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Friday, December 08, 2006

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On the Rabbi's Knee

'Does it hurt?"

The boy and his teacher were in the front seat of the teacher’s blue Plymouth sedan. The boy was 12 years old, pale and shy, and new to Brooklyn—plucked out of another life in Toronto after his mother remarried. He’d lost his father when he was 7, and the promise of a fresh start had appealed to him—a new family, a new world to explore. But a few months had passed, and the boy was lonely. His new stepsisters ignored him; he had trouble making friends at his new school. So when a popular teacher who lived nearby took an interest in him, it seemed like welcome news.

The teacher was in his early twenties—closer in age to many of his students than to his colleagues—tall and athletic, with a shock of red hair, and the kids liked him: He wasn’t the type who’d shake his fist at the heavens if he’d heard someone had gone to see a movie. The teacher taught first grade, and the boy was too old to be in his class, but they were neighbors. On the way to the bus stop, the boy would spot the teacher walking from his modest ground-floor newlywed apartment, coffee mug in hand, to his car. And on many days, the teacher was happy to offer the boy and a few other neighborhood kids a lift.

The teacher would usually park on the access road alongside Ocean Parkway, and they’d all walk into school together. But on this cold autumn morning, a few months into the school year, the boy would later remember, the teacher didn’t leave the car right away. As the boy and his friends began emptying out of the backseat, the boy remembers the teacher turning to him.

“Stay a few minutes. I want to talk to you.”

The other kids left.

“Come to the front,” the boy remembers the teacher saying. “Come sit beside me.”

Was he in trouble? Had he done something wrong? He couldn’t think of anything, but he did as he was told.

The Plymouth had a wide bench seat up front, with no split down the middle.

“Come sit on my lap,” said the teacher.

Then the teacher picked him up, the boy remembers, and put him on his lap. The teacher’s penis was erect.

The boy’s mind flooded. Should I scream? Run? He looked toward Ocean Parkway—Isn’t somebody watching?

The teacher unfastened the boy’s belt, reached around, and slipped his hand into the boy’s pants, the boy says.

He couldn’t see the teacher’s face. But he could hear him.

“Does it hurt?” the boy recalls the teacher saying, over and over. His voice was urgent but also oddly indifferent, as if he were asking about the weather. “Does it hurt?”

The boy was panicked now, desperate to open the car door and run into the school for help. But he was 12 years old, and the teacher was older and stronger, and, after all, he was a teacher.

All the boy wanted was to fit into his new world. The sooner this ended, he thought, the sooner he could forget it ever happened.

The ordeal lasted just minutes, the boy remembers. Then the teacher told him to go. “I don’t remember the exact words, but he said something like ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ ” the boy says.

So into the school the boy went, wondering if he was the only Orthodox Jewish boy who had ever been molested by a rabbi.

For decades, David Framowitz, 48 years old now and living in Israel, tried to forget about Rabbi Yehuda Kolko. But he couldn’t put the memories behind him. A few years ago, prompted by a visit to his old neighborhood, Framowitz found himself impulsively Googling the rabbi’s name. He had to know what had become of him. What he found was at once comforting and devastating: a link to a blog with the rabbi’s name and the words known pedophile. For the first time in 35 years, Framowitz had reason to believe that Kolko was not just his private tormentor.

On May 4, Framowitz filed a $20 million federal lawsuit against Kolko and Yeshiva Torah Temimah of Flatbush, Brooklyn, for what Framowitz says happened on at least fifteen occasions over two years, from 1969 to 1971—in the front seat of the Plymouth, and at the yeshiva at the end of recess, and at Camp Agudah in the Catskills, where Kolko worked for several summers. Framowitz was listed as a John Doe plaintiff in the legal filing, but he now has decided that putting a name and a face on the case will strengthen its credibility.

Framowitz is far from the rabbi’s only accuser. A second plaintiff, who wishes to maintain his anonymity, claims to have been fondled and rubbed up against by Kolko in the eighties, most often in the basement book room of the yeshiva. And on Friday, Framowitz’s attorney, Jeffrey Herman, was expected to file a separate, $10 million suit on behalf of an unnamed plaintiff who says he was abused by Kolko in the late eighties. All told, Herman says he knows of as many as twenty victims between the ages of 19 and 50 who say they were abused by Kolko. There’s the seventh-grader whom Kolko allegedly pulled into a closet in the seventies and held against his erection until that boy broke free. The dozen campers who came forward in the eighties, only to be rebuffed. And one boy who, twenty years later, is said to have punched Kolko at a Bris they were both attending, because of what he said Kolko had done to him years earlier. “It particularly haunted them,” Herman says, “that Kolko was still at the school and children were still being exposed to him.”

One rabbi molesting twenty students over several decades would be disturbing enough, but Framowitz’s lawsuit alleges that there was also a conspiracy among powerful members of the ultra-Orthodox community to cover up Kolko’s actions. The suit names not just Kolko but his yeshiva—accusing Kolko’s boss, Rabbi Lipa Margulies, of orchestrating “a campaign of intimidation, concealment and misrepresentations designed to prevent victims from filing lawsuits.” According to the complaint, Margulies, a pillar of the Borough Park community, took extraordinary measures to derail a rabbinical court action, or beit din, against Kolko in the eighties—telling family members of a dozen alleged victims that if they came forward, they’d be shunned by the ultra-Orthodox world and their other children would be expelled from his respected yeshiva and kept from enrolling elsewhere (Margulies is named in the suit but not as a defendant). The suit also alleges that Margulies had a revered ultra-Orthodox rabbi, Pinchus Scheinberg (also not a defendant), tell the victims that as a matter of Jewish law, Kolko would have had to have more than just fondled them for the acts to qualify as sexual abuse.

The yeshiva—then called Torah Vodaath, now called Torah Temimah—is known today as the Harvard of the Jewish world, educating 1,000 boys at a time in a complex of modern buildings on Ocean Parkway. Kolko is no longer just a first-grade Hebrew teacher but also a school administrator and active in the school’s summer camp, Camp Silver Lake. In the past six months, as Framowitz’s attorney and other community members attempted to bring Kolko to a beit din, Margulies permitted Kolko to keep teaching. He even stayed on for two days after the lawsuit was announced—until last week, when, as New York was preparing this story, the yeshiva placed him on administrative leave and issued a statement denying “that anyone acting on its behalf took any steps to prevent alleged victims of sexual abuse from seeking redress in rabbinical or civil courts.” (Kolko and Margulies would not respond to requests for comment. Scheinberg, 93 and living in Israel, could not be reached.)

What is perhaps most troubling about Framowitz’s case is the idea that Kolko, if culpable, could just be the tip of the iceberg. Rabbi-on-child molestation is a widespread problem in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, and one that has long been covered up, according to rabbis, former students, parents, social-service workers, sociologists, psychologists, victims’ rights advocates, and survivors of abuse interviewed for this story. They argue that sexual repression, the resistance to modernity, and the barriers to outsiders foster an atmosphere conducive to abuse and silence. The most outspoken advocates believe that the secular authorities—the police and the Brooklyn district attorney’s office—are intimidated by rabbinic authorities who don’t want their community’s issues aired publicly and who wield considerable political influence. They are hoping Framowitz’s lawsuit—one of just a few of its kind ever filed and the first to allege a high-level cover-up—could be a signal event, encouraging scores of molestation victims to come forward. Already, the Kolko case is said to have influenced plans for an unrelated case against a prominent Jewish summer camp.

The echoes of another insular religious community—one with its own particular set of sexual restrictions and a proven capacity for institutional denial—are, of course, impossible to miss. “This reminds me of where the Catholic Church was fifteen or twenty years ago,” says Herman, who just before taking on the Kolko case won a $5 million judgment for abuse victims of a Catholic priest. “What I see are some members of the community turning a blind eye to what’s going on in their backyards.”

Even before David Framowitz first found himself alone with Rabbi Kolko, the outlines of his young life had seemed like something out of Dickens. His father, Alfred Szmuk, a public-school teacher, had died when David was 7, leaving his mother, Naomi, not yet 30, to care for him and his younger brother, Jeffrey. For a few years, the family stayed in Toronto; Naomi supported them by teaching Hebrew school. Then Naomi was introduced to Saul Framowitz, a highly Orthodox Borough Park man who had recently lost his wife and only son in a traffic accident and was left with three teenage daughters to raise alone. Within months, there was a courtship and a small wedding, and the widow and her two boys moved in with the widower and his three girls, sharing a three-bedroom, third-floor walk-up in Borough Park.

It was the autumn of 1969, and as the rest of the world seemed to be hurtling headlong into the future, 12-year-old David felt as if he’d been flung back in time. He was taken aback by the bobbing sea of black hats, the women with wigs and long, dark dresses, the way the whole place screeched to a halt on Friday night. It was here that thousands of Hasidic refugees from Europe had chosen to repopulate the people, steadfastly preserving the shtetl life that had almost been destroyed. Any sense of the modern world was ferociously held at bay—no movies or TV or pop music, even newspapers were suspect. The community’s views on sex were perhaps most jarring. Boys were trained never to lock eyes with a woman who wasn’t related; some were taught not to touch their genitals when they washed.

David and his brother were sent to school at a strict Hasidic yeshiva where everyone spoke Yiddish. David stayed through the end of the year, but hated it. “I told my parents that I was not going back there.” He’d tried fitting into the ultra-Orthodox mold but hadn’t made many friends. The next year, he was enrolled at a new school—Torah Vodaath. The founder, Rabbi Lipa Margulies, had made a name for the school by cherry-picking top talent, paying his teachers more, and working them harder. “He’s single-minded,” says Rabbi Nosson Scherman, a former teacher there. “He’s obsessed with his school.”

Torah Vodaath seemed for a time to be a good fit for David. “It was more what I grew up with in Toronto,” he says, “a more normal school, where they had Hebrew lessons or Torah, but they also had English, math, and social studies.” A few of David’s classmates lived on his street. Soon after the start of the school year, Framowitz says, “I met some kids from the school, and they said, ‘We have a lift,’ and I said, ‘With whom?’ and they said, ‘One of the teachers lives here, and he’s gonna give us a ride.’ ” After the first attack in the Plymouth, Framowitz says, he tried to avoid Kolko. He tried not walking down his block. “But how many blocks can you skip to go around to get to school,” he asks, “before other kids started to wonder?” Some days, he’d be late and miss the bus, or it would be freezing, and he couldn’t come up with a reason not to get into Kolko’s car when the rest of his friends were piling aboard. Sometimes, it would be a Sunday, when the school day ended early, and he was playing with his friends.

“Here, I’m going home,” Framowitz says Kolko would say. “I’ll give you a ride.”

“No, no, no, I’m here. I’m gonna catch the bus with my friends.”

“No, come, we’ll go for a ride home.”

“You’re a young boy, and you get scared,” Framowitz says. “What happens if you don’t go with him? He’s a rabbinic authority in the school. He’s the teacher. Will something happen that will cause you to get into trouble because of him—because you didn’t show up to go with him on the ride?”

The abuse, Framowitz says, became ritualistic: Kolko would coax him into his car, place him on his lap, and fondle him. Kolko would keep his own pants up, ensuring that his genitals would never touch the boy—a line, perhaps, the rabbi was afraid to cross. Facing forward, David had no view of Kolko during the act. “Did he ejaculate? I have no idea. Was he getting there? I have no idea. I was 12 years old.” Even avoiding Kolko’s car wasn’t a solution: Framowitz says Kolko would corner him after recess at school and rub against him.

Framowitz thought the end of the school year would bring an end to the abuse. But that summer, his parents sent him to Camp Agudah—run by Agudath Israel of America, a powerful ultra-Orthodox organization—and Kolko was a counselor. When Framowitz saw him, his heart sank. After one baseball game, “he pulled me into the woods, just past the center field, and pushed me up against a tree and started rubbing against me,” Framowitz says. Other times, he says, the incidents were more fleeting—Kolko would wait until he and Framowitz were alone and rub his knee against Framowitz’s groin.

Early on, Framowitz says, he tried telling his mother about Kolko, but she didn’t know how to respond. The new marriage wasn’t going well; his mother had miscarried—a potential replacement son for his stepfather, to help make up for what the accident had taken away. “It was just terrible pressure,” Framowitz says. “One time, she picked herself up, with me and my brother, and she took us down to Manhattan and we stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights. With all the problems in the house, I couldn’t force myself to make this into a big issue. And my stepfather just couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t see how a rabbi, a respectable rabbi, would be doing such things, so I must be making up these stories to get attention.”

After a while, Framowitz just stopped talking about it. “I wasn’t getting anywhere. They weren’t defending me. So I said, Okay, I have to suffer. For family harmony. I’d tell myself, I just want to be a normal kid, but I can’t. I can’t do anything, because I’ll get into trouble. I can’t get into trouble because I can’t cause more upheavals in the house. So just be quiet, and it’ll go away.”

Yehuda Kolko first caught the attention of religious authorities as early as the mid-eighties, after a major sexual-abuse scandal rocked the ultra-Orthodox world in Brooklyn. A Hasidic psychologist named Avrohom Mondrowitz had been accused of not just molesting but having intercourse with four boys in his care, ages 10 to 16, some of whom he allegedly took away on long weekends. He was indicted in 1985 but decamped for Israel. In the wake of the case, several prominent rabbis in Brooklyn decided to field complaints about rabbis and others accused of molesting kids. The rabbi chosen to look into Borough Park, who spoke to New York on the condition of anonymity, says Kolko’s name came up repeatedly.

This rabbi wasted little time empaneling six rabbis to informally hear Kolko’s accusers. Kolko’s alleged problems, according to this rabbi, stemmed from his summers at a camp not far from Camp Agudah that Kolko apparently had an ownership stake in during the eighties. According to a former counselor at the camp, who also wishes to remain anonymous, it was an open secret among counselors that Kolko was misbehaving with several campers. A dozen kids had individually come to different counselors, the former counselor says, to complain that Kolko woke them at night, offered them rides in a golf cart, and then let them steer if they sat in his lap. Others said he’d visit them at night and touch them in inappropriate places. But these counselors were 18 or 19 years old, unsure of how to handle the claims, the former counselor says. Only after the Mondrowitz case broke a few years later did some of the former campers and counselors come forward. The panel of six rabbis heard the campers’ stories and sympathized, according to the rabbi who convened the panel. But, he says, “there was no mechanism in the community to stop Kolko from teaching, except to go to the cops.”

As the six-rabbi panel knew, rabbinical-court proceedings have no real power to substantiate abuse claims or punish abusers. Going to the police is largely frowned on in the ultra-Orthodox world; the notion of mesira, dating to the days of the shtetl, equates going to outsiders with treason. So instead, the teenagers and their families decided first to try to persuade Margulies, Kolko’s boss at Torah Temimah, to force Kolko to sell his stake in the camp and resign from the school. At a preliminary meeting with some of Kolko’s accusers, Margulies asked whom they had as witnesses. “Each name he dismissed: ‘This one is in a fantasyland, this one is a thief, you can’t trust any of them,’ ” the source recalls Margulies saying. “And he was not going to do anything about it.”

The group, along with parents and former campers from Camp Agudah, then tried summoning a beit din to rule on Kolko. They demanded Kolko not be there so the victims would feel comfortable telling their stories. But when the proceeding began, he was there, so they left. Then Margulies is said to have started a second beit din. According to Framowitz’s lawsuit, Pinchus Scheinberg, the powerful rabbi who was close to Margulies, contacted several of Kolko’s alleged victims, listened to their complaints, and told them that what happened to them was not abuse—that there needed to be penetration and that because there was none, their claims were not actionable. Then, the lawsuit says, threats followed. One father allegedly was told by Margulies over the phone that if his boy continued to complain, the safety of the rest of his children could not be assured. Both beit dins were halted, the victims never went to the police, and for years, Margulies told others who inquired about Kolko that the rabbi and the school had been exonerated.

Is molestation more common in the Orthodox Jewish community than it is elsewhere? There are no reliable statistics on the subject—molestation often goes unreported, even in relatively liberal communities—but there’s reason to believe the answer to that question might be yes. “I wasn’t even looking for it, and the amazing thing was how often it would just come up,” says Hella Winston, whose recent book, Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels, examines ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn through the eyes of some dissident members who struggle with the dictates of the community. “I heard more from men than from women. What was really shocking was how many boys—so many boys—have had this experience. People I’ve interviewed have told me every Hasidic kid has heard about this happening to someone.”

There are some who believe the repression in the ultra-Orthodox community can foster abuse. Sex before marriage in Hasidic life is strictly forbidden (unmarried men and women are barely allowed to look at one another), and even within marriage, sex is tightly regulated (couples aren’t allowed to have sex, for instance, during menstruation and the week after). As Winston notes, fathers can’t attend their daughters’ school plays, “as the sound of women singing can lead to uncontrollable male sexual arousal.” In a world of Paris Hilton videos and Victoria’s Secret billboards, there are few outlets for an Orthodox man with compulsions the community refuses to acknowledge even exist. The repression, some say, creates a fertile environment for deviance.

Taboos against reporting sexual abuse don’t just promote silence—they may also encourage molesters. Besides the general prohibition against talking about sex, there is also the shondah factor—the overwhelming concern with shame (a child who makes an abuse claim can be thought to bring shame on his whole family). Then there’s the prohibition against lashon hara, or “evil speech”; the thinking is that virtually any public complaint about another person amounts to slander. There is shalom bayit, or the mandate to maintain peaceful domestic relations; many women and children have been made to feel that it’s their responsibility to maintain harmony by not turning in their abusers. There’s the notion of Chillul Hashem—desecrating God’s name. This can be invoked if you say anything bad about the community at all. Finally, there is mesira, or the suspicion of secular authorities.

The beit dins are hardly an effective mechanism for dealing with abuse. Given the choice between going after sexual abusers and protecting the community from scrutiny by outsiders, victims’ advocates say, religious authorities protect the community almost every time. “They don’t have investigative bodies,” says Rabbi Yosef Blau, a Yeshiva University adviser who has spoken out about other abuse cases. “They don’t do DNA evidence.” There’s one ancient Jewish legal theory that the testimony of a mentally ill man is more highly regarded than the testimony of a woman. And if beit dins fail a victim, there is no appeal. “We’re not accountable to anyone,” says Mark Dratch, a modern-Orthodox rabbi who chaired a task force on rabbinical improprieties for the Rabbinical Council of America. “Even the Catholic Church supposedly has more of a structure for accountability than us. If we don’t have the training to deal with a victim who comes to us for help, we have the potential to make them a victim again.”

The Brooklyn district attorney’s office insists it aggressively pursues sex-abuse cases in the Orthodox community, and D.A. Charles Hynes has been commended for launching Project Eden, a Hasidic-sanctioned program that reaches out to ultra-Orthodox victims of domestic violence. “There is nothing different about the way we handle cases in any community, whether they be sex abuse, homicide, or any other crime,” says Hynes spokesman Jerry Schmetterer. It bears noting, however, that for months, Hynes’s office resisted New York’s requests for information on Project Eden, and still won’t speak in detail about how they handle sex-abuse cases in the Orthodox community. Victims’ advocates have long argued that Hynes’s office simply doesn’t actively go after abusers in the community, and that when complaints do come their way, they’re often too quick to defer to the ruling of a beit din. “I’ve never seen any district attorney do this with the Catholics,” says Amy Neustein, perhaps this issue’s best-known cause célèbre, who in 1986 claimed that her 6-year-old daughter was being sexually abused by her husband, only to have the child taken out of her custody forever. “The beit dins are hijacking the whole justice system.”

Newsday recently uncovered a document, purported to be from the State Department, suggesting that Hynes has all but dropped the Mondrowitz case—ceasing to prod the State Department in its extradition battle. Hynes denies this. “Our position has always been that were Mondrowitz to return to the United States, we would prosecute him for his heinous crimes,” says Rhonnie Jaus, chief of Hynes’s sex-crimes bureau. Now that there’s a civil case against Kolko, are they pursuing a criminal investigation? “We look into cases all the time that are beyond the statute of limitations to see if there are any cases that fall within the statute,” Jaus says. “That’s what happened with the priest investigations.” No Kolko investigation has yet been launched.

What’s certain is that much of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish leadership still refuses to acknowledge that sexual abuse is even a problem. Efforts to persuade Orthodox organizations like Agudath Israel and Torah Umesorah (the National Society for Hebrew Day Schools) to develop a sex-offender registry have so far been all but ignored. Even Henna White, the Lubavitcher community liaison to Hynes’s Project Eden, has complained that she can’t get into the yeshivas to be heard on the subject of abuse. “In New York, we’re going into the girls’ schools,” White said at a conference in January. “Unfortunately, we’re not going into the boys’ schools, and not for lack of trying. Our right-wing yeshivas do not want us there, and there are many people who have tried. The feeling is that this is not a conversation they want to open up.”

“The bottom line is that abuse is a universal issue that closed communities hide because it threatens them,” says one former Lubavitcher in his thirties who says he was molested by an ultra-Orthodox neighbor, and who wishes to remain anonymous. “Whether it’s Jewish or Amish or Mennonite or Catholic or Muslim, it doesn’t make a difference. I feel like this is kind of like a fungus. It grows in the dark.”

When Framowitz was 14, he began hanging out at the Jewish Defense League in Borough Park. “I needed to get away,” he says. “It was more of a showing-off, ‘Oh, I’m JDL,’ like putting up a façade. I was looking for somebody to defend me because I wasn’t getting protection at school or at home.”

Recognizing how unhappy David was, his parents sent him to yet another yeshiva, in Cleveland, for ninth grade. He lasted a year there, six months at a yeshiva in Toronto, and half a year each in Long Beach and Far Rockaway. In Baltimore, he says, he was molested again, by a rabbi who is now deceased. In retrospect, Framowitz wonders if something about him made him seem vulnerable to pedophiles. “I grew up not wanting to make more trouble than there was already in the house,” he says. “Maybe I took everything as it came.”

He was 16 when he dropped out of the yeshiva system, moved home to Borough Park, and started working at a computer-services company on Park Avenue while he pursued his GED. He met his future wife, Joyce, in a youth group; he told her about Kolko almost immediately, he says, and she understood. By 1983, he’d become a CPA, and he and his wife had had their first child and decided to make aliyah before their son was old enough to start school in Brooklyn. The whole family, including his parents, eventually moved to Israel.

Three years ago, on a visit to New York, Framowitz was walking down Ocean Parkway when he ran into his seventh- and eighth-grade rebbe. He called out.

“Rabbi Kaufman, Rabbi Kaufman—I don’t know if you remember me, but you were my teacher 30 years ago.”

The rabbi squinted. “I remember the face, but I don’t remember the name.”

“David Framowitz.”

“Oh,” said the rabbi. “David Framowitz. How are you? It’s been so long.”

“And I told myself, David, say something, tell him that you were molested by Rabbi Kolko. And I said to myself, I can’t. It’s a different world, you’re not there. Forget it—you’ve made a life for yourself.”

Back in Israel, he found himself typing Kolko’s name into Google.

Framowitz found what he was looking for on a blog called Un-Orthodox Jew. The site—one anonymous insider’s blistering, some say heretical, accusations of hypocrisy and corruption in the community—started about a year ago and took just months to report a half-million hits. Its anonymous Webmaster, who calls himself UOJ, has made the Kolko case his main cause. UOJ has never met with me, but he calls when I e-mail him. When he does, my caller I.D. is blocked. “Being from the family I’m from, I know everybody,” he tells me. “They’ve all been to my home. My family’s involved in all aspects of the Jewish community.”

UOJ says that he first became disenchanted with the established Jewish leadership when as a young man he attended a beit din with his father and saw the rabbis there behaving in less than honest ways. “They were businessmen, mostly,” he says. His earliest postings, in March of last year, reflect what would become his signature cynicism. “By the time I was Bar-Mitzvah, I got the whole picture,” he wrote. “The guys with the money got the respect, the final say in the schools and shuls, and were the guests of honor at Jewish functions, period! . . . Give me one truly religious and honorable Jew, and I will give you one hundred thousand who do not have a clue.” UOJ’s first reference to Kolko came on June 26 of last year, in a broadside against Margulies. In no uncertain terms, he accused Margulies of harboring a pedophile and threatening the parents of victims into silence.

The initial responses were hostile. “You’re a bit too bitter, even for my taste,” one reader commented. “Maybe you are just a typical extreme left-wing Jew who hates Rabbonim and the Torah.”

“You are entitled to your opinion,” UOJ replied. “ALL MY POSTS ARE FACTS, AS UGLY AS THEY ARE!!!!”

“FACTS,” his critic replied. “Like what, the New York Times?”

But, a day later, on June 27, came another anonymous comment claiming to confirm what UOJ had said. And then another, from someone saying he was molested by Kolko. And another, from someone claiming to be the parent of another victim, and mentioning a failed beit din.

This is the string of posts that Framowitz noticed on Google. On September 23, he told his story in detail as a comment, using only his first name.

“I too was molested by Rabbi Kolko,” he wrote, “both while a student in 7th and 8th grades and during those same summers whilst a camper in Camp Agudah. . . . He would insert his hands down the front of my pants and would begin to ‘search around,’ to say the least. At the same time he would pull me closer to himself, or would push himself forward against myself, sometimes even pushing me into the steering wheel, to the point that it hurt. Unfortunately I didn’t react or complain. I of course told my parents and tried on several times to explain to them what I was going through, but they didn’t want to believe me and my ‘stories,’ etc. So I just shut up and let the molestation and perversion continue. . . . I feel that it is about time that the wall of silence be torn down.”

A few months later, after getting dozens of similar comments and e-mails, UOJ listed Jeffrey Herman’s name and phone number. He says he hadn’t spoken with Herman—he’d just noticed him as a guest on The O’Reilly Factor, talking about a clergy sex-abuse case, and thought that anyone reading his site who wanted confidentiality might consider calling him. “The key for me,” UOJ says, “was that on his Website, Herman said that he had strategies for getting around the statute of limitations.”

UOJ posted Herman’s name and number. When Herman, in turn, sent an e-mail saying he’d be happy to speak with alleged victims confidentially, Framowitz saw the posting and called him. Herman, an observant Jew from Miami, has handled millions of dollars in sex-abuse claims against clergy and school systems, mainly against the Catholic Church. He says he was interested in working on Jewish cases for the same reasons he works on Catholic ones. “People say, ‘Oh, are you gonna go after a rabbi?’ ” he says. “That’s kind of a funny question to me. I see the kind of work I’m doing as protecting kids. Jewish kids are certainly as worth protecting as Catholic kids.”

On February 2, UOJ paid for a bulk mailing to Orthodox homes in Borough Park, Flatbush, Williamsburg, and Crown Heights that might be too observant to have access to the Internet. The mailing accused Kolko of molestation and Margulies of a cover-up and even included their phone numbers. That’s when UOJ says he started receiving threats—“We’re gonna get your family” and “We know who you are.” (Many of these e-mails have been forwarded to Herman.) People accused him of betraying his community and having an ax to grind against Kolko and Margulies. The Jewish Press ran an editorial blasting the mailing. A rival blog called End UOJ was created. But the most shocking responses came from those who believed that accusing Kolko of abuse—true or not—was worse than the abuse itself. “Certainly speaking evil of somebody, truth or otherwise, establishes the most severe of all wrongdoings,” one pseudonymous comment on UOJ reads—“far, far worse then [sic] ‘child sexual abuse,’ and the punishment far more severe.” The post goes on to claim that having sex with a child is punishable by 39 lashings “at the most,” whereas lashon hara is punishable by leprosy—“a far worse penalty.”

Now that there’s a lawsuit, UOJ feels vindicated. “Molestation is rampant,” he says. “It’s not a one-in-a-million case. There’s at least one in every school. And I’m going to go after them one at a time.”

David Framowitz has four adult children of his own now, with careers and graduate degrees. His kids have served in the Israeli Army and lost friends to terror bombings. He lives in a sunny, concrete split-level house near the West Bank, and considers himself a modern-Orthodox Jew now, wrapping the leather straps of tefillin around his arms every morning, praying three times a day, spending Sabbath at shul. He does not wear the black hat or suit or the curls of payes. He has told his children all about Kolko.

For years, he says, he’s been happy—but he knows he’s been affected by the abuse. “I’d tell myself, It wasn’t my fault, I’m not going to let this ruin my life,” he says. “You keep yourself busy and go to work and have a normal family life. But it’s always there. It’s like a nightmare that never goes away. No matter how hard I try to push it away, his face is always there.”

Framowitz knows it won’t be easy to win the lawsuit. The three-year statute of limitations is the greatest obstacle. Others have tried circumventing it and failed. Most recently, an upstate man named John Zumpano sued a priest for allegedly repeatedly abusing him throughout much of the sixties, arguing that he was too mentally damaged to bring a case until now. The state’s highest court refused this argument. But the decision showed others one possible way around the statute: If after the abuse, a defendant keeps his accusers from suing by intimidation, the statute could perhaps be voided. Margulies’s alleged threats of reprisals against young victims, Herman argues, meet that standard.

The $20 million price tag ($10 million per plaintiff), Herman says, is an appropriate figure given Framowitz’s pain and suffering. (Herman’s latest settlement, in a priest case, was $5 million.) But money isn’t all Framowitz and Herman are after, they say. They’d like Kolko dismissed from the yeshiva and kept from working with children again. They want the yeshiva to establish a fund for victims who resurface in the future. And they want the yeshiva to publicly accept responsibility for its negligence, which in all likelihood would mean disciplining or dismissing Margulies. While Kolko’s chances of returning to the yeshiva are clearly in jeopardy in light of his suspension, people who know Margulies say it’s doubtful he’d ever loosen his hold on the institution he created. “Margulies is angry and bitter about this,” says one longtime supporter. Like the powers-that-be in the Catholic Church, this source says, Margulies “doesn’t get how this crime is viewed by this society with such abhorrence. He still believes the issue can be managed, when the proper response would be to meet it head-on.”

The day his lawsuit was announced, David Framowitz visited the street in Borough Park where he and Kolko first met. He hadn’t been there in years. In the car, he saw men with black hats and payes, women with forties fashions. He noticed a familiar toy store on a corner and shook his head. “Nothing’s changed here,” he said. “They’re in their own little ghetto. It’s hard for them to believe that such things happen.”

He was silent for a time, then he turned toward me.

“So, you have pictures?”

At a red light, I handed him three snapshots of the rabbi, taken a few mornings earlier outside his house in Midwood. Framowitz stared at them.

“Huh. Huh. That’s him. The face.”

The only difference, he said, was the hair—once so red, now all white.

We arrived on the street where Framowitz had lived—57th between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Avenues. He pointed up to the third-floor balcony of a small redbrick building. “Same house, same everything,” he said.

But when we got to Kolko’s old block, there was new construction where Kolko’s house once was. “It’s not there anymore,” he mumbled, crossing the street. “It’s not there.”

Framowitz, silent for 35 years, now couldn’t stop talking.

“If they’ve known about this for 20 years or 25 years, why the cover-up? If there’s even an iota of people thinking or knowing about Kolko, why is the guy still teaching children? Why hasn’t anybody filed a complaint with the police? And why isn’t anybody filing a complaint with the D.A.’s office? If they want to take care of it the Jewish way, fine. But why haven’t they done that? Why aren’t people standing outside the yeshiva demonstrating? For one person getting a ticket in Borough Park, look what they did! They rioted in the streets! Jewish kids are getting harmed, and no one’s outside this school demanding an investigation? I don’t understand it. I should have done this years ago. But if I can still save some kid . . . ”

He trailed off.

“He who saves one life is like saving the world. That’s what the Torah says.”

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Anorexia And The Orthodox Seminary Girl

By: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Wednesday, November 8, 2006

Last week my eldest daughter called me from Israel, where she is studying for a year in seminary, crying and terribly distraught. A girl she was friendly with from another seminary had died of anorexia. She was seventeen years old.
Hearing my daughter wail on the phone, and not being there to comfort her, was indescribably painful, but incomparable to the pain of the poor parents who had sent their daughter to Israel from the United States to study in a chassidic seminary, never to see her again. I asked my daughter how this could happen. Did no one notice that the girl was super-thin, that her life was in danger? My daughter told me that the girl appeared to her to be very small. She could not discern that the girl’s life was at risk.

When I discussed the terrible tragedy with my two other daughters who attend a very religious Jewish high school in New Jersey, they told me that there are several girls in their school who, no doubt, suffer from anorexia, and that the disease is all too common even in religious circles.

I just spent a week filming one of the most difficult episodes of my TV program “Shalom in the Home.” A fifteen-year-old girl hospitalized for anorexia was our subject. I came face to face with just how catastrophic, devastating, and intractable the illness can be. Indeed, anorexia kills one out of every ten girls who suffer from it.

In this case, the young girl we worked with explained that she had a voice inside her which she referred to as ED, for Eating Disorder, which constantly whispered to her that if only she would lose a few more pounds, she would be beautiful. People would love her. Other girls would want to be like her. Getting more attention all depended on losing just a few more pounds. But losing just ten more pounds for this girl would, God forbid, bring her to death’s door. And still the voice whispered.

There was no question that her eating disorder resulted from catastrophically low self-esteem and a determination, based on the culture in which she was raised, that she was all body and no soul. The world did not care for what she had on the inside, only the outside. She also desperately wanted to be famous. She spoke to me constantly about wanting to be a movie star and asked if I could get her on Oprah.

In my book Hating Women, I make the case that the values and mores of our secular culture are slowly killing our young girls as they get the message that to be attractive is the only way to get attention. The world will never appreciate them for anything but their body. To be overweight is to be repulsive and ugly.

The fact that anorexia has found a home in Orthodox circles is the ultimate proof of the tragic failure of contemporary Jewish education to cultivate a healthy self-image among young girls that is based on Torah rather than secular values.

The religious seminaries in Israel and the United States are filled with girls who are obsessively self-conscious about their looks. They know, as they approach marriageable age, that the teachings of the Eishet Chayil (Woman of Valor) prayer, written by King Solomon – “Charm is deceptive and beauty is naught; a God-fearing woman is the one to be praised” – have been utterly rejected by too many male yeshiva students who concern themselves primarily with a young woman’s looks.

Indeed, one wonders what the deceased girl’s seminary rabbis were doing as she slowly wasted away. Were they only teaching laws of Shabbat and Pesach? Did they forget that one of their first obligations in educating young women is to give them a healthy self-image that will render them immune to the misogynistic mores of our time? And where are the yeshiva heads in both Israel and the United States who should be educating their male students, as they get ready to marry, that real beauty is internal and to stop being so dismissive of girls who may carry a few extra pounds?

The Bible says that when a man and woman marry, they become one flesh. But in our time, elements in our religious communities are waging war against the flesh itself, as more and more girls are encouraged to become unhealthy bags of bones in order to cater to the vulgar and grotesque values of shallow men, however religious they profess themselves to be.

When I was in Israel a few weeks ago for Sukkot, I went to the Jerusalem markets where it was a wonder to watch Orthodox men using rulers to measure their etrogim and lulavim to make sure they were perfectly kosher. Certainly it is a praiseworthy thing to take one’s religion so seriously. But even as they did so, many of their young daughters were taking a ruler to their thighs and hips, hating themselves for being too large, and swearing that they would lose just a few more pounds.


And our blindness continues even as innocent little girls pay the ultimate price.





Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the host of TLC’s “Shalom in the Home,” which airs every Monday at 9 p.m. He has just released his newest book, “Parenting with Fire: Lighting Up the Family with Passion and Inspiration” (Penguin).

Monday, October 23, 2006

“C” Is for Content

Researchers in Jewish history and genealogy should check out Jewish Data Online (www.jewishdata.com), an online resource of over 250,000 indexed records, including images of Declaration of Intention documents and Jewish tombstones from various locations. The cost for individual libraries is $500/year; consortial per library costs are lower.

To shul in a Mercedes

Wealthy haredim shun hedonism of secular counterparts, despise ostentation, consult with rabbis before making important decisions

Shoshana Chen

The past few years have seen the introduction of a new social class to Israeli society - wealthy Ultra-Orthodox people. While these individuals are quite affluent, they shun the hedonism as well as the materialistic trappings of their secular counterparts.



Instead, they observe all the traditions and restrictions of haredi society and continue to maintain close ties with their less well-off haredi brethren.


The list of prominent haredi businessmen includes Chaim Fink, who recently acquired Shemen Industries and subsequently granted his first interview ever, Lev Leviev, whom the media basically ignored until he purchased Africa-Israel, and Shaya Boymelgreen, who leaped from relative obscurity to buy the Ezorim construction company from Nochi Danker.


In addition, a significant number of haredim – including many diamond dealers – are undisputed members of Israel’s economic elite yet somehow manage to fly beneath the media’s radar.



Part of the community

According to haredi advertising executive Rachel Bolton, haredi businessmen go to great lengths to avoid ostentation. “The rich haredi needs his community,” she explains. “He needs his prayer quorum to read the Torah three times a week.


“His contact with the regular community requires him to live modestly. Otherwise, the community will reject him. The congregation will be scared of him and will isolate him. Therefore, the rich haredi will drive a fancy car but not a limited model.


“No haredi in Israel has a private yacht,” Bolton continues. “That would invite conversations in the community, in the synagogue. Not just common gossip, but in a manner which would distance him from the nation. Almost no one owns private jets, and those that do - offer them to patients requiring operations abroad.”


The difference between wealthy haredim and secular Israelis extend to their children. “The haredi upper crust’s offspring do not really benefit from the prosperity. The very prosperous will provide an apartment, nice vacations, jewelry. They’ll ‘buy’ a good son-in-law, but they won’t give out handouts or monthly salaries,” Bolton says.


“They try to keep their children within the accepted framework until the wedding,” notes Eitan Dobkin, general manager of the McCann-Erickson advertising agency’s haredi division. “It’s important to them to worry about not doing anything that will potentially harm a wedding match. In general, only after the wedding do they allow them to join the family businesses.”


Furthermore, affluent haredim send their children to the same educational institutions as do the rest of the haredim. There is no such thing as an exclusive yeshiva for the rich.


In general, haredi attitudes to wealth are unique. “The haredi sector doesn’t analyze or scrutinize the well-heeled haredi based on his private life,” observes Avraham Rachtshefer, CEO of Minahalim Nachon, a haredi business monthly. “They check how much he contributes to the community and to those around him. Almost every top-line rich man identifies with a specific organization, tzaddik (righteous individual), or institution to which he donates.”


Another difference is that although wealthy haredim are respected, they do not receive the community’s highest honors or accolades. That distinction is reserved for the sector’s spiritual leaders.


Most haredi businessmen strive to cultivate close ties with the community’s most distinguished figures. Whether they do so for spiritual reasons or in order to advance their careers is open to debate. Cynics may perhaps decry the magnates’ motives, but, indisputably, Torah scholars occupy a higher rank than the tycoons.


“We like money; we even like it very much, but I neither have nor did I ever have a desire to amass piles of it,” one of the new wealthy haredi businessmen insists. “Besides the issue of the business game and besides the personal enjoyment, the question is what gives me pleasure. I have donated Torah scrolls. That gave me a good deal of pleasure as well as satisfaction. You know when you donate a new Torah scroll to the synagogue where you pray that it will be read from each time. What more is there? It’s a special feeling of joy, a sense of exaltation and spirituality.”


Shimon Glick is an American-haredi diamond dealer and real estate entrepreneur. Recently, he hosted Rabbi Aharon Shteinman, a leader of the Lithuanian haredi community, in his New York home. In addition, Glick underwrote, to the tune of one million dollars, the plane fares for the rabbi and his entire entourage. Thus, in one fell swoop, Glick managed to achieve fame and glory, even outside his hometown.


Nevertheless, according to Bolton, much of the capital is lavished on the women. “The wife is the main beneficiary of the money,” Bolton states. “She purchases expensive jewelry, clothes, shoes and handbags for herself. Generally, the wife doesn’t work. And her job is to care for the house and the nuclear family. Also, she deals with all the family issues pertaining to the extended family and the married children.”



Buy yourself a son-in-law

Religion plays a dominant part in wealthy haredim’s lives. As such, most of them do not take any business steps without first consulting with a rabbi.


For instance, according to Sholem Fisher’s relatives, the happiest day of his life was the day that his son married the Erloi Rebbe’s granddaughter. Fisher, an Erloi hassid, is Mathew Bronfman’s partner in the Blue Square chain, deals in real estate in New York, and owns candle factories in Israel and abroad. He credits the Erloi Rebbe, whom he reveres, for his success.


Another old haredi custom is once again becoming increasing popular. In order to marry off their daughters, many wealthy haredim “purchase” eminent Torah scholars from prestigious yeshivas.



“Among the hassidic public, grandchildren of the Grand Rebbes marry each other, and among the Lithuanian public, the ‘blue-bloods’, the sons of the yeshiva heads, are often ‘bought’ by the leaders of the financial aristocracy,” Rachtshefer asserts.



The “price” for pedigreed and talented Torah scholars is an apartment in one of the popular haredi neighborhoods, where high-end apartments can run up to 250-400 thousand dollars.



Occasionally, a rich father-in-law will establish and support a yeshiva or kollel, in order that his exceptional son-in-law can continue learning Torah in the future.


Yet, Dobkin believes that the main difference between wealthy haredim and secular Israelis is that the former are happier. “Religion stabilizes you, it gives you something to lean on,” he muses. “When you are sitting in front of a page of Gemara, it doesn’t matter how much you have in the bank.”


Friday, October 20, 2006

Falling into the gap trap



Last Monday night in Jerusalem, my family and I were walking home with thousands of people from a Succot concert in the City of David, the remarkable archeological remains of King David's ancient city, when I saw four young American yeshiva students, dressed in black and white, disrespectfully taking pictures of soldiers standing on the side to protect us.

They were sticking their cameras in the soldiers' faces, an inch from their noses, and flashing right in their eyes. The soldiers grimaced and asked them to go away. I was disgusted by what I saw. I walked over to the yeshiva students and said, "These soldiers risk their lives for you. Should you really treat them like garbage?"

The leader of the pack screamed at me, "It's none of your business," and ran off with his friends. I walked over to the soldiers to apologize, but they rolled their eyes and told me that they see way too many Americans coming to Israel and behaving like out-of-control idiots.

From there we walked to the Ben-Yehuda mall, where we saw the usual nightly parade of hundreds of American yeshiva kids - in Israel for their year after high school, either hanging out for hours on end, like so many lost sheep, or running amok, booze in hand, like wild jackasses.

In the famous and palpable divide between Orthodox and secular in Israel, it is often overlooked just how often ostensibly religious American teens who come for their year abroad and behave like party-obsessed fools contribute to that divide.

Secular Israelis read about the growing number of American students who are arrested for marijuana possession at their yeshivot, or the even more horrible story, last year, of a yeshiva student dying of a drug overdose, and it hardens their opinion that the Orthodox are hypocrites.

STUDYING IN yeshiva and seminary in Israel for the year after high school has become a rite of passage for thousands of American teens every year. I have a particular interest in the matter because this year my eldest daughter is one of those students in seminary. As a parent you're not supposed to question the year in Israel. It's part of the Jewish canon and creed. As far as the American Orthodox high schools are concerned, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai he brought with him the 11th commandment: Thou shalt send thy high-school graduates to Israel.

But questioning it is exactly what I have been doing on my trip to Israel for Succot. As you walk in the Jerusalem city center at night and see the often drunken orgy of American kids behaving like hooligans, or just wasting so much of their year hanging out at boring caf s, one wonders what they are gaining by being there. For many of these youngsters, Israel is really just a year of freedom, a time to spread their wings and shirk parental supervision. The problem is that it seems that some yeshivot aren't really supervising them either, and they have way too much free time on their hands.

This is, unfortunately, the same impression that I gained last year when we visited as well. I saw so many American kids supposedly in a yeshiva‚ who were drinking and humiliating themselves in front of secular Israelis who were then getting the mistaken impression that this is the way real yeshiva students behave as well.

Don't get me wrong. I too came to Israel, of my own choosing, right after I graduated high school and studied in Jerusalem for two years in the Chabad Yeshiva. In terms of academic and spiritual growth, they were the two greatest years of my life. And the love and reverence that I gained for the Holy Land and the modern State of Israel from being there those two years has stayed with me my entire life.

But without sounding self-righteous, I did not come to Israel seeking fun, but Torah study. Less so was I concerned with freedom, but with a mastery of Judaism. I wanted to drink in the air of the Holy Land through the agency of Judaism's greatest texts, rather than its pizza shops and shwarma stands. I was in a haredi yeshiva where it was unthinkable that we would hang out with girls at outdoor plazas. No one even warned us that if we did so we would be kicked out. The very mention of even such a prohibition would have been ludicrous.

Because whatever flaws we had as students, one of them was not that we thought that yeshiva meant being on Ben-Yehuda flirting every night. Today, so many of the yeshivot and women's seminaries have elaborate rules of what is allowed outside the yeshiva and what is not.

Would it not be better to screen the students before they arrive to ensure that they're looking for the right things when they come to Israel in the first place? I remain a strong believer in the year in Israel, which is why I sent my daughter here, even though letting my baby girl go away from home - even at 17 - was painful. And my daughter was fortunate to have registered in a seminary which is serious and studious and where she is, thank God, flourishing. And even so, I try and keep an eye on her from afar.

Just because she is Israel does not mean that I should not check up on her, inspiring - but also cautioning - her to make the most of her opportunity by vastly increasing her awareness of her Jewishness as well as of the Holy Land.

The blessings that Israel can bestow on one's Jewishness are incomparable, which is why the year in yeshiva in Israel is so important. But lax standards in many of the programs, and parents who don't monitor the activities of their children, are undermining the integrity of the idea.

WORSE, THIS laxity is having a nefarious effect on Israel itself. The Jewish state doesn't need out-of-control teens from abroad who arrive with a wealth of cash and a paucity of values.

On the contrary, the Orthodox young people who come to Israel must know that it is a privilege and a responsibility.

There actions must accord with the holiness of the land, and that as ambassadors of both American Jewry and Orthodoxy, their behavior is being closely scrutinized by religiously non-observant Israelis to determine whether American Jewry has lost its bearings, and whether Orthodox Judaism has lost its sincerity.

The writer's new book Parenting with Fire: Lighting Up the Family with Passion and Inspiration‚ has just been published by Penguin.

Amazing Pictures - Makom HaMikdosh

This morning myself and about 20 of my neighbors made a group visit to the Temple Mount, some for the first time.
At first there were some problems allowing some members of the group to enter (including myself) but in the end everyone was permitted in, with extra special restrictions (in addition to the normal laundry list of restrictions) l'kvod Ramadan.

Here are some pictures with brief explanations and a view you don't often get to see of the makom hamikdash:

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Shomer Negiah?

Click to play.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Judaica Man: Putting the Oy back in Oy Vey

Jewish marketing gone mad!

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

The David Zucker Albright Ad

Fun!

Thursday, September 28, 2006

THE DREAM - Moshiach Answers and Explains

THE DREAM - Moshiach Answers and Explains
BS'D

"I see you! I see you!" I was so excited, "Come out, come out of the cave. Come, come, come, come, come, I'm here, come out, don't be afraid. " For about 15 minutes, I was physically bending down (during sleep), trying to pursuade Moshiach to come out of the cave. He didn't want to come out. I was inside the cave and Moshiach was hiding inside the alcove. I asked him which cave he is in and he said on Mount Carmel, inside the cave of Eliyahu HaNavi.[+/-] show/hide text

I couldn't see his face, because the alcove was dark and low and he was deep inside. (It could also be that he didn't let me see his face and most of all, HaShem didn't allow me to see).

Moshiach said I can ask him questions and he'll answer (the conversation was in Hebrew).


Question: Are you always in the cave of Eliyahu HaNavi?
Answer: No. I come and go.

Question: Why are you in the cave of Eliyahu HaNavi?
Answer: It's something I'm forced to do. I'm occupied by him.

Question: Why am I zoche (merit) to have these dreams, visions and revelations? Is it because I'm the gilgul of *****?
Answer: It's in the zechut of Shalom Bayit, because you please your husband. It is also because your neshamot are connected and are one.

Question: Why are you not revealing yourself already?
Answer: Bnei Israel are not ready.

Question: How can you say that? A Jew just died Al Kiddush HaShem in Uman. Young children are learning Torah. There's a tremendous Teshuva movement world-wide.
Answer: The Knesset handed security authority of Rochel Imenu's Tomb to the PA (Palestinian Authority) and to the Arab border police.

Question: How is it our fault? We did not decide to give it them.
Answer: Less than 3 Jews barely mentioned it, no one cried. It caused so much pain in Shamayim, so much sorrow...

Comment: I will bomb the Knesset and reduce it to pebbles and will die with them Al Kiddush HaShem. I'll kill all the Erev Rav. I will kill them all.
Answer: HaShem gifted you last summer to go to Eretz Israel and fight the disengagement. You didn't go to Rachel's Tomb to daven by her to HKB'H.

Question: As soon as I wake up, I'm going to the airport and fly to Eretz Israel and without any detours, straight to Rachel's Tomb. Will you then reveal and bring us the redemption?
Answer: The opportunity has passed.

Question: So what can we do to bring you?
Answer: שעת רצון (a time of Will).

Question: When is שעת רצון?
Answer: הזמן נפגש עם היום והעיגול מושלם The time meets with the day and the circle is complete.

Question: Can you explain?
Answer: The Magen David is made of 2 triangles that meet. There are 6 corners in the Magen David. In each corner, a different name of HaShem's unique name is engraved and the corners of the Magen David rotates. When it's שעת רצון, say "Moshiach, come" and HaShem will agree. Till today, no one did this.

Moshiach: You may ask 2 more questions. I must leave. I'll give you a few more minutes; time according to earth, not Shamayim.

NK: thinking what to ask....

Question: Who can bring Moshiach more, the men or the women?
Answer: Men, women and children. The completeness is men learning Torah; women being modest and holy; and children praying.
Moshiach explaining: A man without a woman cannot be complete. A woman can be good and bad. She can break the man's learning Torah by being immodest and unholy. But the children, the children, they have innocence. The children have the power to open רקיעים heavens. A child that says Tehillim and prays has the power of בוקע רקיעים erupting heavens more than 1,000 men together learing Torah. If this generation would know the power of children, they would not place them in front of the TV, computers, video games. This generation is very weak.

Question: Did you ever come before?
Answer: 6 times. 60 years ago, 250 years ago. Tzaddikim השביעו me and did יחודים. I cannot tell you the other 4 times.

NK: I'm so happy to know you and speak with you. I will tell everyone that you are here to stay and you will soon be revealed. Please bless Am Israel that --- Moshiach, where are you? where are you? WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW

(NK's comments: I recorded it 99.9% exact. This is probably the most exact recorded dream ever.
I asked Moshiach to bless Am Israel but he disappeared. Imagine having in your hand a cup of water and you are about to drink and it poooof, disappears. When he disappeared, all I could say was WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW.
The dream ended 3:15 am earth time - gematria שי-ה - It can be Roshei Tevot הוא יהיה שם - He will be there (Moshiach), in time of need and it time of sorrow).

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

What is Frum?

People have asked me how I ended up in West Orange. What is a a bearded guy doing in such a modern community...Shouldn't I be in a frummer environment...

Does frum mean homogeneous?

Does frum mean hours of people learning...number of people in davening...signs in Yiddish...black and white on the streets...

Or does frum mean that I am building the best relationship with Gd for me at this time?

Sure, we have a concept of not living in a wicked society, but do we fear that our neighbors that wear t-shirts and have secular newspapers delivered are intrinsically evil? We may think that it isn't the best path for our growth, but isn't their place in the world up to them? Are we only frum if we are surrounded by like minded ideologies? It may be for some, and those that it appeals to should choose it.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Polygamy - Hot Kosher Sex

Jan and Dean sang about it in 1963, but some Jews, concerned over the increasingly lower birth rate among Jews, are suggesting that “two girls for every boy” may be the answer. Statisticians have proclaimed a “clear numerical superiority” of available women over available men in the Jewish dating pool. This is bad news for Jewish women, who become increasingly competitive in looking for Mr. Right, while the men sit back and enjoy the ride, since there are always more women for them to choose from.

Perhaps the time is right for polygamy to make its long-awaited comeback. HBO has a hit show in Big Love, depicting the drama of a polygamous Mormon marriage. Concern with “the dating crisis” has the religious Jewish community up in arms. And recent articles in the Jerusalem Post quoted one Bar-Ilan University professor as suggesting that Jewish men take concubines, to combat the declining birth rate. And last year, noted philanthropist Michael Steinhardt even gave a controversial speech — explained away by some as satire — in which he proposed polygamy as a real-time solution to the problem. As the discussion continues, look for Martha Stewart to advise on how newlywed “triples” or “quads” should handle registering for multiple china patterns.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

frum chat swicki search stats

I thought this was interesing:

Tag Activity

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crown heights 12
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mitzva ...
monsey ...

And someone requested YeshivaWorld be added.

By the way you can search for anything you want on Swicki not just the tags you see you can also suggest sites to be added to search results, it's trainable..

Cool, No?

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Yidchat.com is back up

Sorry about that folks.

Go to link above for yidchat.com

Orthodox Jewish frum chat.

Monday, September 11, 2006

Telethon Promo

chabad Telethon California

Monday, September 04, 2006

Row Over Teen Mums

by TJ Reporter

- Friday 1st of September 2006

A Tory Councillor apologised yesterday for any offence he caused the Jewish community, after he was quoted by two local newspapers as attributing Barnet’s rise in teenage pregnancies primarily to orthodox Jewish girls.

In a front page story bannered ‘Baby Boomers – teenage pregnancy rise highest in the country’ in last week’s Edgware & Mill Hill Times and Hendon & Finchley Times, it was reported that Chris Harris had claimed that the increase in teen births between 15 and 17 was due to “the large religious community such as orthodox Jews who tend to have babies at a young age”.

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His astonishing and unsubstantiated allegations were immediately refuted by orthodox communal rabbis, who called them absurd and bewildering.

Cllr Harris, while apologising to the community for any offence Jewish readers might have taken, said that his remarks had been taken out of context – a claim flatly refuted by the Times Newspaper group.

A spokesman for the two papers which have a combined circulation of over 120,000 copies per week, said it was sticking by its guns last night, saying the quotes were accurate and a fair reflection of Cllr Harris’s interview.

Rabbi Leivi Sudak of Lubavitch of Edgware said: “I’m astonished and shocked that he has come out with this and would challenge Councillor Chris Harris to find a secondary Jewish school which has a crèche in it.

“Other secondary schools do, but there aren’t any Jewish ones. In my 23 years of working as a mohel, I have never performed a bris on a baby whose mother was under 18 years of age and am unaware of any pregnant 15 to 17-year-old teenagers in Barnet. It’s also illegal and against the age of consent for any girl to have a baby at 15 but overall I am just shocked that this has been said.”

Rabbi Benjamin Rabinowitz, of Edgware United Synagogue, said he had never come across a pregnant teenager in his community.

Rabbi Gershon Overlander of Hendon Chabad said: “That’s bizarre. The implication is that they are not married and therefore they couldn’t be referring to the orthodox Jewish community. There is a certain misrepresentation here”.

Rabbi YY Schochet of Mill Hill United Synagogue said “For those orthodox Jewish girls who might get married young, it wouldn’t be below 18 years of age. That has nothing to do with teenage pregnancy and the correlation between the two is just absurd.”

Echoing his comments, Rabbi Avrohom Pinter, the Head teacher of Yesodeh Hatorah Girls School in Stamford Hill said; “That sort of statement is totally unfounded and cannot be attributed to the orthodox Jewish community as they do not get married at such a young age.”

Rabbi Gershon Overlander from Chabad of Hendon said: “That’s bizarre. The implication is that they are not married and therefore they couldn’t be referring to the orthodox Jewish community. There is a certain misrepresentation here”.

Responding to the community’s concerns, Councillor Harris told TJ: “Clearly when I was interviewed by the journalist, we were talking at cross purposes. I believed she was talking about everyone under the age of 20, and didn’t understand she was specifically talking about the age cohort 15 to 17. If I had realised she was referring to that age group, I would never have made the comments I made in relation to some ethnic groups on occasions having children in wedlock at a younger age.

“Evidently, teenage pregnancies in the age group 15 to 17 are virtually unknown in the Jewish community. I apologise if any unintentional offence or confusion has been caused due to the miscommunication between myself and the journalist.”

Corridors of Power: The silent ones

peggy cidor

THE JERUSALEM POST

Aug. 31, 2006

In one of his most sarcastic but less-known pieces, writer S.Y. Agnon imagined the "Beit Siftotayim" (The House of Lips). Long before it was ever created, Agnon imagined a place where our glorious pioneer fathers could not stop talking because they had become free Zionist citizens.

In Arabic the word is magliss, which means a place to sit - and this may provide more than a hint to the origins of the current conflict - but that's another story.

The local city council was created in the image of a parliament as a place where elected people gather and speak.

All this introduction is intended to tell you, dear readers, that when our 31 elected citizens who rule the city convene in the city council, almost all they are expected to do is speak.

Most of them do. Quite a bit.

But a considerable number of them don't.

Shlomo Bresca and Yair Lari, Moshe Lock and Avraham Feiner, Yaakov Shnur and Shlomo Daitch. These are the silent ones, members of the coalition, from the United Torah Judaism and Shas parties. Unlike their colleagues, they hardly ever speak up in city council meetings.

"They were sent to the city council for specific reasons," explains a senior member of the coalition. (We might note that he himself is very talkative and very well-regarded in the haredi world.) "They represent this stream or that rabbi from various sectors of the haredi parties."

Our analyst then adds, "Usually, when they arrive at a city council meeting, they have no idea what it's about or what they are supposed to do, let alone think that they might represent anything other than their own sectorial interest."

At least in one case, it would appear, our cultural interpreter was correct. Upon arrival at the city council, immediately after the last elections, Corridors of Power asked Councilman Lock, the newest representative of the Gur hassidic sect, what his preferred issues would be.

His response was telling. "I am here because the Admor (head of the sect) told me to be here. My only plan is to avoid becoming involved and I took an oath not to talk to the press."
And that was the last time that I or any of my colleagues ever heard his voice.

His predecessor, Rabbi Haim Miller, who is a very talkative politician, explains. "What can I do? A large portion of the new city council members from the haredi parties act as if they were members of a monastery who took an oath of silence."

Perhaps silence is becoming an important part of the basic qualifications of our city councillors, since silent and discreet politicians can also be found in the ranks of Shas.

According to a colleague from Shas, Shlomo Bresca, a very esteemed young city councillor, "has never asked for the floor in a city council meeting." Remaining cautiously anonymous, the colleague adds, "He is very young, only 38 years old... and he has said more than once that if not for the decision of his patron, Rabbi Reuven Elbaz, he wouldn't have dreamed of running for city council."

Yair Lari, who is close to Shas leader Eli Yishai, is also silent. But in contrast to Bresca, our commentator informs us, "Lari understands how politics works and he likes it very much. But discretion is his second name - we don't even know what he does for a living."

Shnur, one of the oldest members of the council, is the representative of Chabad (Lubavitch). Our wily commentator notes that, "Since we all know what the lita'im (Lithuanian Jews) think of Chabad, you can easily understand what his status is."
Shnur may be silent, but this writer still remembers that Shnur was the only member of the council who joined an organized tour of the security barrier around the city two years ago. Tersely, he explained that he "thought that he should see for himself what the fuss was all about."

In the previous council, in accordance with rotation agreements between the different factions of the haredi parties, we even had a city council member who didn't speak Hebrew. He served - in Yiddish - for a very short period and left in the same manner as he arrived: silently and discreetly.

The heads of the parties, who have been around for a long time and are already vice mayors (and so receive a salary), are used to the way things work. They know how to sell a good story, they know how to handle journalists and they know the rules of the game.

"Obviously, some of them have learned to like the job and the honor it brings them," our interlocutor contends. "But others were sent by the rabbis because they weren't shpitz (stars) at the yeshiva. They are here for a specific reason: to preserve their rabbis' interests.

"At the least, they are honest," he concludes. "They don't try to peddle the usual stuff about 'serving the citizens.'"

Friday, September 01, 2006

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Following the herd

By Shahar Ilan

The new communications minister, Ariel Atias, last week provided an astonishing figure in the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Bakehila. The Haredi public, which totals an estimated 600,000 people, has purchased to date only 30,000 "kosher" mobile phones, which exclude content services.

This despite the clear and vociferous directives by Torah sages to use only such cell phones.

This is not the Torah sages' only failure recently. Even more embarrassing was their attempt to ban Internet use. There can hardly be another public so active in the area of online forums as the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox). There you do not need to identify yourself, and under the protection of anonymity may write whatever you think and feel. Haredi businesses have long since learned that whoever is not on the Internet is essentially non-existent.

Ultra-Orthodox rabbis do not internalize the rule that you don't impose a decree the public cannot fulfill. Like a deluge, the modern world is flooding the Haredi street, and the rabbis, instead of instructing their people to wear life jackets, are trying to stop the water with their hands. The result: The Haredi public continues to respect the Torah sages; it just doesn't heed them so much.

There are many possible explanations for the decline in the power and influence of the Torah sages over the past few years. One of the most important is the split of the Council of Torah Sages into three councils - of Agudat Yisrael, Degel Hatorah and Shas.

But the main reason is that the rabbis have made themselves irrelevant. They are battling the modern world instead of trying to serve as regulators. And mainly, they completely fail in dealing with the truly important crisis facing the Haredi society of learners - the economic crisis.

The most prominent scholar on Haredi society, Prof. Menachem Friedman, has been warning for 30 years that this crisis is waiting to happen, but none of the rabbis have tried to preempt the foreknown economic tsunami. Friedman warned, for example, that a time would come when the secular public would no longer be prepared to bankroll the yeshiva students. And yet, when the child allowances were slashed, the rabbis and their public were caught completely off-guard. In the general public, that would be termed a fiasco. The Haredim quietly grumble.

It's not that stuff isn't happening in Haredi society. The Israel Defense Forces' Haredi Nahal battalion was created. Vocational training courses are opening. Dozens of men and women received law degrees last week. But everything is happening too slowly, in a faint trickle. The reason for this is that all of the processes are occuring without the overt support of the rabbis. Their uncourageous consent is expressed merely through turning a blind eye.

The conservative rabbis are trying to hang on by their fingernails to a society in which two out of three men study. They fail to grasp that this is untenable from an economic standpoint. Other rabbis know what has to be done, but they haven't the guts, nor broad enough shoulders.

They haven't the guts to announce that only those who excel ought to study their entire lives, while the rest should study for several years at a kollel - a yeshiva for married men - and then go out to work. They haven't the guts to initiate academic tracks at yeshivas, like in the United States, and to permit the establishment of Haredi high-school yeshivas. Fear of the zealots is stronger than concern for the public.

Within this so very mediocre leadership, Rabbi Aharon Leib Steinman, the Number 2 man in Degel Hatorah, stands out positively. Steinman favors jobs for those who do not wish to continue studying, and also backed the Tal Law. But he too lacks the courage, and perhaps the ability, to take it all the way and express his positions publicly. He is especially admired among Haredim in the Diaspora, but cannot seem to become a prophet in his own city.

And to finish up, a moment of Haredi logic: If this generation was deserving, a leader would surely arise who knows how to contend with the current challenges. Since the generation was not found worthy, the Haredi public has become a herd whose shepherds follow it.

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Is Orthodoxy becoming too religiously right-wing?

In this final part of our series on the move to the religious right in Toronto’s Orthodox community, we hear from other centrist voices about what they see as the growing influence of haredi religious leaders and practices in the rest of the Orthodox community. Much of their concern centres on the prominence of Kollel Avreichim on Coldstream Avenue, located in the heart of the haredi community near Bathurst Street and Lawrence Avenue. As the leading haredi post-yeshiva educational institution in Toronto, its rulings have come to exert significant influence in the wider Orthodox community. (Rabbi Shlomo Miller, its rosh kollel and av beis din – head of the institution and its rabbinical court – declined to speak directly to The CJN, saying that the media have misquoted and misunderstood him. However, he authorized a spokesperson to speak on his behalf.)

Many people in the Orthodox community are troubled by what appears to be a refusal of non-haredi rabbis and other Orthodox leaders to speak out against the current situation. Several people interviewed for this series expressed the view that many Orthodox rabbis and leaders are afraid of being censured by Rabbi Miller and the haredi community, and these sources contend this fear is behind the silence of Orthodox leaders. It is this context – and our belief that issues that generate such vehemence should be discussed openly – that has led The CJN to investigate the situation.
From left: Rabbi Reuven Tradburks, Rabbi Immanuel Schochet and Martin Lockshin

Rabbi Reuven Tradburks, secretary of Toronto’s Vaad Harabonim and spiritual leader of Kehillat Shaarei Torah, a Modern Orthodox congregation, paints a more positive picture than some others of the move toward more stringent religious practices and views in the Orthodox community.

“I feel that, often when there are dramatic changes in policy, people look at it as being a step backward, or as the Orthodox world becoming more fundamentalist. I don’t view it that way. I view it as a positive change, that the number of people who want to live a rich and full life completely consistent with what the Torah wants from us is growing.”

He said he does not see the discrepancies between Modern Orthodox and haredi philosophy as a division between the two groups.

“I think there are different approaches. It’s not a new issue. It’s a new manifestation. Part of the reason [the issue seems more pronounced] is because of e-mail, the Internet and instantaneous communication. And to some extent it’s also the ascendancy of Torah and knowledgeable Jews in the Orthodox world in general.”

However, he noted, there are Orthodox Jews “grappling to find a way of negotiating their allegiance to science and also their allegiance to Torah and Torah leaders.”

Rabbi Tradburks was referring to the debate about British-born, Israel-based Rabbi Natan Slifkin, a haredi scholar who touched off an ongoing controversy in the Orthodox world with his views on creation and science.

Three of his books – including Mysterious Creatures and The Camel, the Hare and the Hyrax, which offer ideas about the origins of the universe that are anathema to his fellow haredim – were banned by Israeli and North American haredi rabbis in early 2005. Especially troubling to them are Rabbi Slifkin’s assertions in The Science of Torah that the world was created not in six days, but over millions of years.

The young rabbi’s profile remained relatively low in Toronto until his visit to the city this past winter to speak at an event sponsored by Torah in Motion, a Modern Orthodox educational organization that hosts lectures and programs.

At that time, Rabbi Shlomo Miller of Kollel Avreichim issued “a letter of admonishment” stating that Rabbi Slifkin’s opinions on the six days of creation were “definitely heretical,” even “boorish.”

A book ban, such as the one imposed on Rabbi Slifkin, is “not something I would do, but I understand the rationale as to why that’s being done, even if I don’t agree with it,” said Rabbi Tradburks, whose synagogue also hosted Rabbi Slifkin as a speaker when he was in Toronto.

* * *

Jonathan Ostroff, a computer science professor at York University who was authorized by Rabbi Miller to speak on his behalf, said that Rabbi Miller had no connection with the original ban on Rabbi Slifkin’s books and that he only issued his own condemnation of his work after he was asked for his opinion on the subject by members of his own community. The letter was intended only for his followers, and not for the general community, Ostroff said.

He also told The CJN that Rabbi Miller distinguishes between “operational science” and “origin science.” Operational science, which Rabbi Miller accepts, examines how things work in the universe, while origin science looks at what caused things to begin.

Ostroff stressed that there is a difference between disagreeing with someone, and hating or looking down on them. “We object to his views, not to him as a person,” Ostroff said. In fact, he said, when Rabbi Slifkin came to Toronto to speak at the Torah in Motion event, he was invited to speak to Rabbi Miller and Ostroff, but was “unresponsive.”

“We would still be willing to talk to him anytime,” Ostroff said.

He added that, for a time, he was involved in dialogue with Rabbi Slifkin, both via the Internet and other means. “I wanted to continue the dialogue, but he cut it off. I don’t believe he wants to discuss substantive issues.”

When contacted by The CJN, Rabbi Slifkin said he had been advised by two Canadian rabbis against meeting with Rabbi Miller, because the rabbis felt the purpose of the meeting would be to try to change his views and not to have an open discussion of the issues.

Rabbi Slifkin added that he stopped his online communication with Ostroff “when the pressures of the ban began.” He said that at that time, his posts on an online discussion group were being passed on “to non-participants in order to stir up opposition to me. I have absolutely no idea what Dr. Ostroff means when he says that I don’t want to discuss substantive issues. I have done nothing else for the last few years!”

* * *

What makes the Slifkin affair unique, according to Yossi Adler, a Toronto lawyer who wrote about the controversy in a CJN column in January, is that in similar past cases, other people have retracted the material that was deemed offensive, “and everything [was] fine and dandy.”

Not only did Rabbi Slifkin not retract his assertions, Adler said, but rabbis who condemned his work went beyond banning his books to condemn him personally.

“It’s censorship,” said Adler, who fears that if someone like Rabbi Slifkin, who is part of the haredi community, can be singled out, then everyone is “potentially a target.”

To a lesser extent, Adler was singled out for his CJN column by some Orthodox Jews who criticized him for airing the issue in public. “They don’t understand that this is a significant issue that merits discussion and analysis,” he said, adding that the response he received to his column was overwhelmingly – perhaps 95 per cent – positive.

The naysayers are “creating an environment where debate is non-existent or only discussed behind closed doors, and that’s regrettable,” said Adler.

He also noted that some haredi Jews feel he and others are “right-wing bashing” out of enjoyment, an accusation he denies. “We came from that world. We feel an affinity to that world, and we care about its direction.”

The bans are increasing in number and seriousness, says Adler, who was raised in the “yeshiva world” but has moved toward what he terms “centrist” Orthodoxy. “I prefer the more centrist [community],” he said. “They’re less likely to build walls and to exclude what modernity has to offer. They’re more interested in secular education, and more Zionistic.

“As each group has become more confident, they feel they can live independently. I feel a significant disrespect [on the part of the haredi community toward] non-Orthodox and less Orthodox Jews.”

A lot of the haredi “suspicion” toward the outside world stems from a perceived breakdown of morality, as exemplified by societal changes that include same-sex marriage and sexual promiscuity, Adler explained.

“They will exclude media from their households. A lot of stuff in the media today is very trashy. At the same time, I think they’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

“It was probably like that before,” he admitted, “but not to the same extent, and they weren’t as bold in the way they impose certain rules in the community.”

Rabbi Miller “has a brilliant mind and is well versed in the sources,” said Adler. “No one’s willing to stand up and say that [what he is saying] is not acceptable, or that this is a stringency going beyond what the community requires.”

Adler said that, as a result, “there are people who have considered walking away from Orthodoxy.”

* * *

Not all rabbis were as forthcoming as Rabbi Tradburks when asked to be interviewed for this article. One said he didn’t even want to be quoted as saying that he declined to comment.

When asked repeatedly about the issue of possible repercussions for people who might challenge the growing influence of haredi religious leaders and practices, Ostroff’s only comments had to do with the reaction that Rabbi Miller has received for publicly expressing his own views.

“He has had repercussions for defending Torah Judaism. Should not a Torah teacher stand up for Torah? That’s what he did. Should he allow people to wallow in ignorance?”

Ostroff added that Rabbi Miller expected that he would face consequences for speaking out, just as anybody who comments publicly on any issue would. “But you have to protect your children, and you have to protect the truth of Torah.”

* * *

Martin Lockshin, a York University professor who is an ordained Orthodox rabbi, remains sanguine about the current environment in the Orthodox world.

The former director of York’s Centre for Jewish Studies says he still feels at home in most places in the Orthodox community and is heartened by the presence of Modern Orthodox institutions in the city, citing the examples of Netivot HaTorah Day School, and Bnei Akiva’s Ulpanat Orot and Or Chaim high schools.

“I see something like Torah In Motion, which tries to do intellectual types of things, as a positive force in the city,” he said.

“I know there are people I see as kindred spirits who I can talk to, who unabashedly call themselves Modern Orthodox.”

However, he noted, “it may be a well-placed concern that congregational rabbis find themselves in the difficult position – the modern centrist liberal kinds – worried about losing their bona fides because of a possible attack from the ultra-Orthodox.”

At his own synagogue, Congregation Bnai Torah, which has a more right-wing philosophy than his own, the rabbi “has been very tolerant of me,” Lockshin said.

* * *

Rabbi Immanuel Schochet, a retired philosophy professor at Humber College and a leader of the Lubavitch movement in Toronto, said the Jewish community has been inundated with dissent and anger, as well as stringencies that go beyond halachah in an attempt to protect tradition.

“We live in a society where under the guise of political correctness, all systems are go. Moral boundaries which were observed by everyone are being trampled,” he said by way of explanation. In today’s “permissive, licentious society,” observant Jews try to take precautions, he added.

Like immunizations, “we may inject kids with poisons to protect them” – in other words, expose them to the non-Jewish world so that they are equipped to deal with it. Or, he added, observant Jews may try to defend tradition by creating more closed enclaves and putting up behavioural fences such as not allowing television or Internet in the home, in an effort to circle the wagons around the community’s children. “It’s not foolproof, but it’s an attempt to protect kids and the young from being corrupted.”

The ideal, he said, is “the golden middle path,” though he admits this path is hard to find.

Rabbi Schochet added that there is “great hostility” within the Orthodox community, which he said comes from divisions that are more about ego than personal ideology.

There is a fight over “my gedolim [rabbinic sages] vs. your gedolim – my way or the highway,” he said, adding that this is not what the pursuit of Torah means. “You have to realize that you aren’t God’s policeman.”

There is nothing wrong with having a difference of opinion, so long as the discussion is kept to the issue and avoids the personal, he said. You condemn the act or action, not the person doing it, he added.

For instance, different schools serve different parts of the Orthodox world, but they should still be conscious of the bonds between them. “I may not send my children to schools whose views I disagree with. But show hostility to them? No.”

Rabbi Schochet said he disagrees with the approach of those who banned Rabbi Slifkin’s book.

“The answer is not to ban a book – that just gives publicity, and popularizes it, the opposite of what is intended. The answer is to discuss, and to question, to say why you think he is wrong.”

You don’t argue with a Jewish heretic, said Rabbi Schochet, speaking hypothetically, and “banning went out with the dodo.” The rabbis who banned Rabbi Slifkin’s books have “moved beyond what society needs. They shot themselves in the foot.”

“Not that I necessarily disagree with their views, just their methods.”

As to whether the Orthodox community will ever be united in the future, Rabbi Schochet said he “won’t place any bets on it. But then, that’s one good reason to hope for the coming of Moshiach.”

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