Tag: The Times of Israel

Raising Awareness of Breast Cancer in the Charedi Community

Though charedi women develop breast cancer less often than the general population, their mortality rate is 30% higher. Among the reasons for this is a lack of awareness of the disease and how to spot it. To counter this, Ruth Colian of Ubizchutan (a charedi women’s political party that ran for Knesset) decided to create ‘pashkevelim’ in modest language and post them in charedi areas.

For the second year running, Chochmat Nashim has joined with Ruth to raise funds for the campaign which reaches out to charedi women calling on them to ‘guard their lives’ (a Torah commandment) and to go for certain medical checks. The posters are written in the charedi style and in very modest language.

Unfortunately, when Ruth contacted the municipality of Bnai Brak- a very large charedi city, she was denied the right to hang posters there for fear of ‘creating panic in the city’. You can see the news story (in Hebrew) here.

This is the silence we are up against. The notion that a breast cancer awareness campaign (which never mentions the word breast or cancer out of sensitivity to the population) is suppressed by a municipality on the basis of creating panic…

With your help, we raised enough funds to create 2,000 posters and to rent a billboard at a major intersection (the Coca Cola intersection) of Bnai Brak (owned by a private individual). Posters were hung in Bet Shemesh, Jerusalem, El Ad and 2,000 fliers with the same message were given out in Bnai Brak and Jerusalem.

Last year the campaign brought in over 200 phone calls from men and women asking what they should do and what a mammogram is. We will continue to raise funds and awareness and collaborate with other organizations working within these populations to reduce these horrible statistics and save lives.

 

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Replacing the Torah with Chaos: The Chief Rabbi seeks to undo a divorce

Calling into question a divorce that has long been in effect has serious, and potentially devastating, ramifications for real people.

Beyond the fate of this one woman. Rabbi Yosef’s actions are dangerous in the extreme for halachic Judaism as a whole.

  1. They undermine the authority of the Beit Din itself.

Every divorce is granted under the auspices of a rabbinic court. If another rabbinic court can come along and revoke the first court’s divorces (or declare them null and void), then no Beit Din may be considered reliable when it comes to divorce, and its status-changing implications…

Yes, the law is on the books that one court can undo the edicts of a previous court — but only under certain conditions of established greatness, and only when it comes to legislative acts, which can’t be enacted in this day and age with no Sandhedrin.  YES, halachic disputes happen all the time. They are built into the system. But when a beit din’s decision on status takes effect, it’s considered sacrosanct.

  1. They undermine the “forever” status of divorce.

Revoking a get sets a very dangerous precedent. If an unrelated court can come along and revoke (or declare null and void) one divorce, even given its unusual circumstances, what is to protect any divorce from the same? Every presumed divorcee should hesitate before marrying again, lest she risk subsequent accusations of adultery. Indeed, every post-divorce marriage risks being called into question.

From a human perspective, this is terribly difficult. How can any divorced person move on with his or her life if the divorce can be questioned? The potential ramifications of this are endless and chaotic.

  1. The human dimension of this specific case.

This woman was married for seven years to a man she knew would not regain consciousness. She’s only 34-years-old. Chaining her to someone whose body functions only by virtue of machines for the rest of his life when there is a legitimate halachic mechanism to release her that was approved by the Tzfat Beit Din is cruel.

In truth, the fact that Rabbi Yosef and many others would convene with the question of revoking this get calls into question our ability to rely on our rabbis to protect our widows, our orphans, our converts, and even Halacha — which allows for this kind of divorce.

Read more in The Times of Israel

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Dying of Modesty

Haredi women are dying of modesty and living in a ghetto of silence.

The death rate among Israeli Haredi women from breast cancer is 30% higher than in the general population. This, despite the fact that the rate of haredi women diagnosed with breast cancer was 70% lower than secular women, according to various studies.

In Haredi society, speaking of breasts and other female body parts is immodest.

So they aren’t spoken about.

This means that Haredi women have fewer breast exams and mammograms are not routinely done and too many women do not learn that they are ill until they are dying.

Read more in the Times of Israel

Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll

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The Distance Between Pixels and Veils

If a man cannot look at a woman and say ‘What a healthy and handsome woman the Almighty has created,’ then I do not know what is happening to us. And I fear that if this continues, we will have to veil our faces.

These are not my words (though I’ve said them in these pages before), these are the words of Rabbanit Adina Bar Shalom, daughter of Rav Ovadia Yosef a’h.

Speaking at a conference, she said she was “greatly ashamed” that the Shas publication “Day to Day” ran a photograph of the newly elected government with the faces of female ministers blurred out.

Read more in the Times of Israel

Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll

 

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Vanishing Women

Recently, Angela Merkel was removed from the now famous picture of the recent rally in France by an ultra-Orthodox newspaper. In this, she joins the ranks of Hillary Clinton and many Jewish women and girls who have been literally erased from the public eye by elements of the Jewish community who fanaticize the concept of “guarding one’s eyes”

Though the aim of this practice is to be holy and desexualize casual encounters, it instead has the opposite effect, making every interaction between genders a potentially sexual — and thus sinful — one and effectively renders any normal interaction between the sexes impossible.

Though this community is small, it is also the fastest growing and its influence reaches beyond its own neighborhoods.

In this society, men seldom look at women and refrain from reading secular newspapers; strict gender segregation is enforced in schools, synagogues and, really, anywhere that it can be implemented. This has extended to buses and certain bus lines are unofficially (because it is illegal) segregated, with women sitting in the back.

Magazines censor images of women and girls. This relatively new phenomenon extends to magazines that cater to religious, yet far more main stream Jewish communities. Magazines such as Ami, Mishpacha, and Binah all censor women despite having a predominantly female readership.

Read More in the Times of Israel

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