The Voice | קולינו Vol I Issue I

INSIDE

THE

Heard In The Bagel Store

By Larry Gordon

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Chesed Corner

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Betraying Friends

FREE!

And Allies 3

By Ron Jager

WWW.KOLEINU.CO.IL

VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1

Shaath On The

BY SHMUEL KATZ

‘Apocalypse Option’

Surely, I am not the only one stunned by the latest ad campaign in the chareidi marketplace. “Rabbis say the internet causes cancer” was bla-

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By Samuel Sokol

FEBRUARY 15, 2011

A m e m b e r o f t h e 5 To w n s J e w i s h T i m e s F a m i l y o f N e w s p a p e r s

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Former PA PM Nabil

’’«²³ ’ ± ’’¢

zoned across several news stories beginning on Wednesday morning. My Facebook page also had numerous posts about it.

Continued on Page 6

SHMU’S SHMOOZE

BY SHMUEL KATZ When I was a kid, I wanted to be a lawyer. My father was a lawyer (and eventually a judge) and I wanted to be just like him. I carried that dream with

me through college, when I flirted with accounting and psychology, but still had no idea what I wanted to “do with my life.”

Continued on Page 7

Give Them Shelter 5

By Rochelle M. Miller

Remembering Ilan Ramon 7

By Michele Justic

“I was evacuated from Cairo by the US Government.” See page 9

Those Killer Comments

by Rav Aryeh Z. Ginzberg

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Egypt: Exodus Of A Brooklyn Jew

By Alex Schindler

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A Land With Milk, Honey, And Mike Huckabee

By Yissachar Ruas

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Water And Money

By Shmuel Katz

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Here We Go Again: Protecting Against A U.S. Dollar Drop

By Aaron Katsman

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Under The Sun: A Survey Of Bet Shemesh News

By Rabbi Dov Lipman

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The $2,000 Shidduch

by Chananya Weissman

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OUR FIRST EDITION EVER!

Heard In The Bagel Store Me And My Amigo

BY LARRY GORDON When it comes to communications from overseas – from Israel, in particular – things are improving. At least, I hope that is the case and intend to find out next week upon our arrival in Israel on our winter visit. Things are definitely vastly improved from where they were just a few years ago, though last July I found communicating with my office and family here in New York somewhat of a telecommunications three-ring circus.

There I was with my regular BlackBerry World phone – which is supposed to work, according to its description, anywhere in the world.

The thing with this phone is that while it works anywhere, it does so at about $2.99 per minute – plus tax – which, if you use it regularly, can run into quite a few dollars.

So, for obvious economic reasons, it’s not such a good idea to use this phone on a regular basis while traveling – and there is no reason to.

The idea, however, is to not have the flow of communications interrupted in such a fashion that makes it difficult for people to reach you or vice versa. These days, with so many devices being promoted, calling around the world should be simple.

The fact is that whenever I land in Israel, I take out my Israel-based phone that we pick up here in New York and just hope that it goes on and hope that the calls go through.

But now a great deal of that has changed, since I got to know Naftoli Horowitz of the Amigo company,

and he has walked, talked, and instructed me through the rapidly advancing technology of cell service in Israel and other countries.

I’m hoping that when I go to Israel next week, I will be able to do so with fewer than four communication devices. Just so you know what I’m talking about here, let me walk you through last summer’s experience and all the gadgetry that accompanied me just about everywhere I went. As I mentioned, there was my regular world phone. Then there was another overseas BlackBerry, which was with me just so I could monitor incoming e-mails when I wasn’t on my computer, though I could not make any calls on it. That device worked most of the time, though not always.

Then there was the regular Israeli cell phone on which you always receive voice mails from the last few people who had the phone number before you. Although most people would have no way of knowing my Israeli number, on the hunch that someone may have gotten ahold of that number, I found myself listening to messages at night from people I didn’t know.

I have to admit that the communications options are still a little confusing and I’m still studying the various choices. But this is what I know so far about the upcoming trip. According to Naftoli, I’m only going to need the overseas BlackBerry that will allow me to make and receive calls from and to an Israeli number.

There will also be a U.S. number assigned to the phone so that people

from here in the States can call me on a U.S. number – for them, a local or domestic call. Additionally, Naftoli informs me that this time around the BlackBerry will both receive and allow me to send e-mails.

I’m still probably going to take a regular Amigo-Israel phone, because I’m just used to having one of those phones after all these years. Naftoli Horowitz says that in the very near future there will be no reason for anyone to travel to Israel, whether on business, on vacation, or as a student, with any other phone aside from the BlackBerry.

Then there is the matter of using my all-important laptop essentially for sending stories and photographs from Israel back to our office for inclusion in the next two issues of this paper. Amigo has a wonderful little wireless card from a company named Orange that plugs right into the side of the computer and launches you onto the Internet from anywhere. It did the job on the last couple of trips, allowing me to communicate via my computer as if I were sitting right there in my Cedarhurst office.

Naftoli Horowitz is an entrepreneur who has acquired unique expertise in a number of aspects of travel, with a specialty in travel to Israel. I enjoy dealing with and talking with him. He’s a busy man with lots of customers and great demand on his time. He always makes sure, however, to reach out to customers to make certain that they have what they need to facilitate their travels. On phones, he says that if you

are planning a combined trip to Israel and Europe, you’re best off with one phone for Israel and another for Europe. He explains that the deals he has been able to negotiate with Israeli cell-phone carriers make it worth anyone’s while to travel with an Israeli phone. Most of the conventional Israeli cell phones go for less than a dollar a day, with all incoming calls free and calls to the States at just about 19 cents per minute.

As an added feature, the company is offering a free three-day, twonight vacation stay at a choice of locations when renting a cell phone from Amigo.

I know that these days everyone is attached to their cell phones and other communications devices.

It takes a lot of willpower and fortitude to give yourself a break and turn these things off. I have to add that I observed Israelis walking and talking on cell phones nonstop long before it became a part of everyday life here in the U.S. I’m not suggesting trying to travel without these things. All I’m advocating here is that the systems have been streamlined and now easier to use, thanks to people like Naftoli Horowitz and his Amigo company.

Oh, yes, you want a ringer on your phone that tells the Israeli people exactly who you are and what your taste in music is? He can help you with that too.

Larry Gordon is the Publisher/Editor of the Five Towns Jewish Times, based in New York, as well as Associate Editor of Koleinu.

Comments can be sent to publisher@koleinu. co.il and will be forwarded to him.

The Chesed Corner Nearly one year ago, Ilana and Ely Katz of Chashmonaim opened G’mach Zichron Chaya to provide formalwear to those in need. The g’mach is a sister to a similar g’mach in Chicago, both of which were created as a way of preserving the memory of Ely’s mother, Roberta (Chaya) Hope Ray Katz, z’l, of Chicago, IL. Roberta Katz died at the young age of 32 from breast cancer leaving behind her husband, three children, parents, siblings, and many loving friends. She was a pillar in the community, involved in many different volunteer organizations and respected by all who knew her.

The g’mach aims to provide formalwear for the entire family. To date, the g’mach houses about 175 women’s gowns/dresses, 160 girls dresses, and a large selection of women’s suits, elegant skirts, and tops as well as little boy suits and tuxes

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The Voice | ʥʰʩʬʥʷ

and men’s suits and tuxes. Clothing items run from size 3 months and up to women’s size 22. All styles and colors can be found in the g’mach as well as a selection of “matching” dresses in different girls’ sizes.

Amazingly, with practically no advertising at all, word of this g’mach has spread at such rapid speed that the g’mach has customers every single day. The people who come to the g’mach hail communities throughout Israel – as far south as Shomriyah, as far east as Karnei Shomron, and as far north as Zichron Yaakov.

In addition, the people coming to the g’mach are truly from all extremes of Judaism: chiloni, dati leumi, chareidi, and everything in between. This is truly gratifying as it is causing real ahavat chinam amongst different communities.

G’mach Zichron Chaya operates as a “free” g’mach; people may bor-

row the items at no charge. They pay a small deposit which is refunded when the garments are returned.

All items must be dry cleaned at the borrowers’ expense. The entire g’mach inventory consists of donated items. Often, a dress is purchased for a specific simcha and the owners have no future use for it. Donating these items to the g’mach is a great way to support a very worthy tzedakah in Israel and makes the donor feel good about where their items are going.

One girl, in Monsey, NY, is using the g’mach as a project for school.

This girl called and asked if the g’mach would mind if she collected items for them. Of course, the g’mach doesn’t mind. This young girl is doing a great job and every couple of months the g’mach receives a large bundle of items that she has collected.

Monetary donations are also accepted at the g’mach. All monies received are used to update and improve the g’mach. This may include purchasing new clothing items to replace items that have been irreparably stained, taking items that are torn to a seamstress, updating the g’mach location itself, and shipping donated items from the U.S. to Israel.

G’mach Zichron Chaya is very excited as they now have the ability to put donated items from the U.S. on a lift to Israel four times per year. Yad Leah, a tzedakah organization in Passaic, NJ, sends four containers per year to Israel containing 1,200 boxes per container. Every box contains clothing going to tzedakahs in Israel.

To make an appointment to come to the g’mach or to donate items, e-mail ilanasn@aol.com or call 08976-2423 or 201-824-5077 (rings in Israel).

Betraying Friends And Allies

BY RON JAGER Something fundamental about American foreign policy has changed.

The United States’ conduct in the Middle East, led by President Obama, attests to inexperience and lack of familiarity with the region at a most basic level. It appears as though a rookie is leading the world. There are no excuses for Obama’s lack of experience and judgment.

How can it be that Bush’s America understood the problem of repression in the Arab world, but Obama’s America ignored it until last week?

How can it be that in May 2009 Mubarak was an esteemed president whom Obama respected, and in January 2011 Mubarak is a dictator abandoned and cast aside by Obama? How can it be that in June 2009 Obama didn’t support the masses who demonstrated by the hundreds and thousands for democratic elections against the dictator of Iran, Ahmadinejad – the only world leader publicly calling for the destruction of a democratic nation, Israel – while now Obama stands by the masses who are coming out against the moderate Mubarak in Egypt?

There can be only one answer: Obama’s foreign policy is not a moral one reflecting a real commitment to human rights. Rather, Obama’s foreign policies reflect the adoption of Jimmy Carter’s worldview: courting and groveling to dictators and tyrants while abandoning moderate, Western-oriented leaders.

Carter’s betrayal of the shah brought us the ayatollahs – and will soon bring us ayatollahs with nuclear arms. The consequences of Obama’s betrayal of Mubarak will be no less severe. It’s not only a betrayal of a leader who was loyal to the West, served stability, and encouraged moderation in the Middle East. It’s a betrayal of every ally of the West in the Middle East and the developing world. The message is sharp and clear: Obama’s word is no word at all; an alliance with Obama is not an alliance. Obama has lost it; he and his administration have stopped being a leading and stabilizing force around the world. The strategic bottom line is that Obama and his administration’s abandonment of Mubarak shows that Israel cannot count on the White House at times of crisis.

Ignoring Middle East Realities We have all been warned over and over again. The geniuses at Peace Now and J Street, Obama, European countries, the think tanks that blanket Capitol Hill, and even the Arab dictators warned us. For decades now, they have been warning us that if you want “peace and stability for 1,000 years in the Middle East,” just fix the Palestinian Arab problem. So what would really happen if peace would break out between Jews and Palestinian Arabs? Would all those furious Arab masses now demonstrating in Egypt, Tunisia, and Jordan feel any better? Would they feel

Israel To Transfer 12,000 Tons Of Apples From Golan To Syria Israel will begin transporting about 12,000 tons of apples from the Golan Heights to Syria. This is the largest quantity of the produce ever transferred between the two countries, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which will be overseeing the operation.

The apples were grown by Syrian farmers living in the Golan Heights.

Although such transfer has been undertaken in the past, it is a rare occurrence as it requires extensive coordination between Syria’s Foreign Ministry and Israel’s Foreign, Defense, Finance, and Agriculture Ministries.

less oppressed? Would they quietly go home?

Even if you absolutely believe in the imperative of creating a Palestinian Arab state, you can’t tell me that the single-minded and global obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the expense of the enormous ills in the rest of the Arab nations of the Middle East hasn’t been idiotic, if not criminally negligent. While tens of millions of Arabs have been suffering for decades from brutal oppression, while writers were jailed, women were humiliated, and dissidents were killed, the world has been obsessed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

As if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has anything to do with the 1,000-year-old bloody conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, or the desire of brutal Arab dictators to stay in power, or the desire of Islamist radicals to bring back the Caliphate, or the economic despair of millions, or simply the absence of free speech or basic human rights throughout the Arab world.

While self-righteous Israel-bashers have scrutinized every flaw in Israel’s democracy, they remained silent about the oppression of millions of Arabs throughout the Middle East.

Think of the ridiculous amount of media ink and diplomatic attention that have been poured onto the Israel-Palestinian conflict over the years, while much of the Arab world was suffering and smoldering.

Imagine if those Israel-bashers, during all the years they put Israel under their hypocritical microscope, had taken Israel’s imperfect democratic experiment and said to the Arab world: “Why don’t you try to emulate the Jews? Why don’t you give your people the same free-

dom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom to vote that Israel gives its people? And offer them the economic opportunities they would get in Israel? Why don’t you treat your Jewish citizens the same way Israel treats its Arab citizens? Why don’t you study how Israel has struggled to balance religion with democracy – a very difficult but not insurmountable task? Why don’t you teach your people that Jews are not the sons of dogs, but a noble, ancient people with a 3,000-year connection to the land of Israel?”

Imagine if President Obama had taken 1 percent of the time he has arrogantly harped on Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria to defend the democratic rights of Egyptian Arabs.

Well, now that the cesspool of human oppression in the Arab world has been opened for all to see, how bad is Israel’s democracy looking? Don’t you wish the Arab world had a modicum of Israel’s civil society? And that it was as stable, reliable, free, and open as Israel? Right now, when I see poor Arab souls being killed for protesting on the street, and the looming threat that one Egyptian leader may be replaced by an even more oppressive one, I’ve never felt more proud of being a citizen of the Jewish State.

This article is based on an article by David Suissa.

Ron Jager is a 25-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, serving as a field mental-health officer. Prior to retiring in 2005, he served as the commander of the central psychiatric military clinic for reserve soldiers at TelHashomer. Since retiring from active duty, he has been providing consultancy services to NGOs, implementing psychological trauma treatment programs in Israel. To contact him, e-mail medconf@netvision.net.il.

‫קולינו‬

The ICRC will act as a neutral mediator in the transfer, which will take roughly 10 weeks to complete.

Three ICRC trucks will drive up and down a strip of demilitarized road half a kilometer in length, crossing the border between Israel-occupied Golan and Syria-occupied Golan.

Apples are at the core of the local economy in the Golan Heights, whose farmers rely on sales in Israel, Syria, and other neighboring countries.

The transfers began six years ago, with 4,000 tons of apples sold.

(Haaretz)

February 15, 2011

The Voice | ʥʰʩʬʥʷ

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Former PA PM Nabil Shaath On The ‘Apocalypse Option’

BY SAMUEL SOKOL Ramallah. Speaking with the our sister newspaper, the Five Towns Jewish Times, from his office in Ramallah, former interim Palestinian Authority Prime Minister and leading Fatah figure Dr. Nabil Shaath consented this week to discuss the recently revealed “Palestine Papers,” his vision of a diplomatic endgame and the possibility of war with Egypt.

Lounging on a leather couch in his wellappointed office in the Al-Ersal building, a commercial high-rise not far from President Mahmoud Abbas’s Muqata compound, Shaath downplayed Palestinian fears that the instability that has swept from to Tunisia across the region would make its way to the Fatah-controlled West Bank.

Asked if he believes that Hamas may try and take the opportunity to disrupt his faction’s rule in Ramallah, Shaath replied that “Hamas does not exist in the West Bank.”

“Really the problem is Gaza,” he said.

“Gaza is out of our reach up to this minute and all of our efforts at reconciliation so far have failed…if there is going to be any upheaval, it might happen in Gaza itself, but here in the West Bank I don’t think that we have any serious problem.”

Expanding on the theme of political stability in the West Bank, Shaath emphasized that Palestinians will soon be able to vote in local, but not national, elections.

Despite a barely functional and politically marginalized Palestinian Legislative Council, Shaath said that under the PA it is “never a problem to have people express themselves and participate” in the political process.

“The problem is with the occupation and that’s the difference between us and the regime in Egypt.”

The Apocalypse Option In January the Jerusalem Post reported that President Abbas said that the failure of the diplomatic track could lead to a popular uprising or a revolution. However, Shaath denied this possibility, conjecturing that Abbas’s statement was “probably allegorical.”

“I mean, look, I cannot live forever under occupation, it’s either you go or else I go. He said that many times.”

Continuing in this vein, Shaath, who is a close advisor to the President, said that if there is no progress in “ending the occupation” by September then Abbas will “dissolve” the Palestinian Authority and “leave everything to the Israelis as occupiers.”

This, Shaath stated, is what he calls the “apocalypse option.”

When asked how likely he estimates such an outcome to be, he replied that “it was always said that that is an option that you have to believe” and that the current status quo is “totally unacceptable to the Palestinian leadership.

Should the leaders of the PA choose to implement the apocalypse option, President Abbas would “send a delegation to Mr. Netanyahu to give him the key to the office of the President and tell him come rule.”

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“Any resistance that happens against you [following the dissolution] is not my responsibility,” Shaath warned.

Peace However, he qualified, prior to rushing toward such a scenario, the Palestinian Authority first plans on going to the United Nations’ General Assembly this September.

“We will go to the general assembly to ask to raise our membership from associate member/observer to full member. That’s how Israel got its recognition.

From that we have two options. The general assembly…can make a state observer but it cannot make us a full member without the approval of the Security Council and in the Security Council the Americans [have a] veto.”

According to Shaath, “Abu Mazen keeps reminding [President] Obama” that he announced to the General Assembly in 2010 that by September 2011 “there will be a new member state in this assembly called Palestine” and, as such, “come next September you cannot veto an application by me to have Palestine as an independent state.”

In pursuit of this goal, Shaath explained that the Palestinian Authority is seeking recognition of a Palestinian state from nations around the world.

He believes that the EU countries will recognize a Palestinian state before September.

However, “some of [the nations of Europe] are going at it in a different way,” he said. “They are raising the level of our representation to a full embassy.”

“They are not saying that we now have recognized your state fully, but they are saying that you have a right to a state and we are going to treat you as a state in our diplomatic relationships.”

Asked how he intends to deal with the Israelis after an international recognition of Palestinian statehood, Shaath explained that “all that we are doing is to put pressure on Israel to go to negotiations that are based on principles other than those [of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and to substitute the principle…that we are going to negotiate peace between us based on the borders from 1967.”

“When Israel recognizes that we have an independent state [in] the borders of 1967, including Jerusalem, there will still remain many issues to negotiate, Shaath said.

Following Israeli acceptance of a Palestinian state along these lines, both sides would “have to negotiate [a] final border demarcation which may include some minor swaps.”

Shaath also cited the refugee issue and security arrangements as matters that would be dealt with after Israel recognized a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines.

“You have to negotiate with Israel security arrangements after the state is done,” he said.

Repudiating Netanyahu’s position that Israel must maintain a military presence in the Jordan Valley, Shaath was adamant that the Palestinians are “never go-

ing to accept that there should be any Israeli forces in Palestine after we become independent,” but admitted that his side is “ready to consider international forces and all kinds of coordination.”

Shaath said that it was “possible” to “accept an Israeli settler who buys his land and abides by the law and acts as a Palestinian” as a citizen of a future state.

Switching topics to the “Palestine Papers” document set recently published

by Al-Jazeera, Shaath stated that “there is absolutely no statement in the Al-Jazeera statement that we have given up the right of return of the refugees” and that “ We have never come to numbers. We talk about principles, we talk about alternatives, options, but we never agreed on any numbers.”

Shaath called a statement attributed to Saeb Erekat by Al-Jazeera that he was willing to allow Israeli control over certain neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem “an exaggeration.”

War President Abbas was recently quoted

by Fatah affiliated newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida as saying that “if the Arabs want war, we are with them.”

“I cannot fight alone. We tried military action during the Second Intifada and during the attack on Gaza at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, after the [Hamas] refusal to renew the ceasefire, and it brought destruction upon us. 25% of the homes in Gaza are still in ruins.”

Asked about Abbas’s words during his interview with the Five Towns Jewish Times, Shaath replied that he had not seen such a report.

“When we commit ourselves not to go to war with Israel we police that,” he said.

“We are not going to side with Israel if goes to war with the Arabs, obviously.”

“We are never going to go to war with Israel if we reach a permanent status agreement that guarantees us our rights on the Palestinian territory with an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.”

Shaath was also firm that the Palestinian Authority “will never be a base for Israel to attack the Arab world.”

When asked what the reaction of the Palestinian Authority would be to a resumption of hostilities between Egypt and Israel, Shaath called such a scenario unlikely. “I don’t think Egypt will go to war to liberate Gaza. Egypt will probably only go to war if the Israelis threaten Egypt…to defend their country against an Israeli attack.”

Shaath said that Israeli “fear about the uprising in Egypt is mostly exaggerated.”

“It’s possible that Egypt will emerge out of [the protests] with a tougher stance visà-vis Israeli occupation of our country and [regarding] Israel’s interests in Sinai, but the new government is still unknown and the Israelis are frightened of the uncertainty. It is grossly exaggerated to think that the new Egyptian government will go and attack Israel.”

Despite the unlikelihood of resumed conflict, Dr. Shaath only explicitly stated that the Palestinians would not join in

war against Israel if there is an agreement signed beforehand.

When asked what his response would be should the 30 year peace break down, Shaath said that “any war between Egypt and Israel is a war between our brothers and our occupiers.”

“When we sign a peace treaty, they will be our allies in peace, our neighbors in peace. That’s different. Today we have the right to fight the Israelis by war ourselves but we decided not to but that doesn’t take that right of so long as they are occupiers.”

Israelis were mixed in their reactions to Shaath’s words.

One senior government official said that “these comments are deeply disturbing and only prove a vindication for those who doubt we can establish an enduring and permanent peace with this current Palestinian leadership. The recent events in the region further demonstrate that we must not sign a peace agreement between leaders but a peace agreement between peoples so it will not be subject to dispute depending on who attains power. The recent ‘Palileaks’ revelations prove that the Palestinian leadership has not readied its people for peace or painful concessions, until that happens how can we enter meaningful negotiations?”

A spokesman for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs also objected to Shaath’s position that the Palestinian Authority maintains the right to make war against Israel, even if, as it has stated, it does not intend to do so. “Dr. Shaath, rather than to focus on ways to promote a much needed peace between Israelis and Palestinians, prefers to fantasize about belligerence and bloodshed. One would expect a more responsible approach from a former Minister, and a more sincere effort to resume peace talks,” the spokesman responded.

However, Yair Evron, principal research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, interpreted Shaath’s statement in a more positive light. Calling the possibility of war breaking out between Egypt and Israel “completely impossible,” Evron said that “the Egyptian regime, even if undergoing modifications due to the recent events will basically maintain the same overall foreign policy ; and even if the policy vis-à-vis Israel will change, it seems unlikely that the peace treaty would be abrogated. Finally, even if the treaty would be cancelled, it is still very very far from war. Shaath’s speculations about how the Palestinians would react are basically irrelevant…but there is a very interesting point in what Shaath says, and that is that if a peace treaty with Israel existed, the Palestinians would keep it even if a war broke out between Israel and Egypt.”

Concluding the interview, Shaath said that while he is not worried that Muslim Brotherhood influence in a new Egyptian government would lead to a new Arab-Israeli war, he did admit that the Palestinian Authority is concerned over the possibility of Brotherhood support for its rival Hamas. However, “in the final analysis we will abide by whatever the Egyptian people decide,” Shaath said. “We are not decision makers in Egypt.”

Give Them Shelter: Bat Melech’s Lifesaving Mission Of Hope

BY ROCHELLE MARUCH MILLER Bat Melech is a comprehensive agency dealing with the needs of abused and battered women and girls. Bat Melech has provided direct social services to thousands of women and their children. With funding and support of the Department of Welfare and Social Services, Bat Melech operates the only safe haven for women and their children in the religious sector escaping domestic abuse. Bat Melech also provides legal and rabbinical court aid/advice. The organization also operates a boarding school for girls at risk. Additionally, Bat Melech is involved in an effort to raise public awareness and educate the religious sector about this issue by means of seminars, printed materials, and personal meetings with community and religious leaders.

The agency was founded about 15 years ago. “Bat Melech was created in response to the obvious need,” explained Shira Shnier, the director of development. “Rabbi Noach Korman, in his position as a family court lawyer, often found himself representing women from the religious sector in obvious distress. Shelters servicing the secular community are not appropriate, for many reasons.”

“A religious woman will not contact a secular organization,” said Rabbi Ko-

rman, who initiated the movement to establish Bat Melech with the cooperation, support, and encouragement of many religious and community leaders and is director of the non-profit organization. “She will be concerned about a conflict of interests in revealing the matter to a foreign body from the outside, about a lack of understanding of her needs as a religious woman, or from stigmas that could affect the family. She will prefer to suffer in silence. ” There isn’t always real awareness of the severity of the situation. The natural inclination is towards peaceful channels and compromise. Sometimes it’s possible, but in many cases the woman is in a sick relationship or even lifethreatening situation. “An abusive man is a character type; it is a kind of warped personality. He could be secular and he could be religious. Men like this are spread out statistically throughout the population, and we must provide a response to these types of cases in our sector, as well,” Rabbi Korman said.

“Bat Melech is the only shelter in Israel that is shomer mitzvot, shomer Shabbat, and shomer kashrut lemehadrin,” said Rabbi Korman. “All staff and personnel are from the religious community and maintain and nurture strong ties with the rabbis and religious counselors of the women residing in the shelter (and in many cases, with the husband involved). Staff and counselors contin-

ue to provide interactive support in this manner as the women and their children transition to independent living situations. In many cases, much of the support, encouragement, and advice offered the women is couched in wording directly from the Torah. This has been found to provide significant emotional support during this difficult time in the women’s lives. In addition, all children in the shelter are assessed to ensure the best of all possible situations in terms of school placements in keeping with their community’s religious observance.”

Bat Melech currently operates a shelter comprising two large houses that can shelter up to nine women and their children, a halfway house, and an apartment for at-risk adolescents. It employs family lawyers to represent the women, as well as psychologists and social workers to accompany them through the rehabilitation process. While at the shelter and during their transitional stages to independence there is ongoing support with therapists for the women and their children. Along with cases from the family courts and religious courts, a 24-hour hotline receives upwards of 150 calls per month. The average year sees approximately 40 women and 150 children staying at the shelter. To date, over 600 women and over 2,000 children have benefited from Bat Melech’s many services.

A second shelter recently closed due to lack of funds. The Welfare Ministry only covers half of the organization’s expenses. Most of the women receive no emotional support from their families; the other women living in the shelter, as well as the staff, are their family and their support group, cheering them on and sharing in their s’machot.

“Seeing the women who have rebuilt their lives and salvaged the lives of their children—our future—is life affirming. As we (staff and supporters of the shelter) participate in the significant celebrations of these women— weddings, bar mitzvot, school graduations, etc.—we realize just how important Bat Melech is to the religious community and the community of Israel as a whole.”

“The Torah commands the husband to honor his wife, treating her like she is himself,” Rabbi Korman explained.

“According to the Torah, a woman is not to continue living with a violent husband. Society, the community, and friends need to do everything to prevent or rescue a woman suffering from spousal abuse. If we do not deal with this within this generation, it will reverberate and continue in each successive generation.”

For additional information about Bat Melech Women’s Shelter Israel, as well as sponsorship opportunities, visit www.batmelech.org.

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Continued from Page 1 One comment really struck home. Jonathan Heller, a former student from my days at Eretz HaTzvi, posted a link to the story and then added his thought, “In other news, cigarettes don’t cause cancer, but are a holy form of health food blessed by the Rebbe.” I think his off-thecuff comment encapsulates a lot.

We laugh off the internet bashing as ludicrous, a simple scare tactic intended to frighten those who do not understand what the internet is. We reason to ourselves that this attitude is not legitimate, a mere tool to keep the “sheep” in line. Yet, I think that this declaration shows that some of the Gedolim of the chareidi world may have lost a connection with the rest of us.

In the U.S., the National Rifle Association has a famous statement, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”

While the flip side of the argument is that guns make it easier to kill people, I think that the argument is the same here. The internet is not the evil – the evil is in how the internet is used.

It brings things like pornography to one’s fingertips, it makes illicit communications that much easier, and it is a goldmine for those who wish to prey upon the elderly, the young, and the weak.

But, it is also a tool that can be used for tremendous good. It opens lines of communication of unlimited potential.

I have a weekly hour-long video chavrusa with a former student who is in uni-

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Smoke And Mirrors versity in Boston via the internet. Our oldest son Chaim, who is in his second year in YU, video chats with his younger siblings who miss him terribly (especially his younger brothers). This newspaper’s editing, design, and printing is done by people in five cities and three countries without ever passing a piece of paper from one to the other. All via the internet.

The key is in how it is used. Like anything else, the internet has the capacity to be easily abused. If we do not monitor ourselves and our children, we will find that even without the internet we can find plenty of trouble to get ourselves into. There is pornography in our bookstores and supermarkets. (Amazingly, the illustrated kama sutra is on the shelf of a local Bet Shemesh bookstore for any nine-year-old to open and peruse). There is the potential for evil throughout the country. Even without the internet.

But I am preaching to the converted here. Most of the readers of this newspaper use the internet in some form. And I did not intend to write a column about internet usage. I did, however, want to write a column about cancer and its causes.

It is a scientific fact that smoking is a major risk factor for lung cancer. Even cigarette manufacturers put a warning label on the package. It is indisputable.

(A quick disclaimer: My wife Goldie, a non-smoker, had a rare form of lung cancer in 2007. She has been, b’H, cancer free for almost four years, but it would be irresponsible to suggest that smoking is the only cause of lung cancer. There are many others.)

Yet everywhere we go, we see yeshiva students and rabbis lighting up.

They are not the only ones. In Israeli society, it seems like almost everyone smokes.

The chareidi community attempts to address this issue. If you walk into the office of the Kupat Cholim in a chareidi neighborhood near our home in Bet Shemesh, you will see a big poster detailing the horrendous risks of smoking. I remember a feature article in a major chareidi magazine a while back that discussed the efforts that Gedolim have made to try and stop yeshiva youth from beginning to smoke.

Unfortunately, their efforts fall way short of the mark. I have a friend and neighbor who is a practicing obstetrician with hours in a Kupat Cholim in Ramat Bet Shemesh Bet, a very chareidi community. One of his pet peeves is the total denial he sees in his patients and their husbands when it comes to the risk of smoking. Some of them are stunned to learn that it is unhealthy, while others shrug off any concern as not real.

The message is not getting through.

Perhaps there is not enough force being put behind the message by the Gedolim. Perhaps their followers don’t really care to follow an edict that is inconvenient. If I were to guess, I would say that it is more the former than the latter. But who am I to say?

It raises an interesting point. Clearly, the Gedolim know that their efforts to stop smoking “because it causes cancer” are not effective. Why are they using the same language regarding the internet?

I would venture to guess that many people who follow these edicts will refrain from using the internet because of this and other similar admonishments. If these Gedolim put the same vehemence into condemning smoking as they do with the internet ban, tzniyus rules, or Shabbos bans, perhaps their followers would listen.

Plenty of stores in chareidi areas refuse to deal with customers who are not dressed in a modest manner. Why can’t a similar ban be put on selling cigarettes? Similarly, we are all familiar with the shouts of “Shabbes, Shabbes!!!” that are rained upon the driver who drives through a chareidi community on Shabbat. Even some little kids do it. Why can’t an edict be made that anyone who sees someone smoking must immediately confront them and start screaming “NO SMOKING, NO SMOKING!!” in their face? The social pressure alone would be a motivation to not smoke.

Shmuel Katz is the publisher of Koleinu.

He can be reached at publisher@koleinu.co.il.

Continued from Page 1 After college, I went through a variety of sales jobs until I formed a consulting company with a couple of partners.

We consulted for public companies for eight years and that was where writing (press releases, public relations sheets, and business plans) began to be a part of my professional life. I was also a volunteer at my son’s yeshiva and eventually a member of the board there, which led to my being hired as executive director of the yeshiva, beginning my transition into the non-profit world.

After five years in the yeshiva, in 2006, my wife Goldie and I made aliyah with our six children. As we planned our aliyah, Larry Gordon, the publisher and editor of the Five Towns Jewish Times, a NY weekly newspaper (www.5tjt.com) called me with a request.

“Shmuel,” he said to me, “we all know someone who has made aliyah. We see them prepare and pack. We see them close up their lives and plan to move on. Yet, that is all we see. Once they get on the plane, we only hear bits and pieces of news about them, usually about smachot or tragedies. I think it would be a tremendous benefit to our community if you could write a journal of sorts about your aliyah, telling the people about what you go through. I think that it will make people closer to Israel and might even inspire some of those who are on the fence to make the move.”

And thus, “Our Aliyah Chronicle” was born. The story of our aliyah is one for another day, one you can read about at the Five Towns Jewish Times website

Shmu’s Shmooze and soon on our website (www.koleinu. co.il) as well. It contains highs and lows like most people’s. The only fact relevant to today is that professionally, I stayed in the non-profit world upon moving here and remained there until this past summer.

Despite the popularity of the column in the U.S., I must admit that I had no intentions whatsoever of entering a career in journalism. None. As many of us know, the career we had when we made aliyah is not necessarily the career we end up with.

We began to miss our Five Towns community paper. It may not have had all the hard news of the day, but it had a community flavor to it. The paper tackled the problems facing our communities, informed us of events relevant to us, and kept us up to date on the Orthodox Jewish communities of the Five Towns, Long Island, Queens, Brooklyn, and beyond. While we could still read it online, it was not the same.

There are alternatives here. Most cities have weekly Hebrew papers that have tremendous coverage of local events. Some of them, those with a higher English-speaking population, also have one or more local magazines geared to the English reader. These come out either monthly or quarterly and provide a tremendous service to local communities.

Nationally, there are also a couple of English newspapers. They have large

subscriber bases and certainly present the news quite well (I am a daily subscriber), but they don’t cater to my needs as much as I would like. There is no local flair in them.

We live in Bet Shemesh. About the only time our city is mentioned in the papers is when there is a violent demonstration by fanatics. Unless it is major news, the press is not inclined to tell you what is going on in the Gush, Renaana, Modiin or any number of other cities and towns where we live.

We began to see the need for a national weekly newspaper for English-speakers. A community paper. You would normally think that the words national and community would describe opposites, but in this case they complement each other. For while we live in various communities, we are still in many ways a single community. The community of English-speaking Israelis.

So we decided to publish the paper you hold in your hands right now. The Voice | ‫ קולינו‬is not going to deliver the hard news of the day. You get that from other sources, sources that do a terrific job. What we will give you is an editorial slant on the news of the day. For instance, this issue’s editorial about the recent PR campaign declaring the internet as a cause of cancer.

News of the Mubarak resignation and army takeover in Egypt is just coming out at our deadline, but you can be sure that we’ll have something to say about

Remembering Ilan Ramon

BY MICHELE JUSTIC My four-year-old son sits on my lap, mesmerized by the book I’m reading to him – Buzz Aldrin’s Look to the Stars. He loves all things space now, following in the footsteps of his father. But suddenly, I have to decide whether to chip away at a little of his childhood innocence or to skip a certain part. Aldrin devotes a portion of his book to the two major tragedies in our space race: the Challenger and the Columbia.

In the U.S., a considerable amount of attention was recently devoted to the Challenger on its 25th anniversary. I remember that day and how it literally defined the word “tragedy” for me, since I was in fourth grade at the time and our teacher taught us that word on that day.

Seeing the two tragedies linked in this book got me thinking about the Columbia as well, since the 8th anniversary for that has recently passed (February 1).

I was privileged to be in Israel while Ilan Ramon was in space. The excitement filled the air as this mission meant so much on so many levels. Space is always exciting. The idea of an Israeli astronaut being incorporated for the first time had all Israelis walking on clouds for awhile. Here was the best the Israeli Air Force had to offer assuming the

highest possible role in space engineering. His consultation with a rabbi about keeping Shabbos, taking a sefer Torah with him, and taking other precious Jewish mementos meant that this was not merely an “Israeli” entering space, but one who cares about his Judaism. While he was conducting experiments, I was touring his land which had been emotionally transformed by his accomplishments.

As I was about to leave for the airport, the news broke out. My friends and I had turned on the television after havdalah and we stood frozen in our spots. To those in the know, space missions are always risky. But to mere civilians, the thought of something going wrong never crossed our minds. The hopes of the country were shattered with that fireball. Personally, it felt even worse since my then-fiancé was in America and I could not share this loss with him. At the airport and on my flight home, everything felt like it was running on autopilot. There was none of that enthusiasm and special character you usually sense, and certainly not the higher level emotions that had been in play for that trip.

Back in the Five Towns, plans were in motion for tributes to Ilan Ramon. Trees were planted through JNF to honor him.

It turns out, he was already a hero before setting foot on the spacecraft. NASA specifies these facts in his biography: “In 1974, Ramon graduated as a fighter pilot from the Israel Air Force (IAF) Flight School. From 1974-1976 he participated in A-4 Basic Training and Operations. 1976-1980 was spent in Mirage IIIC training and operations. In 1980, as one of the IAF’s establishment team of the first F-16 Squadron in Israel, he attended the F-16 Training Course at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. From 1981-1983, he served as the Deputy Squadron Commander B, F-16 Squadron. From 19831987, he attended the University of Tel Aviv. From 1988-1990, he served as Deputy Squadron Commander A, F-4 Phantom Squadron. During 1990, he attended the Squadron Commanders Course.

From 1990-1992, he served as Squadron Commander, F-16 Squadron. From 19921994, he was Head of the Aircraft Branch in the Operations Requirement Department. In 1994, he was promoted to the rank of Colonel and assigned as Head of the Department of Operational Requirement for Weapon Development and Acquisition. He stayed at this post until 1998. Colonel Ramon accumulated over 3,000 flight hours on the A-4, Mirage IIIC, and F-4, and over 1,000 flight hours on the F-16. [Ramon received special

that in our next issue as well. Especially because no matter how you slice it, until the dust settles there is absolutely no way to figure out who will end up on top and what kind of regime they will establish. Yet I am sure you will enjoy this issue’s personal story of an Orthodox student’s forced evacuation from Cairo at the height of the protests.

We will also give you a slice of the news that is happening in your backyard as well as our backyard. Snippets of local news about the quality of life in our cities and towns. You’ll see articles about Yerushalayim, Modiin, and Chashmonaim. We’ll cover events in Efrat, Bet Shemesh, and Renaana. We want to inform you about the places we live in and give a glimpse of insight and experience of each other’s lives.

Yet we can’t do it without you. Do you know something about the progress of a stop light being installed at the main road entrance to Nof Ayalon so that drivers can make a left turn on and off the road to Modiin? Send us the story! Are you aware of new city laws or policies that will impact your neighbors? Is there going to be a road expansion in the near future? All these things and more are potential stories and we invite you to write them up and share them with us at editor@koleinu.co.il.

You’ll get to know me a lot better in the coming weeks, months, and years (we’ll publish twice a month until after Pesach). I hope to get to know you a lot better as well. Until then, I hope you enjoy this inaugural edition of our newspaper and look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks. honors for his involvement with the] Yom Kippur War (1973); Operation Peace for Galilee (1982); and F-16 1,000 Flight Hours (1992).

“In 1997, Colonel Ramon was selected as a Payload Specialist. He was designated to train as prime for a Space Shuttle mission with a payload that included a multispectral camera for recording desert aerosol. In July 1998, he reported for training at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, where he trained until 2003.

He flew aboard STS-107, logging 15 days, 22 hours, and 20 minutes in space.

“STS-107 Columbia (January 16 to February 1, 2003). The 16-day flight was a dedicated science and research mission.

Working 24 hours a day, in two alternating shifts, the crew successfully conducted approximately 80 experiments. The STS-107 mission ended abruptly on February 1, 2003 when Space Shuttle Columbia and the crew perished during entry, 16 minutes before scheduled landing. “[Ramon was] posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, the NASA Space Flight Medal, and the Distinguished Public Service Medal.”

Remembering Ramon on the 8th anniversary of his passing, it is his pioneering spirit that we hope encompasses the message and mission of our publication.

We too wish to fuse the cultures of our past and present selves. We also wish to celebrate the spirit that moved our readers to be pioneers in their own right in moving to our homeland and making the dream of a life in Israel a reality.

February 15, 2011

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Those Killer Comments

BY RAV ARYEH Z. GINZBERG Much has already been written over the past few years (including at times by this author) about the colossal damage and pain inflicted upon individuals and entire communities by anonymous bloggers and commentators who pollute the atmosphere with their words of hate or even outright cruelty.

Recent comments on some of the more popular community news websites that have been brought to my attention have changed my perspective on these anonymous Yidden. I used to consider them misguided; but now I think it would not be a stretch to refer to them as “digital rotzchim (murderers).”

I have a dear Jewish friend who, for the first 25 years of his life, had never met an Orthodox Jew, until he moved to New York to do his residency at Columbia Hospital. It then took another 10 years of learning together and spending Shabbos meals together before he was impressed and inspired enough to become Orthodox himself. And while he is now a devoted and active member of the Orthodox community, he is extremely sensitive to any display of indifference or cruelty that sometimes rears its ugly head in our community.

A few months ago, he e-mailed me a news item from one of the Orthodox

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news websites about the suicide of Bernie Madoff’s son. When I saw this on my BlackBerry, I wrote back to him, “Why would you send me this news item, especially when it’s in the headlines of all the newspapers around the world. And why is this significant to you?” He responded, “It’s not the news item I want you to read, it’s the following two anonymous comments that I want you to read.” (There were only two comments at that point; and by the next day, there were over 200.)

I went back to read the first comment and it said something like, “I don’t understand this guy; he had so much money, why did he have to hang himself with a dog collar? He could have afforded some type of pills that would have been easier and quicker.”

After reading this cruel and heartless comment, I called my friend to ask him why he had sent it to me. And he responded with a pain-filled voice that I can’t forget: “Rabbi Ginzberg, I don’t understand how a (presumably) Orthodox Jew could write such a cruel and hateful comment.

After all, for years you taught me that ‘Bnei Yisrael rachmonim heim,’ the Jews are a compassionate people. In addition, you taught me that if someone manifests the midah of achzarius, cruelty, we have to investigate his yichus.

“Whether Madoff’s son knew or didn’t know about his father’s elaborate Ponzi

scheme, he was a Jew with children, a wife, a family, and was a tzelem Elokim. How is it possible for a Jew to not only think these types of thoughts, but to have a total lack of rachmanus and actually sit down by the keyboard and send out his cruel thoughts for the whole world to read.

“Is this part of the religious community that I sacrificed so much to become part of?” my friend painfully asked.

At that moment I realized that for more than a decade I was able to answer every question and dilemma that he had raised to me, but I was now left speechless and unable to respond.

Another example – which I would never have believed if I hadn’t read it with my own two eyes – was about the destructive fires in the Carmel Forest in Haifa. Upon hearing the first news of the unfolding tragedy, I went to the Orthodox news websites to read about the colossal devastation.

There was the initial news report of more than 40 people who had just been killed by the raging fire, Rachamanah litzlan. Most people’s reaction was to cry out loud the berachah of “Dayan HaEmes,” and the more caring people even shed some tears over the great loss of life and for all the sons, daughters, wives, and parents that had just suffered an irreplaceable loss.

Then I noticed the first comment (one of many similar ones that followed), sent out almost immediately, which analyzed the skill of the bus driver, whether he should have turned right or left to avoid the fire.

I was stunned. A Yid just read about the worst loss of Yiddish life in a fire in Eretz Yisrael’s history, and this is his first reaction? These are the thoughts that a Yid chooses to share with the world in response to such a tragedy?

I’m sure that most of my readers are thinking that it’s only a few people who are like that, for most of us are truly ba’alei rachamim and would never have thoughts like that; or, if we did, we would surely never publicize it. Well, I wish that would be correct. To those that follow these types of comments (which should not be done by people who take the laws of lashon ha’ra seriously) these are unfortunately not just a few individuals.

What has happened to us? Have our years of galus so affected us that we have lost our responsibility to feel for the pain of another Jew that is not in our immediate circle? Have we lost the ability to feel “Imo anochi batzarah”? What has happened to allow a Yid to be so flippant and uncaring that he makes comments on individual or communal tragedies as if it’s some form of sportsmanship to outwit the next person? (All done anonymously, of course.) Do we really believe that “leis Din v’leis Dayan” – there is no law and no Judge – that our Creator doesn’t pay any attention to Yiddishe cruelty if done anonymously, hiding behind a computer screen?

Just a few weeks ago, we read about Moshe Rabbeinu’s selection process to be the redeemer and leader of K’lal

Yisrael. The Meforshim ask: Why, of all the places from which Hashem could choose to speak to Moshe for the first time, did he do so b’soch ha’sneh, from a burning bush? Why not from a more majestic location?

The ba’alei mussar explain that it was because the very first lesson to Moshe as future leader of K’lal Yisrael was to be “Imo anochi batzarah,” one must feel and be a part of the pain and difficulties of another Jew. This lesson was not only vital for Moshe as a future manhig Yisrael, but a lesson for each and every Jew who wants to be part of K’lal Yisrael.

You may be thinking, “What harm is there in writing a few words on a blog that no one takes seriously anyway? There are much worse things.” Surely there are. But the late Torah leader Rav Avrohom Pam, zt’l, taught us a valuable lesson as to the danger of the written word even when directed at the lowest of animals, let alone against a fellow Yid or a community.

A number of years ago, a law was passed in Eretz Yisrael to allow the importation of pigs into the Holy Land (something clearly prohibited in halachah). The Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah in America decided to issue a public statement expressing their collective pain at this development.

A text was drafted and then sent out to all the individual members of the Moetzes to review and if necessary make their comments on the text of the kol korei.

When Rav Pam, the rosh yeshiva from Torah Vodaas, read the text, he quickly called the office with his comment. He said, “It’s written very well, except for one problem. The sentence about the importation of pigs is written in a way that could be seen as demeaning to pigs. Vos is der chazir shuldig as er is a chazir? Der Eibishter hut em azoi bashafen! (Why should the pig be faulted for being a pig?

Hashem created him that way!)”

Rav Pam said that a statement from the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah must be extremely careful not to undermine kavod ha’briyos, the inherent dignity of all of Hashem’s creatures; it should be reworded accordingly.

Now we are not Rav Pam, nor are we members of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah, and we do not have the great sensitivities and midos to concern ourselves with the way we speak about a pig. But, l’havdil elef havdalos, at least we should have the sensitivity and the feelings for another Yid to be unable to write down words of cruelty or indifference upon the tza’ar of another Yid. And on this we are surely to be held accountable even when doing so anonymously.

I do not know the halachic status of someone who is a “digital rotzeiach,” but I do know that it is hurtful, it is embarrassing (not only to my ba’al teshuvah friend), and it does not bode well for K’lal Yisrael. It is time for us to put this relatively new phenomenon behind us. If not for our own dignity and self-respect, let’s do it for Rav Pam, zt’l.

Rabbi Ginzberg is rav of the Chofetz Chaim Torah Center in Cedarhurst, NY.

Egypt: Exodus Of A Brooklyn Jew

BY ALEX SCHINDLER Marhaba, the sign read at the airport.

Welcome to Egypt. It’s the first word they teach you in every guidebook. No one in Egypt ever says it.

If I were the superstitious sort, I’d probably have taken it as a sign when my kosher meal was “forgotten” on the flight to Egypt. But I’m not, and I was pretty psyched about my semester abroad at the American University in Cairo. I’ve wanted to improve my Arabic for years now, and this was the road to fluency.

“Marhaba,” I said to the porter at the airport who took my luggage from me.

He eyed me quizzically. I learned my lesson about that word. “Salaam aleikum,” I tried instead, and as he brought my bags to the exit, he smiled and asked for a tip (ba’sheesh). I handed him two Egyptian pounds, about 30 cents. He wanted more, but I knew better than to become that over-tipping American guy.

Warning Signs I went to buy a SIM card from the airport mall, and found that RadioShack couldn’t sell them because of a “network error.” Fine, I’d contact my family via the internet. Except the store entitled “Telecom” had no internet on its computers.

At this point it didn’t take superstition to start wondering whether maybe this had been a bad idea.

When my apartment broker, a friend of a (Jewish) friend, came to pick me up from the airport, things started looking up. He drove me to my new apartment, an inexpensive three-bedroom flat in New Cairo, and pointed out interesting sites along the way. I passed Al-Azhar, technically the second oldest university in the world, and the old campus of the American University in Cairo. This was my first encounter with Tahrir Square (entitled, ironically, “Liberation Square” in Arabic).

My friend interrupted our light conversation with a sudden, urgent warning. “By the way, lie low next Tuesday, the 25th.

Stay away from this area, from Downtown Cairo. There are going to be demonstrations… protests… and it might get dangerous for you.” My friend was an early member of the 300,000-strong Facebook group used to organize the initial protests against Hosni Mubarak’s Interior Minister, which quickly escalated to protest Mubarak’s entire three-year reign as dictator.

For my part, I wasn’t too troubled. I settled into my apartment, paid my rent, and with the exception of an ATM on campus that saw fit to steal my ATM card, the week went off without a hitch. An Egyptian Jewish friend from Brooklyn visited me via Israel, and on the Tuesday of the protests we spent a day visiting old Jewish synagogues. Maimonides’s was closed “indefinitely,” but Ben Ezra in Fustat (Coptic Cairo), home to the famous Cairo Genizah, was open, as were several synagogues used more recently by the Jewish community prior to the expulsion of Jews from Egypt

by Gamal Abdel Nasser, yimmach shemo.

The day seemed fine. We hadn’t passed

by downtown, and I scarcely remembered the earlier warning. But when we asked for a cab to Khan el-Khalili to hear some music at a café, a concierge at my friend’s hotel warned us that roads were mostly blocked due to demonstrations. Returning past midnight, we saw how right he was. Hundreds of young Egyptians, eyes narrowed purposefully toward their goal ahead of them, passed by us on their way to Tahrir Square. Several thousand had turned out to protest their despised Pharaoh. Police in riot gear lined the sidewalks in numbers I’d never seen before, and a mist that must have been tear gas rose from some streets. I closed my window as the smell irritated my eyes and nose, and wondered how strong the gas would be in concentrated form.

Troubles In Tahrir Square As our cab driver slowly drove on, an angry looking student opened our door, attempting to get into our car. We angrily demanded in Arabic that he leave, as he angrily insisted that we drive him. Our driver, fed up, sped past the row of protestors about to clash with riot police, leaving our uninvited guest behind. The smell of tear gas was stronger now, and I could see several rioters in gas masks as well as police in full-on gas helmets.

The night was hectic, but each of us arrived safely at our destinations; he in a hotel, and I at my apartment. I thought little of it. A few thousand students, some throwing rocks at cops, was no revolution.

Most people are too busy for a revolt as they try to make a living, or else they are distracted by Facebook or online gaming.

Little did I anticipate at that point, Tuesday night, the imminent miscalculation of the Mubarak regime in eliminating those outlets and bringing the revolution straight home to every Egyptian in need of an internet connection.

The next day, after my friend had returned to the airport, I felt obligated to check out the protests at Tahrir Square.

The roads were nearly empty as my cab brought me to my destination. To my surprise, the mob in the area had easily tripled in size from the prior night. The protests were gaining steam, still encouraged by the success of the Tunisian Revolution in prior days and weeks. I made a decision to head out of there when things began to get violent. Police were being attacked by protestors, and the latter were being subjected to tear gas and the occasional gunfire (though at this point, I believe, the bullets were still nonlethal rubber. By the next day this was no longer the case). With some help from hacker friends in America, I posted a Facebook status about how safe and unconcerned I was, the protests being fairly small and under control. I needed the help, because Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter were suddenly losing service.

Thursday, the above social networking sites joined the rest of the internet in being banned by the Egyptian government.

Avoiding the danger zone as I heard tales of live fire used on protestors, I joined my roommate, a cosmopolitan young Egyp-

tian with high ranking military officials in his immediate family, for a night out in Rehab City. He showed me a text he had received about massive protests to be held after prayers the next day on Friday, at 1:00 p.m. Enjoying our tea and sheesha as the house entertainment played popular Oum Kalsoum songs, nothing was further from our mind than thoughts of an all out revolution the next morning. But that is what came, triggered and strengthened by a government crackdown barring internet access and text messages.

A Non-Peaceful Shabbat Friday morning I awoke, startled by noise in my apartment. I leapt out of bed, ready to defend myself, only to see my future roommate had let himself in. Relieved, I asked what was up.

“IT’S A #@! REVOLUTION, man. All communications are off. No phones, no internet, no anything. Look at the TV!” Al-Jazeera was showing at least 100,000 demonstrators in Tahrir Square amid images of tanks destroyed by Molotov cocktails, photos of Hosni Mubarak set aflame, and police overpowered by the crowd.

“What do we do?” I asked, having made plans with him to pick up money for my rent from Western Union that day before sundown. “Can we go out?”

“Sure,” he answered. “Let’s pick up my friend and make a plan.” We drove to Rehab City, where we watched the news on a lounge’s television screen.

“Curfew is in effect,” the TV informed us by 3:00 p.m. “The military will arrest anyone out after 8:00.” A change of plans was necessary. His fiancée would be arriving from Russia that night, and he would be unable to meet her at the airport after curfew unless he drove straight there. My own apartment was on the wrong side of several military checkpoints, and cab services were at any rate no longer existent, so I joined him, leaving my belongings in his car and planning to spend a night at the airport.

And that is how I found myself watching Hosni Mubarak announce his first concessions to the protestors, on Shabbat, in an airport hookah bar in which I planned to spend the night on a couch (already paid for before sundown, of course!), with the son of an Egyptian general and his fiancée newly off the plane from Moscow.

The room erupted with applause as he agreed to dismiss most of his government, tempered with my friend’s observation that Mubarak was going nowhere. We all knew that the revolution would continue until Pharaoh either gave up his throne or defeated his opponents.

By the end of Shabbat, neither internet nor cell phone service had returned to Egypt. I managed to find a working land line with which to inform my parents of my safety, but the revolution only intensified. Moreover, marauding bands of Mubarak’s cronies, beneficiaries of corruption who stood to lose from the establishment of democracy or overthrow of their vicious patron, began looting homes after dark, attacking families in their homes,

stealing from shops and apartments, and assaulting women and children. My friend went to his family’s neighborhood to join them in defense of their home. I remained in our apartment to watch over our things, equipped only with a can of mace and the knowledge that I could always run to the nearby university if I heard a mob approaching. Needless to say, it was a tense, sleepless night.

Preparing For An Emergency Exit Sunday was the first day of returned cell phone service, and with it I began to hear from family and friends in America. I was told to move into a safe dorm in the American University in Cairo, where some security existed. Curfews were in effect after 4:00 p.m, and looters were an omnipresent concern after dark. Protests in Tahrir Square, Alexandria, and Suez were getting larger, and the death toll was rising.

The U.S. Embassy was beginning to advise Americans to leave the country. By Tuesday morning, the American exodus was fully underway, as 53,000 U.S. nationals began clamoring to leave the country through a single crowded airport.

The embassy chartered flights for AUC students, and with six other colleagues I found myself en route to Istanbul after a few hours at Cairo International Airport’s “VIP Hall.” Forced to bring only our bare essentials, we arrived after a stressful bus ride to the airport – a 30 minute drive that took from 9:00 a.m. until nearly 11:00 a.m. due to military checkpoints and stifling, parking lot traffic at the airport. Businessmen were bribing their way to the front of the line, and embassy officials had priority. Those awaiting commercial flights may have taken days to get on – we were lucky to get on chartered ones. By later that night, we were in Istanbul, each making our own arrangements to get home.

Back To Brooklyn After being shuffled around to Istanbul, Amsterdam, and ice-storming Newark, I arrived home in Brooklyn on Wednesday night, only about 45 hours since waking up Tuesday morning, Cairo time. Exhaustion, disappointment at losing my semester abroad, relief at seeing my loved ones, hunger (what do you know, no kosher meals back from Turkey or Amsterdam either), disgust with my own personal hygiene level through the long journey, and most especially disorientation defined me in that moment.

The next morning, Thursday, I joined my dad for the early minyan at Shaare Shalom Congregation. I was given an aliyah. The Kohen and Levi who preceded me must have gotten off of flights from Israel, as they both said Birchat HaGomel.

“Blessed are you, who grants to the undeserving goodness, as you have granted me.” The prayer for surviving life-threatening danger. They both said it before me because they flew over water. I laughed.

Alex Schindler is a junior at the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY-Hunter and an intern for CyberDissidents.org.

February 15, 2011

The Voice | ʥʰʩʬʥʷ

9

A Land With Milk, Honey, And Mike Huckabee

BY YISSACHAR RUAS Governor Mike Huckabee participated in laying the cornerstone to the new Bet Orot neighborhood being erected. The popular television host caused some confusion among the Israelis when saying he would open a “shoeshine” business due to the mud. The Israelis asked each other why he was talking about “Shushan” since Purim isn’t for a couple of months.

Governor Huckabee was on his 15th visit to Israel. He is considered by most to be the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

He would not confirm during his visit whether he planned on running for president again.

Huckabee was interviewed on many of the issues currently on the American-Israeli agenda. He spoke about Jonathan Pollard, the revolution in Egypt, and peace with the Palestin-

ians. He was quoted as saying that Pollard has served more than enough time to pay for his sins and called for his unconditional release. He expressed frustration on why Jews were not allowed to live in certain parts of Jerusalem or Israel. When asked about U.S. Secretary of State Clinton’s remarks that a Jewish presence in East Jerusalem posed a threat to peace, he

yet was being quoted as U.S. policy in the region.

Governor Huckabee was accompanied by his wife and children and Jon Voight, an actor known for his movie roles, his exceptional guest appearance on Seinfeld, and his Chabad Telethon antics.

reiterated the fact that such a thing, if it happened in the U.S., would be a blatant violation of civil rights and

friday prior to publication.

10 February 15, 2011

The Voice | ʥʰʩʬʥʷ

Yissachar Ruas is a professional photographer with 15 years of experience and a diverse portfolio. He is available for your event in Israel. Yissachar made aliyah from NY. He, his wife, and their three children currently live in Bet Shemesh.

Water And Money

BY SHMUEL KATZ Although we made aliyah in 2006, it was not until late 2007 that I became really aware of the water crisis that was developing in Israel. I wrote the original version of this article in March 2009, in the weeks running up to and following an incredibly rainy Purim. Although I bemoaned the fact that our kids got soaked on Purim, overall I was very happy that we had gotten the rain.

Living in Israel has made us much more sensitive to the seasons and the balance of our ecology. Having grown up in the Midwest and spent the majority of my adult years in New York, I am a true city boy. The change of seasons was admired, but only for its aesthetic beauty, not because it had any meaning to me. Rain was an inconvenience, except in “drought years.” Even then, the real inconvenience was in adhering to the “no watering” rules and having a brown lawn.

We enjoyed having snow days and playing in the snow with our kids (although having to shovel a rather large driveway as well as both sidewalks of our corner house was definitely a pain) and playing “bucket hockey” on our driveway in the sunny summers. Weather was an experience, but not much more than that.

Intellectually, I understood that there were farmers whose livelihood could be destroyed by a badly timed storm or by a bad season. I even saw how disastrous it was one year when there was a drought on Long Island and a late rain came and practically ruined that year’s grape crop. But none of that had any real consequence for me or my immediate environment, beyond a higher cost for water or having to pay more for fruits or vegetables—which even when “out of season” would be generally available year-round (since they were “in season” somewhere in the vast USA).

I even understood that the weather in Israel was crucial to the country. With farming being a major industry in Israel, it was obvious that rainfall was important, and as an Orthodox Jew I learned quite early on that we said “Mashiv HaRuach” and why. Yet it was more of an academic understanding, a religious belief without a tremendous internal meaning.

My whole world has changed in this regard. We live in a desert. The summer heat is unbelievable and there are parts of the country that are almost always hot. Being in the middle of the desert, with essentially only one major source of water, the Kineret Lake, we are very conscious of its importance to our lives.

We are also in the middle of one of the worst rainy seasons on record; the first half of the rainy season was one of the driest in Israel since they began tracking such things. As a matter of fact, we have had “normal” rainfall only once in all of the winters that we have been living here (last year), and the con-

tinued shortage keeps compounding the problem. Add in the fact that the entire world (not just Israel) seems to be facing tremendous rain shortages— with severe droughts in parts of the USA, Australia, and Asia causing food shortages and crop devastation—and our current drought takes on more significance.

Each year that we’ve been here, we have said the special prayer for rain that is inserted into the Shemoneh Esreih. I have wondered who it is that determines that we should start saying it, but we have done it every year. So I am assuming there is a system—and the system is saying, “We need help!”

Getting A Feel For The Water Levels When we first made aliyah, I tried to keep abreast of the developments, but my Hebrew was not up to the challenge and I couldn’t find any real-time updates on the water levels. I knew there was concern about the water issue, but it didn’t seem to be a dire picture, just a matter for concern if things would get worse. At the end of the season we were above the “Red Line” that needs to be reached to ensure that we only have to conserve water instead of ration it severely.

We saw tangible results of the shortage in August 2008, when Goldie and I took a couple of days off to vacation in Teveria. We went rafting on the Jordan River. The rafting company told us that the water was extremely low and apologized that in several areas we would have to get out of the raft and push it because the water was so low. And we did. (Interestingly, we returned with the kids for the same trip last year, and the difference in water levels was dramatically noticeable due to the very good amount of rain we had last year.)

We hoped things would improve soon after that. They didn’t. January of 2009 was the driest one on record, and the media began to really buzz with how dire the situation was. We were significantly below the “Lower Red Line,” and a major crisis was brewing.

After months of hearing about how terrible things are and noticing the absence of rain, it began to grate upon me.

In the USA, beautiful sunny weather is the preference. But I began to be disgusted with it—every day, sunny and clear.

I will admit that I did miss the pleasant climate when I went to the USA. Snow? Freezing cold? Definitely not what I was looking forward to when I traveled. Yet, within a few days of my return to Israel I was again looking for rain and getting sick of the sun. (Friday rain was a specific desire—getting much-needed rain with the added bonus of a little-league rainout.)

I began to add a desire for rain to my Facebook status, saying things like “Shmuel is looking forward to at least

three days of rain this weekend—we need even more,” which definitely confused people. And I even got a message from a friend telling me, “Yes, unfortunately it is another disgusting day of sunshine. I cannot wait for the rains to return and those beautiful stormy skies with the delightful sounds of water pouring outside my window.”

I originally thought he was joking, and I made a comment about how he needed to understand how serious the situation was. He replied, “Unfortunately, you think I am joking. I meant truthfully what I said. I am completely sick of sunny days and they are not beautiful to me. I, of course, know the status, and another 12 days of the [amount of] rain we had last will ensure we pass the Red Line. We have been praying to get it—and hopefully more. If it were rainy and cloudy till Pesach, I would be the happiest camper.”

Well, the three days of rain came, and they were awesome! It rained and rained and rained. Of course, rain in Bet Shemesh is not nearly as important as rain in the North, where it feeds the Kineret. But rain in our area is an indirect help, providing water for all things that grow in the ground and eliminating the need to use Kineret water for irrigation or watering.

Yet when the dust (or, in this case, rain clouds) settled, the level of water in the Kineret had risen by 30 centimeters— the most water ever to fall in a single rain event since we began to track such things. It was terrific, and it seemed as if everyone was talking about it.

I posted updates of how much the Kineret had risen and got several comments about it. I even found a terrific website to track the progress of the water that also gives you the shortfall from the “Red Line” and “Full Line” (www.kineret.org.il/main.asp), although the graph on that site is a tad misleading.

On my Monday-morning train ride to Yerushalayim that week in March 2009, I made a point of looking out the window as we approached the station. Just outside the train there is a seasonal stream formed each spring by the runoff of the rains. When it rains, the water runs strong, but within hours it dries up. It was flowing well, something I had not seen in quite a while.

That stream feeds into another stream, which flows continuously throughout the year. On my way home that afternoon I took a look at that second river and was amazed. And very excited.

The second stream was not only flowing strong, I could see that the stream was clearly swollen with water. I could see grass and bushes growing on the banks of the stream that were partially submerged in the water. And it was exhilarating. I couldn’t believe that seeing water would be so stimulating, but it was.

So I hoped and prayed for more and more rain to come our way. Although

we did not end up passing the Lower Red Line in 2009, we did make it past the line last year, in 2010. Of course, we were still 5+ meters from the normal values, but thought we had averted the worst.

Measuring An Ongoing Problem: Red And Black Unfortunately, despite the good year last year, this year’s dismal rain totals have shown that we continue to be faced with a terrible ongoing problem: a deficit in rain vs. our high water usage. This problem is caused not just by the lack of rains, but also by poor crisis management in our government.

Which is tragic.

The more I learn about it, the more I have become engrossed in the saga that is Israel’s water system. The ecological balance of the system is incredibly precarious and allows for very little error.

Throw in a few years of low rainfall and disaster is sure to occur (as it is about to). I have also been asked (often), exactly what the indicators are. What is the Black Line? How about the Red Lines?

And why are there two of them?

The best indicator of the current crisis is the Kineret Lake. It supplies around 40 percent of the country’s water. Since the other 60 percent of the water comes from similar sources (aquifers, reservoirs, etc.), the Kineret level pretty accurately reflects the level of those sources as well.

All of these sources are considered “renewable,” meaning that they are continually replenished by the rain that falls each year. Unfortunately, these resources are also finite, and our consumption level is more that 95 percent of the amount of rain we get in a normal year.

When rainfall is below normal, the reserve levels of these water sources are used. Unfortunately, this has happened for several years and we are now in serious trouble here. Or will be soon.

In 2009, my sister dropped me a note that she had just read that we were less than 2 meters above the Black Line— a Kineret level she had never heard of before. She asked what that meant, and wondered why we were so focused on the Red Line.

There are several “lines” in the Kineret. The “full” line is the Upper Red Line; then there is the Lower Red Line; and finally the Black Line, which was only defined last year.

The Upper Red Line equals 208 meters, 80 centimeters below sea level (–208.80). At this level, the Kineret is at full capacity, and they open the Deganya Dam and allow the overflow to drain into the Jordan River to prevent flooding. (May Hashem grant that this happen in the coming years.)

The Lower Red Line is –213.00 meters. Below this line, the water is has excessive contaminants and pollutants in it. This is not good! This level is also

Continued on Page 13 February 15, 2011

The Voice | ʥʰʩʬʥʷ

11

Here We Go Again: Protecting Against A U.S. Dollar Drop

BY AARON KATSMAN After a brief respite, the U.S. dollar has again started to drop against many major currencies in the world, including the shekel. Many reasons abound for the current dollar fall. The most popular reason bandied about in the press is because of the threat of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve. Quantitative easing is a form of monetary policy that centers on increasing the money supply by creating new reserves that are typically used to buy government bonds and other assets. It is considered to be effectively printing money, therefore weakening the value of a country’s currency.

I am no currency trader but I would expect this current weakening to stop sooner rather than later. After all, the major currencies that are rising against the greenback are nothing to write home about and all have their own serious fundamental issues to deal with.

According to a recent interview with Kit Juckes, chief foreign-exchange strategist at Societe Generale, “The currencies market still seems hell-bent on ignoring the sovereign credit crisis within the euro zone. It’s overly simple to say the euro

is benefiting solely from expectations that the Fed, the Bank of England, and the Bank of Japan are likely to engage in more quantitative easing while the European Central Bank is less inclined to do so. The euro isn’t really bulletproof in the long term. The currency’s recent strength appears tied to perceptions that the Japanese look set to join in on quantitative easing.”

So while many analysts believe the dollar will recover somewhat, local Israeli investors with money abroad still need to take steps to hedge a potentially falling dollar. For those actually living off dollar-based investments, it’s vital to take the steps needed to protect the value of their money.

What To Do One solution to protect your money against a further dollar drop is to become a currency speculator. This would require a lot of money and having to stay glued to the markets all day long in order to catch subtle fluctuations in one currency against another. In fact, several trillion dollars are traded in this manner every day. Until now, hedge funds and other large

institutions with plenty of money to spare have almost exclusively monopolized this market.

For individual investors, on the other hand, who neither have the money, the time to trade in currencies, nor the ability to absorb the potential huge losses (currency trading is very speculative), there are some other good options available to diversify away from the dollar.

Global bond mutual fund. This is a managed portfolio of bonds that are denominated in multiple currencies, such as a basket of currencies (including the yen, the euro, Swiss franc, etc.). Such portfolios may have little exposure to the U.S. dollar. The advantage of this route is that there is a paid manager who is an expert in currencies that manages the portfolio for you. In addition, since it’s a bond portfolio, you also get monthly interest payments. However, be aware that a fund like this can also lose money and is not guaranteed.

Currency Shares “Exchange Traded Funds” (ETFs). Currency Shares ETFs own a corresponding amount of a given underlying currency. The investment is basically linked to the

• • • • •

value of the currency via the dollar.

For example, a share in the Currency Shares Euro ETF is the equivalent of owning 100 euros. This gives investors two ways to make money. Firstly, a monthly dividend is paid. Secondly, investors can also profit when a given currency increases in value against the dollar. When the position is sold, the appreciated currencies eventually translate into more dollars in your account.

Keep in mind that with both of these options, if the U.S. dollar gets stronger against the world’s major currencies, you can end up losing money. While this may seem confusing, one should note that for people in Israel who may be living off their dollar savings or getting help from their parents back in the United States, it’s extremely important to protect the value of their money.

Aaron Katsman is a licensed financial professional both in the United States and Israel, and helps people who open investment accounts in the United States. Securities are offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc. a registered broker dealer, Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA, SIFMA. For more information, call (02) 624-0995 visit www.aaronkatsman.com, or e-mail aaron@lighthousecapital.co.il.

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Continued from Page 11 2 meters above the Black Line. Or maybe not; the definition of what the Black Line is and even what level the Black Line is set at changes depending upon who you ask.

When I first researched it, the Black Line was –215 meters. According to the Israel Ministry of the Environment website (which lists the Black Line at –214.87) and other sources I could find in 2009, at this level, the national water authority’s pumps cannot be used, because the harm done to the ecology of the Kineret and the surrounding area would be too great. Assuming the other water sources are similarly low (having experienced the same drought that currently plagues the Kineret), the loss of the Kinneret’s 40 percent contribution to the water reserves will quickly overburden the system and the country will be effectively dry. Also not such a good thing.

Furthermore, although it may not be true of the Kineret, many of the additional wells and aquifers will become so contaminated at these low levels that they will be irreversibly damaged and might never be used again as a healthy source of water.

So why all the focus on the Lower Red Line? Well, aside from the health issues involved with the drinking water being of “deteriorated quality,” it is a key marker for how close we will get to the Black Line during the summer and fall, before the next rainy season kicks in. Traditionally, the Kineret loses about 1.5 meters each dry season, but it is supposed to recover during the rainy season. However, the past several years have seen less than average rainfall, and the levels never recovered.

Each year’s high level was lower than the prior year’s high (last year was an exception).

Of course, as the water level lowers, the lake itself narrows. A narrower lake

Water And Money means that for any given total height, the total water volume is lower, resulting in more dramatic changes in height.

So the lower we get, the easier it is to lose levels in the summer months. In fact, the summer of 2008 saw a 2-meter drop in the level.

If we were to duplicate 2008’s drop of close to 2 meters from the Kineret during the dry season, in order to ensure that we do not reach the Black Line, the Kineret needs to be at least 2 meters above the Black Line at its high point (sometime in April or May). Thankfully,

conservation efforts led to this number dropping by only 1.5 meters in 2009, despite a less-than-average rainfall the prior year.

The Lower Red Line, aside from being a “safety barometer” for bacteria, is also 2 meters above the Black Line. (The bottom of the Kineret is something like –254, so this is not a significant factor.)

However, that line has apparently been redrawn. The water authority, in a December news release, informed us that in 2001, the Black Line was lowered to a lower level and therefore we are not at a risk of reaching it. I have not found a source to indicate exactly what that new level is—but it is out there somewhere.

The Cost Of Water Why do I say that this crisis has been poorly managed? After all, it isn’t as if the government can control the rains.

water system and our natural ecology.

And we didn’t have the machines that we built to solve the problems plugged in, so that we could save money on our This is true. They can’t. However, they electric bill. Really? can control things like desalination I am not an economist or an ecoloplants. gist. I might be 100 percent wrong here.

The latest crop of desalination has But, if we are able to add (as is being actually begun to open. However, the reported) 120 million cubic meters of current massive desalination project water to the supply by 2012, can someis not supposed to be complete until one please tell me what we were wait2013, a point at which we will theoreti- ing for? As it is, we are on the brink. cally be able to produce enough desal- Why did we wait so long? Aren’t we the inated water that we will no longer be country with the amazingly resilient at risk if drought occurs. One problem economy? Certainly we could have afwith the management of this crisis is forded a couple hundred million sheksimply the amount of time it took us els to guarantee the health of our water (as a country) to commit resources to system, couldn’t we?

Thankfully, we have seen some much-needed rain in the last few weeks. As of Sunday morning, the water level is –213.67. That puts the level 133 centimeters above the Black Line and 67 centimeters below the Lower Red line. Assuming (which is always dangerous) that we get another 20 Graphic reprinted from http://www.kineret.org.il centimeters of rain and/or runthis project, not to mention the de- off from accumulated mountain snow, lays from the initially forecast open- and assuming that we have another ing dates. summer of good conservation, and asYet, the real thing that has me steamed suming the water benefits we get from is the latest news regarding the govern- plugging in the desalination plants ment’s plan to address our current crisis. full-time come through, we will be OK, This past January, in order to help deliv- barely, through the next rainy season. er more water to the system, Infrastruc- After that, we are a year closer to 2013. tures Minister Uzi Landau ordered the So prayers are still a must. head of the Water Authority to run Israel’s desalination plants 24 hours a day. Stay Tuned This issue is so crucial to our counApparently, the plants had been run on less than a full-time basis before then. try that, beginning with our next issue, Why? To save money on electricity and we will be posting a front-page graphic with the prior week’s final water reading in response to immediate demand.

When I saw this I was stunned. Here along with the week’s change in the wawe are, in the midst of a horrible water ter levels. When the level rises, expect situation. We have been adding a special to see a green number with a plus sign. prayer to our tefillot, just to ask for rain. When the level declines, we will post There were huge debates earlier this year that number in red with a minus sign. about having fast days for rain (no, I will not weigh in on that one today). There is Shmuel Katz is the publisher of Koleinu. He can talk of terrible potential damage to the be reached at publisher@koleinu.co.il.

WANT TO REACH CUSTOMERS IN THE USA? Contact our sales department at 052-952-7500 or advertising@koleinu.co.il and learn about marketing opportunities with our sister paper, The 5 Towns Jewish Times.

February 15, 2011

The Voice | ʥʰʩʬʥʷ 13

Under The Sun: A Survey Of Bet Shemesh News

BY RABBI DOV LIPMAN Security Breaches The last few months have seen an increase in crime in Bet Shemesh. Home robberies were rampant, schools were being robbed every weekend, and a general unease has been felt with what coincidentally appeared to be a clear increase in the number of Arab construction workers in the area.

Responding to citizen complaints, the police chief came to community meetings throughout the city and essentially told residents that they would have to organize citizen watch groups since the police did not have enough manpower to tackle the problem themselves. The neighborhoods of RBS Bet and Nofei Aviv took this approach and citizen groups have succeeded in reducing the number of robberies in those areas.

Close to 1,500 citizens signed a petition to the Minister of Public Security Yitzchak Aharonovich (Yisrael Beiteinu) demanding that the national government take action to secure the city’s citizens. The petition asked for increased police forces for the local station to help them deal with the increase in robberies. The minister’s office responded quickly that they would engage themselves in the city’s problems.

Moshe Dadon, the head of the regional council for Mateh Yehuda, also spoke to the minister at a Knesset meeting and

14 February 15, 2011

The Voice | ʥʰʩʬʥʷ

secured guarantees of security improvements in the region.

Representatives in the city council also called a meeting of the police and school principals to discuss the close to 30 school robberies and developed plans to combat the problem. All of these actions have led to improvements with the robbery problem and the police even arrested burglars in the act of robbing a school. These burglars admitted to carrying out many of the recent school robberies.

The recent announcement that suspects in a murder in the forests near Bet Shemesh were arrested in the city and confessed to operating a terrorist cell in the region further increased the severity of the situation and the involvement of the police and IDF to better secure the area. The problem of the illegal Arab workers stems from the fact that there is no se-

curity fence between the West Bank and Israel proper.

Hopefully the joint reactions of the regions’ citizens, local and national leaders, and the army will restore Bet Shemesh to its former state of quiet, calm, and security.

City Considering Move To “Pay Parking” Although the city’s recent move to diagonal instead of parallel parking has provided some relief, Bet Shemesh continues to suffer from limited parking availability in and near shopping centers. It is not unusual for shoppers to spend 20-30 minutes trying to find parking in the main shopping area in Ramat Bet Shemesh Aleph. Car rental companies and residents who do not use their underground parking are a large reason for the problem. Even outside the RBSA area, residents and visitors to Old Bet Shemesh complain that there is simply no place to park there as well.

The city is currently considering several plans to alleviate the parking problems. One option would be to convert all public parking in the city to “blue and white” – pay to park. The city treasurer announced in a recent city council meeting that Bet Shemesh is the

only city with at least 85,000 residents which does not follow the “blue and white” system and earn revenue through parking charges.

The city’s 2011 municipal budget is based upon increased city income on the assumption that there will be a charge for parking as well as increased enforcement of parking regulations. While the move to pay parking has not been made yet, many local residents have already experienced the stricter parking enforcement efforts, receiving fines for parking while facing the wrong direction in front of their homes.

The city is also investigating the feasibility of restricting each car rental company to just three spots in a shopping center’s parking lot. There has also been discussion about changing only the RBSA lot to either “blue and white” or to two hours’ free parking and a charge for anything beyond that.

The city is also trying to identify a location for a new large parking lot in Old Bet Shemesh.

Dov Lipman teaches at Reishit Yerushalayim and Machon Maayan in Bet Shemesh. He has semichah from Ner Yisroel and a master’s in education from Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of three popular books geared to teenagers and their parents. In recent years, Dov has become a community activist in Bet Shemesh. He can be reached at ddlipman@ gmail.com.

The $2,000 Shidduch

BY CHANANYA WEISSMAN By now you have likely heard about an initiative that has cropped up in several Jewish communities, including Baltimore, Queens, and Toronto.

Essentially, if one introduces a single woman from the community over the age of 23 to the person she marries, he will receive a $2,000 reward, in addition to the often large sum of money matchmakers typically receive from the individuals or their parents.

I first wrote about this three years ago in a Jewish Press article shortly after the original initiative was launched by the Star K in Baltimore. Sadly, the article (“Reinventing a Broken Wheel,” w w w. j e w i s h p r e s s .c o m / p a g e r o u t e . do/30755) is just as timely today.

Let us nevertheless revisit the issue; just as the community continues to revive this idea, we must continue to oppose it on logical and moral grounds.

Consider the following: the predominant way for Orthodox Jewish singles to meet nowadays is through introductions, often by people who don’t know them very well taking a clumsy, haphazard stab at a mitzvah, or by “professional” shadchanim who make a business out of it (though no less clumsy and haphazard in their methods).

This method of meeting has become so dominant in the Orthodox community that people in a relationship are usually no longer asked how they met, but who set them up; it is simply taken for granted that they were set up by someone, so few are the opportunities in our society for singles to meet any other way. In fact, an entire generation has been raised in this culture, so that many Orthodox singles have been misinformed from an early age that this is the “traditional” way, the best way, or the only way.

As a result, these singles do not even want more natural meeting opportunities, and are highly uncomfortable in these settings. Young singles today are so socially handicapped that they are incapable of succeeding in normal social settings, and thus require shadchanim as crutches. It would take another generation of proper education simply to enable young singles to once again succeed in social situations.

So, those in favor of shadchanus as the way for singles to meet have conquered a generation. They have won, at least for now, and they have run of the show. Singles flock to shadchanim as their primary, if not only, way to meet a potential spouse, and would neither want nor be able to handle a normal social situation, such as a wedding meal with mixed company.

Concurrently, we have also witnessed what is commonly referred to as a “shidduch crisis”: tens of thousands of singles who are having unprecedented difficulty getting married. We know of nothing else like this in our history as a people. This cri-

sis, however one wishes to define it, cuts through all communal and demographic lines (contrary to the claims of the kollel-centric and chassidic communities, which have a problem ever admitting they have a problem—and that the problem might be them).

In addition, we have an unprecedented increase in divorces and, presumably, shalom bayis issues. So even those who do get married are having a very difficult time creating happy and stable Jewish homes. Those who simply point to the number of people getting married without looking beyond the chuppah are being shortsighted.

A logical person would immediately relate the heavy reliance on shadchanim, which is a departure from how prior generations met socially, with the concurrent problems in the shidduch world. It may not be a complete explanation (and indeed it is far from it), but one cannot ignore it. Yet, somehow, our community has done just that.

A logical person would say that if shadchanim are the predominant way for singles to meet, and singles are meeting in far fewer numbers than ever before, then shadchanim by and large are a colossal failure. Yet, somehow, our community has not drawn this conclusion. On the contrary, our pundits typically say things like, “Everyone should think of all the single boys and girls they know and try to set them up”—as if more of what isn’t working is what we need to solve the problem.

Let me emphasize that I am not opposed to third-party introductions as a method for singles to meet, nor am I opposed to the idea of someone getting paid for the service (though I find it somewhat unsavory). What I am opposed to is the following: First, shadchanus is the dominant way for Orthodox singles to meet, and in some communities there is no other option. Even singles who meet on their own (in spite of all the barriers purposely erected to prevent such a thing from ever happening) are expected to find a shadchan—after they have already met—to “set them up” after the fact and thereby kasher the meeting.

Considering how ineffective shadchanim typically are and how vastly superior other methods of meeting can and would be, shadchanim should neither be the only address for singles nor even the first address. Singles should not explore other methods only once they are older and perhaps desperate; that’s when they should first consider shadchanim.

Second, shadchanim get a free ride to be incompetent and woefully ineffective, and to trample on the basic dignity that is the right of all human beings. Shadchanim hit the jackpot for every “success,” however remote, yet they suffer no consequence even

if they fail hundreds of times. (Even those who don’t win the Lottery still have to pay for their tickets!) Shadchanim take credit for every match, yet assume no blame or responsibility for when it doesn’t work out—when that happens, it is all the fault of the singles.

Shadchanim lie, exaggerate, manipulate, and gossip. That is considered normal behavior for this “profession”; people expect it and are actually shocked, maybe even suspicious, if a shadchan doesn’t behave in this fashion.

Shadchanim treat singles like commodities with price tags attached to them, not as human beings involved in a highly personal search who deserve respect and sensitivity. Singles of higher “value” are treated with more respect; those of lesser “value” are treated cheaply, if even dealt with at all.

The shadchan is typically successful less than 1 percent of the time, yet is still considered an extremely wise person, to be revered and feared. The shadchan has no training or professional qualifications to speak of, is held to no professional standards, and is accountable to no one—yet shadchanim are referred to as professionals.

I have often wondered if a monkey setting up singles entirely at random would be any less successful than the typical shadchan.

Somehow, in spite of all this, we now have this $2,000 incentive to encourage more people to set up more singles. Does this $2,000 prize encourage more thoughtful and careful matchmaking? No, just the opposite.

It encourages more clumsy and haphazard matchmaking, more blindfolded shots with hopes of somehow striking a bull’s-eye.

It encourages even more manipulation of singles to get them to say yes and keep on saying yes, regardless of the long-term consequences. It encourages shadchanim to focus even more on the singles with the greatest perceived value. And it encourages more people with no idea what they are doing and no regard for the people they are affecting to give it a whirl. All for the mitzvah, of course.

In short, this idea is both illogical and highly immoral.

If those who wanted a chance at the reward had to register every introduction with the committee behind the money and pay a nominal fee of $10 (à la Zevi’s matchmaking idea on the EndTheMadness website), do you think there would be such a stampede to set singles up? On the contrary, there would be outrage that our pristine, holy, hard-working shadchanim are being asked to invest even a token amount of money. After all, they are— so it is said—slaving away for countless hours, neglecting their own needs, and paying astronomical phone bills, all to help singles.

Most shadchanim barely know even the most superficial facts about the people they set up. They don’t even want to get to know them better, they have no idea what they are doing, and they get paid enormous sums of money if they make a match in spite of themselves. Every professional is expected to invest some money in his profession, but broach the idea to our intrepid shadchanim and you’ll get quite an earful!

If you think about it, contributing $10 per introduction to the fund that awards $2,000 per successful shidduch is a pittance. If the shadchan gets it right 0.5% of the time— once every 200 attempts—he breaks even, and if he gets it right more than that he makes a great deal of money. Shouldn’t we expect shadchanim to get it right even 0.5% of the time?

Shouldn’t shadchanim believe in themselves that they will get it right 0.5% of the time? Shouldn’t singles be able to trust that the suggestion has a 0.5% chance of being worthwhile?

And shouldn’t shadchanim who can’t get it right 0.5% of the time be weeded out of the system?

Yes to all of the above. But we all know that shadchanim would never go for it and will cover up their own failures with moral outrage. The community would never go for it because the community cannot face the fact that shadchanim are a colossal failure and the system needs a complete overhaul, values and all.

Even singles do not want to believe the truth. They will subjugate themselves to the system with hopes that they will be one of the fortunate ones, and will sooner pray at ten cemeteries than consider a better way. (True hishtadlus is deader than the people in those cemeteries.)

This $2,000 initiative is doomed to fail. It is illogical and immoral. It only perpetuates and encourages the wrong sort of matchmaking.

Do not be blinded by the boasts of “x” number of shidduchim that come from this initiative. Look at the big picture. Look at the values behind the idea and the behavior it validates and perpetuates. Look at the tremendous price that will be paid by singles being burned for every “successful” shidduch.

Thoughtful people with proper Torah values must oppose this effort, and all efforts like it, and instead promote a better way. If you want things to change, you need to change them. If bad ideas like this initiative can catch on and stick around for so many years, imagine what could be if more people devoted themselves to good ideas.

Rabbi Chananya Weissman is the founder of EndTheMadness (www.endthemadness.org), a volunteer effort to rehabilitate the culture of the shidduch world, and HotKiddush (www. hotkiddush.com), a revolutionary networking site for the Orthodox Jewish population. He can be contacted at admin@endthemadness.org.

February 15, 2011

The Voice | ʥʰʩʬʥʷ 15

Look for our next issue, coming your way on March 1, 2011