Judaism under assault in Israel: Intermarrieds sue and Shabbat is watered down
"For love or money
By Shahar Ilan
http://www.haaretz.com/
Thu., October 26, 2006 Cheshvan 4, 5767

A wave of lawsuits has begun to flood the courts - compensation suits filed by non-Jewish immigrant couples who married abroad and are now demanding the state compensate them for their expenses and anguish.

Last week two such suits were filed at the Haifa Magistrate's Court by couples who live in Carmiel. Next week a few more suits will be filed, this time by Haifa residents, and later more will be filed in Tel Aviv. This rash of suits by mixed couples or immigrants lacking a religion is being organized by the Association for Rights of Mixed Families. The association's initial goal is that 10-15 suits be filed, on the assumption that they will be combined for a single principle hearing.

Dimitri and Inessa Yakubovich met in early 2004. She was 25, he 24. Both of Inessa's parents are Jewish. Dimitri has a Jewish father, meaning he is not Jewish according to halakha. They both served as drivers in the Israel Defense Forces. A short while after they first met, they began living together.

That summer they decided to get married. She had just received a NIS 9,000 grant from the army, which paid for their wedding in Sofia, Bulgaria. Since they traveled alone, rather than with a group, the wedding arrangements took a week, rather than the usual three days. They figure their expenses totaled $2,000.

"Every little thing there costs money," lamented Inessa. "You file a petition, it costs money. A international notarized document also has its price." There were also unofficial payments to speed things up.

"There was no festive atmosphere," recalls Inessa. "It was a very small wedding, just my husband and the witnesses - someone we had met in Israel who was going to Bulgaria to visit her mother, and the mother. It was my wedding, and I couldn't have my parents and family there, and I felt a bit uncomfortable and alone."

"You feel like a second-class [citizen] who cannot marry in Israel and must go abroad," says Dimitri. "I serve in the reserves like everyone else, and no one asks me if I'm half-Jewish. It shouldn't be like this."

"We fled Siberia because of anti-Semitism," says Inessa. "There I was a Jew and here I am a Russian. What is being done to us is not fair."

Two and a half years have passed since then. Now they have a child. The suit is important to them, says Inessa, because there are couples who have no money to go abroad to get married.

State failure

Attorney Roman Katsman is filing the suits on behalf of the organization. "Since the plaintiffs have no religion and belong to no religious ethnic group," states one of the suits "they had no possibility of marrying in Israel, due to a failing and/or negligence on the part of the state."

Katsman claims that the state "allows Israeli citizens who have no religion to be discriminated against and be deprived in relation to other citizens."

Katsman notes that Israel "has joined international conventions that state, 'Every man or woman who reaches the age of majority is eligible to enter the covenant of marriage and raise a family without restrictions based on race, citizenship or religion.'"

Surprisingly, paragraph 2 of the Marriage and Divorce Ordinance states civil marriages can be conducted before "the registering authority." In practice, however, writes Katsman, Israel has not established such an authority.

Katsman is claiming $1,000 or more oh behalf of each couple for wedding expenses in Cyprus or Bulgaria. He contends that the state "caused the plaintiffs a sense of humiliation and discrimination by making them feel like second-class citizens and thus caused the plaintiffs non-monetary damage (anguish, disappointment, pain and suffering) since they immigrated to Israel." He estimates the value of this non-monetary damage at NIS 100,000. Since the plaintiffs do not have the means to pay the filing fee for such a large suit, they are each demanding about NIS 20,000.

"The state should have allowed these couples the basic human right to marry," says Itamar Shahar, the spokesman for the Association for the Protection of Mixed Families' Rights. "If the state does not do this, it has to pay [the couples'] expenses."

Shahar warns, "The mixed families could become a new minority in Israeli society that feels deprived and discriminated against. We expect the suits to pressure the state to find a solution."

Shabbat Law making progress

On Sunday the draft bill on the Shabbat Law will be raised for discussion by the ministerial committee for legislation. By next Wednesday there is a reasonable chance that it will be brought before the Knesset plenum for its preliminary reading. Knesset member Natan Sharansky, one of the law's staunchest supporters, is about to leave the Knesset and wants the law to be passed while he still has his seat.

The Shabbat Law is basically an expression of the Gavison-Medan Covenant, which seeks to arrange relations between the religious and secular in Israel. Under the proposed law, commercial centers that operate on Shabbat, such as Shefayim and Bilu Junction, will be closed, but cultural and entertainment enterprises and public transportation will be allowed to operate on a limited scale.

Shopping is currently a major pastime for Israelis. Ostensibly, it is difficult to imagine shopping centers being closed on Shabbat, but the law is being promoted by a special lobby - the lobby for the implementation of the Gavison-Medan Covenant - which is supported by a number of strong organizations such as the Avichai Foundation, the Israel Institute for Democracy and the Yahad Council for religious and secular relations.

A coalition of Knesset members from most of the factions, including Kadima, has formed around the law. Three lobbying and public relations firms are working to get the law passed. Other figures and organizations that support the law include MK Shelly Yachimovich, who wants to reduce work on Shabbat, and merchants organizations, which want to reduce competition from the big shopping centers. The latter have yet to organize themselves against the law.

Despite this impressive coalition, the law's advocates are not convinced it will pass. They fear mainly the opposition of Shas, which has the right to veto any change in religious legislation. Udi Cohen, of the Yahad Council, says the coalition is definitely ready for its first test, and says that even if the law does not pass this time, it can be raised for a vote in another six months."
- posted by Izak @ 11:27 AM (0) comments

 
Christian missionaries use video games targeting Jews
Jews In The Virtual Cross-Hairs

New Evangelical video game has message for non-believers: convert or die.

Liel Leibovitz - Staff Writer
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
Friday, October 20, 2006 / 28 Tishri 5767

Manhattan’s skyline is smoldering.

In the streets, the true believers are fighting to the death against the forces of evil, consisting of rock stars and atheists led by the anti-Christ, the leader of a UN-like organization.

Ordinary New Yorkers, Jews included, have little choice: They can either convert or be killed.

All this is taking place in a new video game, “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” created, ironically, by a team consisting of Jews who now say they believe in Jesus.

Based on the wildly popular Evangelical “Left Behind” book series, which details the struggle between good and evil once the Rapture occurs and true believers in Christ are whisked away to heaven, the game is due out early next month and poised, some industry analysts say, to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. A million copies are also slated to be distributed to churches nationwide.

As members of the Tribulation Force, the game’s protagonists, the player must roam the streets of a carefully rendered Manhattan and interact with passers-by, many of whom come equipped with “life stories” stressing their biography and spiritual state.

New York being New York, a large number of these computer-generated characters are Jewish. One of the game’s major goals is to convert as many of these characters, winning them over to the side of good. Although the game doesn’t mention Christ or Christianity specifically, it does contain bits of scripture and offers, as a reward for completing each level, the opportunity to be directed to a Christian ministry’s Web site.

Those characters that are not converted are won over by the dark side, thereby finding themselves facing death from the player’s array of high-tech weaponry.

To some in the Jewish community, the game and its Evangelical message are troublesome, especially as they are being marketed, as most video games are, to teenagers and young adults.

While the Anti-Defamation League has always expressed concern about the “Left Behind” series, said Deborah Lauter, the director of the organization’s Civil Rights Division, “our concern is escalated by the fact that this game is being targeted primarily to teenagers.”

“Does it pose a problem to Jews?” Lauter added. “Of course it does. Would teenagers who play this game be motivated to proselytize? We don’t know that. Maybe they’ll play out their faith in the game. But I’m not that optimistic. I think teenagers are very impressionable, and when they score points on a video game for converting Jews, that’s a positive message, and I’ll be concerned they’d want to play out the same scenario on the playground.”

Scott Hillman, executive director of the Baltimore-based counter-missionary organization Jews for Judaism, concurred.

Although he has yet to see the game, Hillman said, “Books and movies have been used to help create an atmosphere where people feel its more incumbent upon them to go out and evangelize friends, neighbors, and colleagues,” convincing them that conversion to Christ is the only path to salvation.

The video game, he added, is just another entry in that campaign. “It certainly wants to encourage people they have an obligation to share Jesus with the non-believers,” Hillman added. “Otherwise, the non-believers will be taken by the anti-Christ.”

Even more than books, however, video games, a fundamentally interactive medium, may induce a more personal, emotional experience, said Joost van Dreunen, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University who studies video games.

“Playing a video game is a more ‘lean-forward’ experience than the ‘sit-back’ passivity of reading a book,” he said. “Without pressing the buttons, the story doesn’t move ahead. And so irrespective of the genre or particular narrative, it draws people more into the experience.”

The criticism, however, is not limited to the Jewish community. John B. Thompson, a Christian author, lawyer and activist against obscenity and violence in media in general and video games in particular, has made strong statements condemning the game. He has even severed his relationship with Tyndale House, his publisher as well as the publisher of the “Left Behind” series, for allowing the game to be made.

“The notion that people are to be killing one another on the basis of their unbelief is absurd,” he said. “I think it’s very hurtful for the people who aren’t Christians for the so-called Christian game people to be coming out with nonsense like this.”

The game, he added, might also enforce the notions, expressed by America’s radical Islamist enemies, that “we’re entertaining ourselves with a crusade against people who don’t believe [in Christ]. This is madness.”

But Jeff Frichner, president and co-founder of Left Behind Games, the company which developed the game, disagreed with the criticism.

“I would agree with Thompson’s statement,” he said, “but that’s in no way what the game is about. In the game, you have to defend yourself against the perpetrators of evil, who take over the world and want to kill you because you don’t convert to their worldview. It’s very similar to what happened in Spain, where the Jews were forced to become Maranos, or else were tortured or killed.”

Frichner used another example from Jewish history to describe the Tribulation Force soldiers. Rather than murderous Evangelists, he said, the game’s protagonists were akin to the Righteous Gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust.

“That’s kind of what the Tribulation Forces are like in our game,” he said. “It’s the Nazis trying to get you and you have to fight for your life.”

In defense of his view, Frichner drew attention to several elements in the game that mitigate the violence. First of all, the game includes no graphic depiction of any violent acts, and was awarded the relatively mild “Teen” rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board, indicating that the game is suitable for children 13 and older.

Second, one of the game’s features is a spirituality meter, which is greatly depleted whenever a player kills an opponent, evil or not. After each killing, therefore, the player is advised to press the “Pray” button and increase his character’s spirituality.

“I was listening to an Israeli general on C-Span during the recent conflict in Lebanon,” Frichner said. “He was making a statement about how there really is no winner when you have to fight. I thought that was incredibly thoughtful, and proof that Israel truly has its motives in the right place.” Similar compassion, he said, conveyed through reluctance to commit any violence, exists in the game as well.

Addressing the game’s basic premise — that characters must either convert or, eventually, be killed — Frichner sounded a more ambivalent tone.

“The game is actually agnostic,” he said. “The ‘Left Behind’ series is a Christian series, and it has a motive of wanting to convert people to Christianity. But in the game itself, we don’t even mention the word Christian. We use the ‘Left Behind’ premise as a backdrop. We have a good force and an evil force, and [the player’s] job is to influence agnostic people.”

All that, he added, was not to say that converting people to Christianity is “not important to us.”

“I’m a Jewish believer in Y’shua,” said Frichner, who was born in Rego Park, Queens, and attended Hebrew school before finding Christ in the 1980s. “I attended Yom Kippur services in a messianic synagogue in San Diego. I still maintain my Jewishness even though I’m a believer in Messiah. It’s something that has changed my life deeply, and I hope to share that with people. Whether they decide to be followers or not, that’s their decision.”

By giving players the option to be directed to a ministry’s Web site and learn more about the faith, Frichner added, the game, far from proselytizing, aims to educate and allow players to “discover the faith in Messiah, if that’s their choice.”

Far, then, from severing the budding ties between the Jewish and Evangelical communities, ties based largely on support for Israel, Frichner said the game’s motives are “bridge building, creating dialogue, and helping people to think and talk about matters of internal importance.”

Set for release on Nov. 17, the game, industry analyst Michael Pachter estimated, is slated to sell between 250,000 and a million units, a significant number, especially considering the game’s faith-specific theme. The game will be sold in more than 10,000 retail locations, including Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, Costco and others.

The first entry in what some experts estimate will shortly be a niche market as prosperous and popular as Christian rock, “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” was born out of a partnership, in 2001, between Frichner and Troy Lyndon. Lyndon, a celebrated veteran of the video game industry whose credits include such popular games as the Madden Football series, also identifies as a Jew who believes in Jesus, and was born on the Upper West Side to a Jewish mother.

The two, Frichner said, realized the need for Christian-themed video games, and began searching for existing popular brands to license. “Left Behind,” he added, was a natural choice, although C.S. Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia” and the mega-popular “Veggie Tales” series, which recreates biblical tales starring animated vegetables, were considered as well.

There really is little difference, Frichner said, between his game and the Narnia story, the subject of a popular 2005 film adaptation by Walt Disney Pictures.

A Narnia game, Frichner explained, would be very similar to his current release. “In the movie, there are battles, and in our game there are battles,” he said. “The real-time strategy game, our game’s category, is basically a war category. It’s almost like a computer-generated chess, just a strategic game where you have one side fighting against another, and ultimately you have a victor, and that’s how you win the game. Same is true for our game: You have the force of good and the force of evil, you battle against evil and hopefully you can figure out and manage your resources to win each level and, ultimately, the game.”
- posted by Izak @ 3:53 AM (0) comments

 
Young Jews abandoning a Judaism they don't relate to
Where The Boys Aren’t
Groups now struggling to confront ‘boy crisis’ as large numbers bolt Jewish life after bar mitzvahs.
Debra Nussbaum Cohen - Staff Writer
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
Friday, October 20, 2006 / 28 Tishri 5767

Andrew Roberts, an articulate 16-year-old junior at the Riverdale Country School, enjoys Judaism in an intellectual way, like when he discussed the Torah portion each week while attending the Rodeph Sholom Day School through eighth grade.

Now in high school, his focus has shifted away from Jewish activities. He has played tennis and basketball and is starting a sports magazine at school. He went to synagogue with his family on the High Holy Days but doesn’t go other times, though there’s a Torah discussion group he says he’d probably enjoy. He also hasn’t gone to the youth group where his sister was active.

“I’m sort of regretful about not being involved,” says Roberts, who lives on the Upper West Side with his parents and 12-year-old brother. His 18-year-old sister is at college.

“The process of getting there, into the m indset of going, is the hardest part,” he says. “I found it more meaningful when I was younger.”

He has a lot of company.

Judaism is facing a “boy crisis,” according to a growing chorus of voices, and a couple of groups are trying to address it.

“The anomie that many young males feel has definitely gotten worse,” said William Pollack. A psychologist on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School, Pollack authored “Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood” (Random House).

He is also working for a new organization, Moving Traditions, which sponsored a session last week titled “What’s Up With The Boys?” at the JCC of Manhattan. Pollack spoke at a session crowded to capacity despite a downpour outside.

In startling numbers, boys are simply ceasing their involvement in Jewish activities around the time they become bar mitzvah, according to Moving Traditions. As a result, many Jewish programs for teens and young adults are disproportionately filled with girls.

Several people interviewed for this article attend Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, a popular, creative Conservative synagogue on the Upper West Side, and each of them volunteered that they notice an absence of boys and young men from the services and youth activities.

Deborah Pinsky, the synagogue’s executive director, said that there have long been far many more girls involved.

“Boys consider bar mitzvah their graduation from Jewish life, more than girls do,” says Deborah Meyer, executive director of Moving Traditions, which recently started a three-year research project to identify what boys need.

“Not only do fewer boys participate, but boys have more complaints about Jewish programming,” Meyer says. “As a community we’re clearly not meeting boys where they are.”

Underlying issues aren’t unique to Jewish boys. A Newsweek cover story last January focused on the struggle of increasing numbers of boys in education. And American boys are more suspicious of religion than girls, according to a National Study of Youth and Religion (youthandreligion.org).

That teenagers and young men share a sense of alienation from Jewish activities is clear. Why, and what can be done to address it, is not, say experts.

“There is very little data about what adolescent Jewish boys are thinking and doing, especially those not involved in Jewish activities,” according to Pollack.

Birthright Gender Gap

Len Saxe, director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, has investigated the topic, in the context of birthright israel and Jewish camping.

While the early days of birthright israel had more girls than boys, when the second intifada started the percentage of boys soared. “While parents could say to their college-age daughters ‘we don’t want you to go,’ and the women would say ‘OK’, the guys would go anyway,” said Saxe.
Participation in the birthright trips is now about equally split between young men and women, said Jay Golan, president of birthright israel foundation, but has recently been as much as 55 percent female. Participation mirrors the pool of applicants for the free 10-day trips, he said.

In focus groups, Pollack says, boys “found Jewish programs boring, not interesting. They found sports and other action activities a better draw. Some boys said they felt burnt out after their bar mitzvah and wanted some time off.”

“We haven’t helped boys understand how the traditional values of Judaism can have meaning in their everyday lives,” Pollack says.

Moving Traditions’ interest in boys emerged after its chair, Sally Gottesman, who works as a management consultant for non-profit groups, noticed that clients were struggling to attract young men to their programs.

“Everybody individualized it to their group, wondering ‘how can we get more boys to participate in Hillel, or in our Israel trip,’ as if it were their fault that boys weren’t involved. But it’s a communal issue,” said Gottesman.

Moving Traditions this year is running 190 “Rosh Chodesh: It’s a Girl Thing!” programs for girls in grades 6 through 12 in schools, synagogues and JCCs. Eventually, the organization hopes to publish recommendations about effective ways of reaching boys in a variety of Jewish settings.

Conservative Challenge

The crisis appears to be well entrenched for the Reform movement, but a possibly emerging challenge for the Conservative movement.

Last year the Union for Reform Judaism surveyed its youth programs. Looking at attendance records dating back several years, it found that girls accounted for 57 to 78 percent of participants in youth groups, leadership training, camp and Israel programs for teens and young adults. In none of the 50 programs surveyed did boys outnumber girls.

At Kutz Camp, the Reform overnight summer camp in Warwick, N.Y., boys have accounted for just 28 percent of campers over the last several summers, according to a new website focusing on the URJ’s Young Men’s Project (urj.org/gender).

Several camps, including Kutz, have in the last few years run separate activities for boys and girls, said Rabbi Michael Mellen, director of youth programs for URJ. There have even been gender-segregated prayer services at the camps and at the conventions of the National Federation of Temple Youth.

The movement as a whole is attempting to address it by researching best practices and publicizing them on its Web site and in a book URJ plans to publish before its next biennial convention, in December, 2007. The pre-biennial symposium next year will focus on gender, said Rabbi Mellen.

The exodus of men is visible even in the Reform movement’s seminary. Between 2000 and 2003, men and women each were half of rabbinical students at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. But suddenly women jumped to 71 percent of first –year students in 2004, and 67 percent of students starting rabbinical training this year.

While the Conservative movement’s New York rabbinical school continues to have far more men than women as students (currently 90 men and 49 women), that tide may also be changing.

According to Rabbi Charles Savenor, admissions director, while the current fifth-year class has 17 men and three women, the gap may be closing. The second-year class has eight men and seven women, and the first-year class has 16 men and 12 women.

This year, for the first time, the mechina preparatory program has more women than men (10 women and eight men).

For the rabbinical school overall, “I don’t predict that women will outnumber men,” said Rabbi Savenor, adding “we would welcome a class that was 50/50.” The high school program at JTS, Prozdor, has about half girls and half boys, according to its principal, Bess Adler. Female participation has recently edged up, however, with girls comprising 51 percent of students in the 2004 academic year, 52 percent in 2005 and 53 percent in the current year.

Heads of the Reform and Conservative movement’s synagogue men’s clubs have both been active in trying to reach boys. The 15 regional retreats of the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs, which has 29,000 constituents, have in the last two years reached out to get young men to come with their fathers, with good success, said Rabbi Charles Simon, the executive director.

Some observers, including Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, suggest that men are retreating from active engagement in Jewish life because women now dominate it. Rabbi Salkin, rabbi at The Temple in Atlanta, was interviewed in an article titled “The Retreating Man” in a special section of Reform Judaism magazine devoted to “Re-Engaging Men” in the Fall 2006 issue. In it, he says that the trend toward spirituality in the Reform movement and in American culture “seems too cloying, too feminine, for many men.”

“If you add to this the fact that many of the public practitioners of this spirituality are in fact women, it may seem to many men that what they are really good at is no longer appreciated or needed.”

The “feminization” of Jewish life since women entered the rabbinate in appreciable numbers is not something to blame for the boy crisis, says Pollack.

“I don’t think boys have dropped out because women are leaders,” said Pollack. “They see how women can play their roles but don’t see how boys can change their own roles to be beside those girls and continue to be leaders. Boys haven’t found a way to change because men haven’t found a way to change.” The need to come up with ways to reach the missing males is urgent, say those involved.

“People tend to look too late at an issue, after a tipping point has happened. It’s our generation’s responsibility to look at this now,” Gottesman says. “There is lots more to do for girls, but also lots to do for boys. It’s not either/or, and it’s a long process. Judaism will thrive when men and women and boys and girls are all engaged in it.”

“When the Creator called out to our forefathers and foremothers they said ‘hineni,’ ‘here I am.’ Boys are calling out to us by their actions, not so much in words, ‘are you there for us?’ “ says Pollack. “Are we going to respond by saying ‘hineni,’ or walk in the other direction?”
- posted by Izak @ 3:37 AM (0) comments

 
Converts in limbo in Israel
"Let them get a Reform conversion
By Tamar Rotem
http://www.haaretz.com/
Thu., October 19, 2006 Tishrei 27, 5767

Nothing in the life of the girl who grew up in a bourgeois home in Cologne foretold the unlikely path she would take. But 29-year-old Michal Janietz says she had never felt at ease with her German indentity. The history of her people was part of it, she admits, but mostly she says it was her attraction to Judaism. She finds it hard to recall when she first became aware of her sense of alienation in Germany and whether she deliberated before deciding to live as a Jew in Israel.

About half a year ago, shortly after she came to Israel to study at the Kibbutz Yavneh conversion ulpan in the south, she changed her name from Alyn to the definitely Israeli Michal. No one asked her to do this. She sees the defiant name change as marking the end of a long, deep process of searching for an identity.

Her first visit to Israel came after high school, when she volunteered to work at an old-age home in Jerusalem's Kiryat Ha'yovel neighborhood. And she kept returning to Israel throughout the years.

"I can't say that I developed a religious interest or an attraction to Judaism on my first visit, nor on the second," says Michal, "because I was never a religious person. My interest in religion developed only later." Yet, every visit she felt herself becoming more distanced from there, and closer to here.

Why did she choose to study Semitic languages at university? Why did she write her master's thesis on revived words in Hebrew? Looking back, she says these were just more things that brought her closer to her decision to convert.

She researched the material for her thesis over several months at the Academy of the Hebrew Language. On returning to Germany, two years ago, she started drawing closer to the Jewish community of Cologne, attending a synagogue on Shabbat and keeping kosher. She later began studying for her Ph.D. far from Cologne, and relocated to a lush, green and very peaceful village not far from the university where she studied.

"The village was so remote," she says without a shred of irony, "that the Jewish congregation was too small for a minyan." And the university faculty was "too Christian" for her. Its approach to biblical interpretation bothered her. And so, in March, she left it all and landed at Kibbutz Yavneh to study Judaism.

"Judaism provides me with answers to all the profound questions I had about life and death," she says.

The gate closes.

Janietz already feels Jewish. Her ulpan advisers say she is ready for conversion. The representative of the Conversion Court (the person coordinating between the conversion ulpan and the court) is also convinced. During her studies she met her fiance, Yehuda Shmuel, also a conversion candidate, from South Africa. They plan to marry soon. In the summer, at the end of the course, her path to a life in Israel as a kosher Jew seemed clearer than ever. She was then disappointed to learn that the gates to the country are shut to her.

Janietz belongs to a group of people who wish to convert but are unable to receive citizenship under the Law of Return; hundreds each year apply for conversion with rabbis and conversion ulpans in Israel. The candidates arrive on a tourist visa. The conversion ulpan then directs them to a committee for exceptions - a joint committee of the Interior Ministry and the conversion administration. Each candidate's case comes before the committee members twice: Before the conversion course they determine if the person should be accepted to the course, and after it, they decide if he or she advances to the court for the conversion ceremony.

Shlomit Tur Paz, a lawyer who heads the Jerusalem Itim Institute (a body assisting would-be converts), says that until recently a recommendation such as the court representative gave on the Janietz case was all that was needed to be accepted. However, she says that today the policy has changed to an arbitrary and strict one: "Rabbis in many countries throughout the world send their serious candidates for conversion to Israel, since they cannot provide them with adequate Jewish education. However, upon arriving here, they cannot study and advance on their way to conversion, since they are not citizens. The committee that is supposed to examine the exceptions has ceased to function. It's a catch."

Rabbi Seth Farber, founder of Itim, says: "Now we have chaos. The office treats converts cynically. Its officials are apathetic to the serious efforts converts undertake for periods of two years ormore. It goes against Jewish tradition that talks of empathy toward converts."

About a year ago, new regulations were set for the committee, and legal experts from the Interior Ministry and the Prime Minister's Office were introduced into the panel. Its chair is Rafi Dayan of the conversion administration. But the feeling among conversion professionals is that the new policy, which prevents some converts from starting the official conversion course and others who have passed the course from coming before the Conversion Court, is directed by the Interior Ministry.

Complaints about the committee's work, or lack thereof, abound, and also come from senior officials in the conversion administration, who make no attempt to hide their frustration. "The committee's conduct is scandalous," says one of them. "It rarely meets, it is cumbersome due to the legal nature of the proceedings, their work hours are too limited, and they don't handle the workload. In this way the committee creates injustices and delays of justice." The same official says: "The Interior Ministry's people have the perspective that everyone is a liar. They try to determine the person's sincerity in the religious process. It's absurd." He claims that in the past 25 cases were dealt with every week, and today they manage only 10.

Farber talks about foot-dragging. "When they're kind enough to give an answer, it usually points to an unprofessional and probably intentional attitude designed to make things more difficult." Of 11 from the south who received the rabbinical court's recommendation, he says eight were rejected by the exceptions committee.

Janietz was rejected on the pretext that the course she took was too short. This argument seems outrageous. She gave up a comfortable academic life for a demanding program where she lives and studies. There is nothing heroic or adventurous in menial kibbutz work. Her week is divided into three days of work and three days of studying. On work days she wakes up early in the morning to go clean in the Kibbutz kitchen or spends her day endlessly chopping vegetables. The three days of studying are busy and full.

The head of the Kibbutz Yavneh conversion ulpan, Rabbi Meshulam Shvat, is outraged by the pretext for rejecting Janietz. His conversion ulpan is among the oldest and most famous in the country, and is known for its strict selection and serious reputation. How can they say that his course is short when at other conversion ulpans they study only two afternoons, he asks, and adds that the new converts take part in kibbutz life and can be scrutinized outside studying hours. "Undoubtedly the Interior Ministry is worried that foreign workers will take advantage of conversion and therefore they make the procedures stricter, but closing the gates is not an option," says Shvat.

No work, no marriage.

Conversion candidates are unable to carry on with their lives. They cannot work or get married until they complete their conversion. Some of them fall into poverty during the long process. Such is the case of Anna Maria Kalviano from Romania, who also studied at Kibbutz Yavneh and was rejected by the exceptions committee. Kalviano, who has a doctorate, wrote her dissertation on the Jewish communities of Romania.

The Hebrew University has given her library job, but until she receives a work permit she cannot start working. Meanwhile, she has no financial resources, and to keep a roof over her head, she volunteers at the kibbutz clothing warehouse.

It seems that the Orthodox conversion for non-citizens has gone bankrupt. The absurdity is that the only route available today for converts is the Reform path, this following the Supreme Court ruling to grant citizenship to those who underwent conversion in recognized Reform communities or fast-track conversion abroad. Rabbi Shvat claims that the Hebrew ulpan at the Kibbutz now has a group of blue identity cardholders from South America who do not know much about Judaism: "Reform conversion requires less selection. Some of these people studied on the Internet and were converted in a Reform process. I am pained that this is the game we have to play."

Sharon Harel and his wife, Olga Gendelman, encapsulate this absurdity. He is an Israeli and his wife is from Ukraine. After Gendelman was rejected by the exceptions committee, the frustrated (and generous, it should be said) court representative directed her to a Reform conversion. Rabbi Moshe Klein, deputy head of the conversion system, is appalled by this story, but he admits that changes must be made to the structure of the committee. "The Interior Ministry says that those who convert receive, in effect, the keys to their citizenship, and we want to make sure that the conversion is not a blunt instrument used on their way to citizenship," he says, justifying the ministry's conduct.

However, according to a proposal to be presented next week to the Justice Ministry by Klein and by Rabbi Haim Druckman, the head of the conversion administration, the role of the exceptions committee should be limited to examining the candidate's civic qualification, and in no way interfere with determining the person's religious motives or sincerity. This part falls under the aegis of the conversion administration. In addition, to regulate the converts' legal status, they propose to grant candidates student visas and examine their seriousness during the process.

In the meantime, Janietz is frustrated. After severing ties with her family, who were not supportive of her decision, she feels suspended in mid-air. She lives in Jerusalem and cannot work. Until she gets married, she has to be separated from her fiance in line with the strict religious law she accepted. She is waiting. How long, she does not know: "Not having a legal status, it's no life," she says.

The Population Registry's response: "Representatives from the Interior Ministry take part in the meetings of the committee of which they are members, and their position is taken as a recommendation. The conduct of the committee and its final decision is in the hands of the people heading it - the conversion administration."."
- posted by Izak @ 4:56 AM (0) comments

 
Allegations of sex abuse in Brooklyn yeshivas
Black Hat Meets Blog

The Internet is revolutionizing closed Orthodox communities and exposing long-hidden sexual abuse allegations — and not everyone is happy about it.

Jennifer Friedlin -
Special To The Jewish Week
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
(05/25/2006)

Is computer technology shifting the balance of power in Brooklyn’s insular, fervently Orthodox community?

In the 1980s, two prominent Flatbush rabbis allegedly closed the door on a burgeoning sexual abuse scandal by preventing a rabbinical court proceeding from taking place. Now, two decades later, an Internet blog has reinvigorated the allegations, resulting in two multimillion-dollar lawsuits against a rabbi, a yeshiva and a summer camp for boys.

“Without the Internet, this story never would have been brought to light,” said Un-Orthodox Jew, the anonymous blogger who last year began posting angry diatribes about the alleged abuse and cover-up on www.theunorthodoxjew.blogspot.com .

On the blog, Un-Orthodox Jew, who also goes by UOJ and claims to have deep ties in the “black hat” world, stated that Rabbi Yehuda Kolko sexually abused a number of male students at Yeshiva and Mesivta Torah Temimah in Flatbush and at Camp Agudah in Ferndale, N.Y., while Rabbi Lipa Margulies, the head of the school, allegedly helped to protect him at the expense of the victims. All told, three former students of Rabbi Kolko allege abuse against him in the two lawsuits.

While the blog has generated heaps of scorn among readers — some people have said UOJ’s Web posts were less acceptable than the alleged acts they were revealing — the Web site has also elicited support as well as a response from at least one alleged victim.

David Framowitz, a 48-year-old former student who now lives in Israel with his family, says he first came across the blog while searching for Rabbi Kolko’s name on the Internet. His story was chronicled in a May 22 New York Magazine story.

“I was always typing in Kolko’s name looking to see if anyone else was molested,” he told The Jewish Week in a telephone interview last week. “Then one day, I Googled Kolko and all of a sudden it was there.”

Framowitz posted his story to the UOJ blog, claiming that Kolko repeatedly molested him 36 years ago while he was a seventh and eighth grade student at Torah Temimah and during two summers at Camp Agudah. He said he told his parents, but they did not believe him. Now, he wrote, he was coming out because he felt the time had come to tear down “the wall of silence.”

In response to the posts, UOJ put Framowitz in touch with Jeffrey Herman, a Miami-based lawyer who has litigated sex abuse cases against the Catholic Church. Herman took the case. He is also representing two other plaintiffs who go by John Doe 2 and John Doe 3 in the complaints. The complaints, filed in Brooklyn Federal Court, all name Rabbi Kolko and Yeshiva and Mesivta Torah Temimah as defendants, while the complaint on behalf of Framowitz and John Doe 2 also names Camp Agudah.

Although Rabbi Margulies is not a defendant in the case, the complaint states that Rabbi Margulies threatened to expel from the school and ostracize from the community any child who spoke of the abuse. Herman said that Margulies also enlisted Rabbi Pinchus Scheinberg to help quell the fire by telling victims that sexual abuse had not taken place because there was no penetration. After allegedly thwarting two beit dins, Rabbi Margulies told anyone who asked that Kolko had been exonerated, according to last week’s New York Magazine expose. No one ever went to the authorities.

Avi Moskowitz, a lawyer representing Torah Temimah, told The Jewish Week that the yeshiva “emphatically denies the allegations” and has put Kolko on administrative leave.

Rabbi David Zwiebel, a representative of Agudath Israel of America, the owner of the camp, said that officials in his organization had not heard of any allegations against Rabbi Kolko, who apparently left the camp’s employ of his own accord in the mid-1970s.

“There is nobody currently in the administration who has any recollection from that time,” Zwiebel said.

Rabbi Kolko and Rabbi Margulies declined to comment, while Scheinberg, who is 93 and lives in Israel, could not be reached.

While the statute of limitations has expired for a criminal investigation or a civil lawsuit, Herman said he believes that because of the alleged cover-up the plaintiffs would have the right to pursue the civil action.

Herman also noted that a 22-year-old has come forward with allegations against Rabbi Kolko, but he declined to provide details. If that case moves forward, it could fall within the statute of limitations for a criminal investigation, according to Herman.

Besides blogging, UOJ — who said he will not reveal his identity because it would deflect attention from his cause — said he tried several other avenues to bring the allegations to light, from writing letters to Jewish and secular newspapers to sending a letter about Rabbis Kolko and Margulies to thousands of religious families throughout Brooklyn. But, he said, no one wanted to listen.

“I have submitted letters to the editor and as long as they were non-controversial they were accepted. But once I started snooping around about issues no one was dealing with, my letters were not published,” said UOJ, who describes himself as somewhere between 30 and 40 years of age, observant and married with children. He also says that he comes from a prominent Orthodox family that made a fortune in real estate.

Working as an Internet-based Robin Hood, UOJ said his sole interest in starting his blog was to rattle the cocoon of Orthodoxy, which, he claims, has enabled those in power to exploit their followers.

Experts who advocate on behalf of sex abuse victims have applauded UOJ’s efforts. They say that because many Orthodox communities prohibit people from going to secular authorities with allegations of abuse and that abusers often go unpunished, the Internet provides one of the only vehicles religious people have for accessing support.

“In the Orthodox world people don’t watch TV, they don’t listen to the radios, they don’t read the papers but everyone seems to be sneaking onto the Internet,” said Vicky Polin, executive director of the Awareness Center, a Baltimore-based advocacy group for victims of sexual assault.

Yet others worry about the Internet’s potential for abuse.

Rabbi Kenneth Brander, the dean of Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future, said he thought that recent Internet chatter is “a reflection of the fact that victims have not felt heard on this issue.” Nevertheless, he expressed concern about the harm a vengeful or mistaken blogger could inflict on an innocent person.

“Not everything on a Web site can be treated as truth,” Brander said.

Whether or not the Internet proves helpful or hurtful or a bit of both, most community observers say the Web has forever changed the way Orthodox individuals interact with the world.

“The Internet poses an incredibly serious threat to the status quo in these communities — as it does to any society that controls information and suppresses public dissent,” said Hella Winston, a sociologist and author of “Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels.”

“The fact that David Framowitz was able to connect with UOJ from half a world away, in only a few seconds, is nothing short of revolutionary,” she said.

In the wake of the lawsuits and the New York magazine article, UOJ said he has received more than 400,000 hits to his site. Meanwhile, the alleged abuse has also become a hot topic on other Jewish blogs.

On the Chaptzem blog (http://chaptzem.blogspot.com/ ), which describes itself as “the one and only heimishe news center,” the host wrote:

“The whole Kolko-Margulies story has brought to light some very important questions regarding child abuse. How do we as a community deal with allegations of abuse? How do we decide if they are founded or fabricated? … Also, even if the allegations are founded how do we go about stopping it? How far do we go?”

According to UOJ, such questions have been a long time coming.
- posted by Izak @ 3:36 AM (0) comments

 
Sex accusations in Brooklyn hit the DA's office hard
Child Sex Abuse Case Still Haunts

The Cold Case of Avrohom Mondrowitz and the Silencing of a Community

By ROXANNA SHERWOOD
ABC News Nightline

Oct. 11, 2006 — - Retired New York Police Department Det. Pat Kehoe still remembers a phone call she got more than 20 years ago, from a person making allegations that a rabbi was sexually abusing children in his neighborhood.

"I never received a call like that in my whole career in the New York City Police Department. Never," Kehoe told Cynthia McFadden in a recent interview.

"I'll never forget it because unfortunately it was my birthday, November 21 1984. I was working in the Brooklyn Sex Crimes squad and I received an anonymous call from a male who started to say that there was a rabbi and gave the name and he was abusing people on this block," she said.
Rabbi Avrohom Mondrowitz, as he called himself, lived on a tree-lined block in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. Kehoe and her partner, Sal Catafulmo, went out to the neighborhood where Italians and Hasidic Jews lived side-by-side.

At one of the first addresses they tried, she says a resident told her "Everyone knows Rabbi Mondrowitz. He's good to all our children. He buys them bicycles and takes them away on weekends and things."

That might sound like a recommendation, but not to Kehoe.

"With that information I got very scared," she said.

Kehoe's background in an NYPD pedophilia squad taught her to recognize the signs of pedophilia.
"Pedophiles have a pattern with children to get their confidence and send their so-called love, you might say, and buy them things," she said.

What she heard from the children themselves only confirmed her gut feelings.

"We brought them in without their parents," Kehoe said. "They started to tell us, 'The rabbi is our friend. He takes us away,' and things like that. As the questions became more difficult for the children -- 'Did anything ever happen? Did anything sexual ever happen? Are you aware of it happening to anyone else while you were there?' -- they all broke down and cried, each one separately."

According to Kehoe, the children painted a clear picture of abuse. Kehoe says the children told her that the rabbi had fondled them, had sexual relations with them, and that he had fondled others in front of them.

Apparently the self-proclaimed rabbi -- Mondrowitz had no formal rabbinical credentials -- was counseling young Orthodox boys in the basement office of his home in Borough Park.

Kehoe and her partner immediately obtained a search warrant for his home. When they got to the address, there was no answer at the door, so Kehoe climbed through the basement window.

The alleged pedophile and his family had fled and his house was completely vacant but for what Kehoe says were up to a hundred files of Orthodox boys that Mondrowitz had been counseling in his basement office.

Kehoe and her partner reached out to all of the Orthodox boys' families, she says, but no one would talk.

"They were members of the Hassidic community, and as we found out through the investigation -- at the time I wasn't completely aware of all the different rules in the Hassidic community. And one of the things is that if one of them is ever sexually abused, whether it be by a pedophile or raped, there's a very large stigma that prevents them from getting married and going forward with their lives if this is ever found out or brought to anyone's attention," she said.

The only victims that cooperated with the investigation were Italian. They were neighborhood boys who trusted the rabbi because he bought them gifts like bicycles. Not a single Orthodox Jewish boy or their parents would talk to the police.

The statements of four Italian boys, aged 11 through 16, were the basis for the indictment against Avrohom Mondrowitz. He was facing eight counts of sexual abuse in the first degree, endangering the welfare of a child, and five counts of sodomy in the first degree.

The allegations against Mondrowitz were shocking to those who knew him. Rabbi Herbert Bomzer has been a fixture among ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn for more than 50 years. He is president of the Flatbush Rabbinical Board, composed of nearly 100 rabbis. He hired Mondrowitz to counsel boys at a school for Orthodox boys in the late 1970s.

"He was very effective, so much so that toward the end of the school year when they were planning the graduation exercise the student reps requested that I should invite him to be the guest speaker at the exercise," Bomzer said.

Young boys were equally impressed with the charismatic older man. Mark Weiss was one of them. At 13 years old, growing up in Chicago, Weiss says he was having trouble fitting in and reconciling his orthodoxy with the outside world. In the summer of 1980, his father sent Weiss to New York to receive counseling from Mondrowitz.

"He had kind of a sporty little car, and he had this really cool sound system in there. And right off the bat I remember being just completely overwhelmed with just like how cool this guy is," Weiss said. "He took me out to eat. He took me out to lunch, to dinner. He took me to an amusement park. He took me sightseeing here."

Weiss trusted the man so much that with his family away on a trip to the mountains, he didn't hesitate when Mondrowitz invited him to sleep in his own bed with him, telling him, Weiss says, that it might be more comfortable there than in another bedroom in the front of the house.

What Weiss says happened in the rabbi's bedroom is something that even to this day makes him uncomfortable to talk about, but he knows how important it is to tell his story, not only for the sake of raising consciousness but for his own healing.

He says that over the course of the week he spent with Mondrowitz, the older man sodomized him on multiple occasions.

Weiss says he tucked the experience away in the deepest recesses of his mind and did not think of it again, that is, until five years later, in 1984, when as an 18-year-old, he was celebrating the holidays in Chicago where he says Mondrowitz was also visiting family.

"I look across the room, and across the room I see Remel Mondrowitz," Weiss said. "It just hit me like a ton of bricks what had happened and I froze. And I just sort of went into a state of shock."

Everything came back to him, he said.

"I realized that I was sexually molested when I was thirteen years old," he said

Weiss immediately turned to his parents for guidance. He first told his mother.

"She was just completely incredulous. She couldn't accept what I was telling her," Weiss said. "What I was telling her was essentially shaking the entire infrastructure to its foundation, really, because it was more than just me being molested. It was just the unraveling of the entire foundation of her support system and of her religious infrastructure."

His father was also devastated and confused -- after all, this was a man he respected and knew. Weiss said his father told him Mondrowitz was a frum man -- a religious Jew.

His father's belief that this is perhaps an experience better kept quiet is a view, Weiss said, his father still maintains today.

"Just a few short days ago, my father was in a panic that this was just going to turn into a huge Chillul Hashem, which is a disgrace of God's name," Weiss said. "A bad image would be cast upon Judaism and orthodox Judaism and the Jewish people."

Now a 39-year-old husband and father of three sons, Weiss said he has carried his painful memory of abuse silently for years. About five years ago, when he and his family were living in Denver, he saw an announcement in a Jewish publication for an event for survivors of sexual molestation.

He was ecstatic at the prospect that his community was finally prepared to confront this problem, so he immediately booked a flight to New York.

"It was going to be this night in which survivors were to be able to meet with leaders of the Jewish community and they were to be able to address and to tell their stories essentially and to be heard for the first time, really, in a public forum in the right wing religious community," he said. But the event did not unfold as he had imagined or hoped it would.

"It was very clear, unfortunately, that the rabbis who were there and the leaders of our community didn't really have an understanding of what it was they were there to do," he said.

"None of the survivors got to say a word. Any questions that were to be asked were written down on these little index cards and they sort of cherry picked the most benign questions and subsequent comments that were followed up by the rabbis really had nothing to do with actual sexual molestation whatsoever," he said.

When the evening was over, Weiss said he was devastated.

"Anybody who was really a victim and really had gone through some horrible experiences was really shell-shocked. We sort of all walked around like we had just survived a plane crash."

A Fall 2000 ad in the Jewish Image published an announcement for one such event, "Let's talk about what never happened..." and in small letters underneath "...but it did." Another ad that ran in a 2001 Jewish Observer advertising one such event bears in its heading a clear message of silence: "SHHH..."

"Because of the unwillingness to expose it, pedophiles can operate pretty safely in the orthodox community?" McFadden asked Mark Weiss. "It's fertile ground. It's fertile ground," Weiss readily replied.

"I've met victims and survivors who have been told by their rabbis they shouldn't say anything because this is what we call Lashone Harah," explained Rabbi Mark Dratch, an officer of the Rabbinical Council of America and head of JSafe, an organization to help Orthodox Jewish victims of domestic violence and sex abuse.

The biblical concept of Lashone Harah is "gossip or slander, a biblical prohibition against maligning another person, against speaking ill of another person," and holds even when the allegations being made are proven true, Dratch said.

There's another biblical concept at play when dealing with sex abuse and domestic violence in the community, he said.

"It's called Mesira. And that's a prohibition on the books of reporting fellow Jews to the authorities under any circumstances," Dratch said.

The mesira edict was published in a Yiddish-language Orthodox Brooklyn newspaper called Der Blatt in the wake of a case of a 6-year-old Orthodox Jewish boy who had brought allegations against a rabbi who had been tutoring him. The case was brought before the Brooklyn district attorney, who ultimately disbanded the grand jury on the case.

Sociologist Amy Neustein, an Orthodox Jewish woman who studies sex abuse in the community and who says she has spoken to members of the victim's family, said the Hebrew publication that ran under the title "Severe Warning and Prohibition" drove the child's family out of town.

"Rabbis sign on to this edict about Mesira stating that he who informs to the Christian authorities can be murdered at the first opportunity," Neustein said. "Well of course that sends such a chill to the family that they pick themselves up with their children, from Brooklyn and they ran out of the county."

"Victims are very hesitant to come forward," Dratch said. "Number one is the denial of the community. So there is a fear that they are not going to be believed.

"Secondly, it's -- I'll use a wonderful Yiddish word -- it's called Shanda, the shame of it all. And individuals are afraid of what the impact of their report will be on themselves personally and on their family and on the extended family," he said.

"The shame is that Mondrowitz didn't get arrested. To me that was the shame," Kehoe said.

Mondrowitz, now 58 years old, has been living comfortably in Israel since 1985, and the retired NYPD detective said she believes he has been amassing new victims.

"Hundreds, I'm sure. He's been in Israel almost 20 years," Kehoe said. "It's a sickness. It's something that you have to do every time when you find a new victim."

In the wake of recent allegations against another Brooklyn Orthodox rabbi, several Orthodox Jewish men alleging that they too were sexually abused by Mondrowitz have come forward to tell of the abuse that they say has haunted them.

Michael Lesher, an attorney who represents six alleged victims of Mondrowitz, including Mark Weiss, said it is similar to what has happened with the Catholic Church.

"The comparisons are obvious, but I would say at the same time that what we are seeing in the Jewish community is in some respects worse because it's more institutionalized," he said.

Rabbi Mark Dratch agrees.

"As an outsider to the Catholic Church, it seems to me that there is an infrastructure or a hierarchy and they have the mechanism, they really do have the mechanism to effect systemic change in a much easier way in a much more efficient way and a much quicker way because of that hierarchy," Dratch said. "In the Orthodox world, we don't have such a hierarchy. There is no pope and there are no levels of responsibility and answerability."

Dratch said there is no way to really gauge how widespread the problem is in the community, "because of this conspiracy of silence."

All parties involved with this story wanted to make sure that one thing was absolutely clear -- that there is sex abuse against children in every community. They would like to see changes in the way some rabbinical leaders handle the allegations when they surface.

"The biggest thing that I worry about really is that I represent the story well and not pre-cast it off in way that this just looks like a besmirch of -- a black eye and a besmirching of the Orthodox Jewish world," Weiss said. "But the truth is, is that it is a black eye to everybody. This problem knows no borders and no boundaries."

"The community senses there is a crisis here and that something very serious needs to be done," Dratch said.

ABC News easily found Mondrowitz living in a quiet Jerusalem neighborhood, his name prominently displayed on a mailbox. He even lectures at the Jerusalem College of Engineering.

He politely declined to be interviewed for the story, and thanked us for the opportunity.

"Mondrowitz proved to be brilliant at working the system," Lesher said. "He understands this Orthodox culture, if possible, better than we do. He understands just what it will do and just what it won't do, what he can get away with and when he has to run. He's manipulated it masterfully and that is really a shameful commentary on the community. That a man like this understands it so well and has been able to turn it so well to his advantage all these years."

"And I was told when I embarked on this crusade to examine, explore sex abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community that Mondrowitz was the key, what he was able to do and how he comported himself and how the community so adroitly managed to cover up for what he did and to keep things quiet as he was out of the country. Just to keep the victims suppressed. To keep their voices silenced," Amy Neustein said.

Though some members of the Orthodox community told ABC News this is a very old case and very old charges with very deep wounds and that it would be better to just let it go now, but Lesher told a different story.

"That's not what my clients believe and they're the victims carrying the wounds," he said. "That's not what I believe and I belong to the community they do."

Lesher, who plans to push the Brooklyn district attorney to try to extradite Mondrowitz.

"This man is not an ancient man. He's only 58 years old now. He was 37 when he fled the country. These victims are not ancient people. These are people in their late 30s and early 40s. They are seething, still seething with what was done to them," Lesher said. "And as one of them put it to me, every day that Mondrowitz can live openly in Israel knowing that he's safe from prosecution because nobody cares, is another day that they are victimized all over again."

The question of whether Mondrowitz could be extradited to stand trial in the United States is unclear. When Mondrowitz fled, then Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman made swift moves to have the alleged pedophile extradited, but under Israeli law at the time, sodomy against boys was not recognized as an extraditable offense, so she was unsuccessful.

Israeli law has since been changed.

The current Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles Hynes, is not trying to extradite at this time.

Weiss said he believes that speaking about the issue of sex abuse is the only answer.

"Throwing it under the rug will do no good. You need to just come out and say it and you know what, we are better people for it," he said. "Nobody's going to look down upon the Orthodox Jewish community negatively because we're talking about this. They are going to come to admire us for being straight about it and admitting we have a problem and we're going to solve it.

Copyright © 2006 ABC News Internet Ventures

----

Hynes Mum On Mondrowitz

Jennifer Friedlin
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
Friday, October 20, 2006 / 28 Tishri 5767

A recent episode of ABC’s “Nightline” discussed the case of an Orthodox Brooklyn therapist who fled to Israel to escape prosecution for sex-crime charges.

Those on the side of a group of alleged victims hoped the national attention would finally force Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes to fight for extradition of the suspected pedophile Avrohom Mondrowitz, who has been on the lam for nearly a quarter of a century.

But the DA refuses to discuss the matter.

“We are not commenting on this case,” a spokesman for Hynes, Sandy Silverstein, told The Jewish Week after Hynes declined to appear on “Nightline.”

Mondrowitz was indicted in 1984 on four counts of sodomy and eight counts of sexual abuse in the first degree for allegedly abusing four boys – none Jewish – in Brooklyn. After he fled, then-District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman fought for Mondrowitz’s extradition. But because the Israeli definition of rape did not include sodomy, and, therefore, Mondrowitz had not broken Israeli law, extradition was off the table.

Israel changed the definition of rape to include sodomy in 1988. But after Hynes was elected the following year, the matter faded.

Hynes’ office has said it did not pursue the case because the extradition treaty could not be applied retroactively. But a memo from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to the State Department regarding Mondrowitz indicated the case could be reopened, said Michael Lesher, a lawyer currently representing six Jewish people who say Mondrowitz abused them.

One of them, Mark Weiss, now 39, says Mondrowitz sexually assaulted him during a summer stay in Mondrowitz’s home when Weiss was 13. After years of keeping quiet, he decided he was ready to publicly tell his story in the hopes that both Hynes and the Orthodox community would take greater action to fight sex abuse.

“I don’t think the DA is going to be able to say it’s a dead issue now,” said Weiss.

After the “Nightline” show, Lesher faxed Hynes additional statements from four more people who claim for the first time that they, too, were abused by Mondrowitz in Brooklyn.

“If the DA doesn’t pursue this case, it’s hard to say what case they would pursue,” said Lesher, who believes Hynes won’t push for extradition because of a cozy relationship with Brooklyn’s Orthodox community.

Lesher is waiting for some answers from Hynes in response to the latest claims.

So far, Hynes is keeping mum.
- posted by Izak @ 3:12 AM (0) comments

 
Jews and Amish interact
Lancaster's Jews Open Their Hearts To Amish

One Jewish resident who lives among the Amish discusses the tragedy and the friendships she's formed.

Doug Chandler - Special To The Jewish Week
http://thejewishweek.com/
Friday, October 13, 2006 / 21 Tishri 5767

For Lisa Wright, one of the few Jews of Lancaster County to live in a rural area with Amish neighbors, what stands out about the past two weeks are mostly the contrasts.

Living where she does, on farmland about six miles from the city of Lancaster, Pa., offers a certain sense of security from the chaos and uncertainty often associated with urban life, she said. "Most of my neighbors here have lived on the same road for more than 20 years. We've aged together, done errands for each other, watched our children grow together and even babysat for each other's children."

That sense of peace and serenity was shattered Oct. 2, the day many Jews observed Yom Kippur, when a local truck driver, Charles Roberts, entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse, tied together 10 trembling girls and gunned them down before killing himself. The slaughter, in which five girls died, shocked the area's residents, as well as other Americans. It also capped a week of violence in the nation's schools, including one other hostage-taking and two homicides.

The other contrast ingrained in Wright's mind is between the reaction of her Amish neighbors to last week's tragedy and her own response.

One of her closest neighbors, an Amish farmer in his 20s, said he believed the gunman was "full of the devil" and that he "couldn't fathom why he did it," Wright recalled. But, like other members of his faith, the neighbor said he had no hate for the killer and was able to forgive him, seeing the tragedy as somehow part of God's plan.

Wright, on the other hand, said in a phone interview Sunday that she remains angry about the murders, a response that may be closer to Jewish notions of forgiveness. Although Wright works as a speech pathologist in the Lancaster School District, she did not know any of the girls killed or their families.

Wright discussed last week's tragedy and her family's friendship with Amish neighbors as Lancaster residents opened their hearts and, in some cases, their wallets to those directly affected by the killings.

As in other houses of worship, leaders of the area's three synagogues, all in Lancaster, had either begun collection drives for the families of the 10 girls or were steering members to where they could make contributions.

Rabbi Stephan Parnes of Temple Beth El, the city's Conservative synagogue, sent an e-mail to members of his congregation two days after the killings, suggesting they recite the 23rd Psalm and asking them to reflect on the event. The 23rd Psalm, beginning with the words, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want," offers comfort at times of deep distress. The e-mail also listed several efforts, such as the Amish School Recovery Fund, to which members might donate.

At Temple Shaarai Shomayim, a Reform synagogue, the Tikkun Olam Committee decided that donations to the congregation's tzedakah fund would go to the Amish families. Meanwhile, Rabbi Jack Paskoff, the synagogue's leader, met with religious school students and their parents last week to discuss the episode and how Jewish theology might address it.

The city's third and oldest congregation is the Orthodox Degel Torah, where members approached Rabbi Shaya Sackett to facilitate their contributions.

Nevertheless, little interaction exists between the county's Amish residents and members of the area's Jewish community, which numbers about 1,500, said Andrew DeWitt, executive director of the Jewish Community Alliance of Lancaster. DeWitt, whose agency combines the functions of a Jewish federation and a JCC, said nearly all the area's Jews live in the city while the Amish are mostly farmers in rural parts of the county.

One of the few exceptions to that, and perhaps the only exception, is Lisa Wright, who lives on nearly 10 acres of land with her husband, Jeffry, and their two children, Nathaniel, 14, and Benjamin, 16. Their tract is in West Lampeter, a township about six miles from Nickel Mines, the site of last week's killings.

Wright, in fact, formed part of what appears to be a rare and enriching friendship, one between her, a Jewish woman raised in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and an Amish woman, roughly the same age, who had never before left Lancaster County.

Wright and her friend, Barbie King, met shortly after Wright and her husband moved to the area 21 years ago, recalled Wright, now 48 and a member of Shaarai Shomayim. The friendship took off after Jeffry Wright volunteered to help the Kings stack hay on their farm, a gesture the Kings returned by baking a pie for the Wrights.

Between those moments and two years ago, when Barbie King died of cancer, the two women watched each other's children, shopped together, sampled each other's food and even traveled together. (Although they don't own cars themselves, the Amish allow themselves to ride in other people's cars.) They also engaged in deep conversations, some over their vastly different lifestyles and some over theology.

The Wrights today are still close friends with Barbie King's daughter and son-in-law, Mary and David Blank, who live in the same farmhouse the Kings once inhabited. It's a rural life based partly on neighbors helping neighbors, said Wright, whose husband is an attorney.

"A week doesn't go by when I don't pick up a tractor part [for the Blanks] or go on an errand or when Mary doesn't bring over tomatoes or homemade bread."

Wright said that, although she has encountered anti-Semitism from Mennonites and other Christians in the area, she has never heard an ill word from any of the Amish, who she calls nonjudgmental. "They don't proselytize," she added. "They have no desire to convert you, and they wouldn't convert you, and I'm very comfortable with that."

Meanwhile, in light of last week's tragedy, she professes both respect and amazement for the Amish concept of forgiveness, a concept that differs greatly from the idea held by most Jews, according to two area rabbis.

"Our first emotion is that we're not ready to forgive somebody in that situation," Rabbi Parnes said. Most Jews believe deeply that individuals make choices and, therefore, have a responsibility for their actions, he continued. "We feel there shouldn't be forgiveness at least until the individual does repentance."

The Amish community, on the other hand, believes that God has a plan for the world, a plan, said the rabbi, that although they might not understand, they feel they must accept. "So they are ready to forgive and not bear that hatred within themselves as time goes on."

Rabbi Sackett, the area's Orthodox rabbi, said forgiveness for Jews "is not spontaneous or instantaneous. It has to come about through hard work and resolve and changing one's being." Moreover, among Jews, "it's not the family's place to offer forgiveness, but the person who's most directly wronged" and, in the case of homicide, that person is no longer there.
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Non-Jews learn parenting from the Talmud
So the Torah Is a Parenting Guide?

By EMILY BAZELON
The New York Times
Published: October 1, 2006

In the third century, the rabbis who put together the Talmud instructed fathers to teach their sons to swim. It’s safe to say that most American Jews aren’t familiar with this directive, whether or not they take their kids to the lake or the pool. But one morning this past summer, a group of mostly non-Jewish parents puzzled over its meaning in a classroom at the Carolina Day School, a nonsectarian private school in Asheville, N.C.

These mothers and fathers were accidental students of Judaism. They had come together because they often felt flattened by achieving the modern ideal of successful children. They were seeking relief in a weeklong course based on the book “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children,” by a Los Angeles clinical psychologist named Wendy Mogel.

Genevieve Fortuna, a 58-year-old former preschool teacher who has been teaching classes on raising children for 30 years, wrote the Talmudic quote about swimming in blue marker on the classroom’s white board. The half-dozen or so parents, dressed in summer-casual shorts and sandals, looked up at her from their seats around two child’s-height tables. Fortuna opened her copy of Mogel’s book. “Jewish wisdom holds that our children don’t belong to us,” she read. “They are both a loan and a gift from God, and the gift has strings attached. Our job is to raise our children to leave us. The children’s job is to find their own path in life. If they stay carefully protected in the nest of the family, children will become weak and fearful or feel too comfortable to want to leave.”

“This is the most difficult part for me,” said Marie-Louise Murphy, a mother of three. “My husband is really protective of our girls. Even more so now that they’re older, because it’s such a critical period for them.” Her 14-year-old daughter is eager to baby-sit, Murphy explained, but her husband “is having the hardest time with it.”

Increasingly, not being involved in every aspect of a child’s life and letting children take risks that used to be a matter of course feels like an act of negligence to many parents. To resist the forces of judgment, internal and external, the parents in Asheville were in search of what every countercultural movement needs — a manifesto. Wendy Mogel’s book may seem an unlikely one, with its reliance not only on the Bible but also on the Talmud and other intricate rabbinic texts. Published in 2001 with a print run of 5,000 and little publicity, it went largely unreviewed, and bookstores often shelved it with their bar-mitzvah fare. Yet five years later, “Blessing” has sold about 120,000 copies at a pace of more than 20,000 a year. It’s the kind of book that has influence beyond its sales figures. Principals press it into the hands of mothers, who read it and then buy it in bulk to give away as baby presents. If you have children of a certain age, chances are that someone you know will own a copy or have lent one away.

Strikingly, Mogel’s book is being used as a text for classes and discussion groups that take place not in Jewish settings but in churches or schools like Carolina Day. Mogel, who gives about a speech a month, has been a keynote speaker at the annual meetings of the National Association of Independent Schools, which represents 1,300 private schools, and the American Camp Association, an umbrella group for 2,600 summer camps and youth groups. This fall, the National Association of Episcopal Schools will give her top billing. Mogel’s diagnosis of the ills of middle- and upper-class modern American child-rearing — that children too often don’t learn to take care of themselves — resonates with the educators who deal with these families every day. In thinking about this issue, Mogel finds her psychological training useful but insufficient and turns her audience’s attention to the laws and teachings of old Jewish texts.


Wendy Mogel wasn’t to the religious manner born. Her grandfather was the president of his Orthodox synagogue in Brighton Beach, N.Y. But her father fell away from strict observance, and her mother never knew it — “she was as close to a shiksa as he could get,” Mogel says. Mogel was raised to know the difference between cherrystone and littleneck clams, not to follow the Jewish proscription against eating shellfish.

At Middlebury College in Vermont, Mogel majored in art history. She spent the summers as a counselor at a camp for emotionally disturbed children, working alongside her husband to be, Michael Tolkin. After marrying, the couple eventually moved to Los Angeles. Tolkin’s father wrote for the TV series “All in the Family.” Tolkin entered the family business; his best-known movie is “The Player,” directed by Robert Altman and based on a novel Tolkin wrote. The sequel, published recently, bears the mark of spousal influence: it creates a world of Hollywood sharks let loose on the process of high-powered private-school admissions.

Mogel has lived in Hollywood for almost 30 years now, and she is of it without being captive to it. At 55, her style is part girlish, part granny. Her hair is unbleached and her skin un-Botoxed; on the night I visited her, she wore a white T-shirt, a pink flowered skirt and low-heeled green sandals. Her voice is commandingly deep and throaty, except when she’s excited and lets out a thrilled squeal. (“Me too!” she squeaked when I confessed my poor sense of direction.) Mogel did her doctorate work at the Wright Institute in Los Angeles — “very alternative, Marxist-Feminist,” she says — and interned at the “totally mainstream” Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Mogel got her license as a clinical psychologist in 1985. She opened a dual practice, doing therapy for children and families and also testing for disorders and disabilities, like dyslexia and attention-deficit disorder. For 15 years, the work was fulfilling. The hard part of Mogel’s life lay elsewhere; she and Tolkin struggled for several years to have a child and went through many miscarriages, including the loss of a premature baby born on the way to the hospital. None of this hardship moved Mogel toward religion. When she was 35, Mogel gave birth to a girl, Susanna, and four years later, to a second daughter, Emma.

Mogel continued to practice after her daughters were born, and by 1990, she was seeing a disturbing shift among her clients. Mogel lives in a sumptuous house near Hollywood — the garden features a fountain, a pool and climbing roses — and the kids Mogel was treating came from similarly well-off homes. In the testing part of her practice, Mogel long dreaded telling parents of a diagnosis that could disrupt their high hopes for their children. Now, however, she noticed that many families seemed to want her to find something clinically wrong that could be fixed.

Much of the time, the children didn’t have a pathology that she could name and treat. “But my child is suffering!” parents would say. And Mogel tended to agree. Anxiety pervaded her office. “Everyone — parents and children — seemed off course, unmoored and chronically unhappy,” she writes in “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee.” The kids weren’t sick. But their family dynamic was. It wasn’t just parents’ outsize ambition for their children that was the problem — after all, for generations, children have faced high expectations. It was what parents with means did to protect their investment. Worried about their children’s future in an increasingly competitive world, parents would expect everything at school — and then compensate for these inflexible demands by expecting almost nothing at home. The words “I have a test” automatically relieved children of any other obligation, Mogel says. Instead of being left to muddle through — and to learn from adversity and their failures — kids were whisked off to tutors and coaches and extra classes. Pressured in one sphere and pampered and overprotected the rest of the time, their lives were too difficult in one way and too easy in every other. As a result, they often didn’t learn to solve problems on their own or gain the strength that comes with independence.

College counselors and deans see these kids so often, Mogel says, that they have come up with terms for them, “teacups” and “krispies”: fragile and burned-out undergraduates who crumble once they’re away from home. Other psychologists have joined her in charting this territory. Madeline Levine, whose clinical psychology practice is in Marin County, Calif., recommends Mogel’s book to her clients and recently published her own book on the topic, “The Price of Privilege.” She, too, saw many unhappy teenagers who said they felt bored, passive and empty. “Indulged, coddled, pressured and micromanaged on the outside, my young patients appeared to be inadvertently deprived of the opportunity to develop an inside,” she writes in her book. “They lack the secure, reliable, welcoming internal structure that we call the ‘self.”’

Mogel knew that to help her child clients, she needed to help their parents. But she felt as if her psychological training was failing her. She had been taught to refrain from making judgments, yet she felt increasingly judgmental. She went back into therapy herself. It didn’t help. Instead, like the parents trooping into her office, she felt increasingly drained. At home, she wanted to make everything just right for her own daughters. She tore ragged pieces of lettuce off the corners of their sandwiches and woke in the night to fret over their school art projects: did the teacher who sent home a note asking for the cardboard tube from a paper towel roll expect her to make a pile of paper towels to get at the cylinder inside?

Then one night in 1990 on a lark, Mogel accepted a friend’s invitation to go to a service for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. She thought of the excursion as cultural anthropology: she’d had a good time with her daughter Susanna at an international mask and dance festival; “now we could see how these people, the Jews of West Los Angeles, celebrated their ancient holy day,” she writes in “Skinned Knee.” But Mogel listened to the prayers and found herself crying.

She went back a second time. Then she decided to go alone to a Friday-night service at a Reform synagogue near her house. By listening to a tape, she started learning the Hebrew prayers and their melodies. She and her husband began celebrating the Jewish Sabbath — first by stumbling through the candle-lighting and going out for Thai food (shrimp included) and gradually adding the full liturgy and a traditional meal. “It was always the same, which was what I loved about it,” Susanna, now 19, remembers. Mogel baked challah. Tolkin made poached salmon. Every family member and guest said their “gratefuls,” naming the events of the week they felt thankful for.

The family never took the full leap into Orthodox Judaism, with its restrictions on food and travel on Shabbat and relatively fixed gender roles. But they sent their daughters to schools at Reform synagogues for a good part of elementary school and tried out different L.A. synagogues — from Reform to modern Orthodox to the exploratory Mountaintop Minyan. The rituals were soothing, but Mogel was most moved by Jewish learning. As she began to read the Torah and the Talmud, the massive compendium of rabbinic teachings on Jewish law and commentary on the Bible, she felt she was on the trail of the sort of wisdom she’d been missing.

In 1992, Mogel decided to take a break from her practice for a year and study the old Jewish texts full time. Her office partner was taken aback. So were her parents. But she proceeded even though Jewish study didn’t come easily to her — she took basic Judaism and introductory Hebrew three times. Her studies helped to repair her frayed ends. “This is going to sound too pious, but I started thinking about my children in terms of a higher mission,” she told me when I met her at her home in June. “I didn’t need to be the mom who cut the ends off lettuce leaves. That is idol worship, and it’s exactly what Judaism says you shouldn’t do.” She spent more time with Susanna and Emma and less time worrying about them. She stopped waking up to fret and plan in the middle of the night.


Mogel missed the regular contact with her clients and their troubles. But when she reopened her practice, she focused on teaching child-rearing classes and working with families rather than just doing traditional psychotherapy with children. And she started using Jewish teachings. “It wasn’t that the Jewish texts had a brand new idea that psychology had never come up with,” Mogel says. “But they came at it from a different angle.” Like the concept of the yetser hara, the bad impulse within us that is a source of passion and an impetus to creativity, and the yetser tov, the good and proper impulse. “They’re very different from the id and the ego and the superego. Psychology textbooks don’t typically say that your child’s worst trait is also the seed of his best traits.”

In her book, which evolved out of a group for parents that she ran for three years out of her office, Mogel relates a Talmudic legend about men from a great synagogue who wanted to kill the wild yetser hara. They captured it and locked it up for three days. But during that time, not a single new egg hatched anywhere in the land. The men understood that the yetser hara was the source of procreation — without it, there could be no creative life force. So they let it go. The yetser hara is tov me’od, the rabbinic authors concluded — very good.

Most Orthodox Jewish child-rearing books that Mogel read prescribed devout Judaism as the single path to raising moral children. Mogel wanted to use Jewish teachings to “show you how to raise good people, not just good little Jews,” as Genevieve Fortuna put it to her students. To the psychologist, the yetser hara is a way to think about the root of longing and a reminder that passionate desire isn’t all bad. “Without it, there would be no marriage, no children conceived, no homes built, no businesses,” Mogel writes. So children shouldn’t be blamed for their desires. But that doesn’t mean they should be placated either, a phenomenon Mogel heard about frequently from parents. The wildness of the yetser hara can’t be stamped out, and shouldn’t be. But it doesn’t get to run the show.

There is also the good impulse of the yetser tov to be cultivated, which means teaching a child to hold herself in check. “As her parent I accept my dual responsibilities: one is to respect her zeal, her yetser hara, and the other is to help her develop a strong yetser tov,” Mogel writes. “So I will say a calm and emphatic no to the Beanie Babies and the moon bounce, but I will not criticize her for desiring them, for that is her right.” Fortuna read that passage to her parents, and they talked about how to expect generosity from children — like giving away old toys — without blaming them for resisting.

Within Judaism, applying concepts in a time and a place removed from their original context is a respected method. “There is a longstanding tradition of interpreting Talmudic texts not only literally but as symbols for larger constructs or life lessons,” says Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, a professor of Jewish history and thought at Yeshiva University. “The connection she’s making is homiletic. It’s what rabbis do when they give sermons.”

Another way that Mogel uses the Jewish texts in her thinking about child-rearing is to embrace the importance of action as opposed to pure faith — what she calls “deed over creed.” In Jewish law, there are hundreds of mitzvahs, or sacred deeds, that Jews have been traditionally encouraged to do, ranging from not taking revenge to saying grace after meals. They are to be performed whether or not one feels moved to. “The hope is that you will have kavanah, or deliberate intent, when you do these mitzvahs,” explains Elazar Muskin, rabbi of the Orthodox Los Angeles congregation Young Israel of Century City. “But at the end of the day, the rabbis say that if a person does the act, then there was some kind of intent. And over time, we hope the kavanah will follow.”

Mogel points out that cognitive behavioral therapy shares the same premise: Changed behavior can lead to changed feelings. (Christianity also teaches believers to perform good works but emphasizes the transformative power of faith in Jesus Christ as a means to salvation.) Based on this principle, Mogel urges parents to press children to contribute at home even if they whine and resist. And she discourages long rational-minded explanations about why a child can’t have something she covets. “Don’t bother talking to the yetser hara,” she instructs; instead, be clear about what your kids are entitled to and stick to it. From rules, kids learn their roles in the household, and from chores they learn practical skills — when they go off to college they will know how to do their laundry. And if your children know that their behavior at home matters, they have an opportunity to feel good about themselves that’s not tied to academic success.

In her work, Mogel often sees children and teenagers who are petulant and awkward — young people who refuse to extend the simple courtesy of a greeting, or who feel too uncomfortable to respond to adults’ well-meaning questions. As a template for reasonable expectations, she looks to the Talmud’s instructions on social obligations. The rabbis came up with detailed guidelines for derekh erets, a phrase that means “way of the land” and basically describes an ancient version of etiquette. It includes the mitzvah hakhnasat orkheem, or hospitality. People receiving guests at their homes should greet them at the door and escort them inside; be cheerful during the visit; offer food and drink; ask the guests about themselves; and escort them to the door when they leave. Mogel urges that teaching children accordingly counters a “culture of narcissism,” as she puts it, in which children are encouraged to express their feelings even when the result is a show of bad manners. “The Talmud says the mitzvah of hospitality is as important as Torah study and a way to honor God. That’s because all of this trains us in the habit of thinking about other people’s feelings,” Mogel says. “The rabbis understood how we learn compassion.”


At St. Matthew’s Episcopal church in the Connecticut town of Wilton, Rev. Janet Waggoner, the assistant rector, read “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” with her Thursday-morning Bible study group last fall. She sandwiched Mogel’s book between the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew. Waggoner added some New Testament passages about the themes that Mogel discusses but points out that Episcopalians often look outside the denomination for texts. It’s part of the church’s relatively liberal orientation.

Wilton is an affluent town with a high-performance school system that starts the push toward college as early as first grade. In other words, it’s a breeding ground for hyper parents, some of whom, like the parents in Asheville, long to resist. A frequent complaint is the time crunch, Waggoner says — the unending procession of school and work and scheduled events and activities.

Mogel’s answer to this is the Jewish Sabbath, which makes the day holy by prohibiting work, broadly defined. The Wilton Episcopalians weren’t about to stop driving or answering the phone on Saturday (or Sunday). “We don’t have the same structure for the Sabbath,” Waggoner says. But in the course of reading “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee,” Waggoner realized that St. Matthew’s was obstructing a goal that Christians share for the Sabbath: spending time together as a family. The church youth-group meetings had always taken place during the Sunday dinner hour.

Waggoner changed the meeting time to afternoon. It seemed obvious in retrospect — so obvious that Waggoner was rueful that she had to be reminded of a Biblical commandment to come up with a simple scheduling change. But the congregation didn’t see it that way. “People said, ‘Thank you, thank you,”’ she said. “It turned out that was the one night of the week when the whole family could sit down for dinner together.”

Mogel says that she originally wanted to call her book “The Blessing of a Broken Leg” in honor of the bone she broke falling off a horse at camp while riding bareback one summer. Her agent talked her out of the harsher title, but her point is that kids need more than tightly controlled doses of risk. That’s what the Talmud is trying to teach by requiring parents to teach their children to swim, Mogel argues. The passage has been interpreted as an instruction to pass on the tools of survival. Rabbi Schacter agrees that the larger lesson is that children need to learn to fend for themselves. But that’s not an easy or comfortable process. It involves some flailing and swallowing water.

For the professionals who work with children — principals, teachers, camp directors, school psychologists — that lesson is worth the price of Mogel’s paperback. “If you ask parents, Do you want your children to learn new things, they all say, ‘Of course,”’ says Peg Smith, C.E.O. of the American Camp Association. “Well, we can’t teach new things without exposing kids to discomfort. We are desperate for parents to understand that.” When Mogel broke her leg at camp, she learned after a lot of frustration how to get around on crutches and thought about what it would be like to be handicapped. “That was my best summer in 16 years of camp,” she says. These days, it’s the rare camp that would let a child ride bareback — a good thing, probably, but also, as Mogel sees it, a loss.

Mogel says that “sometimes I think I wrote the book to remind myself of all the things that I don’t want to do that I’m still doing” in raising her children. Now that her daughters are teenagers, that means trusting them to venture into the world on their own, despite the risks involved. Emma baby-sits regularly and spent part of the summer in England. Susanna took off in June to trek through Cambodia, Laos and Thailand and came home and got a job at a jewelry store.

It’s been harder for Mogel and her husband to curb expectations of traditional achievement. They sent their older daughter, Susanna, to a public junior high with a program for gifted students. She went on to a highly competitive private Los Angeles high school and is in her sophomore year at Haverford College. Mogel isn’t sure that Susanna’s high school was the best choice for her daughter. Neither is Susanna. “I might have done better at a more progressive school,” she says. “It was a little — I might have been happier.” Emma, perhaps, is reaping the benefits of coming second. During eighth grade, she asked her parents if she could leave her high-powered private school the following year. “This was a difficult decision for Michael and me,” Mogel says, acknowledging how hard it is for parents to give up the premium academically competitive opportunity for their children. But they decided to respect their daughter’s wishes and switched her to a more relaxed school. “I often see parents eager to send their child to the most selective school that will have them. And then I see children who might’ve flourished wither instead.” To help parents keep perspective, Mogel advises them — in her practice and at lectures — to adhere to her 20-minute rule: spend no more than 20 minutes a day “thinking about your child’s education or worrying about your child, period.” It’s a concrete goal, and she finds that it helps some parents control their excesses.

Mogel’s attitude toward school is an aspect of her approach that is particularly hard for some parents. If you don’t push kids, parents often retort, they sit like lumps and then are sorry later. “I teach math,” says Linda Lawson, a college professor who attended the Asheville class and has a 7-year-old son. “I see a lot of kids who don’t mature until two or three years into college. If they haven’t taken the courses they need to do what they want to do, they’re stuck. Parents push kids so they’ll have opportunities.” Mogel counters that the point is to refrain from pushing a child to excel in an area that’s not her strength. “Your child is not your masterpiece,” she writes.

It’s worth noting, though, that for this view she didn’t find much direct support in mainstream Jewish texts. (In the end, the Talmud is bigger on promoting Torah study than swimming lessons.) So Mogel turned to Hasidic Judaism, a movement dating to the 18th century, which rebelled against the idea that only the Torah scholar could be an upstanding Jew. There is a Hasidic saying that Mogel quotes, “If your child has a talent to be a baker, don’t ask him to be a doctor.” By definition, most children cannot be at the top of the class; value their talents in whatever realm you find them. “When we ignore a child’s intrinsic strengths in an effort to push him toward our notion of extraordinary achievement, we are undermining God’s plan,” Mogel writes.

Mogel also tries to calm the education frenzy by stressing the family as a sphere of influence, arguing that the example parents set at home matters more than stellar schools. But that is ultimately misleading, argues Judith Rich Harris, author of “The Nurture Assumption,” a compilation of evidence showing that children take cues from peers far more than parents. Perhaps the most important thing parents can do, Harris concludes, is to send their children to school “with smart, hard-working kids” who will make them want to be smart and hard-working. Harris agrees with Mogel that organized religion is one of the most effective means of instilling an identity that resists the majority culture. But she says that is because religious children mold each other. “Mogel’s children behaved like good little Jewish girls even when they were outside the home because they went to school with other children who came from similar homes,” Harris wrote in an e-mail message. “Had her children not learned these things at home, their behavior outside the home would have been the same, because they would have picked up the culture from their classmates at school.”

Mogel recognizes the importance of Harris’s contribution. But she’s still convinced that parental influence is profound. Her second book, “The Blessing of a B Minus,” which Scribner will publish in 2008, is about everyday ethics for parents of teenagers. One of Mogel’s favorite lessons comes from the car-pool drop-off lane at school: When you cheat in line, you signal that you don’t care about rules or other people. “And believe me, your kids are watching,” she says.

“The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” highlights the value of religious observance, in addition to Jewish wisdom, in raising young children. In her second book, Mogel concedes that outside of insular communities, religious rituals and synagogue (or church or mosque) attendance may not work as well as a structure for family life during adolescence. “It’s too difficult,” she says of forcing observance on recalcitrant older children. “You get a kind of anguished compliance that can break the bond between parent and adolescent. On this one, you trust them.” It is one way to step back and let teenagers find their own path.


Mogel’s family no longer attends synagogue regularly. But they still frequently have Shabbat dinner. On a midsummer Friday, I arrived at her house, and Emma opened the door, blue braces lighting up her smile. Her father was away making an episode of a series for ABC, and her sister was off on her East Asian travels. But a small group of family and friends soon arrived. The men put on kipas, and everyone took a turn lighting a candle, passing a long match from one person to the next. Then Mogel called together the four girls and women in the room. They bent their heads, and she blessed them in Hebrew with the traditional prayer for daughters: “May God make you like Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah. May God bless you and watch over you. May God shine his face like a light upon you.”

The dinner menu featured halibut and lamb sausages instead of the family’s traditional poached salmon. Mogel served up an almond cake she baked that afternoon, breaking off a rose blossom from a nearby vase to set in its center. The teenagers sat at one end of the table and the adults at the other. When Emma started describing a pair of pleather pants to her friends, Mogel broke in. “Pleather?” she asked. It was an irresistible moment for adolescent eye-rolling. But Emma said easily: “Yeah, Mom, plastic and leather. Like the ones in ‘The School of Rock.’ Susanna bought them for like $2.” She added for reassurance, “We just wear them around the house.”

After dinner, Mogel prevailed on her brother-in-law to drive Emma to a party in Beverly Hills. That gave her a couple of hours to drink tea, call her husband and breathe in the peace of an empty house. But on this evening, Emma needed an assist — a ride home. There is a time to let teenagers swim on their own. And there is a time to recognize that they’re not ready. It’s a balancing act, and that night it tipped in favor of making sure Emma got home safely. Mogel waited for her daughter to call. At 1 a.m., she got her summons, headed into the cricket-filled night and drove to Beverly Hills.

Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate. Her last article for the magazine was on resilience in children.
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