivor describes his miraculous escape

Arutz 7   Rabbi Shmuel Goldstein describes his 'miraculous' escape from the brutal massacre at Har Nof synagogue - after tackling a terrorist.

Rabbi Shmuel Goldstein, one of several people seriously wounded in last week's horrific attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem, has described his "miraculous" survival to journalists for the first time.

Speaking with some difficulty from a wheelchair at the Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem where he is being treated for his wounds, Rabbi Goldstein recounted the terrifying moment two terrorists burst in during morning prayers at Har Nof's Kehillat Bnei Torah synagogue.

He said the attack happened during the Amida - the central prayer of the service - and recalled how he suddenly heard gunshot and saw people fall to the floor "ducking for cover."

Rabbi Goldstein described how one of the two terrorists struck him three times with a meat-cleaver, twice in the head and once in the back, leaving him for dead on the ground.[...]

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Religious affairs minister:Jailed Israeli Get refusers should be denied mehadrin food

bhol

הפתרון שישחרר עגונות? סגן שר הדתות מציע חוק שישלול מסרבני גט את האפשרות לקבלת אוכל 'מהדרין

 

הצהריים (א) הופיע סגן השר לשירותי דת הרב אלי בן דהן בפני ועדת השרים לענייני חקיקה וביקש מחברי הועדה לתמוך בחוק אשר שולל מסרבני גט שמרצים מאסר בבית סוהר, אפשרות לקבלת אוכל מהדרין.
 

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Computers and automation make us dumb

Wall Street Journal    Artificial intelligence has arrived. Today’s computers are discerning and sharp. They can sense the environment, untangle knotty problems, make subtle judgments and learn from experience. They don’t think the way we think—they’re still as mindless as toothpicks—but they can replicate many of our most prized intellectual talents. Dazzled by our brilliant new machines, we’ve been rushing to hand them all sorts of sophisticated jobs that we used to do ourselves.

But our growing reliance on computer automation may be exacting a high price. Worrisome evidence suggests that our own intelligence is withering as we become more dependent on the artificial variety. Rather than lifting us up, smart software seems to be dumbing us down.[...]

Then, in the 1950s, a Harvard Business School professor named James Bright went into the field to study automation’s actual effects on a variety of industries, from heavy manufacturing to oil refining to bread baking. Factory conditions, he discovered, were anything but uplifting. More often than not, the new machines were leaving workers with drabber, less demanding jobs. An automated milling machine, for example, didn’t transform the metalworker into a more creative artisan; it turned him into a pusher of buttons.

Bright concluded that the overriding effect of automation was (in the jargon of labor economists) to “de-skill” workers rather than to “up-skill” them. “The lesson should be increasingly clear,” he wrote in 1966. “Highly complex equipment” did not require “skilled operators. The ‘skill’ can be built into the machine.”[...]

Late last year, a report from a Federal Aviation Administration task force on cockpit technology documented a growing link between crashes and an overreliance on automation. Pilots have become “accustomed to watching things happen, and reacting, instead of being proactive,” the panel warned. The FAA is now urging airlines to get pilots to spend more time flying by hand.[...]

The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in 2002 that human expertise develops through “experience in a variety of situations, all seen from the same perspective but requiring different tactical decisions.” In other words, our skills get sharper only through practice, when we use them regularly to overcome different sorts of difficult challenges.

The goal of modern software, by contrast, is to ease our way through such challenges. Arduous, painstaking work is exactly what programmers are most eager to automate—after all, that is where the immediate efficiency gains tend to lie. In other words, a fundamental tension ripples between the interests of the people doing the automation and the interests of the people doing the work. [...]

Harvard Medical School professor Beth Lown, in a 2012 journal article written with her student Dayron Rodriquez, warned that when doctors become “screen-driven,” following a computer’s prompts rather than “the patient’s narrative thread,” their thinking can become constricted. In the worst cases, they may miss important diagnostic signals. [...]

We do not have to resign ourselves to this situation, however. Automation needn’t remove challenges from our work and diminish our skills. Those losses stem from what ergonomists and other scholars call “technology-centered automation,” a design philosophy that has come to dominate the thinking of programmers and engineers. [....]

There is an alternative.

In “human-centered automation,” the talents of people take precedence. Systems are designed to keep the human operator in what engineers call “the decision loop”—the continuing process of action, feedback and judgment-making. That keeps workers attentive and engaged and promotes the kind of challenging practice that strengthens skills.[...]

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