Renana Levine, the producer of this video, which seems to have gone viral. And, of course, to all the unladylike ladies who gathered in the "House of the Rising Sun" to press their point of view.
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Every dog has its day, they say.
A Rabbinical court has ruled that the mean spirit of a secular lawyer who insulted judges 20 years ago was transferred into the body of a stray dog, reports Ynet news! This article caused a bit of headscratching among lawyers who haven't yet been reincarnated as canines. Ridiculous? PETA activists and their ilk don't think so and have unleashed their own flurry of protests. When the international press began drawing comparisons to Sharia courts and medieval justice to pariahs, many Israelis cringed. (The actions of Black Hats often seem barking mad to outsiders.)
A Jerusalem rabbinical court recently sentenced a wandering dog to death by stoning. The cruel sentence stemmed from the suspicion that the hound was the reincarnation of a famous secular lawyer, who insulted the court's judges 20 years ago.
Several weeks ago, according to the Behadrei Hadarim website, a large dog entered the Monetary Affairs Court near the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim. The dog scared the court's visitors and, to their surprise, refused to leave even after they attempted to drive him away.
One of the judges suddenly recalled that about 20 years ago, a famous secular lawyer who insulted the court was cursed by the panel of judges, who wished that his spirit would move on to the body of a dog (considered an impure animal by Halacha). The lawyer passed away several years ago.
Still offended, one of the judges sentenced the poor animal to death by stoning, recruiting the neighborhood's children to carry out the order. Luckily, the dog managed to escape.
The head of the court, Rabbi Avraham Dov Levin, denied that the judges had called for the dog's stoning. But one of the court's managers confirmed the report to Yedioth Ahronoth.
"It was ordered by the rabbis because of the grief he had caused the court," he said. "They didn't issue an official ruling, but ordered the children outside to throw stones at him in order to drive him away. They didn't think of it as cruelty to animals, but as an appropriate way to 'get back at' the spirit which entered the poor dog."
Jerusalem City Council Member and social activist Rachel Azaria sent an urgent letter to the attorney general, calling on him to "deal with the criminals". The Let the Animals Live organization filed a complaint with the police against Rabbi Levin.
Tip of the shtreimel to photographer Gali Tibbon for this hairy tale about a possible ban on animal pelts from Asia, and how it could impact the ultra-Orthodox community inside Israel. Note that there also are fake fur hats for the rain - a better look perhaps than an elasticated shower cap fastened on for protection
For Jason Koutsoukis' original article,filed from Jerusalem, click here
At dusk on the Sabbath, few things are more spectacular in Jerusalem than the passing parade of fur hats moving inexorably towards the Western Wall.
There are great furry crowns of all shades of brown, lined with velvet and leather. Some are so wide and flat they look like a sombrero made of sable; others so high you might think they were top hats made of mink.
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They are shtreimels, the traditional headwear of some Hasidic Jews worn on the Sabbath and on holidays, but not to be confused with spodiks or kolpiks, other varieties of hairy hat reserved for more revered rabbinical sages.
Once symbols of persecution, they were first imposed by 18th-century Polish kings who decreed that Jews must wear the tail of an animal on the Sabbath to show they were not working.
The tradition spread through eastern Europe, with each Jewish sect adapting the shtreimel to its own taste, and instead of being a mark of persecution it became a symbol of pride.
Standing at the Damascus Gate to Jerusalem's Old City before sunset on Friday, watching the stream of shtreimels make their way to the holiest site in Judaism, the practised eye can tell a lot about each person just from the cut of their hat — the name of the sect each Hasid comes from, and which part of Europe their ancestors hailed from.
The shtreimel is also a dead giveaway for things such as the income of the wearer, what religious texts and customs they adhere to, and even whether or not they are Zionists.
Sitting in his office at the Knesset, Israel's parliament, dressed in a black tailcoat, black vest and white shirt, Rabbi Moses had just returned from heated debate in the Knesset chamber.
"People want to ban furs imported from Asia because of the way the animal is killed there," he says. "But what does this mean for the shtreimel?"
With the proposed law carrying a punishment of a year in prison, Rabbi Moses asks who will pay for the prisons to house all the law-breaking Jews who import the wrong kind of fur.
"Today, as I told the history of the shtreimel, what it means to Jewish history and custom, I left them all wide-eyed in the Knesset. Jaws open," he said.
Rabbi Moses said that the opposition leader, Tzipi Livni, was among those who approached him after his speech, offering her congratulations. End result? The bill has been deferred to committee.
To make one shtreimel can take up to 400 tails of various breeds of mink, sable and fox — the scrap of the fur industry.
Customers are fussy... The hardest part is measuring their heads to get an exact size.
With only 10,000 shtreimels produced around the world each year, it's definitely what you would call a niche market. But at a cost of up to $4000 each, it can be a profitable one.
Here's an advert for a cable channel which shows how the secular Tel Aviv bubble-bubbas view their ultra-Orthodox brethren. The integration of schools seems to be a tough issue for the insular black hat sects and leads to insoluble problems in some school districts inside Jerusalem.
Update from AP:
...one of the largest protests in Jerusalem's history [was] a stark reminder of the ultra-Orthodox minority's refusal to accept the authority of the state.
Also, the throngs of devout Jews showed to which extent the ultra-Orthodox live by their own rules, some of them archaic, while wielding disproportionate power in the modern state of Israel.
Parents of European, or Ashkenazi, descent at a girls' school in the West Bank settlement of Emanuel don't want their daughters to study with schoolgirls of Mideast and North African descent, known as Sephardim.
The Ashkenazi parents insist they aren't racist, but want to keep the classrooms segregated, as they have been for years, arguing that the families of the Sephardi girls aren't religious enough.
Israel's Supreme Court rejected that argument, and ruled that the 43 sets of parents who have defied the integration efforts by keeping their daughters from school were to be jailed on Thursday for two weeks.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said about 100,000 people converged in downtown Jerusalem in support of the Ashkenazi parents. An additional 20,000 demonstrated in the central city of Bnei Brak. He said 10,000 police were deployed.
Most of the demonstrators were men wearing the long beards and heavy black clothing typical among ultra-Orthodox Jews. "The Supreme Court is fascist," said one poster.
Esther Bark, 50, who has seven daughters, said the issue is keeping the girls away from the temptations of the modern world. "To suddenly put them in an open-minded place is not good for them," she said.
A large demonstration is likely to take place this afternoon,June 17th, in the City Center and Me'a She'arim areas of Jerusalem between 2:00pm and 5:00pm. Estimates of up to 100,000 people are expected to march from Yirmiyahu, Bar Eilan, and Shvtei Yisrael and Prophet Streets toward the Israeli National Police station at the
"Russian compound" where the demonstration will take place.the city entrance.
Now you see em; now you don't!
Altered reality has stopped coming as a surprise on the streets of Israel. It's a given in this city of high sects' appeal. Can you find the distaff ministers in the group shot of Bibi Netanyahu's new administration? Aha
Two ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspapers have touched up an official photo of the new Israeli cabinet, removing two female ministers from the "bloated committee", in order to adhere to their comunities' devout behavioural standards.
Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver were snapped with the rest of the 30-member cabinet for their inaugural photo.
But Yated Neeman newspaper digitally changed the picture by replacing them with two men. The Shaa Tova newspaper blacked out the females.
Publishing pictures of women is viewed by many ultra-orthodox Jews as a violation of female modesty.
Other Israeli papers jokingly reprinted the altered images next to the original photos, with one headlining it "Find the lady".
The ultra-Orthodox community keeps apart from mainstream society through its arcane religious practices and prescribed clothing. Black hats, coats and sidelocks are required for the men and long skirts, snoods and sleeves for the women.
Restrictions include using only "Kosher" telephones, only carrying items outside the home on the Sabbath if walking under Rabbinically approved wires called eruv, and, of course, not accessing websites with content deemed inappropriate. Is Israelity Bites on the verboten list?
Considering oneself "holier than thou" is not an acceptable excuse for striking out. And somehow, worrying incidents linked to extremist fundamentalist views invariably hit out against women. There's a common thread of common brutality that ties together patriarchal monotheistic cultures. Lately, the most conservative ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem have begun to dispatch self-appointed modesty patrols which, in action, are not too different from those despicable goons armed with whips who circulated Kabul for the Taliban's ministry for propagation of virtue and suppression of vice. The AFP interviewed the anonymous witness, who still is cowering from these so-called religious men:
Shaking as she recalled her brutal beating at the hands of Jewish ultra-Orthodox vigilantes, a 28-year-old Jerusalem woman who would only identify herself as M. said she feared for her life.
Some residents say the self-styled "modesty squads" are spreading terror among those seen as straying from the strict moral code demanded of the ultra-Orthodox in the more conservative neighbourhoods of the Holy City.
There life revolves largely around the study of holy texts and a strict dress code that has men sporting black coats and wide-brimmed hats and women covering their heads, arms and legs.
Two weeks ago police arrested two alleged members of a modesty patrol accused of brutally beating M.
The gang allegedly gagged her, hit her, kicked her and said she would be killed if she did not move out of the ultra-Orthodox Maalot Dafna neighbourhood.
"They beat me up, tied me up and threatened to kill me," M. said, holding back her tears. "Who will prevent them from killing me?"
Neighbours had complained of what they called the divorcee's "indecent" lifestyle, which in such neighbourhoods can mean anything from wearing trousers to meeting men in private.
"I don't know why I was treated this way. What has my life got to do with those guys," said M., who until three years ago was married to a Haredi -- a term used to describe the most theologically conservative form of Judaism.
Police have also detained a man accused of torching a store in an ultra-Orthodox district that sold what some residents considered "immoral" clothing.
In Mea Shearim, a Haredi bastion where streets are sealed off for the Jewish day of rest and satellite dishes are considered a sign of heresy, an electronics store has become the latest target of the morality squads.
A young man, sporting the distinctive Haredi sidecurls, beard, black garb and hat, stood outside the store handing out pamphlets.
He said the store was threatening the morals of the community by selling MP4 players that would allow buyers to view indecent movies in their homes.
"This shop corrupts the neighbourhood youth," the man said. "We will fight until they stop selling these impure devices."
David, a salesman at the store, said he is an Orthodox Jew but believes that the protesters who have picketed outside for weeks "are spreading terror in the neighbourhood".
"They burned down our stocks, nothing will stop them," he said, declining to give his family name for fear of being singled out for attack.
In June, a 14-year-old Mea Sharim resident was taken to hospital with burns after an attacker hurled acid at her.
Israeli media said that at the time of the attack the girl had been wearing loose-fitting trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, enough to provoke the ire of religious fanatics.
In 2006, a 50-year-old American-Israeli woman was viciously attacked by four men because she refused to go to the back of a bus while on holiday in Jerusalem. The bus was not one of the sex-segregated lines Jerusalem runs to accommodate Haredi preferences.
In addition to violence within the Haredi community, Israel has also seen tensions between religious and secular Jews over the course of its 60-year history.
The ultra-Orthodox have led violent protests against swimming pools, cinemas and other establishments they consider immoral for failing to segregate the sexes or sacrilegious for opening on the Sabbath.
Meny Schwartz, who heads the religious Kol Haredi radio station, said the modesty patrols have been around for years, with the full approval of religious leaders, but appear to have become increasingly violent.
"For some weeks we've been seeing excesses," he said.
Oops. Tel Aviv airport staff are great at preventing dodgy items aboard the plane, but a little girl passenger got left behind, the AP reports.
Israeli airport police say a local couple embarked on an unlikely European vacation, remembering their duty-free shopping and their 18 suitcases but forgetting their three-year-old daughter at the airport.
The couple and their five children were late for their flight to Paris yesterday and made a dash to the gate. In the confusion, their daughter got lost. A policeman found her wandering around the terminal, crying for her mother.
Israeli media Monday reported that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish parents, whose names were not released, didn't notice the child was missing until they were told in the air that she had been found at Ben-Gurion airport. The child, accompanied by a member of airline staff, took the next flight to Paris where she was safely reunited with her parents.
Some fascinating snippets of history are posted by a thoughtful Tim Franks, on the BBC Jerusalem Diary
"Here, everyone begrudges everyone else," President Shimon Peres is quoted as saying.
So what do Israelis make of their compatriots, and their state? Check out the BBC Today programme's interviews with "five tribes" of the Holy Land: secular, settler, ultra-orthodox, Palestinian (the man in question rejects the label "Israeli Arab"), and a non-Jewish Russian immigrant.The one thing the five share is that they all hold Israeli citizenship.
# Yuli, the secular trainee teacher from Jerusalem: "The moment that people will prefer to deal with their own stuff, and dream their own dreams, rather than the dreams of the big Jewish nation, maybe the situation will get better."
# Shoshana, the settler from Qedumim: "This is the Middle East: another language, another code. It's not Europe; it's not America… My father, who built this state, always told us that we have to pay a tax, a price, for living here. We have an obligation to pay, as we don't have any other place to go."
# Mohammed, the Palestinian from a village near Nazareth: "The way Israel deals with its Arab minority is the indication of how the world should deal with the Jewish minority. If Israel continues to discriminate against the Arab minority in Israel, it has no moral right to speak against discrimination against Jews around the world."
# Jonathan, the Haredi (ultra-orthodox man) from Jerusalem: "Israel was meant to create a New Jew - the idea that the term Jew was not enough, and we had to create something new, something that was a rejection in many respects of the Jew of the exile. But that New Jew has turned out to be a chimera."
# Mila, the non-Jewish Russian immigrant, now living in Gedera: "I am not a Jew, no. But when I sing songs in class about love for the land of Israel, it's just like in Russia when we would have moments of love for our homeland. Then when I hear the songs and spoke with older Arabs, my heart hurts and I start to cry."
Ramat Beit Shemesh (which, a former Jerusalem city councilwoman tells me, translates as ‘House of the Rising Sun’,) is an oddly appropriate name for a troubled suburb of Jerusalem. Remember?
Oh mother tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Spend your lives in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun
In the narrow lanes of Beit Shemesh, a suburb where cloistered ultra-Orthodox families vie for space with Israeli Arabs, there evolved a cult of radically modest Jewish women who insist on cloaking their faces and bodies under seven layers of fabric, refraining from speaking to any males who are not their husbands (including their own sons)and rarely leaving their homes.
It was odd how the Israeli press labeled the cult leader as "that Taleban woman" -- even though she was not remotely Islamic, but a member of the tribe. The group seemed like cranks and people preferred not to be associated with them. "The women of Israel are lessening in God's eyes because the Arabs are more modest in dress. If the Jews want to conquer the Arabs in this land they must enhance their modesty,” her followers had asserted.
Click here for the Times of London take on the cult.
So what does one call a “Jewish Burqa”?-- no, jokers, not a Berkowitz, but a “sai”. As the odd group gained momentum almost 100 of the female cultist's followers began dressing like ambient sacks. The lumpy ladies were dismissed as a quirky curiosity, until it became tragically apparent that Keren, their self-styled leader, had something more than her face to hide. The mother was arrested for neglecting and abusing her brood of a dozen children and even tolerating incest amongst the teenagers. Her own sister admitted her concern that this sibling was mad and needed help. But going to the authorities for help is viewed akin to treason; problems are expected to be dealt with inside the group. One doesn't air dirty laundry and taint the name of the religion. For G*d's sake shut up, is accepted practice.
(Finally this month Keren was charged with at least 25 counts of aggravated assault on six of her 12 children. The High Court ordered her to remain in custody, and overturned a lower court ruling which would have seen the woman placed under house arrest.)
But then an even more horrifying case, if possible, was unearthed inside the secretive world of Jerusalem's ultra-orthodox community. A mother of eight, following tips from the charismatic Rabbi Elior Chen, sought help for "correcting" her naughtiest pre-school age children, a few months after separating from her husband. The adults had attempted to purge demons from the boys with cigarette burns, hammer blows that broke bones, by locking them inside suitcases for days on end, then forcing the lads to eat feces and drink water from the toilet. The four-year-old ultimately was admitted to hospital in a coma, and his father sought permission to pray at his bedside in intensive care. Rabbi Chen fled to Canada when the case broke.
Tragic as they are, these haredi child abuse cases do shine a light into dark family corners and indicate what can happen inside a hermetic world, where youngsters are not taught words to describe abuse and outsiders rarely dare to interfere.
Israelity bites.
A Baptist Bible church, located in one of the swankiest neighborhoods of Jerusalem, was torched last night, 25 years after ultra-Orthodox extremist vandals burnt down its original wooden chapel. This attack comes barely 2 weeks after the murder of a Baptist bookseller on the streets of Gaza City, and the Christian community in Israel is playing the incident down.
Chuck Kopp, one of the pastors of the Narkis Baptist church, said he did not know who was behind the latest outrage, which left smouldering chairs and a scorched interior, but did not destroy Bibles or hymnals. Attackers fled the scene and remained at large on Wednesday.
Their motive for arson was not immediately clear, police said.
Arsonists broke into the church building, located in Rehavia, just before 11 p.m. on Tuesday night, setting it alight in three different places.Jewish neighbors summoned firefighters to protect the present sanctuary, which had opened in 1993.
The church offers services in English, Hebrew, and Russian. Worshippers number in the hundreds and attend separate sermons for different congregations, including two for Messianic Jews. Worryingly, some of the Russian speakers attending the services for Messianic Jews had been previously threatened, church officials told police. Messianic Jews consider themselves Jewish even though they believe in Jesus, and are anathema to ultra-Orthodox extremists, who pity them.
In the past, Israeli anti-proselytizer activists have called the church a hotbed of missionary activity.
The church pastor, who has been living in Israel for 40 years, noted that the arson attack took place on the date commemorating the assassination of the late prime minster Yitzhak Rabin 12 years ago, according to the Hebrew calendar.
"Every society has its fanatics and there is no lack of fanatics here in the Middle East," he said, adding that he was not surprised by the attack.
"We've been needing a face-lift anyway," he shrugged.
The rescue of an eight-year old boy, who was pulled alive from the Dead Sea after midnight on Friday following five hours of intensive searching, is hailed as a miracle in today's Israeli press reports. Little Shneur Zalman Friedman kept his hopes afloat and his head above water even though his ultra-Orthodox dad and brother failed to notice that he was missing until almost nightfall. (It was a male-only outing on Thursday afternoon, and Izzy Bee can't help but wonder whether Mama Friedman, back in Jerusalem's Mea Shearim neighborhood, might have noticed sooner that her son was nowhere to be found. Brisk offshore winds caused him to drift south for three kilometers.)
It's almost impossible to sink in this buoyant mineral-laden Dead Sea, as the photo above shows. But a single drop in the eye causes excruciating pain and after five hours of submersion, the little boy would have had a tremendous thirst and chapped lips. Swallowing any water would have been disastrous. The little boy with salt-caked sidecurls was in shock when a boat finally pulled up alongside him. He eventually told his rescuers that he'd recited Psalms, prayed and even briefly dozed off, and had contemplated swimming toward the mountains for help. To avoid an international incident, the IDF warned Jordanian authorities on the opposite shore about their night search which featured emergency flairs, helicopters, and motor boats.
Ironically, the Israeli lifeguards' union went on general strike the following day, all along the coast except for Tel Aviv and Haifa. Five Israelis drowned over the weekend, three of them after the strike went into effect, when police officers had to stand guard. Rookie Israeli lifeguards are paid only minimum wage, 19.50 shekels per hour (less than five dollars) and negotiations for increases had stalemated. The Mediterranean Sea, unlike the calmer Dead Sea, now is rife with riptides and higher than normal waves. Since the bathing season started in April, 19 Israelis have drowned.
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