How’s this for rank cronyism?

Birthright Israel, the program that gives every Jewish young adult in North America a free trip to Israel, also funds ‘aftercare’ programs back home under the auspices of Birthright-NEXT meant to keep newly-Jewishly-enthused Birthright participants in the Jewish communal fold. Birthright has so far shown little success in aftercare and retention. Most participants barely participate in Jewish communal life after returning from the greatest free vacation many of them will ever have. Of those participants who have already finished college, only about half participate in any measurable way, and "participation" can mean as little as attending one program several years ago. A recent study commissioned by Birthright emphasizes the need for varied programming conducted in small intimate settings by many organizations in each locale. To achieve this, many different organizations need funding. But that is not what Birthright does. Indeed, in the New York City area, home to the largest concentration of young Jews in North America, Birthright focuses its funding on a small handful of organizations. One of them, the Jewish Enrichment Center, gets a heavily disproportionate amount of that funding.

The JEC is an ultra-Orthodox founded and run outreach center, started as part of the Kiruv Movement – in other words, the JEC was conceived and birthed by Jewish missionaries out to make you ultra-Orthodox.  Beginning in 2002, the JEC was the NYC "outreach post" of Ohr Somayach, the right wing ultra-Orthodox kiruv yeshiva and missionary network. So why is Birthright-NEXT funding ultra-Orthodox missionary activity?

Michael Steinhardt. That’s right. Jewish philanthropy’s uber-secularist is behind Birthright-NEXT’s over-endowed ultra-Orthodox missionaries. Steinhardt makes a donation each year to Birthright-NEXT earmarked specifically for the JEC. How much does the JEC get? According to the Forward:

The group was given $1.4 million last year, according to Birthright Israel NEXT’s executive director, Rabbi Daniel Brenner. In 2007, the last year for which the Forward was able to attain tax returns, the JEC received $1.87 million. By contrast, that year, Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life was granted a total of $547,516 for programming nationwide.

Why is Steinhardt doing this? Has he suddenly gone native? Is he eating glatt kosher and wrapping tefillin, doing Jewish line dances with sweaty bearded men in frock coats and fedoras or uttering fervent prayers at rabbis’ graves? Nope. This has nothing to do with religion. Steinhardt is putting millions into ultra-Orthodox missionaries because a close friend of his family’s wants him to. Who is that close friend? Rebecca Sugar, who has been close to the Steinhardt family for decades. And guess what job Ms. Sugar holds? She’s the New York City director of Birthright-NEXT. This cronyism might be forgivable – if you could overlook stealth missionary activity offered up with the imprimatur of the Jewish community, and if it didn’t hurt other non-Orthodox programs. But it does hurt them, siphoning off funds and participants and killing competition. But it’s even worse than that. With all its money, killer Web site and huge staff (fourteen strong, last time I checked), the JEC is, like much else associated with Birthright and Birthright-Next, a failure. In March, the JTA reported Birthright’s retention issues, before Birthright’s heavily disproportionate funding of the JEC was known:

In New York, where 43 percent of returnees have not attended any Jewish program since their Israel trip, researchers found an array of Jewish offerings but little effort to communicate that information to Birthright alumni.

Why the "little effort to communicate"? Perhaps because all NYC organizations involved with Birthright-NEXT are cash-strapped, except for one – the Steinhardt-and-crony-endowed JEC. But there is one area the JEC does succeed in – furthering the goals of Ohr Somayach and other ultra-Orthodox missionary organizations. These organizations get access to Birthright alumni through Ohr Somayach’s proxy, the JEC. Its overall success rate might be poor, but those alumni the JEC does "succeed" with have a much higher chance of owning a black fedora or a wig than your average twenty-something Jewish New Yorker. And that is exactly what Ohr Somayach wants. This is not the end of Birthright’s troubles. Just last month, Birthright hired the disgraced PR flackery 5WPR to represent it. 5W is notorious for impersonating critics of the corrupt glatt kosher meatpacker Agriprocessors in a bid to discredit them. The victims of this sockpuppetry included Conservative Jewish leader Rabbi Morris Allen. This was big enough news at the time to headline Gawker and make page one of the New York Times, but it wasn’t big enough to stop Birthright from hiring 5WPR. Perhaps that is because 5W’s head, Ronn Torossian, is closely associated with Israel’s political and religious right wing, and supports many of the same causes and neo-con politicians domestically that Steinhardt does. Birthright is clearly troubled, and that’s a shame. It should be and could be a success. But it won’t be a success as long as the key criteria for getting funding are cronyism and ultra-Orthodoxy.

The post Birthright Israel Wants You to Be Ultra-Orthodox appeared first on Jewcy.

Agriprocessors itself was indicted shortly after Rubashkin’s second arrest, and the company faces millions of dollars in fines.

Early in November, Agriprocessors declared bankruptcy.  Then, on November 14, the day of Rubashkin’s first federal arrest, Agriprocessors missed its payroll, leaving workers – many of them already poor – without money and, in many cases, food. Production ceased shortly after.

Now Agriprocessors’ court-appointed trustee, Joseph Sarachek of New York, is trying to restart production and pay workers – at least those workers who play ball with the company.

In effect, Sarachek is running a plantation with slavery replaced by indentured servitude. If workers come back to work, they will be given back wages owed to them in dribs and drabs. If they do not come back to work, they will need to wait for the final bankruptcy settlement  – which means they likely will never see any money. Secured creditors like banks get paid first, and Agriprocessors has more debt now, including potential fines, than industry experts I’ve spoken with believe it has equity.

Sarachek told me Friday that he wants "everyone" to be repaid, but said the "budget" he has been given and US bankruptcy law prevents him from doing more for workers.

Sarachek’s press release announcing the possible resumption of production and repayment of selected workers tells workers to contact plant spokesman Chaim Abrahams with questions. 

Abrahams – a fierce Rubashkin partisan and a fellow member of the Chabad-Lubavitch hasidic sect – is one of the figures in Agriprocessors most distrusted by workers. Throughout the 6 1/2 month crisis, Abrahams has defended almost every action of the company. He has repeatedly denied the company abused workers or shorted their pay.

Abrahams also tried to silence Postville’s community radio station, KPVL, and fire or censor its main on-air personality, Jeff Abbas. Abrahams is especially upset by Abbas’ airing of interviews done with former workers, calling the bad news about the company "divisive" and bad for Postville.

Abrahams sits on the radio station’s board. The station is a nonprofit, and Abrahams should have resigned from that board immediately after the May 12 raid. He did  not. Instead, he tried to use his position and influence to remove Abbas.

Along with running KPVL, Abbas stepped in to fill the void left by city inaction. As Agriprocessors workers found themselves broke, hungry and sometimes homeless, Abbas lobbied state officials to bring in relief. When the mayor heard that Jewish families were going hungry because they lacked kosher food, he turned to Abbas, who led a successful emergency drive to get kosher food for Postville’s Jews.

Before that, Abbas started an impromptu 7-day soup kitchen and food shelf in Postville’s multicultural center next to his radio station to augment the existing 3-day-per-week community food shelf.  The city objected to this use of the multicultural center and repeatedly tried to shut the Abbas soup kitchen/food shelf down. At the same time, the city made no attempt to pick up the the slack that this shutdown, if successful, would bring.

On Friday, November 21, state, county and city officials, along with volunteers like Abbas, met in Postville to try to coordinate relief efforts. Under pressure, the city agreed to use Turner Hall, an unoccupied city-owned landmark, as a relief center. 

According to volunteers (and according to the sign posted on the building’s entrance) the relief center was supposed to be open seven days a week, staffed by volunteers. 

But, when volunteers showed up Saturday morning, they found the building locked tight. No one from the city came to open it or returned their calls. Hungry Agriprocessors workers were left on the streets to fend for themselves – a situation the city has seemed quite happy with these past few months.

Among Agriprocessors’ dispossessed,  Abbas has become the go-to person for all types of help.  He has helped find dozens transportation home – whether that home is Indianapolis or Palau, the South Sea island where some of the newer Agriprocessors workers are from.

So when one of those dispossessed heard others talking about robbing stores and holding Rubashkin family members at gunpoint to get the money owed them, the worker made a beeline to Abbas.

Abbas smartly recorded the worker’s story and then called the county sheriff (it was too early in the morning to call Postville’s tiny police department, which was closed). After that, Abbas called the mayor and a prominent member of the Jewish community. He did not air the threat because he did not want to create panic.

Three hours after first informing law enforcement, Abbas decided the threat should be publicly available information, so he sent the audio to me. I published it immediately and urged the Jewish community to take precautions, including evacuating its private school.

Abbas’s decision infuriated both Postville’s city administration and the Jewish community – even though at the time I posted the audio reinforcements from the county sheriff had still not arrived in Postville (they were "on the way," a law enforcement source told me, and should be arriving "soon"; remember, this is three full hours after Abbas first called), and Postville’s tiny police force did not have the capability on its own to handle the threat.

Iowa media picked up on the threat, the JTA later blogged about it, and the attention helped push through the coordinated relief effort mentioned above – the same relief effort the city is now undermining.

Meanwhile, we also recently learned that the undocumented Agriprocessors workers released from federal prison after serving five month sentences for aggravated identity theft are being supported entirely by St. Bridget’s Catholic Church.

The workers have to remain in the country until they testify at Agriprocessors’ and Sholom M. Rubashkin’s trials, along with the trials of other indicted Agriprocessors managers. But they have no means of support. Their temporary work permits arrived weeks after their release and, in any case, jobs are very scarce in Postville these days.

But that scarcity of work does not apply to the Rubashkin family.

I asked Agriprocessors’ trustee, Joseph Sarachek, if Rubashkin family members like Sholom M. Rubashkin’s brother, Heshy (also an Agriprocessors VP) or Sholom M.’s son Getzel would be employed by the company if production restarts Monday or Tuesday.

"Yes," Sarachek said.

I asked him why.

"I need their experience," Sarachek replied.

Ditto for Chaim Abrahams, the Agriprocessors spokesman and would-be censor who Sarachek named point man for workers’ questions.

"It’s like triage," Sarachek said, "I have to work with what I’ve got." 

What Sarachek has is far more than what most workers and unsecured creditors will ever see – real income from Agriprocessors.

Can meat produced through a modern form of indentured servitude be kosher?

Joseph Sarachek’s grandfather, the late Rabbi Joseph Sarachek, was at one time the head of the NYC Board of Rabbis.

I wonder how Rabbi Sarachek would answer that question.

The post Agriprocessors: The Gift That Keeps On Giving appeared first on Jewcy.

"This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my expiation. This chicken shall go to its death and I shall proceed to a good long life and peace."

As the Orthodox Jews watched, each chicken was ritually slaughtered, then donated to the poor.

Kapparot is of questionable origin. There is no mention of kapparot in the Bible or in post-Biblical Jewish literature until the Middle Ages. And many great Jewish legal scholars, including Rabbi Yosef Karo, the author of the Shulkhan Arukh (Code of Jewish Law), believed it to be of pagan origin and forbid it. According to many rabbinic opinions, kapparot can be done with money. Chickens are not necessary. But kapparot was promoted by the Hasidic movement, which these days is primarily responsible for keeping kapparot, as opposed to kapparot chickens, alive.

If kapparot was done carefully and humanely, the only argument against it would be theological. But often kapparot are neither carefully run nor humane.

Chickens are routinely transported over long distances crammed in small cages. They are not fed or given water. Many chickens die in transport.

But that isn’t all.

Once dumped on the streets of Brooklyn (or Kiryas Joel, or Miami Beach, or Jerusalem), kapparot chickens are often left to wait for another day or two without food or water or even shade. Predictably, more chickens die of heat stroke and dehydration than of ritualistic slaughter.

When the time comes for kapparot to begin, the live birds are pulled from the dead, and the swinging and chanting begins.

Then comes the slaughter. The blood pools on the ground mixed with feces; it covers the clothes and hands of workers. Wash stations and hand sanitizer is rarely provided. Children play next to dead and dying chickens.

After slaughter, the chickens are frequently tossed in heaps on the ground or in large garbage containers. Eventually – often many unrefrigerated hours later – they are collected and sent off for basic processing and, perhaps kashering as well. Then they are supposedly distributed to poor Jews to use for the Sukkot holiday that follows less than a week later.

But that is only in theory. Reality is often very different.

Last year, the animal rights group PETA. caught Chabad’s Brooklyn kapparot operation dumping thousands of correctly slaughtered kosher chickens in the garbage. Even though Crown Heights has more than its share of poor Jews, the National Committee For The Furtherance of Jewish Education threw these chickens away. Why?

The logic works like this. NCFJE charged $13 per bird for kapparot. Even after expenses, the NCFJE comes out way ahead on each chicken – so much so that a kapparot worker told an undercover PETA investigator she should not worry:

"At $13, we have enough money there to purchase another chicken – so another chicken will be purchased also."

In other words, because NCFJE lacked the capacity to process the thousands of chickens slaughtered in Crown Heights, it threw some of them away. But it made enough money off the ritual to be able to purchase a regular slaughterhouse-killed and processed chicken to donate to the poor – and it did so.

NCFJE could have given those unprocessed chickens to a local non-Jewish soup kitchen or community organization. Or, it could have done better planning and processed all the chickens it killed. Instead, it dumped hundreds, perhaps thousands, of kapparot chickens into the garbage.

NCJE Chairman Rabbi Shea Hecht this week denied that chickens were thrown in the garbage. In an emailed statement, PETA’s Philip Schein responded by calling Hecht a liar:

"…On the afternoon of December 31, 2007, in a private face-to-face meeting with PETA, Rabbi Hecht and Rabbi Yosef Moya of the National Committee for Furtherance of Jewish Education (NCFJE) admitted that more than two-thirds of the slaughtered chickens at the NCFJE kapporos were disposed of and not given to tzedakah. NCFJE didn’t have the capacity to process thousands of chickens, and so the volunteers threw the garbage bags containing thousands of the slaughtered chickens into the dumpster….The garbage bags full of the dead, unused chickens are clearly shown in the PETA undercover video."

Apparently to counter PETA’s video evidence from previous years, a Chabad blog posted sanitized pictures of kapparot that do not show the slaughter or the storage of the birds.

Under fire from PETA (and from Jews who are fed up with ultra-Orthodox mistreatment of animals), NCFJE responded by claiming that PETA was out to attack Judaism.

In the same interview with Israel’s right wing settler-controlled news outlet Arutz 7 where Hecht claimed the chickens were not thrown in the garbage, the rabbi claimed PETA was out to attack Judaism. Hecht said, "[A]s a Lubavitcher Chossid, as chairman of the board at NCFJE, I suppose I represent world Jewry to these people. We will not be threatened."

To bolster his claims, Hecht also played the antisemitism/Holocaust card.

PETA launched an email campaign on its website to try to clean up – or stop – kapparot. NCFJE’s email boxes were jammed and its phones rang off the hook. One person claiming to be a PETA supporter mistakenly thought the NCFJE was blocking all emails sent by PETA’s web server. So, according to Arutz 7, he faxed the following letter to NCFJE:

"I guess you are ‘blocking’ all e-mails from PETA. Go ahead and ‘Hide’ like the little ‘[expletive deleted]’ you are. Go molest your sisters.

LISTEN UP [expletive deleted]. I’M "GERMAN", AND I WOULD LOVE TO EXECUTE EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU… MAYBE WAVE YOU OVER GERMANS’ HEADS IN APPRECIATION OF THE HOLOCAUST. HOW DOES THAT SOUND? STOP DISGRACING THE JEWISH COMMUNITY BY INHUMANE TREATMENT OF CHICKENS. "KOSHER" MEANS "KOSHER"… YOUR PRACTICES ARE A DISGRACE AND I HOPE YOU, RABBI LEVERTOV, RABBI YOSSI BROOK, & LET’S NOT FORGET, RABBI ZALMAN OSDOBA (rabbis in the community -ed.), ALL ROT IN HELL. HAVE A [expletive deleted] LIFE. LET ME KNOW IF YOU WANT ME TO E-MAIL YOU AGAIN, I WOULD LIKE THAT.

 

The cruelty at your kapporos center, year after year, is a disgrace. Please make the compassionate decision to use money instead of live chickens at the NCFJE kapporos."

Only the last paragraph comes from PETA’s form email.

How your run-of-the-mill semi-literate antisemite would know the name of rabbis in the Crown Heights community (Levertov, Brook,Osdoba) not mentioned in PETA’s campaign Hecht does not bother to explain.

That did not stop him from claiming that PETA itself is antisemitic. Hecht contacted the The NYPD Hate Crimes Unit to file a complaint, and then shamelessly alerted the media to let them know what "PETA" had done.

Rabbi Luzer Weiss, director of the New York State Department of Agriculture’s Kosher Law Enforcement division, told Arutz 7 that his department received "no reports" of chicken dumping during last year’s kapparot from special rabbi inspectors he sent to "make the rounds." Of course, those inspectors were sent only after PETA repeatedly filed complaints, and only after those complaints spurred Brooklyn ultra-Orthodox rabbis to act to save kapparot – facts Weiss and Arutz 7 conveniently omit. The rabbis mandated that chickens be fed and watered, not be left out in the sun, and that various health measures be taken. Little if any of those changes are visible on PETA’s video of NCFJE’s Crown Heights kapparot.

In fairness to the NCFJE, some of PETA’s claims of chicken mishandling by kapparot goers (as opposed to kapparot workers) seem wrong. Most of the hasidim in the video look to me to be handling the chickens correctly.

The NCFJE’s Hecht is perhaps most infamous for his claims made early this summer during a period of racial tension in Crown Heights.

Explaining why Lubavitchers refused to tell police the names of the fellow members of their sect who beat a young innocent black man on way home from school, Hecht told the New York Daily News that Lubavitchers couldn’t cooperate with police. Why? Simple. Cooperation, Hecht claimed, is against Jewish law:

"The Hebrew word is mesira, which means basically you are not allowed to be an informant. In essence, I am not allowed to snitch, period."

For seven years, Shea Hecht was a Commissioner of Human Rights for the city of New York

Attorney Michael Lesher says that Hecht, when he served as a member of Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes Jewish advisory council, lobbied Hynes to stop extradition of accused ultra-Orthodox child molester Avrohom Mondrowitz from his hideout in Israel. Presumably Hecht’s reason for trying to block extradition is similar to his reason for not helping police catch the Lubavitch thugs who beat that black man.

In early October, Hecht asserted the Rubashkin family of Chabad hasidim, owners of the notorious meatpacker Agriprocessors, are being treated unfairly. Why?

According to Hecht, the scandals surrounding Agriprocessors are mere "allegations," and those allegations "are imagined and all of them stem either from the antagonistic press, self-hating Jewish animal advocates, overzealous Immigration P.R. news people, and a gaggle of anti-Semitic perennial criticizers."

Hecht is a leader of Crown Height’s Lubavitchers. He is also a radio show host, political activist and sometime humanitarian. Many years ago, he was my first teacher in yeshiva.

In Crown Heights, Hecht’s views are not in the least bit extreme.

The post May This Chicken Atone For Your Sins appeared first on Jewcy.

Israel is facing an economic crisis of truly epic proportions, but even though its immediate cause is the declining dollar and the crisis now gripping US financial markets, its roots lie in Mea Shearim quarter, not on Wall Street. Every year, Israeli ultra-Orthodox charities raise almost $1 billion abroad. That money is used to support soup kitchens, food pantries, organizations like ZAKA, and the ultra-Orthodox school system, including yeshivas and kollels. Kollels are yeshivas for married men. And herein lies the problem. 70% of ultra-Orthodox married men choose not to work.  Instead, they study in kollel. They are each given a stipend from the kollel that amounts to about $300 per month. Their families subsist on government welfare benefits, aid from various ultra-Orthodox charities, and whatever else the mothers of seven (or more) children are able to earn in their “spare” time. This planned unemployment – which often lasts well into a man’s forties – is a tremendous drain on government resources. It is also a tremendous drain on charities which, one way or another, are compelled to support it. Except for those few lucky kollel students with rich parents or in-laws, these families live in real poverty, packed together in small, aging apartments, worried about their childrens’ next meal. Why would anyone voluntarily do this? Because their rabbis told them to. For a generation, ultra-Orthodox rabbis have ordered their followers to study at all costs. From the rabbis’ perspective, it is easy to see why. Kollel students are exempt from army service, which not only keeps them off the battlefield – it keeps them out of the army, where they would surely mix with and befriend non-ultra-Orthodox Jews. This could, in the rabbis’ view, lead to a weakening of faith. In the same way, because kollel students do not leave their ultra-Orthodox enclaves for work, they do not mix with non-ultra-Orthodox coworkers. On top of that, at the rabbis’ direction the ultra-Orthodox do not study in universities. This keeps them blissfully ignorant of modern science, philosophy, and history – all things that could easily lead an ultra-Orthodox person to question his faith. It also keeps them away from secular members of the opposite sex. In other words, kollel study combined with an enforced lack of secular knowledge serves as a buffer from modernity, the mortal enemy of ultra-Orthodoxy. Of course, that’s not how the rabbis sell kollel study to their followers. Instead, it’s presented as a religious obligation: it is holy, work is not. Work is a last resort, something to be done only if there is no other option left, and then only if the rabbis agree. For years this system survived because the government partially supported the kollels, supported the kollel families through child allowances and other welfare benefits, and because American Jews donated money. But the government cut back on those child allowances. And then, the worst happened – the US dollar went into a tailspin. Dollars are worth about 20% less today than they were a year ago. That  means, all things being equal, these charities have 20% less to spend for the needy. But all things are not equal. Because of worldwide economic uncertainty, the amount of dollars coming in has also dropped – how much, no one is yet sure – but Israeli ultra-Orthodox charities report their net incomes are down about 30%.

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox non-profits were already stretched to the breaking point before this economic downturn. Now many are cutting back on services. Soup kitchens are serving smaller portions and even skipping meals. The newly needy are not finding help. Despite all of this, the rabbis have not changed their call: ultra-Orthodox men are still expected to study full time. Even if ultra-Orthodox rabbis would tell their followers to go find jobs, few would be employable. These men have spent their lives in a school system that did not teach them science, history, civics, English, modern Hebrew, or even math. They lack the skills necessary for all but the most menial jobs. And, because so few ultra-Orthodox men now work, that means few create jobs that could be filled by other ultra-Orthodox. Welfare payments are a major issue fought over by ultra-Orthodox politicians and the beleaguered public servants who try to keep Israel’s budget on an even keel. Entire governments have been held hostage by small ultra-Orthodox political parties demanding increases in these welfare payments. Those small parties’ threats to leave the governing coalition would force new elections. When Israelis think of welfare, they tend to think of "welfare cheats."  In their minds, these are the ultra-Orthodox, who do not serve in the army, who often do not pay taxes, and who take from the country in so many ways without giving back. None of this is meant to excuse Israel’s attitude toward its poor who are not poor-by-choice – or, more accurately, poor-by-their-rabbis’-choice. These unfortunate people are expected to subsist on welfare payments so low, many go hungry. It is not at all uncommon to see elderly begging for food on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Israel also has its homeless, many of whom are not mentally ill or substance abusers – they’re just poor.  The country could go a long way to rectifying this situation by outlawing welfare payments to able-bodied men above the age of twenty-one who choose to study in kollel rather than work or serve in the army. That would free resources that could be used to help the truly needy, and could also be used to ease the ultra-Orthodox transition to work by providing job training and internship programs. None of these changes would stop ultra-Orthodoxy from itself supporting its true scholars and allowing them to study in kollel for many years – perhaps for their entire lives. Ultra-Orthodoxy treats its rabbis like popes, infallible and exceedingly wise, with a direct line to the Divine Will. But, like every cataclysmic event to befall the Jewish people in recent memory – the Russian pogroms of the 1880s; the upheavals and slaughters of World War One; and, of course, the Holocaust –  the rabbis did not see it coming. They did not prepare their followers for the day after Wall Street’s collapse any more than they did for  the collapse of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire or the Nazi Holocaust. After each of those earlier tragedies, large numbers of ultra-Orthodox left the fold. Chances are, some of them were your ancestors. Will that happen now? It would, I think, if ultra-Orthodox defectors were given the necessary support to transition from their closed communities to secular society, where a strong back and a willingness to work hard is no longer enough to get by. But without that support, these potential defectors will remain trapped in ultra-Orthodoxy, dependent on ultra-Orthodox charities for subsistence. That is why you can expect ultra-Orthodox rabbis to fight any attempt to provide widespread job training or secular education for their followers. It is also why the problem of Israel’s poor-by-choice will not go away any time soon.

The post The Heretic: Will Wall Street Bring the Collapse of Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox Welfare State? appeared first on Jewcy.

On Sunday, Jewish law killed a 55-year old American-Israeli man. Rabbi Yossie Raichik died of a lung infection. He was waiting in Israel, where he had lived for almost 30 years, for a transplant to replace his irreversibly damaged lungs. It could have saved his life. It did not because the donor organs that matched him did not arrive. Raichick headed Chabad’s Children of Chernobyl project. Children of Chernobyl took children from the area around Chernobyl’s exploded nuclear reactor and brought them and their families to Israel for medical treatment. Raichik brought more than 2500 children to Israel during the 22 years since the disaster. He is said to have played a role in airlifting Jewish children out of Iran just after the revolution ushered in what became the Islamic regime. Raichik’s transplant didn’t come because the donor’s family insisted on consulting with an unnamed leading Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbinic expert before allowing the transplant. While the rabbi investigated, the woman’s heart failed and the organs – including the lungs that could have saved Raichik – were lost.  Raichik died soon after. Unlike kidneys and livers, which if necessary can be removed immediately after cardiac death, lungs must be taken while the donor’s heart is still beating.  This means the only way to get lungs for transplant is to take them from patients who are brain stem dead, or from Chinese political prisoners killed by the government for their organs. Orthodox rabbinic interpreters of Jewish law seem united in their opposition to the Chinese option, as everyone should be. But they are divided on the validity of brain stem death, and it was this divide that killed Yossie Raichick. The Jerusalem Talmud, the older brother of the commonly studied and followed Babylonian Talmud, defines death as the complete, irreversible cessation of breathing. This is defined in two ways: 1) No discernible air exhaled or inhaled through the nose, and 2) No respirations discernible by intently studying the navel area (i.e., the diaphragm). Manuscript versions of the Babylonian Talmud follow this reading, including the versions used by leading medieval scholars like Isaac Alfassi, Nachmanides, Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel, and many others. But one medieval scholar living in what was then the remote hinterland of Jewish communities had a manuscript with a different reading. Unfortunately for Raichik and many others, that scholar was Rashi, and Rashi wrote what is considered the seminal commentary on the Talmud. When the printing press came into use hundreds of years after Rashi’s death, Rashi’s commentary was printed alongside the main text of the Babylonian Talmud. Rashi’s version of the Talmud replaced the word “navel” with the word heart, so death was defined by complete cessation of breathing and heartbeat. Printers apparently amended the text of the Talmud to match Rashi’s commentary. Rashi’s opinion makes most transplants impossible. For hundreds of years, Jews determined death by placing a feather at the nostrils and intently watching for signs of breathing. If there were none after a few minutes, the person was declared dead. (This was by no means foolproof. Rarely, faint breathing was missed by the observers. This sometimes led to ‘corpses’ “coming back to life” in their coffins.) With the advent of modern medical technology came ventilators and cardiac resuscitation devices. Suddenly, stopped hearts could be restarted and lungs too weak to breathe adequately on their own could be assisted. These and many other advanced medical treatments have allowed very physically compromised people to live, and some eventually to recover. Eventually, improved medical technology brought the potential for organ transplantation. But along with organ transplantation came a renewed concern about how to determine when a person is really, truly dead. Medical science uses brain stem death to define death in applicable cases. Brain stem death is like decapitation. Without a living brain stem, a person can never breathe independently. He can never regain consciousness. He can never function in any way, however compromised. And, like decapitation, brain stem death is irreversible. If a brain-stem-dead patient is removed from his ventilator, his body will make no visible or measurable effort to breathe, and his heart will fail. Based on this, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (d. 1986), the leading American ultra-Orthodox rabbi of his era, accepted brain stem death as death, allowing viable organs to be taken from brain-stem-dead patients. But many Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbis disagreed. Even with special tests devised to prove lack of both spontaneous breathing and lack of brain function, these rabbis refused to accept brain stem death as death. Why? In the words of nonagenarian ultra-Orthodox leader Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv – posted across Jerusalem and published in ultra-Orthodox papers in late March after Israel passed an organ donation bill recognizing brain stem death as death – “[A]s long as the heart is still pumping blood, even in the case of ‘brain death,’ it is not permitted to remove any organ from the patient.” And, under banner headlines proclaiming, “Thou Shalt Not Murder!,” Elyashiv and his followers called reliance on brain stem death “murder.” It was those words that apparently caused the donor’s family to delay donation, and it was those words that apparently caused the leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi they asked for advice to himself delay.

Taking Elyashiv’s position to an illogical extreme, it could be argued that a decapitated person with a beating heart and a surgically closed neck wound is fully alive, even though headless. Indeed, two rabbis, Hershel Schachter and J. David Bleich, both associated with Manhattan-based Yeshiva University’s right wing, have done just that. To them, the complete absence of a head does not signify death. Schachter is to Modern Orthodoxy what Elyashiv is to ultra-Orthodoxy – the top guy. Speaking at an Orthodox medical ethics conference in 2006, Schachter makes significant errors of medical fact, avers that heart and lung transplantation is murder  – even though he acknowledges the donor’s entire brain may be irreversibly dead – and misrepresents the original decision of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate permitting such transplants. In response to a question from a physician, who asks Schachter if he permits Jews to take a donated heart when that heart has come from, in Schachter’s opinion, a “murder,” Schachter answers by saying many rabbis permit taking these organs because the “doctors” will “murder” the patient anyway.

The truth, however, is significantly different. The only organs removed from a donor are organs for which there is a recipient match within the immediate geographic area. If no such match exists, no organs are taken. Schachter and many of the other rabbis who permit taking organs but not donating organs must be aware of this. They simply ignore the truth out of expediency. It would be one thing if Elyashiv, Schachter, and their followers refrained from accepting donated organs. But they don’t. While forbidding donating organs, Elyashiv and Schachter have said nothing about not taking them. Their followers who need organs take organs, often displacing people on recipient lists who are, themselves, potential donors registered with various organ donation programs, including the Halachic Organ Donation Society.

This, along with the traditional Jewish desire to bury the body intact, has caused a dire shortage of organs in Israel. This shortage is made worse because Israelis cannot get organs from many other countries. Why? Because of the shortage, Israel cannot provide those countries with anything like reciprocity. Israelis are seen as takers of organs but not as givers. If not for the unusual generosity of the United States, Israelis would have few places to turn. This perception of Jews as organ takers but not givers extends to communities worldwide with large Orthodox communities. This has sparked fears that countries will start banning all Jews, not just Israelis, from receiving donated organs. Elyashiv and his fellow travelers claim they object to brain stem death because they want to protect the sanctity of life, and this may be the case.  But medical science has advanced exponentially since the Talmud was compiled in the 8th century. Just as Orthodox Jews benefit from those advances, the Jewish law they follow needs to take these advances into account. Just as we do not mix the potions described in the Talmud to cure illness, and we do not follow its diet recommendations to promote health, we should not be basing something as important as death on 1300 year old Talmudic science – or on a 500 year old printer’s error. Yossie Raichik’s donor died. So did Yossie Raichik. It didn’t have to be that way.

The post The Heretic: How Jewish Law Killed Rabbi Yossie Raichik appeared first on Jewcy.

“You’ll never find a leftist who cares about suffering white or Christian peoples. Examples Afrikaner in the "new South Africa," whites under Mugabe, Loyalist victims of IRA terror, Sudetan Germans the list is endless. I agree that a lot of leftist agitation is due to hatred of the West, the white race and any non Third World political aspiration. However, not all.”

Who wrote this? An arch conservative? A white supremacist? A Nazi?

The man who wrote those words is not a Nazi. He is, however, both an arch conservative and a white supremacist. And he is also an ultra-Orthodox rabbi. Rabbi Mayer Schiller teaches advanced Talmud at the Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy, Yeshiva University’s affiliated high school.  But Schiller, who lives in the ultra-Orthodox bastion of Monsey, New York, is not Modern Orthodox – he is a Skver hasid and serves as spokesperson for New Square, the Skver-founded village. Schiller is a supporter of far-right political groups worldwide, and advocates “peaceful” separation of the races.  His racist views have been public for at least 15 years, yet neither Yeshiva University or New Square have removed Schiller from his jobs. That may be partially because Schiller is a cagey racist, and he parses his racism finely. Schiller speaks of each individual, even those who are dark-skinned, being created in the “image of God.” But, Schiller continues, those same image-of-God-created individuals each belong to different groups based on race and nationality, and those groups, in Schiller’s view, are each good for different things and not for others. Those groups and races, Schiller avers,  need to be kept separate – very separate. Orthodox apologists for Schiller like to spin him as a talented teacher and a benign eccentric who paternalistically wants the best for black people, as long as that best doesn’t involve sex with white people. Real racists, this line of twisted thought goes, would not want the best for black people – no matter who those blacks don’t sleep with. It is often thought that ultra-Orthodox racism, readily evident in ultra-Orthodox communities in urban centers like Brooklyn, comes from a geographic proximity to lower class black and hispanic neighborhoods. The idea is that, because ultra-Orthodox suffer from black and hispanic crime, racism is a natural (if incorrect) reaction. This is thought to be true even though that same crime disproportionately ravages blacks and hispanics.  
While that explains a part of the problem, it does not explain the whole. And there is no better proof of that than Rabbi Efraim Luft.  Luft lives in Bnei Brak, Israel – half a world away from the ghettos of Brooklyn. He heads something called the “Committee for Jewish Music,” which works in close cooperation with ultra-Orthodox “modesty squads.”  These “modesty squads” are part Church Lady, part Ku Klux Klan lynching party, with a bit of Mob enforcer thrown in for good measure. Luft has rallied the support of leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis here and in Israel in his crusade to ban African-influenced “primitive” music. He claims electric guitars, bass, and saxophones are “indecent,” and he has just published a broadside endorsed by those ultra-Orthodox rabbis titled “Rules For Playing Kosher Music.”  The rules read like they were pulled from a 1950s Ku Klux Klan publication – because, for the most part, they were.

Luft approvingly quotes “The Southerner,” a Klan-linked notorious race-baiting tabloid. (You can read that article here with the offending source removed after bloggers first exposed Luft in 2005.) The Southerner’s editor, Asa Earl Carter, passed his Klan initiation with flying colors – he castrated a retarded black man.

Luft quotes sources like Creationists quote science: selectively and old. (Perhaps this isn’t much of a surprise – Luft is also a Creationist.) These sources are mostly from the mid-1950s and reflect the racism prevalent at that time, not any science or empirical data. But that has not stopped publications controlled by leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis from publishing Luft and citing those sources, and it has not stopped these same rabbis from endorsing what amounts to a ban on almost all music of non-Western European origin.
While these ultra-Orthodox rabbinic leaders were addressing the “important” issue of African-origin rhythms and “impure” music, a separate, small group of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn were attempting to launch a task force to deal with a truly pressing problem: rabbinic sexual predators.

The lead case on their agenda is a case of alleged rabbi-on-boy child abuse and coverup at the Satmar hasidic movement’s main Brooklyn yeshiva. Satmar is considered to be the most violence prone of U.S.-based ultra-Orthodox groups.  The man chosen to lead this modest effort, Rabbi Dr. Benzion Twerski, a scion of the Chernobyl hasidic dynasty, was threatened by neighbors and, I’m told, by people linked to a Brooklyn-based modesty squad. Among the more benign threats, Twerski was told that his grandchildren would not get good shidduchim (marriage partners) unless he immediately resigned from the task force. He did.  And Twerski went the goons one better – he retired from public life, as well. Twerski’s grandchildren can now enter their married lives secure and well matched, while safely dancing to Luft-approved “kosher” music. Like the 1950s South, ultra-Orthodoxy relies on shunning, threats, and violence in order to maintain a status quo that cannot survive any other way, and it shares some of the same racism. But ultra-Orthodoxy won’t have a Civil Rights Act to clean it up. Either change will come from the inside – or, more likely, change won’t come at all.

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Earlier this week, our friends at Agriprocessors, America’s largest supplier of glatt kosher meat, were charged with more than 9000 counts of child labor violations. Named in the Iowa affidavit are Aaron Rubashkin, Agriprocessors owner, his son Sholom M. Rubashkin, and Agriprocessors Human Resources director, and its two HR managers. The New York Times reports that fines could total more than $5 million. Jail time could stretch for years. One of the child laborers was 13 years old. Coincidentally, on the same day and time that Iowa’s charges against Agriprocessors were announced, the two named HR managers, Laura Althouse and Karina Freund, were arrested by federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Althouse is charged with aiding and abetting document fraud, aiding and abetting aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to harbor undocumented aliens.  Freund was charged with aiding and abetting the harboring of illegal aliens. Two senior Agriprocessors supervisors were previously arrested and both have pleaded guilty. A third fled indictment and is now living in Israel. These indictments, charges, and pleas all stem from ICE’s May 12 immigration raid at Agriprocessors, then the largest single site immigration raid in US history. On the day of the raid, about 75% of Agriprocessors’ workforce was illegal.  ICE agents found stacks of blank Green Cards in Agriprocessors’ HR office, along with forged Green Cards and other fraudulent documents. Sources familiar with federal law enforcement tell me the US government is following an established pattern: indict and charge those lower down while using information gleaned from those relatively minor players to help build stronger cases against the bosses. They think it’s reasonable to expect federal charges against senior Agriprocessors management sometime this fall. But Agriprocessors recent troubles don’t stop there. Last Friday, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) released an undercover videotape showing inhumane slaughter at Agriprocessors. This is the Agriprocessors third undercover video shot by PETA since 2004. All show a variant of the same abuse. The new footage was shot this summer.  In it, a non-Jewish Agriprocessors employee uses a regular carving-style knife to hack inside the gaping throat wounds of still conscious cattle. The USDA cited Agriprocessors for violations of Humane Slaughter law, but called those violations “not egregious.” Temple Grandin, the noted animal welfare expert who serves as an advisor to the USDA, put it a bit differently.  Dr. Grandin told the New York Times the animals would “definitely” feel pain from those hacking cuts.  She called on the USDA to install 24/7 Internet streaming video monitoring of Agriprocessors in order to stop Agriprocessors from abusing cattle.  You can sign a petition to that effect here. Agriprocessors claims the procedure shown on PETA’s video is a protected part of the kosher slaughter process. Its spokesman, Menachem Lubinsky, even claims that procedure, known as a “second cut,” is common. When the first PETA video showing this second cut was released in 2004, I asked dozens of Orthodox rabbis about the procedure. Not one of them had ever seen it done. All but a small handful did not even know it could be done. Grandin, who has consulted for more than 30 different kosher slaughter plants in her long career, has only seen this procedure done by one company – Agriprocessors – which first did it using a meat hook. It was the most horrific violation of Humane Slaughter law Grandin had ever seen. The furor around that video caused the OU – one of Agriprocessors kosher supervising agencies – to announce that the “procedure” would no longer be done. The head of the OU’s kosher division, Rabbi Menachem Genack, clearly stated in an article he wrote that the second cut is not a part of the shechita (ritual slaughter) process at all.

Yet the only exemption to allow this brutal procedure is that it is a part of the shechita process. If it is not a part of that process, no exemption legally exists. Last year I sent Freedom of Information Act requests to the USDA. What I found is chilling. In response to requests made by Orthodox rabbis – including Orthodox rabbis from the OU – the USDA had broadened the ritual slaughter exemption to such a degree that even ripping the throat out of live cattle using a meat hook would be considered an exempt, and therefore protected, practice. In other words, a painful and abusive procedure used only at Agriprocessors and defined by the OU itself as something outside the ritual slaughter process is now embedded in US law as a protected part of that ritual slaughter process. And, as Agriprocessors’ spokespeople have been quick to note, US law defines ritual slaughter as humane. How’s that for doublespeak? Agriprocesors quietly switched from a meat hook to a smaller boning hook, was again caught by PETA, said it would stop doing the procedure, surreptitiously switched to using a carving-type knife, got caught by PETA, said it would stop doing the procedure – but its spokesman, Menachem Lubinsky, now says the procedure continues unabated. The OU – the same OU that presides over this second cut that is not a part of the shechita process but still is – now says that Agriprocessors has two weeks to bring in a new management team. If Agriprocessors does not do this, Rabbi Genack says the OU will “suspend” its kosher supervision. But in mid-May, after the ICE raid, Genack said essentially the same thing: "Bring in new management or we’re out of here."  The OU ‘forced’ Sholom M. Rubashkin to ‘step down’ as Agriprocessors’ CEO.  Problem?  No new CEO was hired and Sholom Rubashkin did not leave Agriprocessors.  To this day, he continues to help manage the plant and is still Agriprocessors’ VP. The OU did not pull its kosher supervision. In the aftermath of the ICE raid, Rabbi Genack was asked a tough question. Would the OU remove its supervision if Agriprocessors senior management were charged?  Rabbi Genack said he would, but he hoped new management would be brought in before that time so that decision would not need to be made. But new management was not brought in, the decision had to be made and Genack parsed it.  Rather than pulling the OU’s supervision, Genack gave Agriprocessors a two week deadline to bring in new management. And while that new management has to be “independent,” Rabbi Genack told me  the Rubaskins can continue to control the board of this privately owned family corporation.  Sholom M. Rubashkin can still serve as VP; Aaron Rubashkin can still be president.  And Heshy Rubashkin, Sholom’s as yet unindicted younger brother, can continue to serve on the board and can work in the company’s management as well. Genack, who was once Bill Clinton’s rabbi, dices language finer and faster than a sushi chef on a Red Bull binge.  Was an inhumane procedure stopped?  It depends on what the meanings of “procedure” and “meat hook” are.  Is new management really on Agriprocessors’ horizon?  It depends on how “management” is defined. If the OU had reacted properly to Agriprocessors’ first violations of Humane Slaughter law, the Jewish community would not be suffering through yet another Agriprocessors scandal. But the OU did not properly react – no matter how that term is parsed or who does the parsing. For its part, I’m told Agriprocessors has turned down offers to buy the company, one from a group of Japanese investors. Unless the Rubashkins can get what is described as a very high asking price, any ‘sale’ of Agriprocessors may turn out in the end to be a shell game, with the Rubashkins remaining in full control behind the scenes. I’d like to say that the Jewish community deserves better than this – but we don’t. We stood by silently as Agriprocessors business practices became exponentially more abusive and exploitative.  Having access to kosher meat was more important that how that access was gained or who was hurt as a result. It wasn’t until we felt public shame that we reacted. Have we learned our lesson?  I don’t think so. Two weeks ago the Forward exposed mistreatment of workers at America’s number two glatt kosher meatpacker, Alle Processing. Owned by Satmar hasidim, Alle pays its workers bare minimum wages with no paid sick leave, health insurance, or other benefits, and it engages in what appear to be illegal union-busting tactics. One worker told the Forward that, when seriously injured on the job, Alle punched out his timecard the hour the injury happened. He was paid nothing after that. Worse yet, Alle management told him when he recovers he will be suspended for one month without pay, because he used the machine that injured him improperly. Workers at Alle receive little if any safety training. So far, the Jewish community has remained silent.

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I caught early chunks of Obama’s acceptance speech at the gym of my local JCC. Not surprisingly, the crowd that night was heavily Republican, and there were mutterings of concern: Is Obama truly committed to Israel? Is Obama too soft on terror? Is he simply another pie-in-the-sky liberal, full of fancy talk, elaborate plans and much hot air? No one was concerned about Obama’s skin color.

We’re less than 145 years removed from slavery and only 40 removed from legal segregation, and we may very well elect a black man as president. No matter your political affiliation, chances are you understand it was an historic moment for America.

I left part way through Obama’s speech and drove to a Jewish community nursing home to make a late visit. While the nursing home is affiliated with the Jewish community, most of its residents are not Jewish. In order to accept federal, state and local funds, nursing homes cannot discriminate based on religious affiliation, color, country of origin, sexual preference, or gender. Years ago, the Jewish community opted to take government funds, a decision that eventually turned the facility’s resident base into a pretty fair representation of the local population, rather than a spot on representation of the Jewish community. With this change came good and bad. The good is diversity. The bad is Christmas trees, Christian prayer services, nuns in the hallways, and an atmosphere that at one point, before some modicum of balance was struck, had Jewish residents feeling like an oppressed minority in their own home. During the peak of this, even the facility’s rabbis felt beleaguered.

I asked one if she had anyone who could help a resident light electric Shabbat candles. With tears in her eyes told me, “There isn’t anyone. There’s nothing Jewish here.” Another had his facility-wide Purim decorations ripped down by staff and replaced with St. Patrick’s Day ornamentation when the two holidays coincided on the calendar. Not too long ago, a new resident – an elderly black woman whom I’ll call Jennie – was admitted. Suffering from a form of dementia, she’s often overcome with fear. She hears noises in the hall and thinks neighborhood thugs are breaking in to try to kill her. She thinks everyone is conspiring against her and that her food is poisoned. She can be loud and disruptive, breaking into tears and sobbing or putting on her best street bravado to ward off enemies that are not there. As much as I try not to let myself judge an elderly, demented person by her actions – and especially by their skin color or religion – there are times when I catch myself thinking about how disruptive, non-Jewish residents should go to non-Jewish facilities. A few months ago, I had a moment like that with Jennie. She sat in a lounge area, alternately threatening to “pop” imaginary intruders and breaking into tears. I told myself what I always do in encounters like these: Reverse the situation. How would I judge it if the disruptive demented person were Jewish and the nursing facility was not? Would I think it’s okay for that facility to remove the sick, elderly, disruptive Jew because he’s Jewish? Of course not. So why should the reverse be any different? I sat beside Jennie and calmed her down by asking about her youth.  She told me that as a child, she had known freed slaves. She’d been born dirt poor and had faced intense discrimination. But she raised children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. And she had built a successful business. After a while she asked, “Where are we now? What’s the name of this place?”

I told her. She looked at me, startled, and then looked around her. “I used to work here,” she said, “in the kitchen, along time ago. But it looks different.”

I told her this was a different building in a different neighborhood than before. Then she told me about her friend the kosher butcher, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, whose shop once stood nearby the old building. “I used to buy all my meat from him when I first got married,” she explained.

I said that I had owned that store years later, and the same butcher had been my landlord and friend. A few nights later, I found Jennie wandering in a hallway without her wheelchair or her wandering alarm. I had her hold onto a railing so she wouldn’t fall and I called for help. Then I asked Jennie why she was up so late, wandering around alone. “I’m a poor black woman,” she said. “If I don’t get up and get out of this house and find me some money, I’ll never go to college.” I asked her what she wanted to major in. “I want to be an engineer,” she replied.

When I arrived at the nursing home on the night of Obama’s speech, all the residents were asleep except Jennie. It was the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "I Have A Dream" speech, providentially coinciding with Obama’s. Obama’s speech had ended and a T.V. station was showing a documentary on the two. Jennie sat silent in her wheelchair in front of the TV, watching King and Obama. Gone were the disruptive behaviors, the paranoia, and the pain. I stopped to say hello. King was on the screen.

“They shot him, didn’t they?” she said.

“They did,” I told her.

She turned and looked at me. “And now a black man could be president?”

I said he very well could.

She turned back to the screen. “And now a black man could be president,” she said watching King. This time it wasn’t a question. Barack Obama is not the Democratic nominee because of his skin color or despite it. He isn’t a token or a novelty. Barack Obama is the nominee because his was the strongest message and the best run campaign. This is the first time America has been truly colorblind. I don’t know if Barack Obama will win. He wasn’t my first choice among Democratic candidates – I’m not even sure who I’ll vote for come November. But there is one thing I am sure of: America is a better place because Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee.

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Joel Teitelbaum, the Rebbe of Satmar and the most coercive of all modern day ultra-Orthodox leaders, passed away 29 years ago this month.  A vociferous anti-Zionist, Teitelbaum is known for having exhorted his followers to stay in Europe.  Later, as the Nazis approached, he was one of many Hungarian ultra-Orthodox rabbis who told their flocks to remain calm.  There is nothing to worry about, these rabbis announced, God will protect us because of our anti-Zionism. Unfortunately for Teitelbaum’s followers, God didn’t go along with his promises. While most of his followers perished in Auschwitz, Teitelbaum went into hiding and later escaped to freedom. He did not do this through his own ingenuity or through some divine intervention – Joel Teitelbaum, uber-anti-Zionist, was saved from certain death by a Zionist leader. That Zionist, Rudolph Kasztner, organized the largest Holocaust rescue of Jews by another Jew.  He did it with smoke and mirrors, with bravado and slight of hand. Kasztner saved thousands of his people by negotiating with Adolph Eichmann – short of Hitler, the most feared Nazi in the world. Oskar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame said Kasztner was the bravest man he knew. After the War, Teitelbaum lived for a brief time in Palestine, where he became a leader of the rabidly anti-Zionist, rabidly anti-modern, Edah HaCharedit. When you read about Jerusalem video stores being torched or Internet cafés trashed, chances are the thugs who did it are proudly affiliated with Edah HaCharedit. Teitelbaum couldn’t stand what he saw as the ‘destruction’ of the Holy Land by the irreligious and imperfectly religious – in practice, pretty much everyone who wasn’t a Teitelbaum follower or acolyte. So, in 1946, Teitelbaum moved to Brooklyn and set up what was then his small hasidic court.  Teitelbaum found America’s Orthodox welcoming, and America’s Jewish welfare agencies helped to resettle many of his followers in Brooklyn.

You’ve probably heard the stories about these American Jews – the same ones who were so hospitable and supportive of Teitelbaum when he first arrived: Pious Jews fled pogroms in Eastern Europe.  The need to make a living in America forced them to give up strict Shabbat observance and other Orthodox practices. Their children, lacking the example of fully Orthodox parents, became even less observant. If those pious Jews had just kept Shabbat, the story goes, their descendants would still be Orthodox today. The flip side to this story is another story you’ve also probably heard: Seemingly pious Eastern European Jews board a ship bound for America. As the ship leaves the harbor and gets beyond sight of the shore, they cut off their beards and pitch their tefillin into the sea. Both stories probably happened, although the first was probably far more common than the second. But even though these are iconic stories, neither really tells the tale of Eastern European immigration to the United States. That is because both are based on a lie – the idea that these immigration ships were filled with characters out of Broadway’s Fiddler On The Roof: long-bearded shtetl-dwellers with untrimmed earlocks, whose only brush with secular culture had taken place moments before. By the 1920s, the masses of Eastern European Jews were secular or only nominally religious. Emancipation, which spread throughout Europe during the 19th century,  made belonging to a religious community – and following that community’s laws – optional. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, itself a reactionary movement to the Enlightenment that preceded Emancipation, lost its state-sponsored coercive powers as did all forms of Orthodoxy. And Jews, no longer forced to be Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox, left Orthodoxy by the tens of thousands as a result. Most Jews who came to America during the great wave of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were neither ultra-Orthodox or rabidly secular – they were somewhere in between. They were Jews with a respect for Jewish law and tradition, but they were also Jews who appreciated and enjoyed secular culture and the freedoms it gave them. The Orthodoxy they found in America was more suited to this hybrid outlook than the Orthodoxy of Eastern Europe. Never subject to state enforcement of religious law, American Jews – even American Orthodox Jews – took any type of religious coercion badly. These new immigrants developed their own versions of Orthodoxy, too, founding shuls grouped around country or city of origin. In part, they did this to preserve the unique customs they grew up with. But they also did it for coarser, more practical reasons. These new shuls also served as affinity associations, and the social networking they provided helped immigrants land jobs and acclimate to American life. These shuls were rarely coercive – you paid your dues and you helped out with a minyan when you were able, and you were in. These old and new American Orthodox Jews founded yeshivas like Torah Vodaas in Brooklyn and what would later become Yeshiva University in Manhattan. They also founded or helped to found many of the leading national Jewish organizations of their day, including what we now know as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and other welfare organizations meant to help suffering Jews in Eastern Europe and beyond. Despite this, and despite the fact that these same American Orthodox Jews would be instrumental in rescuing and resettling Eastern European Jews during and after the Holocaust, Teitelbaum rejected American Orthodoxy as impure and watered down by compromise and modernity.  He sought to impose Edah HaCharedit standards on it, demanding stricter forms of kashrut and the rejection of all secular values, including basic secular education. He created a community virtually walled off from the rest of society. And, when that was not enough, he created another in Upstate New York that now carries his name.To this day, when Satmar hasidim choose to leave Brooklyn or Kiryas Joel and the hasidic life, they often leave it illiterate in English. An entire organization, Footsteps, exists primarily to help these former hasids adapt to American life. Yet the pull of a closed life and the allure of rebuilding a fantasy version of pre-Holocaust Satmar Jewish life was strong. Teitelbaum’s group grew to be largest hasidic court in America, although that growth has far more to do with the fertility and fruitfulness of its members (not to mention the difficulties those members face when defecting) than it does with the attractiveness of its lifestyle to outsiders. Like the Edah HaCharedit, Teitelbaum and the movement he founded are ultra-Orthodoxy unvarnished, presented without PR agencies or concern for anyone else’s opinion. Although he had opportunities to do so, Joel Teitelbaum never thanked the man who saved his life. Teitelbaum even refused to acknowledge that a Zionist had saved him. His pat answer when pressed was that he was saved by God, not by man, and would discuss the issue no further. Perhaps most shockingly, despite the failure of his theology and the success of Israel, Teitelbaum continued his anti-Zionist agitation, becoming the leading anti-Zionist in the world. He showed little if any respect for the American Orthodox community that initially welcomed him, and he eventually shunned its leaders just as he shunned their schools, shuls, and organizations. Many of the men and women who immigrated to pre-Holocaust America did so to flee men like Teitelbaum and the extremism that so often surrounds them.  That did not mean they threw their Judaism into the sea.  It meant they wanted to live a life free from religious enforcers and from antisemitism – a life where they could rise or fall based on their merits, not on their religious observance. In short, they wanted an American life, not an ultra-Orthodox one.

In a fit of rabid theodicy unmatched in modern times, Teitelbaum ultimately blamed Zionism for the Holocaust itself.

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Did you know that the little kosher symbol on your food may have a geopolitical, rather than strictly religious, purpose – especially if you live in Israel? Some Orthodox rabbis in the Holy Land use that symbol to reduce the number of Palestinians working in Israel. Here’s how it works:

Jewish law requires that many foods be cooked by Jews. This means that even if the ingredients are fully kosher and the food was prepared in a kosher kitchen under the watchful eye of an Orthodox Jew, if a non-Jew did the cooking, Jews are not supposed to eat that food. Of course, if you’ve eaten a kosher restaurant lately, you probably noticed non-Jews working there. You may also have noticed that many of those non-Jewish workers seem to be directly involved in food preparation. That’s because Jewish law has provisions in place to circumvent the ban. And herein lies the story. Before the 16th century publication of the Shulkhan Arukh, the standard code still in use today, Jewish law was hodgepodge that varied much from place to place. While the biblical and Talmudic laws were constant, rabbinic laws, edicts, and interpretations were not. But the upheaval caused by the expulsion from Spain and the resulting Inquisition created a situation where Jews, all refugees from different towns and countries, now lived side by side as refugees. This meant Jews living in adjoining houses were each following, in effect, different laws. Rabbi Yosef Karo, an exile from Spain who settled in Tzefat, now in northern Israel, sought to rectify this situation by standardizing and codifying Jewish law. It almost worked. Karo relied on three major early legal works, the Rif, the Rosh, and Mishne Torah of Maimonides. The Rif was written in North Africa, and reflects the customs of prevalent there. The Rosh is representative of Ashkenazim, German Jewry, and its outgrowths. The Mishne Torah, although written in Egypt, reflects the traditions of Maimonides’ Spanish homeland. In effect, what Karo did is place the traditions of the three major Jewish communities extant at that time in front of him and decide the law based on the majority. So, for example, if Spain and Germany said "permitted," and North Africa said "prohibited," the majority won. For the most part, Sefardi and North African Jewish communities accepted Karo’s code. Eastern European Jewry did not. Rabbi Moshe Isserles, a leading Polish rabbi and contemporary of Karo known as the Rama, thought Karo had shorted Ashkenazi traditions. He wrote a commentary to Karo’s work, pointing out every case where current Ashkenazi practice differed from Karo’s decision. From the late 16th century onward, Karo’s Shulkhan Arukh has been printed with Isserles’ commentary interwoven in its text. Karo’s attempt at unity failed.

So, what does all of this have to do with our restaurant problem? Karo’s code calls for a Jew to start the fire used for cooking. Without this involvement, most foods cooked by non-Jews are forbidden for Jews to eat. Isserles allows a Jew to do a minor symbolic action – adding kindling to an existing fire, for example. In his view, this permits the food. In Israel today, Isserles’ view on this issue determines the law for restaurants and food producers that carry the Jerusalem Rabbinate’s basic kosher supervision. In practice, this means a rabbinic supervisor can visit most restaurants in the morning, light the oven’s pilot lights, and leave. The restaurants' non-Jewish cooks – generally Palestinians – cook without his direct supervision for most of the day, while the rabbinic supervisor spot checks the restaurants periodically. Karo’s stricter view is followed by restaurants and food producers carrying the Jerusalem Rabbinate’s mehadrin, “choice,” supervision. These restaurants tend to have a rabbinic supervisor on premises at all times, as well. But now a group of settler rabbis, overwhelmingly Ashkenazim of eastern European origin, are challenging the Jerusalem Rabbinate’s reliance on Isserles, the Ashkenazi codifier. Why? Because forcing the Jerusalem Rabbinate to follow the stricter Sefardi view would force many restaurants to hire more Jews and, more importantly for these settler rabbis, to fire Arabs.

Kosharot, supposedly meant to be a kosher industry watchdog, leaked a report smearing dozens of Jerusalem eateries. The charges range from lax supervision to allowing Arabs to place uncooked food on the fire. Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Rabbinate, itself under ultra-Orthodox control, blasted Kosharot’s report, pointing out significant errors of both fact and law. Rabbi Benny Lau, a leader of moderate Orthodox rabbis, investigated Kosharot’s charges and refuted them. He wrote, "There is a real concern that Kosharot's interests are not restricted solely to Halacha and kashrut. Rather, for them it is no less important to reduce the number of non-Jews working in Israel.” But this is far from the first time kosher food law has been misused for a non-food-related purpose. Perhaps the earliest account on record goes back to the dawn of Rabbinic Judaism itself, approximately forty years before the destruction of the Second Temple.

The schools of Hillel and Shammai, the two competing camps that made up Rabbinic Judaism in the 1st century, disagreed about many aspects of Jewish law. One of those aspects was Judaism’s treatment of non-Jews. Shammai’s school waned gentiles kept as far away from Jews as possible. It viewed gentiles as a corrupting influence, and contact with them, in Shammai’s view, posed an unacceptable risk of intermarriage. Shammai’s school tried to pass legislation banning contact with gentiles and enhancing the spiritual “cleanliness” of Jews. Hillel’s school opposed this. Shammai’s followers did not have the votes to win – so they went dirty. The Jerusalem Talmud (Shabbat 1:4) describes what happened. The sages were meeting at the home of a prominent supporter, on the roof deck of his house. Beit Shammai came armed, murdered several members of Hillel’s school, and blocked the exits from the roof. Hillel’s remaining followers were held at spear-point until they cast votes for Shammai’s anti-gentile legislation. The 18 gezerot (decrees) proposed by Shammai’s school were then passed into law. The Jerusalem Talmud calls this day the “blackest day” to befall the Jewish people since the destruction of the Temple. Most of those 18 gezerot are in force to this day, including bans on gentile-baked bread and gentile-produced wine. The theory was, if you can’t eat a gentile’s bread or drink his wine, you can’t eat in his home. If you can’t eat in his home, you can’t socialize with him. And, if you can’t socialize with him, you probably won’t marry him. The law forbidding food cooked by non-Jews is a derivative of those laws. What Israel’s settler rabbis are doing isn’t that different from what Shammai’s followers did. What they could never gain legitimately they seek to gain through fraud and deceit. A flip side to this is B’maaglei Tzedek, a moderate Orthodox justice organization that certifies restaurants treat their employees fairly. About one third of Jerusalem restaurants now carry this certification alongside kosher supervision from the Jerusalem Rabbinate.

While Rabbinic Judaism claims to be following the traditions of Hillel’s school, the truth is far more complex. Rabbinic Judaism is a blend of both Hillel and Shammai’s outlook. In most ritual matters, we follow Hillel. But, in matters relating to contact with gentiles, Shammai’s view – the more radical and restrictive – still prevails. Fanatics see the world in black and white, and their law reflects that. Moderates understand that nuance exists and that there is room for compromise. The fanatic position is easier to sell – think right wing talk radio – because moderation requires living with complexity and the uncertainty that always shadows it. Although the Academy was dominated by Hillel’s moderates, the populace was solidly in Shammai’s corner and would remain so until the Second Temple was destroyed. Indeed, it is thought that many of the zealots who helped cause the destruction were children of Shammai’s followers.

Just like in ancient times, there are two polarizing forces in Rabbinic Judaism. One is ever more radical, restrictive and exclusionary; the other, moderate.

Have the lessons of the past been learned? Only time will tell.

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