Editor – Joel Katz
By
Revital Blumenfeld www.haaretz.com March 18, 2012
"They
are partial Jews while I am a complete Jew," Yehoshua said, referring to
American Jewry. "In no way are we the same thing - we are total and they
are partial; we are Israeli and also Jewish.”
Yehoshua
added that living outside Israel "is a very deep failure of the Jewish
people."
By Yair
Ettinger www.haaretz.com March 16, 2012
The questions were exacting, but Anna Heiman,
29, expertly fired back her answers. Finally, the rabbinic court judges asked
her and her Israeli partner, Ronen Osher, to leave the room. The rabbis
discussed the matter at length and resolved to accept Heiman as a Jew.
But this was no ordinary conversion: It took
place in a private rabbinic court in the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut.
[T]he
Religious Services Ministry … is threatening sanctions against Rosen's two
partners: Rabbi Gideon Perl, the rabbi of Alon Shvut, and Rabbi Uri Samet, the
rabbi of Kibbutz Migdal Oz.
By Ruth
Stein Opinion www.timesofisrael.com
March 18, 2012
The
author of this article asked to use a pseudonym for fear that revealing her
true identity would negatively affect her conversion process.
I find
myself at the center of a tug-of-war between Israel’s religious and secular
identity. In America, these personal struggles are left to the individual to
figure out. In Israel, the system attempts to make a choice for you.
By Amanda Borschel-Dan www.timesofisrael.com
March 13, 2012
Ariel
Beery: “Somebody will call into question the membership of my daughter
to the Jewish People?”
“The
second we realized it will not be the choice of our daughter to marry here,
that the only community in the world where she can’t marry in the Jewish
tradition is here in Israel, that she can’t even aspire to be a religious
judge, deciding on religious issues. And not because she’s not considered
Jewish; because she’s a woman. If there was a law that a woman couldn’t be a
surveyor, would we accept that? You start realizing, like, Holy crap! That’s
ridiculous!”
By Amanda
Borschel-Dan www.timesofisrael.com
March 8, 2012
Ed Rettig: “The individual is the legitimator
of religious practice” in the US. He chooses to be “saved”; he chooses when and
how to pray.
Conversely, the foundations of Israel are about
the collective, the Jewish People, versus the individual. There is a state
religion, not a separation of church and state. In Israel there is “an identity
by fate. Much like a relationship with a parent. ‘I am the child of my parents.
I would die for my parents, go to war, etc.’ The relationship is lifelong. With
American Jewry, it is more like a relationship with a spouse: a choice, like
marriage.
“The assumptions of Jewish identity are so
different.”
See also interviews with Jay Ruderman and Gidi
Mark.
By Arnie
Eisen http://blog.jtsa.edu March 7, 2012
The main take-away? Neat
divides between “religious” and “secular” are woefully off the mark. I think
the categories should be dropped entirely in Israel (as among Diaspora Jews).
They tell us little that is
important—and turn our view away both from commonalities that should not be
missed and from divisions that are all too real and will not be healed any time
soon.
Israelis are bound by a
“covenant of fate” that links them powerfully to the Jewish people and the
Jewish past. Questions of faith are not easily avoided.
By Jeremy
Sharon www.jpost.com March 19, 2012
The Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice
Committee on Sunday approved two so-called “Tzohar bills” designed to enable
the association of national-religious rabbis – who are considered somewhat more
liberal than other Orthodox rabbis – to more easily perform wedding ceremonies.
The bills,
one initiated by MK Otniel Schneller (Kadima) and the other by MK Faina
Kirshenbaum (Israel Beiteinu), would allow couples to register for marriage in
the city or municipal jurisdiction of their choice, regardless of where they
reside, something which at present is technically prohibited by law.
By Jeremy
Sharon www.jpost.com March 14, 2012
Women’s rights advocates made several proposals
to have at least one woman appointed to the Selection Committee for Rabbinical
Judges on Tuesday, during a tempestuous hearing of the Knesset Committee for
the Advancement of the Status of Women.
Batsheva
Sherman-Shani, director of the Yad L’Isha organization, proposed during the
hearing that either one of the two male Knesset members on the committee be
replaced and switched for a female member, or that the prime minister select a
female minister to fill one of the two places on the committee reserved for
cabinet ministers.
By
Nehemia Shtrasler Opinion www.haaretz.com March 20, 2012
[W]hat
[Netanyahu] really did was give the subsidized apartments to Shas'
ultra-Orthodox constituents.
...Not working is an anti-Jewish custom that
was invented only in Israel. It does not exist in Brooklyn or Paris, because
Jews always saw labor as a moral duty - see Maimonides. But Yishai and Atias are
making a mockery of Maimonides as well.
By Moti
Bassok www.haaretz.com March 14, 2012
The
criteria, which do not mention employment as a requirement but do give weight
to the number of children a couple has, have been widely slammed as catering to
the ultra-Orthodox community at the expense of the general public.
By
Talila Nesher www.haaretz.com
March 20, 2012
Hundreds of parents in Tel Aviv are seeking
municipal authorization to open a school for secular and religious students in
September that would be the first such school in the city.
If the parents get their way, the school will become the first secular-religious school that falls fully under the state jurisdiction rather than being at least partly run by a non-profit group. The Knesset recently approved regulations for religiously mixed education that could pave the way for that to take place.
By Lahav
Harkov www.jpost.com March 15, 2012
When the
Tal Law was canceled last month, hesder yeshivas – the religious- Zionist
institutions that combine Torah study and IDF service – were an accidental
victim, set to become illegal on August 1, unless they are anchored in new
legislation.
UTJ MK
Gafni told The Jerusalem Post hesder yeshivas must, and should, remain in the
same legislative category as haredi yeshivas because they are both institutions
for Torah study.
Anyway, he
added with a grin, the Tal Law was canceled because of inequality, and hesder
students are part of that inequality because they spend less than half of the
time their secular peers spend serving in the IDF.
By Lahav
Harkov www.jpost.com March 11, 2012
The future
of hesder yeshivas remains unclear, as the Ministerial Committee for
Legislation postponed by two months on Sunday a vote on a bill meant to save
the program.
By Jeremy
Sharon www.jpost.com March 15, 2012
Rabbi Haim Druckman, Israel Prize laureate and
head of Yeshivat Or Etzion, spoke at the IDF induction center on Monday to
students enrolled in the hesder yeshiva program, who will begin their military
service this week.
By Yoav
Zitun www.ynetnews.com March 20, 2012
Yaakov Yosef, the eldest son of Shas' spiritual
leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, was recently uninvited from a day of Torah studies
meant for soldiers in the Kfir brigade. The ban marks the IDF's recent stream
of decisions to leave the decision of approving lectures given by religious
leaders to the Military Rabbinate.
A Ra'anana resident is demanding NIS 18,000
from the Religious Services Ministry - the amount he had to pay the civil
cemetery in Kfar Sava to bury his wife because he is not a Kfar Sava resident.
Tzvika Ginsberg, 72, who filed the suit in Kfar
Sava Small Claims Court, said the religious establishment has not been
sufficiently dedicated in building civil cemeteries for those who prefer to be
buried without a religious ceremony.
By Rabbi
Haviva Ner-David http://mayyimhayyimblog.com March 7, 2012
Rabbi
Haviva Ner David is a teacher, writer, and activist.
At the
newly-revived religiously and socially progressive Kibbutz Hannaton in Lower Galilee, a tradition has evolved to hold a women’s
circle at our mikveh for each woman a few weeks before she is due to give
birth.
Thankfully, we have located on our kibbutz a unique mikveh
in the Israeli scene: Shmaya: A Spiritual and Educational Mikveh in Galilee,
where anyone can come to immerse for whatever purpose—with or without guidance,
in private or with accompaniment .
By Rivka
Haut Susan Aranoff http://womenofthewall.org.il March 7, 2012
The
foolish King of the Purim story feared that if Vashti’s defiance were known,
every husband’s power to be master of his household, his wife, would be
weakened. So he issued a decree that every man should be “sorer” in his house.
We laugh at that. Yet our rabbis have enshrined that edict by allowing
every Jewish husband to be “sorer b’veito” to have power over his wife.
It plagued me last summer
in Israel. My first day in Jerusalem, I stepped out of the Western Wall plaza,
half-dizzy from elation, and was immediately approached by an old,
pious-looking woman.
She was shaking her finger, screeching, “Erva!” and
pointing to my hair, which was partially covered with a scarf. “Nakedness! How
dare you not dress as a daughter of Israel, in the holiest of places? Where is
the respect? How dare you not respect your husband, and the holiness of this
place?”
There were other moments.
Like being shoved into the back of a bus leaving from the Kotel on Saturday
night. Women to the back! Young men (boys! children!) hooted and sneered
into megaphones by the bus stop that there ought to be a separation of seating.
And at first, I accepted it, without thought—of course, this is where a
woman belongs.
By Jacob Kamaras, JointMedia News Service www.jewishagency.org March
13, 2012
“Now, of
course, if you plan to connect young Jews with their heritage, with their
communities, and with the state of Israel, you have to be where young Jews are,
mainly the campuses and the universities. So, in the last two years we more
than tripled our program of [placing JAFI Israel Fellows to Hillel] on
campuses.
When I came to the Jewish Agency we were working on 15 campuses,
today we are working on 50. And our aim in the years to come is to work on 100
campuses.”
Editor – Joel Katz
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