Haredi hat-snatching gangs in Bnei Brak

Hang onto your hats, fellows. This is not conflict as we Israelis usually know it... it might have been inspired by a Dr Seuss plot. But maybe we can use the same strategy for peace settlements elsewhere, since the Road Map has folded and the Annapolis agreement is a non-starter. Buki Naeh, of Yediot Aharonot, lifts the lid on the furious fur hat snatching reportedly going on in Bnei Brak, a densely-packed ultra-orthodox city east of Tel Aviv.
(Where is PETA to sort them out??)

Rival gangs in the Viznits Hasidic community in Bnei Brak won't steal shekels or waste their breath in ideological arguments, Buki tells us. Instead, these Hasidic quarrelers swipe each others shtreimels and barter for their return.

First some background: The shtreimel is a fur hat worn by many married haredi Jewish men belonging to one of the various Hasidic sects on Sabbath and holidays. The hat, like those once worn by Polish and Russian nobles, requires up to 30 skins-- preferably sable, mink, or fox. A Hasidic man buys one or two expensive shterimels throughout his life for a price range of $2,000 to $5,000. Fake fur shtreimels are available, especially inside Israel, but are frowned upon by traditionalists. Usually the bride's father purchases the shtreimel for a groom to wear at his wedding. Nowadays, it is customary to buy two shtreimels—a cheaper version (sells for $800-1,500), called the regn shtraml (rain shtreimel) is used for occasions where the expensive one may get damaged. But economy-minded family men often prefer shower caps or plastic bags to protect regn shtreimels on sodden Saturdays. Most of these hats are made in New York City, Montreal or Israel.

The shtreimel is worn without fastening, a significant factor in the latest street fights in the Viznits neighborhood. Those looking to humiliate a Hasid snatch his shterimel, forcing him to return home with a lowered head sporting only his yarmulke.

In recent weeks, the brawls between the camps have intensified, with both sides snatching each other’s shtreimels. During the peacemaking, each camp returns the other’s goods stolen in the latest strife.

The barters, one of which took place two weeks ago, also include returning torn shterimels that were intentionally spoiled and torn in the heat of battle in exchange for ones in mint condition.

In each fight, the Viznits Hassids try to snatch as many shterimels off their opponents’ heads, so as to have as many bargaining chips as possible ahead of the next barter.

An entire book can be written about the background leading to these street fights in the Viznits community. When Hasidic leader Rabbi Yehoshua Moshe Hagar fell ill, a world war was ignited between his sons – the elder Yisrael and the younger Menachem Mendel – on who will succeed him.

Mendel vs. Yisrael

Viznits Hasidism is divided between the “Yisraelists” following Rabbi Yisrael and “Mendelists” supporting Rabbi Menachem Mendel. The walls in Kiryat Viznits are filled with defamatory posters. Rabbi Yisrael controls the synagogue and the community institutions while Rabbi Mendel reigns over the neighborhood.

Until about six weeks ago, the status quo between the two camps had the Mendelists come to pray at the central synagogue of “Torat Chaim” only on Fridays. They would stand on their seats during the tish (a Hasidic gathering of Hasidim around their Rabbi) held by the ailing Rabbi.

But then the visiting Mendelists’ seats were broken down, and the Yisraelists prevented their entrance to the synagogue. In response, the Menedlists tried to stand on the Yisraelists’ seats, waging war once again.

The recent street fights – mainly during weekends – included more than 100 participants hitting each other and trying to grab the shterimels. One brawl follows another, sending dozens of people to hospital.

The police claim they are doing their best to calm the atmosphere, but they are ill at hand, as each camp complains the police is siding with its opponent. Legal counseling has recently been applied to the case, when Attorney Moshe Meroz was approached by some Mendelists. Meroz immediately sent a letter to the Tel Aviv Police, asking them to handle the pogroms issued by the Yisarelists against the Mendalists.

In his urgent letter, Meroz claims that the Mendelists’ complaints about the pogroms are not being handled by the police. He further says that hundreds of Yisraelists attacked Rabbi Mendel and his followers, beating them mercilessly – completely overlooked by the police.

Meroz ends his letter by saying that some 20 shterimels have yet to be returned to the Mendelists, and that real danger is at hand due to the police’s continued disregard of the matter.

The police responded by saying they were well aware of the strife and is handling the case without siding with either camp. The police also claim they have arrested Hasidim from both camps after the last fight.

Bridge of Strings - with dangling performers

Bridge of Strings _131
Originally uploaded by bdnegin

Maybe it was worth the 2 million shekels to the spectators in Jerusalem, Israel's poorest city. If you were stalled in traffic and unable to see, and only heard the explosions, you might have been excused for thinking Apocalypse!

Calatrava Bridge, Jerusalem

Calatrava Bridge, Jerusalem
Originally uploaded by spindexr

Here's another night view of the new bridgein Jerusalem !


In conjunction with its opening, check out some awesome Black Hat influence stories...

http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/jerusalem/

Does Jerusalem's new bridge come with strings attached?

One topic guaranteed to split Jerusalem dinner parties into rabid warring factions is the brand new light railway bridge that the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava has erected at great expense- at $73m, triple the original estimate. Add to that the pricey opening ceremony last night, which blew half the city's cultural affairs budget for the whole year on dazzling skyrockets, aerial acrobats and pop singers. Since the railway is at least a couple of years behind schedule, and its construction creates maddening chaos for drivers, kvetching is inevitable.

Love it or hate it, there's no middle ground on this bridge. The response of Jean Max, a grandmother who's lived three decades in Jerusalem, is typical:"It might even be great architecture. But not for this city. It's too modern and it clashes. Ugly, ugly, ugly." At the opening ceremony, opponents booed the mayor and called it "cursed." They labelled it a "clothes line", rather than use the lofty official name Bridge of Chords (more like discord). Most Jerusalemites call it the Bridge of Strings, because of its suspension with 66 steel cables from a tilted mast over 100 meters high. From certain angles , it resembles a goliath David's Harp. Or a Bedouin's tent. From afar, it's striking, even though it pokes out from a clutter of grubby apartment complexes and hotels. (Every time Izzy Bee catches a glimpse of the spectacular structure, it makes me gasp. A modern and useful landmark in a modern part of West Jerusalem is to be praised. So what if it's not imitating the buildings from King Herod's day?)

Haaretz newspaper griped on its front page how the opening ceremony for the bridge brought the city to gridlock for ten hours, when the whole idea was initially to ease traffic. Commentators complained that there are 40 Calatrava bridges scattered around the globe, and they all share a "processed and globalized aesthetic" which makes them comparable to "the McDonalds of bridges: easy to digest but whose nutritional value is suspect." What's more, it's super-sized!

When it emerged that a Palestinian subcontractor for the project employed workers during the Jewish Sabbath, when observant Jews do not work, many ultra-Orthodox demanded the opening ceremony be cancelled.

“The municipality was stunned to discover this week that a subcontractor from East Jerusalem … carried out surfacing work at the bridge’s plaza before the end of Shabbat (Sabbath)” the city said in a statement.
The subcontractor was fired.

For admirers, this bridge evokes harps and psalms and the Midrashic legend

that David went everywhere with his harp in hand, and would hang his harp above his bed when he slept. At midnight as the wind would blow from the north, the harp would begin to play by itself. He would awaken and begin anew to praise G-d..

Arabs living in East Jerusalem have little time to fuss over the aesthetics of the new white suspension bridge at the city's opposite gateway. Most of them get greeted at gunpoint by soldiers at checkpoints along the less-than-lovely separation barrier, after all.

Shooting stops Sarkozy farewell fest dead

"Shalom, we had a blast!"

Er, well, at least up to the time that a guard killed himself Tuesday in the middle of a farewell ceremony at Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion airport. The security was tight for French President Nicolas Sarkozy, his wife Carla Bruni, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, President Shimon Peres and other state dignitaries. Police spokesman Shlomi Sagi said the guard died in an apparent suicide, and police denied an attempted assassination attempt on Sarkozy.

However, a conflicting report said the soldier apparently fell from a vantage point he was occupying on a high building, from where he was securing the event, and the bullet that killed him misfired from his M-16 rifle.

According to Israel Radio, the incident happened no more than 200 meters from where Olmert was standing.

Initially, the prime minister's security personnel withdrew their handguns and rushed Olmert and Peres to bullet-proof cars, while Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy were rushed to the French president's plane. The shooting occurred while a military band was playing, and the leaders apparently didn't hear anything.

When the incident ended Olmert and Peres boarded Sarkozy's plane to bid the French president farewell.

It was not immediately clear whether the soldier died from the impact of the fall or from the misfired bullet.

The incident brought the ceremony to an abrupt end.

Some jested that the security guard lost his footing while straining to see Madame Carla, the French first lady, who has had a Jackie Kennedy dazzle on the populace at large. Israel Radio said the soldier who was shot was stationed 100 meters to 200 meters away. Two women soldiers who witnessed the shooting were treated for shock, the radio said.

Israel's volunteer medical service Zaka said the soldier apparently committed suicide. But other media reports said he may have fainted from the heat, discharging his gun accidentally.

There was no immediate word on the soldier's condition.

Israelis less than enraptured with Hagee

Is Pastor Hagee Good for the Jews? writes David Van Biema in Time Magazine. The fire and brimstone preacher directs plenty of American dollars and prayers to Israel with his faith-fuelled boosterism, and cynical Israelis certainly do not indulge in "Hagee-ography". Instead, they welcome him with open arms, and ignore offensive parts of his message.

Cutting ties with John Hagee has proved to be a lot easier for Senator John McCain than it has been for some of the very Jewish groups most offended by the conservative Evangelical pastor's statements about God and the Holocaust. McCain moved to dissociate himself from Hagee after a 1999 sermon was publicized in which Hagee claimed that God intended the Holocaust, and had prophesied it in the Book of Jeremiah. "And that will be offensive to some people," Hagee boomed. "Well, dear heart, be offended. I didn't write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, 'My top priority to the Jewish people is to get them back to Israel.'

But where McCain cut ties with the Evangelical mega-pastor who had endorsed his candidacy, Abe Foxman, head of the anti-Semitism watchdog organization the Anti-defamation League, appeared more willing to forgive. The reason for Foxman's reluctance to abandon Hagee may have been summed up in a letter from the pastor carried on the ADL's website, in which Hagee points out, "I have devoted much of my adult life to combating anti-Semitism and supporting the state of Israel."
Hagee's support for the Jewish State — he also heads up the influential organization Christians United for Israel, and was a key speaker at last year's conference of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — has brought Israel millions, if not billions of dollars from Evangelical tourism, and it has delivered political support for a strong pro-Israel policy in Washington. As important as it has been to Israel, such backing has always come with an asterisk: Hagee's affection for Israel derives from a belief that for the Second Coming of Christ to occur, the Jews must return to Israel and rebuild the Temple destroyed by the Romans. The catch in this belief is that once the End Times roll, practicing Jews will be killed off during a period called the Tribulation — only those who convert to Christianity will survive.
Asked about this theology in a 2006 interview with NPR's Terry Gross, Hagee said that Jews would not be "raptured" and would be exposed to the Tribulation, although he said an unspecified number of survivors will accept Jesus as the Messiah and thereby attain eternal life. Many Jewish supporters of Israel tolerated Hagee's disdain for their beliefs, reasoning that his friendship was useful to Israel and that his End-Times scenario was but a harmless fantasy.
But the 1999 sermon jolted many, because of its implication that Hagee could look with equanimity upon the mass extermination of Jews not only at some point in the hypothetical future, but also in the recent past. And, dear heart, they were offended.

After McCain dropped Hagee, the pastor wrote in a letter to Foxman that the Holocaust had been "a tragedy unique in its evil and horror," and that he himself was committed to helping the Jewish community fulfill the words "Never again." However, he admitted, "Central to my faith is a belief in an omnipotent, sovereign God" who presumably could have stopped it. "I grappled with the vexing question of why a loving God would allow the Holocaust to occur."

Hagee is a potent influence in the hyper-fundamentalist wing of the Evangelical movement, and although his beliefs (technically known as pre-millenial dispensationalism) are held formally only by a minority of Evangelical congregations, the Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, which render those ideas in fictional form, have been wildly popular. So it is worth noting that Hagee's claim to have been pained and perplexed at how his God could have allowed the Holocaust may represent fuzzy logic. After all, Hagee made clear in 1999 that he thinks he knows exactly why God had allowed the Holocaust — in Hagee's view of the preordained march of history towards Salvation, the Jews are collateral damage.

Most Biblical historians believe that Jeremiah, who indeed spent his career predicting his own people's ruin, lived to see his vision fulfilled when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem in 587 BC. It's difficult to find a serious academic who believes Jeremiah was looking 2,600-odd years into the future, although it may be a snug fit with the narrative of pre-millenialism. Unlike most of his predecessors, Hagee knows and likes Jews — rather like a Maoist who has personally befriended some members of the bourgeoisie, and finds himself torn between his affinity for them as individuals and what he knows to be their fate as a class in history's inevitable march toward a greater good.

For McCain, Hagee's theology may make him a liability, but for Foxman, the need for the Evangelical powerhouse's support for Israel trumps any annoyance at his view that the purpose of the Jewish State is to create conditions for an apocalypse that will see most Jews destroyed. Without commenting directly on Hagee, the ADL chief told TIME that in general "My condition for [evangelical] friendship is that your love is not conditioned on my accepting your theology." Hagee apparently passes muster, since Foxman, replying to his letter, stated that he looked forward to working with the pastor against anti-Semitism. "We value your acknowledgement that the Holocaust was a tragedy unique in its evil and horror" and "the limits of our understanding in seeking to comprehend the mind of God," Foxman wrote. He added avuncularly, "We mortals sometimes get into trouble fathoming God's ways." Some of us more predictably than most.

Two further memorable quotes from Hagee, the millionaire televangelist. Makes one wonder whether it's hyperbole from the pulpit or scary bombast:

“God caused Hurricane Katrina to wipe out New Orleans because it had a gay pride the week before and was filled with sexual sin.”

“All Muslims are programmed to kill and we can never negotiate with any of them. …those who live by the Koran have a mandate to kill Christians and Jews.”

Settler rocket lands beside an Arab at prayer

On the Yeshiva Od Yosef Hai, an extremist religious school about 3 km outside Nablus, the students in knitted skullcaps aren't exactly rocket scientists. But they can consult the Internet and tinker with explosives. Two weeks back, rowdy theological students fired a homemade steel rocket at the Palestinian village nearby. Virtually identical to the Hamas militants' Qassams, the rocket was of basic design and wildly inaccurate. Who would have guessed that during the leadup to the this week's agreed "lull" in the hostilities in Gaza, the West Bank would get peppered by an improvised 'Kosher' Kassam or two?

Maariv, a Hebrew language daily, headlined their piece "Yeshiva Student from Yitzhar Built Kassam Rocket and Fired it on Arab Village", as if it were a one-off incident. But according to the AP wires, plenty of weapons are stashed in the settlement and radical settlers fire at Arab villages nearby. These aggressive moves somehow are seen as pre-emptive self-defense in the Promised Land. Unlike in Sderot, no Red Dawn warning sounds a few moments before these rockets explode.

A Kassam of One’s Own

A Blue and White Kassam Rocket
Ma’ariv (p. 4) by Roi Sharon -- The settlement Yitzhar in Samaria has been in an uproar in the wake of an unprecedented affair. A pupil who attends the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva in the settlement fired a home-made Kassam rocket from a hilltop near the settlement in the direction of a Palestinian village. The first person to be questioned in the incident was Rabbi Itzik Shapira, the yeshiva principal, who was arrested yesterday.
Shortly before the incident, members of the launching crew informed people on the settlement that an experiment was about to be held and that an explosion would sound. The launching crew members said that the explosion in question would be controlled and ought to be ignored by residents of the settlement. The rocket, which was comprised of a launching construct, a pipe and explosives, landed in farmland between Yitzhar and the Palestinian village. The rocket exploded. Breslau Hassid happened to be standing in the field and praying a few meters away from where the rocket exploded. He was not injured.
After the rocket exploded, which created a very loud report throughout the sector, large numbers of military troops were sent to the area. The security forces were inclined to believe at first that this had been a terror attack, but a preliminary examination established that the rocket had been fired from the settlement at the village and not the other way around. As soon as Central Command officials understood that they were dealing with Jewish rocket fire, the investigation was turned over to the GSS and to the Samaria and Judea District Police.
The detectives believe that the student who assembled the rocket, and who has yet to be arrested, obtained the know-how from the internet. The detectives are now trying to establish who supplied the boy with the explosives and who were his partners to the launching.
The yeshiva administration, which understood immediately that this was a red line that had been crossed, immediately expelled the student who was responsible for the rocket fire.
Residents of the settlement, where the incident is commonly referred to as the ‘rocket incident,’ also disassociated themselves vehemently from the people responsible. The Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva is identified with the extreme right wing, and many of the 20 people who were banned from entering Judea and Samaria a year and a half ago are students at that yeshiva.
Incidentally, the president of the yeshiva is Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, the author of a book that praises Baruch Goldstein [who perpetrated the 1994 massacre in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron].
The GSS recently provided the police with information that might lead to a few additional suspects in the incident and asked the police to carry out a number of arrests and searches. Yesterday morning dozens of police officers arrived at the yeshiva in Yitzhar, conducted a search of the premises and confiscated a number of computers. The search provided the police with no new information. The police also detained Rabbi Itzik Shapira and another two people, who were turned over to the GSS for questioning in a nearby military base.
All three were released after a three-hour interrogation. The three are not suspected of being involved in the incident but were questioned with the purpose of obtaining information that might facilitate the investigation.
A central figure in Yitzhar said in response: “As opposed to the incidents surrounding the destruction of the trailer, in the rocket affair the settlement completely disassociates itself from the behavior of the yeshiva students. The settlement places full responsibility on the yeshiva administration for the acts of its students and refuses to back up the yeshiva on this affair.”
The security forces view the incident with extreme gravity since it is the first time that right wing elements have tried their hand at high trajectory fire.
The Samaria and Judea District Police said that “the incident is still under investigation.” A GSS spokesman said that the General Security Service would not discuss the incident.

After the loud explosion, continued the Jerusalem Post, a large number of IDF soldiers arrived at the scene, concerned that a terror attack had been perpetrated. However, the troops discovered that the rocket had been fired from the Yitzhar area and not from Palestinian territory.

When the IDF Central Command was informed that the rocket had been fired by Jews, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and the Judea and Samaria Police opened an investigation.

Police spokesman Danny Poleg said Friday that detectives searched Yitzhar and questioned residents but made no arrests.

Ma'ariv said that the student allegedly learned how to make the rocket on the Internet. Detectives were trying to find out who provided the explosives and who else was involved in the incident.Yeshiva heads immediately expelled the student responsible.

The yeshiva is strongly affiliated with the extreme Right and some of its students were among the 20 people police banned from Judea and Samaria--aka Occupied Palestinian Territory-- about a year ago. The yeshiva's president, Yitzhak Ginsberg, has written a book in praise of Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 massacred Muslims at prayer in Hebron.