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Tuesday, October 6, 2020
'Spiritual Death' a Bigger Threat Than COVID Rabbanim Say
An amazing video clip was making the rounds of the internet when Yom Kippur ended. It showed police offered arriving at the main synagogue of the Vizhnitz Hassidim in Bnei Brak and breaking up a mass indoor gathering. In the clip, the Vizhnitzer rebbe himself, Yisroel Hager, is seen coming out of the front door, dressed in white holiday robes, flanked by two of his Hassidim.
Vizhnitz is one of the three largest Hassidic sects in Israel, and their rebbe is one of the most important spiritual leaders in the Hassidic world.
In another clip, Vizhnitz Hassidim are seeing waiting for buses, packed closely together, without masks.
It sounded almost incredible that six months into the COVID pandemic such a senior spiritual leader would be violating the rules. So I looked into it. I spoke with Hassidim, Vizhnitz and others, as well as with close associates of a few other Hassidic leaders, and it turns out that we – the general public – are spitting nails and demanding that the Hassidim follow the same public health guidelines as the rest of us, while they have adopted a completely different policy. They want herd immunity – let everyone get sick, and be done with it.
The way they see it, this is not a disregard for the regulations, and they have no trouble understanding the explanations about simple instructions such as wearing masks, avoiding gatherings, and washing hands. So what is going on? It seems that a number of Hassidic leaders have decided on a policy according to which the elderly and members of other high-risk groups will be careful, but young people and the Hassidic sect as a whole will go on as usual.
The Haredi public in Israel is comprised of Lithuanian, Sephardi, and Hassidic Jews. Most of the first two groups are taking care to follow COVID rules, but when it comes to the Hassidim, things are more complicated.
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Rabbi Zach Fredman "Rules Halachically" That it's OK to Pray for Tump's Death!
Rabbi Zach Fredman, formerly of The New Shul in New York City
This is what happens when a leftist progressive liberal Jew goes off the deep end. Fredman a vile sewer rat, a "reform rabbi" who has a band called "Epichorus ( a play on the Hebrew word apikoiras, meaning heretic) has the gall to quote a "midrash" .....
How about quoting the Torah that talks about keeping the Shabbat? ...
The naive, cruel and ungrateful Fredman doesn't realize that the leftists mobs that he so adors will turn on him soon enough and feed him to the ovens ... he has learned nothing from Jewish history ....he will learn very soon that the leftists that he brown-noses, hate him just like they hate Trump!
Fredman who always has an anti-Jewish agenda joined Jstreet and T'ruah, two vile self-hating Jewish organizations to sign a joint letter opposing federal and local legislative efforts to outlaw BDS.
This sickie when visiting Yerushalayim hung out with arabs and wrote a song called "song of the buffalo" which "honors a Native American woman that marries a buffalo"
Fredman a disturbed creature dressed in a talit, like a pig that displays its kosher hoofs, to showcase its fake piety, mentions Hitler, Haman and Trump in one paragraph!
Yes he compares Trump a man who just made peace between an Arab country and the State of Israel to Hitler that exterminated 3/4 of the Jewish people.
He cruelly compares Trump who moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem to Haman who wanted to exterminate the entire Jewish world!
He wishes the best friend that the Jews ever had in the White House, that has a Jewish child and Jewish grandchildren.. that "the disease works strongly on him, kills him even.."
How much hate does Fredman possess in his diseased heart that he wishes death and sickness to another human being ...someone created in the image of God and to the President of the USA no less..how low can one sink?
Hey Fredman ... you useful idiot to anarchists, take you cursed guitar, shove it up where the sun don't shine and go to hell ...
This piece was lightly adapted from Fredman’s email newsletter.
"With the news that Trump had tested positive for COVID, I couldn’t stop myself from wishing that the disease works strongly upon him, kills him even. … But is it OK to pray for the death of an evil person? Not just to think about it, but to actively enter a prayerful state and yearn for the disease to end his life in this body, that good may come to so many lives who have suffered on his account?
“Discussing that question with a friend, I was reminded of a midrash that appears in the commentaries on the Book of Esther, where Haman, the fascist villain, is the archetype of pure evil in the Judaic tradition.
“Two variants of the commentary appear. In one, all the trees of the world — the apple tree and the oak, the willow, the cedar, the olive and the palm — come before God and beg to be the vehicle for Haman’s death. They want to be the tree that Haman will hang from. In the other variant of the story, all the trees come before God, the same trees, and none wishes to be the tree upon which Haman will be hung. They don’t want to be proximate to evil, they don’t want to be contaminated by his vileness. In the end of both stories, the thorn bush is chosen to be the tree upon which Haman hangs.
“There are two instincts regarding evil — the desire to destroy it, and the inclination to flee its reign. Both live in us, and both yearnings have their place. If no one comes to fight Hitler, to protest Trump and the Proud Boys, evil thrives. If we come at him untethered to the wisdom that fighting evil carries the risk of being tainted by it, we are already undone. The line between these two yearnings is flimsy as a thorn. And living one without the other does not leave us whole.
“So yes, you can pray for his demise, but you will be changed by that prayer, and maybe not for the better.”
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Shtreimlich Safe As Israel Moves to Ban Fur Trade
Israel has moved to ban the fur trade, making it one of the first countries in the world to do so; however, the new initiative is seen as largely symbolic as it continues to allow the use of fur for religious reasons.
“This morning we launched an important initiative to ban the fur trade,” said Environmental Protection Minister Gila Gamliel on Sunday. “There is no need or justification for using fur in the fashion industry.”The move was praised by animal rights group PETA, which hailed Israel “for recognizing that the trade in coats, pom-poms, and other frivolous fashion items made from wild animals’ fur offends the values held by all decent citizens,” according to the BBC
However, the law, which could see offenders fined $22,000 or face a year in jail, has a major loophole that will continue to allow the importation of fur for “scientific research, education or for instruction and for religious purposes or tradition.”
That exempts ultra-Orthodox Jews, who often wear cake-shaped sable hats known as shtreimels on Shabbat and holidays, although importers will now need to apply for special permits.
Made from the tails of sables and foxes, the hats can cost as much as $5,000. They are pretty much the only widespread users of fur in Israel, with its warm Mediterranean climate.
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US court orders Iran to pay $1.4B to family of ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson
A US judge has ordered Iran to pay $1.45 billion to the family of a former FBI agent believed to have been kidnapped by the Islamic Republic while on an unauthorized CIA mission to an Iranian island in 2007.
The judgment this month comes after Robert Levinson’s family and the US government now believe he died in the Iranian government’s custody, something long denied by Tehran, though officials over time have offered contradictory accounts about what happened to him on Kish Island.
Tensions remain high between the US and Iran amid US President Donald Trump’s maximalist pressure campaign over Tehran’s nuclear program. And though the US and Iran haven’t had diplomatic relations since the aftermath of the 1979 US Embassy hostage crisis in Tehran, America stills holds billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets that could be used to pay Levinson’s family.
In a ruling dated Thursday, the US District Court in Washington found Iran owed Levinson’s family $1.35 billion in punitive damages and $107 million in compensatory damages for his kidnapping. The court cited the case of Otto Warmbier, an American college student who died in 2017 shortly after being freed from captivity in North Korea, in deciding to award the massive amount of punitive damages to Levinson’s family.
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Why are President Trump and haredi Jews blamed for their coronavirus infections, while BLM and anti-government protesters are not?
This past weekend, a lot of us received a test in our commitment to our values about how to behave towards those who are ill and who might be our political opponents. Some of us did better than others.
I refer, of course, to the news that President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, tested positive for COVID-19 with the president being hospitalized. After three nights at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the president has returned to the White House, and it appears that the nation has been spared a possible crisis in which the commander-in-chief was incapacitated. Reactions to the announcement, however, have been something like a national ethics test where we were asked to put aside our political opinions and exhibit what in the Jewish world we commonly call menschlichkeit or a sense of humanity.
The good news is that most people in public life passed the test. That was true of former Vice President Joe Biden, who, along with his wife, issued a gracious statement saying that they were “praying for the health and safety of the president and his family.” Just as important, he reminded his followers that “this is not about politics.”
The Bidens weren’t alone in saying that. Many people in public life—left, right and in the middle—did the same, giving us a heartening lesson that disagreeing with someone, even vehement disagreement, shouldn’t cause us to lose our own humanity in wishing them ill, especially in the middle of a pandemic.
Not everyone, however, met that same high standard. While Trump was in the hospital, social media was a cesspool of vile invective and hateful rhetoric illustrating the anger of many of the president’s detractors in language that was inappropriate and gave the lie to their claim to the moral high ground.
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Bobover Rebbe 45 Tests Positive for COVID-19
Just last week, a photo of a Hasidic rabbi from Borough Park wearing a mask outdoors went viral, even prompting one of New York City’s top health officials to cite him as a model of responsible community leadership during a press conference about the recent uptick in COVID-19 cases in New York City’s Orthodox Jewish communities.
But now the rabbi, Rabbi Mordechai David Unger, head of a faction of the Bobov Hasidic sect, has tested positive himself.
According to an Instagram post by BoroPark24, a local news site in the Brooklyn neighborhood where the Hasidic group is based, Unger tested positive for COVID-19 and is experiencing mild symptoms.
The photograph of Unger wearing a mask was taken just before Yom Kippur started, days after New York City threatened Borough Park and several other heavily Orthodox neighborhoods with consequences if they did not bring down their infection rates. But during the holiday last Monday, two attendees at Unger’s synagogue said there were no masks in sight at the services.
Unger is not the first major rabbi to test positive for COVID-19 recently. Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a major haredi leader in Israel who is also seen as a leader for communities in the United States, tested positive for COVID-19 last week. Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, head of a faction of the Satmar Hasidic group, recovered from COVID earlier this year. And Rabbi Mordechai Leifer, known as the Pittsburgher rebbe, died of the disease this week in Israel at age 65.
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How the Kretchniver Rebbe in Kiryat Gat Spoke to the Cop That Was Sent to Break Up The "Tish" in the Sukkah
This video is in Hebrew but the bottom line is that the Rebbe spoke with the utmost respect and love towards the officer who came to break up the "Tish gathering" of hundreds of Chassidim in the Sukkah...
The Rebbe told him that he understands that he has a job to do and that the Rebbe is "envious of how the officer does his job with such loyalty" and that he should understand that the gathering was not an act of defiance but was a way to thank Hashem for giving us such a great Yom Tov that is all about Simcha...
At the end, they came to an understanding and the Rebbe ended the Tish quickly and violence was avoided...
Isn't this a better way or do we want to be like the protestors?
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