Fallen IDF Hero Who Prevented Attack Mourned by Hundreds as ‘Huge Person’ and JONATHAN S. TOBIN writes Do religious Jews have a right to reject basic secular education? and PHYLLIS CHESLER Insidious propaganda at ‘The New York Times’ and Prague cobblestones made from Jewish headstones returned to the community and 50,000 Jewish Visits: Record Numbers Visit Temple Mount in 5782 By Aryeh Savir, and Supreme Court Requires Yeshiva University to Recognize LGBTQ Student Group By Hana Levi Julian
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
More than a thousand mourners gathered on Wednesday evening to honor an Israeli officer killed in the line of duty Tuesday who was remembered for his strength, bravery, and — through his own words and actions — an enduring devotion to his country.
Maj. Bar Falah, 30, deputy commander of the Nahal brigade reconnaissance unit, was fatally shot in a clash with two Palestinian gunmen on Tuesday evening near Gilboa Crossing, north of Jenin in the West Bank.
"He was killed as he and his soldiers heroically confronted and neutralized the terrorists," said Prime Minister Yair Lapid. "The operation in which he was killed thwarted a major terrorist attack and saved lives."
One of the Palestinian gunmen, both of whom died in the firefight, was a member of the Palestinian Authority's intelligence forces, according to the Israeli government. "This escalates things to another level," said Lapid. "We will not hesitate to act in any place that the Palestinian Authority does not maintain order."
In the hours following his death, a letter Falah wrote in 2019 to his troops on Yom HaZikaron, Israel's day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism, was circulated on social networks and Hebrew-language media.
"On Memorial Day we learn that there is something greater than life itself," Falah wrote. "There is something for which we are ready to sacrifice our lives — the State of Israel."
"I will think about this at the time of the siren, while I stand with the nation of Israel in silence, I will remember all those heroes, but I will not bow my head," he continued. "I will lift my head with a sharp look at the flag, with a broadened chest, with pride, because these are all my brothers, brave and daring, who in the moment of truth put aside all personal desires and give their lives for the sanctification of God, the nation, and the land."
Falah, who is survived by his mother and siblings, was laid to rest in the military cemetery in his hometown Netanya.
"He took so much onto himself, and always put others before himself," said his girlfriend Ariel between sobs. "The best person I ever met, the most beloved. I always tell him, the amount of friends you have shows how much of a light you are to everyone."
"I read, I asked, I dug, just to understand what you go through there in the nights, what a sensitive and good hearted person like you goes through every night," she said of his work. "How much he would sacrifice."
"You told me not to worry, that everything would be alright," said Ariel. "My life, my biggest nightmare has happened."
"You were a huge person, an activist for justice," said his cousin Shahar Gavrieli. "You fought violence against women and supported cancer patients, you rode throughout the country to make people happy. You hosted Holocaust survivors … just to satisfy your giant heart, that didn't rest for a moment. Even tonight you rushed forward, certainly without thinking twice, and you stopped the next catastrophe with your body."
Amit Swarovski, commander of Oketz, the canine special forces unit where Falah began his military career, remembered his friend as the "strongest fighter with the strongest dog," and a commander who "led your subordinates with genius."
How proud you were of the uniform, how upright you were when you saluted the flag," he recalled. "You were characterized by a joy for life, social activities, and love of people. I stand here heartbroken and disbelieving that you're gone."
The Three Musketeers at the Kotel
The Three are Rabbi Yehuda Glick, famous temple mount activist, and former Israel Mk, and then Robert Weinger, the world's greatest shofar blower and seller of Shofars, and myself after we had gone to the 12 gates of the Temple Mount in 2020 to blow the shofar to ask G-d to heal the world from the Pandemic. It was a highlight to my experience in living in Israel and I put it on my blog each day to remember.
The articles that I include each day are those that I find interesting, so I feel you will find them interesting as well. I don't always agree with all the points of each article but found them interesting or important to share with you, my readers, and friends. It is cathartic for me to share my thoughts and frustrations with you about life in general and in Israel. As a Rabbi, I try to teach and share the Torah of the G-d of Israel as a modern Orthodox Rabbi. I never intend to offend anyone but sometimes people are offended and I apologize in advance for any mistakes. The most important psychological principle I have learned is that once someone's mind is made up, they don't want to be bothered with the facts, so, like Rabbi Akiva, I drip water (Torah is compared to water) on their made-up minds and hope that some of what I have share sinks in. Love Rabbi Yehuda Lave.
50,000 Jewish Visits: Record Numbers Visit Temple Mount in 5782 By Aryeh Savir,
Probably not since the Second Temple was standing has the Temple Mount seen so many Jewish visitors. Jewish worshippers visiting the Temple Mount set a new record this week when the number of Jewish visits to the holy site since the beginning of the Jewish year crossed the 50,000 marker.
Temple Mount statistics for 5782.
This precedent number surpassed by a large margin all previous years, which stood at less than 30,000.
According to the count of the "Beyadenu – for the Temple Mount" organization, this number is a 95% increase from last year, when only 25,582 Jews visit the Temple Mount, and a 69% increase from the previous record of 29,420.
Tom Nisani, CEO of Beyadenu, said Thursday that "despite the restrictions, harassment, the limited five hours a day and only on weekdays limitation, despite it all – a record was broken this year in Jewish visit. The Jewish People are returning to the Temple Mount! The next goal is 100,000 visitors a year!"
Assaf Fried, of the Temple Mount Administration, said that "the dramatic record on the Temple Mount is a result of the great transformation that has taken place on the Temple Mount in the last seven years. The Temple Mount has transformed from a scene of struggles that remained in the margins, to a place of Torah and prayer."
These historic numbers were recorded despite the fact that Jews' visits to the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest site, are limited in time, space, as well as the number of visitors allowed access at any given time. While Jews' rights to worship at the site have improved in recent years, much remains wanting, and the full freedom of worship has yet to be granted by the State of Israel to Jews visiting the Temple Mount.
While Muslims enter the holy site freely, Jews are screened by metal detectors, undergo security searches, and are banned from bringing Jewish religious objects to the site.
Do religious Jews have a right to reject basic secular education?
Chassidic communities are entitled to isolate their children from the secular world. Does that mean scrutiny of their schools' alleged failures by "The New York Times" is anti-Semitic?
After more than a century of biased reporting about Israel, contempt for Zionism, and a lack of interest in reporting about anti-Semitism, readers are right to regard any coverage of the Jewish community by The New York Times with skepticism, if not justified suspicion, of ill intentions. So, after the Times invested a year of the time of two reporters and who knows how many researchers in investigating conditions in schools run by the ultra-Orthodox community and Chassidic sects in the greater New York area, the assumption on the part of many Jews was that the product of this effort would reek of prejudice.
That explains why the reaction from many Jews to the massive front-page feature published on the subject by the Times this past Sunday was intense and angry. They wondered why, in an era when inner-city public schools are notoriously failing their students, the newspaper thought that schools run primarily by Chassidic Jews in Brooklyn and Rockland County were deserving of so much scrutiny. That much of the reporting seemed to be driven by criticisms of these communities by former members who complain that they emerged from these schools lacking basic skills in English or math, as well as with stories about suffering beatings by teachers, also left many Jewish readers thinking that an anti-Orthodox agenda rather than justified concerns were behind the decision to report and publish the piece.
That the Times also took the extraordinary step of publishing the story in Yiddish and included a form response for those with experiences in these schools to send in their thoughts also seemed to indicate that the goal of the project was to disparage the Jewish community. That it came after the last two years when politicians and news outlets unfairly scapegoated the ultra-Orthodox for spreading COVID-19 deepened the hurt. The fact that the Times continues to ignore an epidemic of anti-Semitic attacks on this community from African-American assailants has also created a situation in which nothing the paper is likely to publish on related subjects will be taken as anything other than an attack by many Jews.
But even if all that is true, and the Times' reporting does betray a cultural bias and condescension on the part of its staff and the overwhelmingly liberal readership of the paper, does that mean any scrutiny of ultra-Orthodox schools is inherently anti-Semitic?
As much as it would be easy to dismiss the story, if test scores and reports from other sources, including from Jews who are deeply worried about the failure of this system to prepare its students for any sort of a productive life other than Torah scholarship—are to be trusted, then there is more here than cultural or religious bias.
The ultra-Orthodox community under scrutiny here has seemed to adopt the same model as their haredi counterparts in Israel, where educational standards in their schools on secular subjects are abysmal. While most of the discussion about the haredim in Israel has focused on their refusal to do their fair share in defending the Jewish state by refusing military service, the fact that their rapidly growing ultra-Orthodox schools are solely focused on religious education while producing people who lack the rudimentary skills to support themselves is an even greater challenge for Israel.
A situation where Torah study is the only respectable profession for haredi men is one that is a recipe for endemic poverty. Nevertheless, the political muscle of Israel's religious parties has not only guaranteed funding for these schools but also ensured that the state is never going to require that their students are given even minimal adequate instruction in non-religious subjects.
While politics has created a daunting economic challenge that poses huge dilemmas for Israel's future, it appears a similar situation has unfolded in New York. Observers of New York politics have long understood that the ultra-Orthodox communities vote as blocs with members apparently doing the bidding of their rabbinic leadership in much the same way as in Israel. In this manner, New York politicians like disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his successor, Kathy Hochul, have obtained the lockstep support of Chassidic enclaves in exchange for their influence in ensuring that no one looks too closely at what happens in their schools.
The result is that these institutions are turning out students who lack rudimentary skills in English and math. You don't have to share the contempt for religious Jews that may be widespread in the Times newsroom to be alarmed by the fact that test scores in these subjects at ultra-Orthodox schools for boys (girls, who are expected to get jobs rather than merely study sacred texts, get slightly more instruction and do marginally better) appear to be the lowest in the state. That means that they are worse than those at public schools in New York where poor and minority students are being short-changed by a system that is resistant to change, as well as those at other religious institutions.
As philanthropist Michael Steinhardt wrote last week in the New York Post, the failure of these schools is a Jewish tragedy. That is why he and others have been urging greater state scrutiny of these schools, and forcing them to change to improve their secular education. To that the communities and many of their defenders, such as the editors of the New York Sun, cry foul.
They believe that the issue here isn't so much poor education as the refusal of the secular state—cheered on by secular Jews—to accept the desire of the ultra-Orthodox community to opt out of society. The point of the education they are giving their children is not, after all, to produce productive members of a secular society—let alone, as is the case with many schools, to prepare children for college — but for religious lives as separate as possible from their non-Jewish neighbors. Their fear of assimilation—and the toll it takes on Jewish and religious identity—is such that in some quarters, there is not only hostility to Internet use and secular subjects but also English as an everyday language. Under those circumstances, it's little wonder that these schools must be understood as playing a role in the growth of Jewish poverty. But their defenders seem to be taking the position that any interference in their curricula is a denial of their right to religious freedom.
The secular left has been waging war on public religious observance and seeks to marginalize people of faith. The hostility on the part of newspapers like the Times and mainstream liberal Jewish groups, like the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, to recent Supreme Court decisions that defend the rights of religious believers is lamentable. But the attempt to shoehorn this controversy into the broader debate about religious freedom is unpersuasive. Those who want to ensure that ultra-Orthodox schools give students at least the basics of English and math—something that is required by the New York State Constitution—are not attempting to infringe on their right to worship or have schools dedicated to their faith. The haredim are fully entitled to live and worship as they please, and to isolate themselves from the secular world as much as they want. But it is both reasonable and necessary for the state to ensure that their schools do not turn out students that are functionally illiterate in English and unable to do basic math.
Even if we were to dismiss the Times' focus on the use of corporal punishment at Chassidic schools, which is deeply problematic if true but tangential to the question of their academic failures, as a function of the paper's bias, it is not anti-Semitic to worry about the role that schools are playing in fomenting poverty. The reality of a population that is not only growing at exponential rates due to large family sizes—something that those who care about the shrinking non-Orthodox population applaud—but also increasingly dependent on state welfare programs paid for by taxpayers, is something that must be addressed.
Nor does anyone need to be caught up, as is the Times, in the drama surrounding defectors from the ultra-Orthodox world. The literary genre of the memoirs of such rebels against religious life is, as scholar Ruth Wisse has discussed, not new. It's been going on since the late 19th century. One can sympathize with such people or revile them as turncoats who are besmirching their origins, but that has nothing to do with whether Chassidic schools are fulfilling their obligations to provide a minimal decent secular education along with their focus on Judaism.
As some point out, institutions that produce students capable of understanding and studying the Talmud and other sacred texts are learning advanced reasoning skills that are often missing elsewhere. Yet as even a defender of these schools, like Mosaic columnist Eli Spitzer notes, it is something of a fairy tale to pretend that such instruction is a substitute for teaching Jewish children the basic English and math they need to survive outside of a yeshivah or kollel. These schools should neither be demonized nor idealized; however, the idea that any outside scrutiny is an attack on Judaism is not an argument that can be reasonably defended.
As much as it can be a mistake to generalize about conditions in these schools and as much as the Times' motives are suspect, the willingness of many Jews to reflexively circle the wagons around them and to defend the resistance of the ultra-Orthodox leadership to even minimal scrutiny or accountability for their failures in secular subjects is not merely a mistake. It's consigning a large and important part of the Jewish community to a future of poverty that would be indefensible if we were describing any other group.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
Even articles on food are dedicated to hating Israel.
I have been reading The New York Times all my life. It's my hometown newspaper. Sometimes, I enjoy or agree with its opinions (and there are nothing but opinions in it now). Sometimes, I cannot bear its biased and wildly unbalanced coverage of Israel and Jews.
How does propaganda work? Sometimes, it consists of Big Brazen Lies—no apology, no context, no facts. It's all narrative-driven with a malevolent purpose. More often, it's a steady, low-key diet of info-bits that are meant to normalize the larger lies. The New York Times does this brilliantly.
For example, in the Times' Sept. 11 Book Review, Karen Armstrong, who has been the Times' go-to person on Saudi Arabia, was featured. Armstrong, who is an ex-nun, stated, "My understanding of religion was transformed nearly 30 years ago by the great Muslim scholar and mystic Ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240). Sadly, he is little known in the West." She often quotes from al-Arabi.
Armstrong emphasized that people who are ignorant of other faiths do not understand that God cannot be "confined to one creed." To prove it, she said that Al-Arabi quoted the Quran: "Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah." Her audiences in Pakistan, she said, are always "relieved to hear it." Al-Arabi wrote "Allah," not "God," but I quibble.
When Armstrong was asked which three writers she would invite to a dinner party, she answered: "My guests would be Confucius, Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad because I would like them to tell me … what they had in common and what was most needed in our world today."
Hmm… but there is no Moses, no Jewish ethics or laws, no desire to invite Moses for dinner.
Such a small thing, and something said by an interviewee, not by the interviewer—and yet, small things eventually add up to the disappearance of Judaism and Israel from the map of memory.
In the Times magazine, also on Sept. 11, an article titled "Journey to the Plate: The back story of this spicy dish of shrimp and greens traces a line of authenticity and discovery" by Yotam Ottolenghi appeared. The recipe in question is a Filipino dish in which taro leaves are cooked down with coconut milk. The leaves and other ingredients are not easy to find in the New World—but Elaine Goad, who grew up in Hong Kong, the Philippines and Britain, came to work in the Ottolenghi kitchen in West London. Elaine's "comfort zone" is the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Korea.
Get ready for it.
Ottolenghi wrote, "So, to pair the laing (leaves) of her childhood with cod, she flicked through 'Falastin,' the Palestinian cookbook written by my colleagues Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley, and there she found a spice mix for fish. The mild sweetness of the mix, which has cardamon, cumin, paprika and turmeric worked perfectly."
Another very small thing, but one that normalizes the false narrative that there always was a "Falastin" and that the recipes of the indigenous Arab world, which consisted of Christians and Jews as well as Muslims and a host of other religions, were somehow specific to "Falastin." By the way, Ottolenghi wrote the introduction to the Falastin cookbook.
There's more from the Paper of Record.
On Feb. 12, 2020, Ligaya Mishan, the Times' food critic, wrote about the increasing number of cookbooks for Palestinian/Falastinian food. Rarely does one read food reviews that politicize recipes, let alone to such an extreme and persistent degree.
Mishan wove one lie after another into her food narrative. She wrote, "How to speak of the cuisine, given the political context? Alongside recipes, must there be testimony to the daily tolls of life under Israel's occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes and the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of local olive trees over the past half century?"
Mishan did ask whether the rockets lobbed into Israeli territory, the rise of anti-Semitism in the Islamic world, etc., "can make a case for suffering on both sides." Still, she continued to refer to certain dishes as Gazan or Ramallah-specific, which they may be, but this does not mean that they are "Palestinian" as opposed to regional Arab and Mediterranean dishes.
In addition, Mishan blamed the alleged loss of a Palestinian food identity on an Israeli occupation in which land has been seized and "85% of Gaza's fishing waters placed off-limits. Palestinian farmers have been separated from their fields by barrier walls; the flow of water is restricted and Palestinians are currently forbidden to dig or restore wells without a permit."
Mishan also wrote, "It's worth noting that the term 'Israeli cuisine' is of fairly recent vintage … and appears to have more currency outside Israel. … The Israeli journalist Ronit Vered, who writes for the newspaper Haaretz, suggested that because the country is so young, 'we don't know yet what is Israeli and what is just part of the region's diet'—but there is a willful refusal by some Israelis, she said, to acknowledge Arab influences."
Along the way, Mishan denigrated Jewish dishes in Israel that have European origins. But why?
Finally, Mishan cited some demographics: "Around 1.9 million Palestinians live within the borders of Israel, 2.8 million in the West Bank and 1.8 million in the breathlessly crowded 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip. Six million, nearly half the total population, make up the diaspora. They are a people who have no country to call their own, like the Basques in Spain, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Roma in eastern Europe and, for millenniums, the Jews."
What is such propaganda doing in a piece written by a food critic? Is this now typical of all food writing—or is it specific to attempts to bolster a narrative that a country that has never existed is really first among nations and has always existed?
In March of 2022, Mishan continued her politicized food column vis-à-vis the Palestinians in the Times. She featured the very creative food artist Mirna Bamieh, who "stages dinner performances." Bamieh accused Israel of stealing or "appropriating" Palestinian cuisine: "hummus, falafel, couscous, etc. We are not allowed to collect wild herbs."
Enough. Mishan and Bamieh were writing about a lentil dish. I have noted that lentils were "one of the first farmed crops in the entire Middle East region."
My God! Lentils are used in recipes by Lebanese, Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Saudis, etc. and by Jews in Israel and the diaspora of all these countries.
But, more importantly, a reader does not have her guard up when she is reading a food column or a recipe. This means that dropping propaganda, drip by drip, like honey into a recipe, is more likely to enter one's bloodstream. This is what makes the small info-bits quite insidious.
Phyllis Chesler is an emerita professor of psychology and women's studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the author of 20 books, including Women and Madness and A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killings.
Prague cobblestones made from Jewish headstones returned to community
'Return of the Stones' monument part of larger effort to address desecration of Jewish cemeteries throughout Eastern Europe after the Holocaust
Members of the Jewish community of Prague, the Czech Republic, attend the unveiling of a monument made of Jewish headstones at a local Jewish cemetery, on September 7, 2022. (Courtesy of the Jewish Community of Prague via JTA)
JTA — During and after the decimation of Eastern Europe's Jewish populations in the Holocaust, even the dead were not spared: locals, their Nazi occupiers and their communist rulers looted Jewish cemeteries for headstones and used them to pave roads and build countless public buildings, including schools, park pavilions and even churches.
On September 7, the Jewish community of Prague in the Czech Republic unveiled a new monument at its cemetery in an attempt to undo some of the damage. The monument consists of about 6,000 cobblestones made from Jewish headstones that were used in 1987 to pave Prague's Wenceslas Square, the national broadcaster Česka Televize reported. The municipality handed over the stones to the Jewish community in 2020, after the stones were removed during renovations.
The community commissioned artists Jaroslav and Lucie Rona to build the monument, which cost about $32,000 and comprises a mound surrounded by nine blocks made up of the cobblestones. Although letters in the Hebrew and Roman alphabets can be seen on some of the stones, no individual headstone used to make the cobblestones was identified, according to the report.
In a speech at the unveiling ceremony, František Bányai, the chairman of Prague's Jewish community, called the paving stones a "symbol of barbarism, rudeness and archaic ruthlessness." The Jewish Cemetery in Žižkov, where the monument titled "Return of the Stones" was unveiled, was among the many Jewish cemeteries whose land was stolen under communism. Authorities built a television antenna on part of the cemetery, in violation of the Jewish tradition's laws against disturbing places of burial.
The memorial is part of a wider effort across the region to address the desecration of Jewish cemeteries. Jews see the desecrations as having added insult to injury, because they targeted even the memory of communities wiped out by the Holocaust.
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The use of headstones as building material has attracted media attention in recent years in several Eastern European countries with complicated Jewish histories.
People walk across pavement, parts of which were made from tombstones taken from a Jewish cemetery, in the pedestrian zone at Wenceslas Square in Prague, March 20, 2018. (Michal Cizek/AFP photo)
In 2014, the municipality of Warsaw, the capital of Poland, returned to a Jewish community headstones that had been used to build a pavilion at a local park.
And last month, Jewish headstones that had been used to build stairs leading to the Evangelical Reformist Church in Vilnius, Lithuania, were returned to a local Jewish cemetery there following a years-long campaign by members of the city's Jewish community.
Supreme Court Requires Yeshiva University to Recognize LGBTQ Student Group
The Supreme Court has rejected Yeshiva University's emergency request for a stay that would stop a ruling by a New York State judge, ordering the Jewish institution to recognize a "Pride Alliance" LGBTQ student group.
The 5-4 vote supports a lower court order ruling by Judge Lynn Kotler on June 14 requiring Yeshiva University, the most prominent Modern Orthodox institution of higher learning in America, to carry out an action that comes in direct contradiction to its most basic religious tenets.
Kotler had ruled the university is bound by the New York City Human Rights Law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, noting that Yeshiva is not incorporated as a religious institution. She concluded that Yeshiva did not meet relevant criteria to be covered under an exemption for religious organizations that is included in the law.
Two New York state appeal courts had issued similar rulings.
Pride Alliance members have said they are planning events backing LGBTQ rights in the near future, including some timed around Jewish holidays.
The decision counters a previous ruling by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who issued a stay on September 9 pending a Supreme Court ruling on the issue.
After having issued that stay, however, Sotomayor chose to rule against Yeshiva on Wednesday (Sept. 4) with four other Supreme Court justices.
They added in their decision that the university can turn to the Supreme Court again if it is not able to block the ruling in New York State courts.
The Court is still on summer recess and not scheduled to return for the new term until October.
The dissenting judges said Yeshiva should have been granted immediate relief from having to recognize an LGBTQ student group against its religious beliefs.
"I doubt that Yeshiva's return to state court will be fruitful, and I see no reason why we should not grant a stay at this time. It is our duty to stand up for the Constitution even when doing so is controversial," Justice Samuel Alito wrote.
