Overhauling Orthodox Education To Make Better Jews

By: Rabbi Dov Lipman

Published: August 1st, 2012

Rabbi Dov Lipman

I am in shock.

A friend of mine was visiting the United States and his ride to the airport for his return flight to Israel fell through. At the last minute he needed to find a ride to a terminal that was 50 minutes away in order to catch a bus to New York City where he would then take a shuttle to the airport.

A young man, fresh off a year of Torah study in a top hesder yeshiva and looking forward to his second year of learning in Israel, offered to drive this visiting rabbi. This boy would appear to be a yeshiva high school success story – religious and learning Torah. Of course, he was told, the rabbi will pay something to offset gas expenses and for his time.

They arrived at the bus terminal and my friend decided he would give the boy more than what he thought the effort was worth since he appreciated the gesture. He offered the young man $50. The boy said it was not enough. My friend offered $60. The boy said, "You have to pay me double because I now have to drive back."

My friend was taken by surprise and said $60 for 90 minutes of driving was certainly fair. The boy insisted on asking a cab driver what he would charge. The cabbie answered $60. The boy would not accept that. He demanded $100. The rabbi said he needed cash for more buses and for food. The boy responded that this was "taking away time from Torah learning" and he needed to be compensated accordingly. My friend managed to find $84 only to be met with the boy saying, "This is just not right." And with that they parted ways.
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Does Israel Really Need A Compulsory Draft?

By: Moshe Feiglin

Published: August 1st, 2012

Haredi soldiers who graduated from an IDF course met with the former Chief of the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi.
Photo Credit: IDF Spokesperson's Office

The State of Israel is bickering over nothing. It is like a fight between a seller who has nothing to sell and a buyer who has no intention of buying. They shout at each other, call the police, or go to court when all they really want is attention for reasons of their own. One thing, however, is for sure: No deal will be struck between the two sides.

The Left does not want the haredim in the army. The legions of religious Zionists make the army feel pressured enough as it is. The sane majority of Israelis does not want Arabs in the army, either. Anybody with a tad of intelligence can understand that when the Arabs’ quintessential representative, MK Ahmad Tibi, opposes the construction of a space center in the Arab town of Taibeh because it is to be named after the late Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who was also a combat pilot, the basic loyalty of Israel’s Arabs is not to the state but to their people – who aim to destroy it.

Now for some statistics:
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Prayer to Come to the Land of Israel

By: Tzvi Fishman

Published: July 31st, 2012

In our previous blog, we mentioned that Moshe Rabainu offered 515 prayers to Hashem, at the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, begging Hashem to let him enter the Land of Israel. Some people have trouble making up prayers if it isn’t written out for them in a siddur. So here’s a prayer I wrote for coming to the Land of Israel. Print it out and say it every day for the next 515 days. If it doesn’t work, crumple up the page, send it to me, and I’ll eat it.

It may be the most important prayer you say in your lives.

Prayer to Come to the Land of Israel
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US Jewish Federations to Drop ‘Zionism’ from their Global Plans

By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Published: July 27th, 2012
Latest update: July 29th, 2012

Susan Stern, the 2011-2012 National Campaign Chair Designate of The Jewish Federations of North America, visited the Wailing Wall in 2005 with then U.S Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Now Stern et al may be dropping the term "Zionism" from their organizational vocabulary.
Photo Credit: Flash90

See an update at the end of this report.

In what has been described as "a closeted and cowardly move," the Jewish Federations of North America last week rejected the inclusion of the term "Zionism" in a major system-wide planning document.

The JFNA's Global Planning Table is the mechanism by which JFNA and Federation leadership come together to determine the allocation of dollars for new Federation initiatives outside of the United States.  The Report issued by this collaborative is considered a building block of the allocations decision making process, and it was the call to include Zionism in the recent report that was rejected.  The Global Planning Table page of the JFNA website does not include either the term Zionism or Israel.

Richard Wexler, former chair of the Chicago Federation and national chairman of the United Jewish Appeal in the late '90's, revealed yesterday, July 26, that JFNA's leaders have rejected the inclusion of the term "Zionism" in their Global Planning Table Work Group Report  because the term "is too controversial."
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Next Year in Jerusalem — Maybe

By: Tzvi Fishman

Published: July 27th, 2012

Rabbi Meir Kahane published this in The Jewish Press 40 years ago. Some things just don’t seem to change:

The synagogue is filled from end to end. Every seat is reserved, every inch of space taken up. The Yom Kippur Neila service is drawing to an end. A day of repentance, prayer and charity fades to a close. A congregation, elevated for a day at least, watches as the Shofar is raised and a long, clear, vibrant blast fills the hall. Five hundred voices cry out spontaneously —

“L’Shanah Ha’Ba’ah b’Yerushalayim!” “Next Year in Jerusalem!”

The crowd files out to begin yet another year of bitter exile amidst television and Miami Beach.

The synagogue is dark and hushed. A few candles flutter in the corners, their flickering flames lighting the pained and saddened faces of the congregation sitting on low benches waiting for the Tisha B’Av services to begin, and the mournful tune of the Eycha — Lamentations — rises softly, punctuated by the sobs of the mourners of Zion. Every mind is shattered as the picture of the beloved homeland, bereft of its children, comes to mind. Every pious Jew sitting in the room sighs and dreams of the day — may it soon come — when God will allow him to, once again, kiss the soil of the homeland — courtesy of a three-week American Jewish Congress guided tour, and then back home again to the painful fleshpots.

A religion which develops a split personality is a religion in danger. A faith whose adherents begin to merely pay lip service to its tenets is in the first stages of atrophy. When individuals create a dichotomy between what they believe and what they practice, it calls for serious re-evaluation.

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Haredi or Conservadox?

By: Tzvi Fishman

Published: August 5th, 2012

There are many people who claim to be Haredi Jews, but they aren’t Haredi at all. In the Torah portion of “V’Etchanan,” which we read on Shabbat, we learn from Rashi’s commentary the true nature of a Haredi Jew, epitomized by Moshe Rabeinu himself. On the verse which describes how Moshe set aside three cities of refuge on the eastern bank of the Yarden, Rashi states, “Being that his heart was God fearing (hared) to set them aside, even though their status wouldn’t take effect until those in the Land of Canaan were set aside first – Moshe said, ‘A mitzvah that is possible to observe, I will observe it’” (Devarim, 4:41).

In other words, we learn from Moshe that the true meaning of Haredi is someone whose fear and reverence of God so fills his being that he rushes to do every single mitzvah as speedily and as completely as he can, not wanting to miss the slightest opportunity in serving God.

We also find this Haredi quality in Moshe’s great desire to live in the Land of Israel. Moshe wanted to make aliyah more than anything else. This is a sign of a true Haredi Jew – a towering love for the Land of Israel and a passionate desire to live there. As we wrote in a previous blog, our Sages tell us that Moshe begged God again and again, 515 times, to enter the Land of Israel. This was his life’s supreme desire – not merely to long for the Land of Israel, but to go there to perform the commandments of the Torah the very first opportunity he had. This is what being a true Haredi Jew is all about. A person who wants to fulfill the will of God as completely as he can, rushes to perform every mitzvah he can. He doesn’t wait for a mitzvah to come his way – he hurries to be first on line. Loving God and fearing him with a burning reverence and awe, Moshe yearned to fulfill God’s will in everything, especially regarding the mitzvah of living in the Land of Israel, a mitzvah which our Sages tell us is equal in weight to all the commandments of the Torah (Sifre, Reah, 12:29), as it says over and over again in the portion we read on Shabbat:
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Joseph’s Tomb Attack A Harbinger Of What Palestinian State Will Bring

By: Jonathan S. Tobin

Published: August 6th, 2012

Sunday's attack on Jewish worshippers at Joseph's Tomb in Nablus needs to be understood as something more significant than just another unfortunate instance of violence between Jews and Arabs. It is nothing less than a warning of what will happen once Palestinians achieve full sovereignty, as the Obama administration appears to be demanding, over all of the West Bank.

The incident occurred when a group of religious Jews, members of the Breslov chassidic sect, visited the Jewish holy site unaccompanied by Israeli soldiers. The tomb is located in the city of Nablus, a place that is completely under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

Twice a month Israel coordinates a visit by those Israelis who wish to pray there but religious Jews believe, not without reason, that restricting Jewish worship at the site in this manner is wrong and often attempt to go on their own. Rather than merely accommodate the presence of a few Jews in an Arab city, the Palestinian Authority police attacked the group that arrived on Sunday, killing one and wounding two others.

That this crime was committed by a member of the Palestinian Authority's own security forces - which have been trained and vouched for by the PA's foreign donors such as the United States - is telling. Rather than keep the peace and root out the terrorists who are a threat to the safety of both Jews and Arabs, the PA police have yet again proven themselves to be a group that is willing to commit acts of terrorism themselves. Advertisement

There is, after all, a precedent for the PA police to act in this manner around Joseph's Tomb. In 1996, six Israeli soldiers were killed during a Palestinian attack on the site. Four years later, at the start of the Second Intifada in September 2000, PA policemen stormed the holy site that was at that time the home of a yeshiva. An Israeli soldier was killed in the assault after which a Palestinian mob sacked the Tomb, demolishing it and desecrating holy books and Torah scrolls......

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Women Celebrate Completing Daf Yomi Cycle, Asking ‘Why Not?’

By: Malkah Fleisher

Published: August 5th, 2012

Matan Siyum HaShas
Photo Credit: Matan

On August 1, the biggest Jewish American event  ever took place – the completion of the daily learning of the entire Gemara, which happens once every 7 and a half years, known as Siyum HaShas – filling 90,000 seats at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. However, a significantly smaller, but just as intriguing group celebrated the event in skirts, scarves and a spirit of sisterhood in Jerusalem.

At Matan, an institute for women’s Torah study in Jerusalem, a festive meal, a class, and speeches by rabbis, teachers, families and students marked the occasion of the completion of another round of Shas -the first for the women’s group.  While the Jewish people celebrated the 12^th cycle finished since the practice of studying a page of gemara a day until its completion was instituted by Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin at the First World Congress of World Agudath Israel – an umbrella organization of ultra-Orthodox Jewry – in Vienna in 1923, this was the first commemoration of its kind for women.

“Baruch Hashem, we were able to finish the Shas”, mother, grandmother and Matan founder Malke Bina told The Jewish Press. “There were 15 completers for Siyum HaShas from Matan, about 30 women from all over Israel.”
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Behind Closed Doors Panetta Called Israel Ungrateful, ‘Chazerai’

By: Yori Yanover

Published: August 2nd, 2012
Latest update: August 4th, 2012

Secretary Panetta (L) and Minister Barak in front of an Iron Dome rocket defense shield battery outside Ashkelon in southern Israel last Wednesday.
Photo Credit: Tsafrir Abayov/Flash90

Despite the commonly accepted view that the meetings of U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta with Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Barak, and President Shimon Peres, were generally positive, in private conversations Panetta expressed frustration at the lack of confidence expressed by Netanyahu and Barak regarding the American commitment to stopping the Iranian nuclear program, Maariv reports. An Israeli source told the paper that the Americans believe Israel is being ungrateful. The source even used the term "Chazerai"—which in colloquial Hebrew means selfishness—to describe Netanyahu's and Barak's attitude in light of unwavering U.S. support for Israel's security.

Panetta's visit to Israel was intended to enhance the image of the Obama Administration's unquestionable supports for Israel without question. This is how political circles interpreted Panetta's decision to create a photo-op next to an Iron Dome battery near Ashkelon, just north of the Gaza Strip.

But before Ashkelon, Panetta met on Wednesday with Prime Minister Netanyahu, who lectured him on the futility of diplomacy, sanctions and "tough" statements which to date have not caused the Iranians nuclear program to budge. The PM also reiterated that the time to resolve the issue peacefully is running out.

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Former Mossad Chief: ‘If I Were an Iranian, I Would Be Very Fearful of the Next 12 Weeks’

By: Jewish Press Staff

Published: August 2nd, 2012

Efraim Halevy, former head of the Mossad
Photo Credit: Flash90

An Israeli ex-intelligence chief offered an ominous evaluation on the prospects of an Israeli military strike on Iran in the coming months.

Efraim Halevy, former head of the Mossad who left the agency a decade ago, was quoted by the New York Times on Thursday as saying that “If I were an Iranian, I would be very fearful of the next 12 weeks.”

Halevy echoed these sentiments in an interview with Israel Radio on Thursday, cautioning the Iranian regime against testing the resolve of the Jewish state: "[The Iranians'] math is off if they think they have open-ended immunity" to "continue to play their games" in the ongoing nuclear negotiations between Iran and the international community.

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