Egyptian Writer speaks out on Whats Really Happening to Women in Arab Countries! Video

Mona Eltahawy

Deborah Feldman talks about women being oppressed in the Chassidic Circles,
 She has no clue what oppression really is ... see Video

Time to Boycott South Africa !

The director of Shamir Salads, Amiram Guy announced that in response to the South African boycott of products manufactured in Yehuda and Shomron, he has decided that his company will be cutting all ties with that country.
Shamir is one of the companies targeted since it is located in Shomron, in the Barkan Industrial Park near Ariel. Guy however is not making apologies, calling on other companies to join him in boycotting S. Africa in response. He explains that while he does not sell to South Africa, he does import, including avocados, and this is now a thing of the past – stating the boycott can work both ways. He explains he used to import a ton of avocados from S. Africa monthly but he is moving his business to Ecuador or Mexico.
He admits that his move is a token one in the big picture, but he is hopeful that his move will serve as an impetus for others to follow, to give the S. Africans a taste of their own medicine. He also calls on Israelis to boycott S. Africa by removing it as a tourist option.
Guy himself is one of the owners of Shamir and another company in Shomron and while he resides in Ramat HaSharon, he explains he feels warmth for the area and its residents.

Organic eaters are mean, more judgemental and a bunch of jerks: Study, Video

Aguda reiterates: Abuse Victims must go to Rabbis first.

An Orthodox parent whose child tells him he’s been sexually abused may not take that child’s claim to the police without first getting religious sanction from a specially trained rabbi, the head of America’s leading ultra-Orthodox umbrella group has told the Forward.
But one year after acknowledging that no such registry of trained rabbis exists, Rabbi David Zwiebel said that his group has now dropped the idea of developing one.

One of the main reasons, said Zwiebel, was a warning from Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes — issued only a few days earlier — that rabbis who prevent families from going to police could be arrested.

“If they [rabbis] don’t give the right advice, they can be in trouble,” said Zwiebel. “Why would you want to create some sort of a list that would make them more vulnerable?”

Zwiebel, who is the executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, said that despite the absence of such a registry, his group would staunchly resist increased public pressure to lift its requirement that parents obtain rabbinic permission.

“We’re not going to compromise our essence and our integrity because we are nervous about a relationship that may be damaged with a government leader,” he said.

Zwiebel’s comments, offered over the course of an hour-long interview in Agudath’s Manhattan headquarters on May 21, highlighted a growing fissure that has opened between Agudath and previously friendly senior public officials in New York. The break comes in the wake of a New York Times exposé that chronicled intimidation of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn by their own communities to keep them from bypassing rabbinic authorities and reporting abuse. The Times’ two articles, and a flood of media stories that followed, also reported how Hynes appeared to accommodate rather than challenge the ground rules set down by ultra-Orthodox leaders asserting their authority over such cases.

Zwiebel acknowledged tensions between secular legal requirements and Jewish law. But he said the community was duty-bound to follow the rulings of rabbinic leaders.

Continue reading at The Forward 

What Women's Media Needs to Know About Chassidic Women

Hi. I'm Chaya, and I am a Chassidic Jewish woman. I am also a media professional with a degree in Women's Studies from a large, very liberal university (magna cum laude, baby!).

In the past few days, I've been reading the backlash against "the asifa," a recent mass meeting of religious Jewish men meant to draw a few boundaries around Internet use in our homes (meaning religious Jewish homes; not your house).

Whenever religious Jews make a stink about some cultural issue, the media moves in on it with a bizarre kind of vengeance. Like yesterday, Katie J.M. Baker published an article on Jezebel about the event, in which she actually compared Jewish men to ants!

See: "While men in traditional Orthodox garb filed into Citi Field as steadily as a never-ending line of ants approaching an anthill…" Um, where have I seen Jews compard to insects before? Oh, wait, WWII.

As a resident of Brooklyn, the epicenter of all things hipster and the home of many, many clad-in-black religious Jews, I'd like to clarify a few things for all of you. Here are a few things you need to know about Chassidic women:

 1. We are not imprisoned. 

The last time I checked (which was right now), I am free to do whatever I want to do. Nobody is making me do anything. If I want to leave the community I live in, whether to go grocery shopping or to put on a pair of pants and go to a disco and snort coke, I can. Nobody is going to stop me. Would I wear a pair of skinny jeans and snort coke in a disco? No. Why?

2. We like ourselves the way we are. And most of us are happy.

Poor Deborah Feldman got the short end of the stick. She got a dysfunctional family and a crummy school. But listen: That happens everywhere. How many (non-Jewish or secular Jewish) friends of yours come from dysfunctional families and crappy schools and just couldn't wait to leave home? Did they represent your entire hometown? 

 We call becoming lax in religious observance and adopting a secular lifestyle "frying out." People fry out all the time. Most of us, though, feel like we are leading pretty rewarding lives.

Look at it this way: When your friends go to India to learn how to meditate and come home "leading spiritual lives" and suddenly won't go out for barbecue with you, you think it is cool. Your friend is leading a spiritual life. Spiritual lives involve boundaries and not just doing whatever your body feels like at that second. We lead spiritual lives. Leading a spiritual life is rewarding. 

3. We find our husbands attractive.

You know those guys with the long beards and the black coats who are always reading something in Hebrew on the train and you're kind of freaked out by them? So they're our husbands.

My husband has a very impressive beard. He wears a black suit, and a kippah and a black hat. He is also the most handsome, hot, attractive man in the entire world to me. Nobody forced me to marry him. My father did not trade me to him for a flock of sheep.

Fun fact: Jewish law prohibits marrying someone who you're not attracted to. Another fun fact: In the Jewish marriage contract, one of the conditions of marriage is that a husband is obligated to sexually satisfy his wife. If my husband would deny "conjugal rights" to me, that's grounds for divorce. Pretty effing progressive if you ask me.

 4. We have been happily shagging for millennia. Jews never had the concept of "original sin." 

Judaism is the original sex-positive culture. What? You heard me right. Y'all need "sex-positive Third wave feminism" to help you feel like having sex is OK. Jews bypassed the whole Christian idea that all sex, even in marriage, is a sin. And Protestant asceticism just never happened for us.

G-d likes it when a married Jewish couple has sex. Jews never got a message that sex is dirty. We think sex is good. It is so good that having it is actually a commandment. No, we cannot shag "anything that moves." No, we can't sleep around or have sex outside of marriage. But once you're married, sex is totally cool and awesome and G-d likes it.

I don't know who made up the dumb story about having sex through a sheet, but let's bury that old chestnut now. Having sex through a sheet is actually prohibited by Torah and we are commanded explicitly by G-d to get totally naked to shag. Just in case you're wondering.

 5. Mikveh is awesome. We don't go to the mikveh because we're "dirty." 

Holy moly! How many times have I heard feminists totally misread the Jewish practice of abstaining from sex during one's period and then immersing in a mikveh (a ritual bath)? It is hard to explain this one to people who grew up in Puritan America.

When you hear the word "impure," it has a totally different meaning than the meaning it has in the context of Torah. In Torah, you're dealing with states of being that are related to the service in the Beis HaMikdash (the Great Temple). It's called "ritual purity" and "ritual impurity." These states of being have nothing to do with being dirty or clean.  You could, in fact, not shower for days and roll in the mud and you'd still be "ritually pure."

Are you confused? You should be. We think about these things in a paradigm that is so not the dominant paradigm. 

All you need to know is that the practice of not touching your husband when you're on your period and then immersing in a mikveh is awesome. Most women's mikvehs are like spas. Picture the most beautiful spa you've ever been to, in a quiet all-girls safe space, and that's mikveh. 

 Incidentally, Orthodox Jewish women have one of the lowest rates of cervical and other reproductive cancers because of…wait for it…these customs. We do not have sex at times that our vaginas are vulnerable to infection (such as right after birth). Because we do internal checks for menstrual blood the week after we finish menstruating, the rate of early detection of (G-d forbid) tumors and cysts in the vagina is very high.

You think we are sexually repressed and afraid of our own bodies just because we dress modestly? Every single Chassidic woman you see sticks her own fingers in her own vagina at least twice a day for 7 days of the month. The chicks in my women's studies classes didn't even do that. 

 In conclusion…

When you slam Orthodox Jews because you think you're defending or somehow liberating the women of our communities, you're actually doing us a huge disservice. When you slam Jewish men, you're slamming us, too. Not in my name, gals.  

The next time you see a Jewish lady in a wig pushing a baby carriage through Brooklyn, I hope you won't see an imprisoned waif who is just waiting to be liberated. Cuz we're not like that. We're strong. We're invincible. And we make delicious kugel. L'chaim, chicas!

Christopher Columbus was looking to to find a Homeland for the Jews, Historians claim!

Over five centuries after the famed explorer's death, historians are taking a fresh look at what motivated Christopher Columbus to make his voyage across the Atlantic -- and how his faith may have played into those motivations.

Some scholars, after analyzing Columbus' will and other documents, have devised a new theory about the explorer. They believe he was a Marrano, or a Jew who pretended to be a Catholic to avoid religious persecution. These historians also theorize that Columbus' main goal in life was to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control, and that he decided to take his historic quest to North America in order to find a new homeland for Jews who had been forced out of Spain.

During the time of Columbus' voyage, Marranos were a targeted group. Tens of thousands of them were tortured during the Spanish Inquisition, so keeping one's true religious identity secret was a crucial priority for many.

As CNN reports, Columbus' will contained five provisions that some scholars believe to be evidence of the explorer's true faith:

Two of his wishes -- tithe one-tenth of his income to the poor and provide an anonymous dowry for poor girls -- are part of Jewish customs. He also decreed to give money to a Jew who lived at the entrance of the Lisbon Jewish Quarter.

On those documents, Columbus used a triangular signature of dots and letters that resembled inscriptions found on gravestones of Jewish cemeteries in Spain. He ordered his heirs to use the signature in perpetuity.

According to British historian Cecil Roth's "The History of the Marranos," the anagram was a cryptic substitute for the Kaddish, a prayer recited in the synagogue by mourners after the death of a close relative. Thus, Columbus's subterfuge allowed his sons to say Kaddish for their crypto-Jewish father when he died. Finally, Columbus left money to support the crusade he hoped his successors would take up to liberate the Holy Land.

Scholars also point to the real financiers of the voyage as evidence of the trip's purpose. While most schoolchildren grow up learning that the expedition was financed by Queen Isabella, historians say it was mostly paid for by two prominent Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism, Louis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez.

While these claims may be difficult to verify, the new portrait of Columbus painted by these scholars adds a complicated layer to the already convoluted sentiment toward the famed explorer. While he is lauded in the United States with a federal holiday and a receives a great deal of credit for discovering North America, his legacy has been tainted by charges of genocide and exploitation. But if Columbus' true intent was not imperialism, but freedom from religious trial, public perception of the man may shift yet again.

More than a third of divorce filings last year contained the word Facebook, UK Survey!

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg changed his status to “married” Saturday and received over one million “likes” from his followers. But the site he founded isn’t always so marriage-friendly.  In fact, lawyers say the social network 
contributes to an increasing number of marriage breakups.

More than a third of divorce filings last year contained the word Facebook, according to a U.K. survey by Divorce Online, a  legal services firm. And over 80% of U.S. divorce attorneys say they’ve seen a rise in the number of cases using social networking, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “I see Facebook issues breaking up marriages all the time,” says Gary Traystman, a divorce attorney in New London, Conn. Of the 15 cases he handles per year where computer history, texts and emails are admitted as evidence, 60% exclusively involve Facebook.

“Affairs happen with a lightning speed on Facebook,” says K. Jason Krafsky, who authored the book “Facebook and Your Marriage” with his wife Kelli. In the real world, he says, office romances and out-of-town trysts can take months or even years to develop. “On Facebook,” he says, “they happen in just a few clicks.” The social network is different from most social networks or dating sites in that it both re-connects old flames and allows people to “friend” someone they may only met once in passing. “It puts temptation in the path of people who would never in a million years risk having an affair,” he says. Facebook declined to comment.

Final seconds of famly killed in Teveriah! as told by 7 year old survivor

Seven year old Rachel Atias, who alone survived Monday’s horrific crash, related the final seconds before the crash to her 

uncle.

“The car started to move quickly and our mother told us to read from the book Psalms,” she said. “We knew something was wrong and prayed.”

“Mother kissed me, and there were screams in the car. Father called the police before we crashed, he cried and cried,” she added.

Police officials on Tuesday said their initial investigation had concluded the accident that claimed eight members of the Attias family resulted from mechanical failure.

However, police stress the investigation is not complete. Investigators are now reportedly looking into the cause of the mechanical defect, and have not ruled out possible negligence on the part of vehicle inspectors.

Thousands of friends and family members took part in the funeral Tuesday for the eight members of the Atias family, killed in a car crash near Tiberias overnight Monday, they were brought to rest at the cemetery in Safed on Tuesday.

The dead have been named as Rafi and Yehudit, the parents, aged 42, their daughter, Avia, 17, twin sons Shimon and Elyshav, 16, Shira, 11, Tair, 9, and Noa, 5, from the small village of Bar Yochai. Rahel Atias, 7, was the only member of the family to survive the crash.

Yishai Atias spoke of the loss of his brother Rafael, sister-in-law Yehudit, and six of their seven children in a tragic road accident.

“Yesterday we celebrated the opening of the synagogue and brought in two Torah scrolls. It was the happiest day of my life,” he told Army Radio. “Today is exactly the opposite.”

1986 Murder of Jewish Child, Chaim Weiss, still unsolved. Coverup?

Before the internet and before Leiby Kletzky there was a MURDER in 1986. The largest cover-up perpetrated by frum jews in the 20th century. The murderer is still free. WHY? 

Chaim Weiss, 15, was found dead in his dormitory room at the Mesivta Yeshiva of Long Beach early on the morning of Nov. 1, 1986. The youth had been stabbed repeatedly by someone who evidently was well acquainted with the dormitory and its routine. At first, there was speculation that the murder might have been an act of anti-Semitic violence because of harassment of the Orthodox Jewish boys who attended the yeshiva. However, the investigation soon revealed that Chaim Weiss's murderer was knowledgeable about religious customs. A window had been left open slightly in the victim's room, which, according to Orthodoxy, enables the spirit of the dead to depart. Beyond that, a lighted mourning candle was placed on Chaim's desk. The victim's father, Anton Weiss of Staten Island, eventually grew disenchanted with how the Nassau police were handling the case. He said he felt that the police had been ''outsmarted,'' and he requested the naming of a special prosecutor. That was never done. ''There was very little to find in the way of leads,'' Lieutenant Nolan said. ''We were dealing with a group that holds very different mores. But eventually, we were able to interview everyone in the school, as well as all past and present employees. ''We couldn't even find out why Chaim was killed. To this day, we can't positively state whether it was from inside or outside of the school.''
For a more extensive discussion on the murder .... read the following thread:
Read especially the poster:"CCMMZE" who must have been a classmate of Chaim.
http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/archive/index.php/t-40393.html

Frum Michael Sabo gets 20 years for molesting children!

The victims of a deviant dad who preyed on kids lashed out today at the "monster" who stripped them of their childhoods as he was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.

Sicko father of four Michael Sabo never looked up while relatives of two of his young victims read aloud letters that lashed out at the Orthodox Jewish pervert who pleaded guilty this month to molesting children and stockpiling sickening images of kiddie porn.

"I feel like breaking your bones and I hope you rot in prison," his now 16-year-old victim wrote in a letter read aloud in court by his dad. "I want to kill you over and over again."

The father choked up as he read aloud words from his son, who trashed Sabo as a "miserable, rotten piece of slime."

"Why? Why did you hurt these innocent children?" the father said. "What did they do to you?"

Sabo was set to go to trial and face the boy and a girl who accused him of sexually assault before taking a deal from prosecutors that Justice Vincent DelGiudice lamented was "lenient."

"They should have peace in knowing this man will never be able to harm another child for as long as he lives," DelGiudice said.

But relatives of the boy and girl that he admitted to molesting didn't hold back as they blasted Sabo, 38.

"While pretending to be our family and pretending to be nice, he was sexually abusing my sister," said the older sister of his 12-year-old female victim. "This is the true definition of a sociopath."

"You ruined her childhood, and perhaps her whole life," the sister added. "You are a monster."

The family of another of Sabo's accusers didn't cooperate because of fear of reprisals from within the Orthodox community, prosecutors said, and yet another alleged victim backed out on the eve of trial. In addition, prosecutors said they had evidence of five other victims.

Proescutor Kevin O'Donnell said the relatives of the 12-year-old girl were pressured in synagogue by Sabo supporters who vowed to pack the courtroom during her testimony.

"Despite this shameful act, these children and their parents still had the courage to come to court," O'Donnell said.

A defense lawyer for Sabo descibed his client as a "monster" whose twisted acts may have been caused by the sexual abuse he suffered as a child.

"Before he evolved into this monster, he, too, was a frightened young kid," Jeffrey Schwartz said.

The 38-year-old registered nurse was busted in 2010 when authorities found hundreds of revolting kiddie porn images on his home computer.

Sabo's perversion became exposed when a rabbi tracked down the family of the boy, whose image had ended up on a vile Russian kiddie porn website.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/victims_of_convicted_child_molester_NXeq13dvZo2aif2Cb3XzEO#ixzz1vYrcuEdl