Israel is facing an economic crisis of truly epic proportions, but even though its immediate cause is the declining dollar and the crisis now gripping US financial markets, its roots lie in Mea Shearim quarter, not on Wall Street.

Every year, Israeli ultra-Orthodox charities raise almost $1 billion abroad. That money is used to support soup kitchens, food pantries, organizations like ZAKA, and the ultra-Orthodox school system, including yeshivas and kollels. Kollels are yeshivas for married men. And herein lies the problem.

70% of ultra-Orthodox married men choose not to work.  Instead, they study in kollel. They are each given a stipend from the kollel that amounts to about $300 per month. Their families subsist on government welfare benefits, aid from various ultra-Orthodox charities, and whatever else the mothers of seven (or more) children are able to earn in their “spare” time.

This planned unemployment – which often lasts well into a man’s forties – is a tremendous drain on government resources. It is also a tremendous drain on charities which, one way or another, are compelled to support it.

Dirt Poor: in the city of goldExcept for those few lucky kollel students with rich parents or in-laws, these families live in real poverty, packed together in small, aging apartments, worried about their childrens' next meal.

Why would anyone voluntarily do this? Because their rabbis told them to.

For a generation, ultra-Orthodox rabbis have ordered their followers to study at all costs. From the rabbis’ perspective, it is easy to see why.

Kollel students are exempt from army service, which not only keeps them off the battlefield – it keeps them out of the army, where they would surely mix with and befriend non-ultra-Orthodox Jews. This could, in the rabbis’ view, lead to a weakening of faith.

In the same way, because kollel students do not leave their ultra-Orthodox enclaves for work, they do not mix with non-ultra-Orthodox coworkers.

On top of that, at the rabbis’ direction the ultra-Orthodox do not study in universities. This keeps them blissfully ignorant of modern science, philosophy, and history – all things that could easily lead an ultra-Orthodox person to question his faith. It also keeps them away from secular members of the opposite sex.

In other words, kollel study combined with an enforced lack of secular knowledge serves as a buffer from modernity, the mortal enemy of ultra-Orthodoxy.

Of course, that's not how the rabbis sell kollel study to their followers. Instead, it's presented as a religious obligation: it is holy, work is not. Work is a last resort, something to be done only if there is no other option left, and then only if the rabbis agree.

For years this system survived because the government partially supported the kollels, supported the kollel families through child allowances and other welfare benefits, and because American Jews donated money.

But the government cut back on those child allowances. And then, the worst happened – the US dollar went into a tailspin.

Dollars are worth about 20% less today than they were a year ago. That  means, all things being equal, these charities have 20% less to spend for the needy.

But all things are not equal.

Because of worldwide economic uncertainty, the amount of dollars coming in has also dropped – how much, no one is yet sure – but Israeli ultra-Orthodox charities report their net incomes are down about 30%.

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox non-profits were already stretched to the breaking point before this economic downturn. Now many are cutting back on services. Soup kitchens are serving smaller portions and even skipping meals. The newly needy are not finding help.

Despite all of this, the rabbis have not changed their call: ultra-Orthodox men are still expected to study full time.

Even if ultra-Orthodox rabbis would tell their followers to go find jobs, few would be employable. These men have spent their lives in a school system that did not teach them science, history, civics, English, modern Hebrew, or even math. They lack the skills necessary for all but the most menial jobs.

And, because so few ultra-Orthodox men now work, that means few create jobs that could be filled by other ultra-Orthodox.

Welfare payments are a major issue fought over by ultra-Orthodox politicians and the beleaguered public servants who try to keep Israel’s budget on an even keel. Entire governments have been held hostage by small ultra-Orthodox political parties demanding increases in these welfare payments. Those small parties’ threats to leave the governing coalition would force new elections.

When Israelis think of welfare, they tend to think of "welfare cheats."  In their minds, these are the ultra-Orthodox, who do not serve in the army, who often do not pay taxes, and who take from the country in so many ways without giving back.

None of this is meant to excuse Israel’s attitude toward its poor who are not poor-by-choice – or, more accurately, poor-by-their-rabbis’-choice. These unfortunate people are expected to subsist on welfare payments so low, many go hungry. It is not at all uncommon to see elderly begging for food on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Israel also has its homeless, many of whom are not mentally ill or substance abusers – they’re just poor.  The country could go a long way to rectifying this situation by outlawing welfare payments to able-bodied men above the age of twenty-one who choose to study in kollel rather than work or serve in the army. That would free resources that could be used to help the truly needy, and could also be used to ease the ultra-Orthodox transition to work by providing job training and internship programs.

None of these changes would stop ultra-Orthodoxy from itself supporting its true scholars and allowing them to study in kollel for many years – perhaps for their entire lives.

Ultra-Orthodoxy treats its rabbis like popes, infallible and exceedingly wise, with a direct line to the Divine Will. But, like every cataclysmic event to befall the Jewish people in recent memory – the Russian pogroms of the 1880s; the upheavals and slaughters of World War One; and, of course, the Holocaust –  the rabbis did not see it coming. They did not prepare their followers for the day after Wall Street’s collapse any more than they did for  the collapse of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire or the Nazi Holocaust.

After each of those earlier tragedies, large numbers of ultra-Orthodox left the fold. Chances are, some of them were your ancestors.

Will that happen now?

It would, I think, if ultra-Orthodox defectors were given the necessary support to transition from their closed communities to secular society, where a strong back and a willingness to work hard is no longer enough to get by. But without that support, these potential defectors will remain trapped in ultra-Orthodoxy, dependent on ultra-Orthodox charities for subsistence.

That is why you can expect ultra-Orthodox rabbis to fight any attempt to provide widespread job training or secular education for their followers.

It is also why the problem of Israel’s poor-by-choice will not go away any time soon.

On Sunday, Jewish law killed a 55-year old American-Israeli man. Rabbi Yossie Raichik died of a lung infection. He was waiting in Israel, where he had lived for almost 30 years, for a transplant to replace his irreversibly damaged lungs. It could have saved his life. It did not because the donor organs that matched him did not arrive.

Raichick headed Chabad’s Children of Chernobyl project. Children of Chernobyl took children from the area around Chernobyl’s exploded nuclear reactor and brought them and their families to Israel for medical treatment. Raichik brought more than 2500 children to Israel during the 22 years since the disaster. He is said to have played a role in airlifting Jewish children out of Iran just after the revolution ushered in what became the Islamic regime.

Raichik’s transplant didn’t come because the donor’s family insisted on consulting with an unnamed leading Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbinic expert before allowing the transplant. While the rabbi investigated, the woman’s heart failed and the organs – including the lungs that could have saved Raichik – were lost.  Raichik died soon after.

Unlike kidneys and livers, which if necessary can be removed immediately after cardiac death, lungs must be taken while the donor’s heart is still beating.  This means the only way to get lungs for transplant is to take them from patients who are brain stem dead, or from Chinese political prisoners killed by the government for their organs.

Orthodox rabbinic interpreters of Jewish law seem united in their opposition to the Chinese option, as everyone should be. But they are divided on the validity of brain stem death, and it was this divide that killed Yossie Raichick.

The Jerusalem Talmud, the older brother of the commonly studied and followed Babylonian Talmud, defines death as the complete, irreversible cessation of breathing. This is defined in two ways: 1) No discernible air exhaled or inhaled through the nose, and 2) No respirations discernible by intently studying the navel area (i.e., the diaphragm).

Manuscript versions of the Babylonian Talmud follow this reading, including the versions used by leading medieval scholars like Isaac Alfassi, Nachmanides, Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel, and many others.

But one medieval scholar living in what was then the remote hinterland of Jewish communities had a manuscript with a different reading. Unfortunately for Raichik and many others, that scholar was Rashi, and Rashi wrote what is considered the seminal commentary on the Talmud. When the printing press came into use hundreds of years after Rashi’s death, Rashi’s commentary was printed alongside the main text of the Babylonian Talmud.

Rashi’s version of the Talmud replaced the word “navel” with the word heart, so death was defined by complete cessation of breathing and heartbeat. Printers apparently amended the text of the Talmud to match Rashi’s commentary.

Rashi’s opinion makes most transplants impossible.

For hundreds of years, Jews determined death by placing a feather at the nostrils and intently watching for signs of breathing. If there were none after a few minutes, the person was declared dead.

(This was by no means foolproof. Rarely, faint breathing was missed by the observers. This sometimes led to ‘corpses’ “coming back to life” in their coffins.)

With the advent of modern medical technology came ventilators and cardiac resuscitation devices. Suddenly, stopped hearts could be restarted and lungs too weak to breathe adequately on their own could be assisted.

These and many other advanced medical treatments have allowed very physically compromised people to live, and some eventually to recover.

Eventually, improved medical technology brought the potential for organ transplantation. But along with organ transplantation came a renewed concern about how to determine when a person is really, truly dead.

Medical science uses brain stem death to define death in applicable cases. Brain stem death is like decapitation. Without a living brain stem, a person can never breathe independently. He can never regain consciousness. He can never function in any way, however compromised. And, like decapitation, brain stem death is irreversible.

If a brain-stem-dead patient is removed from his ventilator, his body will make no visible or measurable effort to breathe, and his heart will fail.

Based on this, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (d. 1986), the leading American ultra-Orthodox rabbi of his era, accepted brain stem death as death, allowing viable organs to be taken from brain-stem-dead patients.

But many Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbis disagreed. Even with special tests devised to prove lack of both spontaneous breathing and lack of brain function, these rabbis refused to accept brain stem death as death.

Why?

In the words of nonagenarian ultra-Orthodox leader Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv – posted across Jerusalem and published in ultra-Orthodox papers in late March after Israel passed an organ donation bill recognizing brain stem death as death – “[A]s long as the heart is still pumping blood, even in the case of 'brain death,' it is not permitted to remove any organ from the patient.” And, under banner headlines proclaiming, “Thou Shalt Not Murder!,” Elyashiv and his followers called reliance on brain stem death “murder.”

It was those words that apparently caused the donor’s family to delay donation, and it was those words that apparently caused the leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi they asked for advice to himself delay.

Taking Elyashiv’s position to an illogical extreme, it could be argued that a decapitated person with a beating heart and a surgically closed neck wound is fully alive, even though headless. Indeed, two rabbis, Hershel Schachter and J. David Bleich, both associated with Manhattan-based Yeshiva University’s right wing, have done just that. To them, the complete absence of a head does not signify death. Schachter is to Modern Orthodoxy what Elyashiv is to ultra-Orthodoxy – the top guy.

Speaking at an Orthodox medical ethics conference in 2006, Schachter makes significant errors of medical fact, avers that heart and lung transplantation is murder  – even though he acknowledges the donor’s entire brain may be irreversibly dead – and misrepresents the original decision of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate permitting such transplants. In response to a question from a physician, who asks Schachter if he permits Jews to take a donated heart when that heart has come from, in Schachter’s opinion, a “murder,” Schachter answers by saying many rabbis permit taking these organs because the “doctors” will “murder” the patient anyway.

The truth, however, is significantly different. The only organs removed from a donor are organs for which there is a recipient match within the immediate geographic area. If no such match exists, no organs are taken. Schachter and many of the other rabbis who permit taking organs but not donating organs must be aware of this. They simply ignore the truth out of expediency.

It would be one thing if Elyashiv, Schachter, and their followers refrained from accepting donated organs. But they don’t. While forbidding donating organs, Elyashiv and Schachter have said nothing about not taking them. Their followers who need organs take organs, often displacing people on recipient lists who are, themselves, potential donors registered with various organ donation programs, including the Halachic Organ Donation Society.

This, along with the traditional Jewish desire to bury the body intact, has caused a dire shortage of organs in Israel. This shortage is made worse because Israelis cannot get organs from many other countries. Why? Because of the shortage, Israel cannot provide those countries with anything like reciprocity. Israelis are seen as takers of organs but not as givers. If not for the unusual generosity of the United States, Israelis would have few places to turn.

This perception of Jews as organ takers but not givers extends to communities worldwide with large Orthodox communities. This has sparked fears that countries will start banning all Jews, not just Israelis, from receiving donated organs.

Elyashiv and his fellow travelers claim they object to brain stem death because they want to protect the sanctity of life, and this may be the case.  But medical science has advanced exponentially since the Talmud was compiled in the 8th century. Just as Orthodox Jews benefit from those advances, the Jewish law they follow needs to take these advances into account. Just as we do not mix the potions described in the Talmud to cure illness, and we do not follow its diet recommendations to promote health, we should not be basing something as important as death on 1300 year old Talmudic science – or on a 500 year old printer’s error.

Yossie Raichik’s donor died. So did Yossie Raichik. It didn’t have to be that way.

“You'll never find a leftist who cares about suffering white or Christian peoples. Examples Afrikaner in the "new South Africa," whites under Mugabe, Loyalist victims of IRA terror, Sudetan Germans the list is endless. I agree that a lot of leftist agitation is due to hatred of the West, the white race and any non Third World political aspiration. However, not all.”

Who wrote this? An arch conservative? A white supremacist? A Nazi?

Rabbi Mayer Schiller: teaches advanced Talmud and white supremacy

The man who wrote those words is not a Nazi. He is, however, both an arch conservative and a white supremacist.

And he is also an ultra-Orthodox rabbi.

Rabbi Mayer Schiller teaches advanced Talmud at the Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy, Yeshiva University’s affiliated high school.  But Schiller, who lives in the ultra-Orthodox bastion of Monsey, New York, is not Modern Orthodox – he is a Skver hasid and serves as spokesperson for New Square, the Skver-founded village.

Schiller is a supporter of far-right political groups worldwide, and advocates “peaceful” separation of the races.  His racist views have been public for at least 15 years, yet neither Yeshiva University or New Square have removed Schiller from his jobs.

That may be partially because Schiller is a cagey racist, and he parses his racism finely. Schiller speaks of each individual, even those who are dark-skinned, being created in the “image of God.” But, Schiller continues, those same image-of-God-created individuals each belong to different groups based on race and nationality, and those groups, in Schiller’s view, are each good for different things and not for others. Those groups and races, Schiller avers,  need to be kept separate – very separate.

Orthodox apologists for Schiller like to spin him as a talented teacher and a benign eccentric who paternalistically wants the best for black people, as long as that best doesn’t involve sex with white people. Real racists, this line of twisted thought goes, would not want the best for black people – no matter who those blacks don’t sleep with.

It is often thought that ultra-Orthodox racism, readily evident in ultra-Orthodox communities in urban centers like Brooklyn, comes from a geographic proximity to lower class black and hispanic neighborhoods. The idea is that, because ultra-Orthodox suffer from black and hispanic crime, racism is a natural (if incorrect) reaction. This is thought to be true even though that same crime disproportionately ravages blacks and hispanics.  

Rabbi Efraim Luft: hates the electric guitarWhile that explains a part of the problem, it does not explain the whole. And there is no better proof of that than Rabbi Efraim Luft.  Luft lives in Bnei Brak, Israel – half a world away from the ghettos of Brooklyn.

He heads something called the “Committee for Jewish Music,” which works in close cooperation with ultra-Orthodox “modesty squads.”  These “modesty squads” are part Church Lady, part Ku Klux Klan lynching party, with a bit of Mob enforcer thrown in for good measure.

Luft has rallied the support of leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis here and in Israel in his crusade to ban African-influenced “primitive” music. He claims electric guitars, bass, and saxophones are “indecent,” and he has just published a broadside endorsed by those ultra-Orthodox rabbis titled “Rules For Playing Kosher Music.”  The rules read like they were pulled from a 1950s Ku Klux Klan publication – because, for the most part, they were.

Luft approvingly quotes “The Southerner,” a Klan-linked notorious race-baiting tabloid. (You can read that article here with the offending source removed after bloggers first exposed Luft in 2005.) The Southerner’s editor, Asa Earl Carter, passed his Klan initiation with flying colors – he castrated a retarded black man.

Luft quotes sources like Creationists quote science: selectively and old. (Perhaps this isn’t much of a surprise – Luft is also a Creationist.) These sources are mostly from the mid-1950s and reflect the racism prevalent at that time, not any science or empirical data. But that has not stopped publications controlled by leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis from publishing Luft and citing those sources, and it has not stopped these same rabbis from endorsing what amounts to a ban on almost all music of non-Western European origin.

Rabbi Dr. Benzion Twerski: resigned and retired under pressure and threatsWhile these ultra-Orthodox rabbinic leaders were addressing the “important” issue of African-origin rhythms and “impure” music, a separate, small group of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn were attempting to launch a task force to deal with a truly pressing problem: rabbinic sexual predators.

The lead case on their agenda is a case of alleged rabbi-on-boy child abuse and coverup at the Satmar hasidic movement’s main Brooklyn yeshiva. Satmar is considered to be the most violence prone of U.S.-based ultra-Orthodox groups.  The man chosen to lead this modest effort, Rabbi Dr. Benzion Twerski, a scion of the Chernobyl hasidic dynasty, was threatened by neighbors and, I’m told, by people linked to a Brooklyn-based modesty squad.

Among the more benign threats, Twerski was told that his grandchildren would not get good shidduchim (marriage partners) unless he immediately resigned from the task force. He did.  And Twerski went the goons one better – he retired from public life, as well.

Twerski’s grandchildren can now enter their married lives secure and well matched, while safely dancing to Luft-approved “kosher” music.

Like the 1950s South, ultra-Orthodoxy relies on shunning, threats, and violence in order to maintain a status quo that cannot survive any other way, and it shares some of the same racism. But ultra-Orthodoxy won’t have a Civil Rights Act to clean it up. Either change will come from the inside – or, more likely, change won’t come at all.

Earlier this week, our friends at Agriprocessors, America’s largest supplier of glatt kosher meat, were charged with more than 9000 counts of child labor violations. Named in the Iowa affidavit are Aaron Rubashkin, Agriprocessors owner, his son Sholom M. Rubashkin, and Agriprocessors Human Resources director, and its two HR managers. The New York Times reports that fines could total more than $5 million. Jail time could stretch for years. One of the child laborers was 13 years old.

Coincidentally, on the same day and time that Iowa’s charges against Agriprocessors were announced, the two named HR managers, Laura Althouse and Karina Freund, were arrested by federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Althouse is charged with aiding and abetting document fraud, aiding and abetting aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to harbor undocumented aliens.  Freund was charged with aiding and abetting the harboring of illegal aliens. Two senior Agriprocessors supervisors were previously arrested and both have pleaded guilty. A third fled indictment and is now living in Israel.

These indictments, charges, and pleas all stem from ICE’s May 12 immigration raid at Agriprocessors, then the largest single site immigration raid in US history. On the day of the raid, about 75% of Agriprocessors’ workforce was illegal.  ICE agents found stacks of blank Green Cards in Agriprocessors’ HR office, along with forged Green Cards and other fraudulent documents.

Sources familiar with federal law enforcement tell me the US government is following an established pattern: indict and charge those lower down while using information gleaned from those relatively minor players to help build stronger cases against the bosses. They think it’s reasonable to expect federal charges against senior Agriprocessors management sometime this fall.

But Agriprocessors recent troubles don’t stop there. Last Friday, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) released an undercover videotape showing inhumane slaughter at Agriprocessors. This is the Agriprocessors third undercover video shot by PETA since 2004. All show a variant of the same abuse. The new footage was shot this summer.  In it, a non-Jewish Agriprocessors employee uses a regular carving-style knife to hack inside the gaping throat wounds of still conscious cattle. The USDA cited Agriprocessors for violations of Humane Slaughter law, but called those violations “not egregious.”

Temple Grandin, the noted animal welfare expert who serves as an advisor to the USDA, put it a bit differently.  Dr. Grandin told the New York Times the animals would “definitely” feel pain from those hacking cuts.  She called on the USDA to install 24/7 Internet streaming video monitoring of Agriprocessors in order to stop Agriprocessors from abusing cattle.  You can sign a petition to that effect here.

Agriprocessors claims the procedure shown on PETA’s video is a protected part of the kosher slaughter process. Its spokesman, Menachem Lubinsky, even claims that procedure, known as a “second cut,” is common. When the first PETA video showing this second cut was released in 2004, I asked dozens of Orthodox rabbis about the procedure. Not one of them had ever seen it done. All but a small handful did not even know it could be done.

Grandin, who has consulted for more than 30 different kosher slaughter plants in her long career, has only seen this procedure done by one company – Agriprocessors – which first did it using a meat hook. It was the most horrific violation of Humane Slaughter law Grandin had ever seen.

The furor around that video caused the OU – one of Agriprocessors kosher supervising agencies – to announce that the “procedure” would no longer be done. The head of the OU’s kosher division, Rabbi Menachem Genack, clearly stated in an article he wrote that the second cut is not a part of the shechita (ritual slaughter) process at all.

Yet the only exemption to allow this brutal procedure is that it is a part of the shechita process. If it is not a part of that process, no exemption legally exists.

Last year I sent Freedom of Information Act requests to the USDA. What I found is chilling. In response to requests made by Orthodox rabbis – including Orthodox rabbis from the OU – the USDA had broadened the ritual slaughter exemption to such a degree that even ripping the throat out of live cattle using a meat hook would be considered an exempt, and therefore protected, practice.

In other words, a painful and abusive procedure used only at Agriprocessors and defined by the OU itself as something outside the ritual slaughter process is now embedded in US law as a protected part of that ritual slaughter process. And, as Agriprocessors’ spokespeople have been quick to note, US law defines ritual slaughter as humane. How’s that for doublespeak?

Agriprocesors quietly switched from a meat hook to a smaller boning hook, was again caught by PETA, said it would stop doing the procedure, surreptitiously switched to using a carving-type knife, got caught by PETA, said it would stop doing the procedure – but its spokesman, Menachem Lubinsky, now says the procedure continues unabated.

The OU – the same OU that presides over this second cut that is not a part of the shechita process but still is – now says that Agriprocessors has two weeks to bring in a new management team. If Agriprocessors does not do this, Rabbi Genack says the OU will “suspend” its kosher supervision.

But in mid-May, after the ICE raid, Genack said essentially the same thing: "Bring in new management or we’re out of here."  The OU ‘forced’ Sholom M. Rubashkin to ‘step down’ as Agriprocessors’ CEO.  Problem?  No new CEO was hired and Sholom Rubashkin did not leave Agriprocessors.  To this day, he continues to help manage the plant and is still Agriprocessors’ VP.

The OU did not pull its kosher supervision.

In the aftermath of the ICE raid, Rabbi Genack was asked a tough question. Would the OU remove its supervision if Agriprocessors senior management were charged?  Rabbi Genack said he would, but he hoped new management would be brought in before that time so that decision would not need to be made.

But new management was not brought in, the decision had to be made and Genack parsed it.  Rather than pulling the OU’s supervision, Genack gave Agriprocessors a two week deadline to bring in new management.

And while that new management has to be “independent,” Rabbi Genack told me  the Rubaskins can continue to control the board of this privately owned family corporation.  Sholom M. Rubashkin can still serve as VP; Aaron Rubashkin can still be president.  And Heshy Rubashkin, Sholom’s as yet unindicted younger brother, can continue to serve on the board and can work in the company’s management as well.

Genack, who was once Bill Clinton’s rabbi, dices language finer and faster than a sushi chef on a Red Bull binge.  Was an inhumane procedure stopped?  It depends on what the meanings of “procedure” and “meat hook” are.  Is new management really on Agriprocessors’ horizon?  It depends on how “management” is defined.

If the OU had reacted properly to Agriprocessors’ first violations of Humane Slaughter law, the Jewish community would not be suffering through yet another Agriprocessors scandal. But the OU did not properly react – no matter how that term is parsed or who does the parsing.

For its part, I’m told Agriprocessors has turned down offers to buy the company, one from a group of Japanese investors. Unless the Rubashkins can get what is described as a very high asking price, any ‘sale’ of Agriprocessors may turn out in the end to be a shell game, with the Rubashkins remaining in full control behind the scenes.

I’d like to say that the Jewish community deserves better than this – but we don’t. We stood by silently as Agriprocessors business practices became exponentially more abusive and exploitative.  Having access to kosher meat was more important that how that access was gained or who was hurt as a result.

It wasn’t until we felt public shame that we reacted.

Have we learned our lesson?  I don’t think so.

Two weeks ago the Forward exposed mistreatment of workers at America’s number two glatt kosher meatpacker, Alle Processing. Owned by Satmar hasidim, Alle pays its workers bare minimum wages with no paid sick leave, health insurance, or other benefits, and it engages in what appear to be illegal union-busting tactics. One worker told the Forward that, when seriously injured on the job, Alle punched out his timecard the hour the injury happened. He was paid nothing after that. Worse yet, Alle management told him when he recovers he will be suspended for one month without pay, because he used the machine that injured him improperly. Workers at Alle receive little if any safety training.

So far, the Jewish community has remained silent.

I caught early chunks of Obama’s acceptance speech at the gym of my local JCC. Not surprisingly, the crowd that night was heavily Republican, and there were mutterings of concern: Is Obama truly committed to Israel? Is Obama too soft on terror? Is he simply another pie-in-the-sky liberal, full of fancy talk, elaborate plans and much hot air?

No one was concerned about Obama’s skin color.

We’re less than 145 years removed from slavery and only 40 removed from legal segregation, and we may very well elect a black man as president. No matter your political affiliation, chances are you understand it was an historic moment for America.

I left part way through Obama’s speech and drove to a Jewish community nursing home to make a late visit. While the nursing home is affiliated with the Jewish community, most of its residents are not Jewish. In order to accept federal, state and local funds, nursing homes cannot discriminate based on religious affiliation, color, country of origin, sexual preference, or gender. Years ago, the Jewish community opted to take government funds, a decision that eventually turned the facility’s resident base into a pretty fair representation of the local population, rather than a spot on representation of the Jewish community.

With this change came good and bad. The good is diversity. The bad is Christmas trees, Christian prayer services, nuns in the hallways, and an atmosphere that at one point, before some modicum of balance was struck, had Jewish residents feeling like an oppressed minority in their own home. During the peak of this, even the facility’s rabbis felt beleaguered.

I asked one if she had anyone who could help a resident light electric Shabbat candles. With tears in her eyes told me, “There isn’t anyone. There’s nothing Jewish here.” Another had his facility-wide Purim decorations ripped down by staff and replaced with St. Patrick’s Day ornamentation when the two holidays coincided on the calendar.

Not too long ago, a new resident – an elderly black woman whom I’ll call Jennie – was admitted. Suffering from a form of dementia, she’s often overcome with fear. She hears noises in the hall and thinks neighborhood thugs are breaking in to try to kill her. She thinks everyone is conspiring against her and that her food is poisoned. She can be loud and disruptive, breaking into tears and sobbing or putting on her best street bravado to ward off enemies that are not there.

As much as I try not to let myself judge an elderly, demented person by her actions – and especially by their skin color or religion – there are times when I catch myself thinking about how disruptive, non-Jewish residents should go to non-Jewish facilities.

A few months ago, I had a moment like that with Jennie. She sat in a lounge area, alternately threatening to “pop” imaginary intruders and breaking into tears. I told myself what I always do in encounters like these: Reverse the situation. How would I judge it if the disruptive demented person were Jewish and the nursing facility was not? Would I think it’s okay for that facility to remove the sick, elderly, disruptive Jew because he’s Jewish? Of course not. So why should the reverse be any different?

I sat beside Jennie and calmed her down by asking about her youth.  She told me that as a child, she had known freed slaves. She'd been born dirt poor and had faced intense discrimination. But she raised children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. And she had built a successful business.

After a while she asked, “Where are we now? What’s the name of this place?”

I told her. She looked at me, startled, and then looked around her. “I used to work here,” she said, “in the kitchen, along time ago. But it looks different.”

I told her this was a different building in a different neighborhood than before. Then she told me about her friend the kosher butcher, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, whose shop once stood nearby the old building. “I used to buy all my meat from him when I first got married,” she explained.

I said that I had owned that store years later, and the same butcher had been my landlord and friend.

A few nights later, I found Jennie wandering in a hallway without her wheelchair or her wandering alarm. I had her hold onto a railing so she wouldn’t fall and I called for help. Then I asked Jennie why she was up so late, wandering around alone. “I’m a poor black woman,” she said. “If I don’t get up and get out of this house and find me some money, I’ll never go to college.” I asked her what she wanted to major in. “I want to be an engineer,” she replied.

When I arrived at the nursing home on the night of Obama’s speech, all the residents were asleep except Jennie. It was the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, providentially coinciding with Obama’s. Obama’s speech had ended and a T.V. station was showing a documentary on the two. Jennie sat silent in her wheelchair in front of the TV, watching King and Obama. Gone were the disruptive behaviors, the paranoia, and the pain.

I stopped to say hello. King was on the screen.

“They shot him, didn't they?” she said.

“They did,” I told her.

She turned and looked at me. “And now a black man could be president?”

I said he very well could.

She turned back to the screen. “And now a black man could be president,” she said watching King. This time it wasn’t a question.

Barack Obama is not the Democratic nominee because of his skin color or despite it. He isn’t a token or a novelty. Barack Obama is the nominee because his was the strongest message and the best run campaign. This is the first time America has been truly colorblind.

I don't know if Barack Obama will win. He wasn’t my first choice among Democratic candidates – I’m not even sure who I’ll vote for come November. But there is one thing I am sure of: America is a better place because Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee.

Joel Teitelbaum, the Rebbe of Satmar and the most coercive of all modern day ultra-Orthodox leaders, passed away 29 years ago this month.  A vociferous anti-Zionist, Teitelbaum is known for having exhorted his followers to stay in Europe.  Later, as the Nazis approached, he was one of many Hungarian ultra-Orthodox rabbis who told their flocks to remain calm.  There is nothing to worry about, these rabbis announced, God will protect us because of our anti-Zionism.

Unfortunately for Teitelbaum’s followers, God didn’t go along with his promises. While most of his followers perished in Auschwitz, Teitelbaum went into hiding and later escaped to freedom. He did not do this through his own ingenuity or through some divine intervention – Joel Teitelbaum, uber-anti-Zionist, was saved from certain death by a Zionist leader.

That Zionist, Rudolph Kasztner, organized the largest Holocaust rescue of Jews by another Jew.  He did it with smoke and mirrors, with bravado and slight of hand. Kasztner saved thousands of his people by negotiating with Adolph Eichmann – short of Hitler, the most feared Nazi in the world. Oskar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame said Kasztner was the bravest man he knew.

After the War, Teitelbaum lived for a brief time in Palestine, where he became a leader of the rabidly anti-Zionist, rabidly anti-modern, Edah HaCharedit. When you read about Jerusalem video stores being torched or Internet cafés trashed, chances are the thugs who did it are proudly affiliated with Edah HaCharedit.

Teitelbaum couldn’t stand what he saw as the ‘destruction’ of the Holy Land by the irreligious and imperfectly religious – in practice, pretty much everyone who wasn’t a Teitelbaum follower or acolyte. So, in 1946, Teitelbaum moved to Brooklyn and set up what was then his small hasidic court.  Teitelbaum found America’s Orthodox welcoming, and America’s Jewish welfare agencies helped to resettle many of his followers in Brooklyn.

You’ve probably heard the stories about these American Jews – the same ones who were so hospitable and supportive of Teitelbaum when he first arrived: Pious Jews fled pogroms in Eastern Europe.  The need to make a living in America forced them to give up strict Shabbat observance and other Orthodox practices. Their children, lacking the example of fully Orthodox parents, became even less observant. If those pious Jews had just kept Shabbat, the story goes, their descendants would still be Orthodox today.

The flip side to this story is another story you’ve also probably heard: Seemingly pious Eastern European Jews board a ship bound for America. As the ship leaves the harbor and gets beyond sight of the shore, they cut off their beards and pitch their tefillin into the sea.

Both stories probably happened, although the first was probably far more common than the second. But even though these are iconic stories, neither really tells the tale of Eastern European immigration to the United States. That is because both are based on a lie – the idea that these immigration ships were filled with characters out of Broadway’s Fiddler On The Roof: long-bearded shtetl-dwellers with untrimmed earlocks, whose only brush with secular culture had taken place moments before.

By the 1920s, the masses of Eastern European Jews were secular or only nominally religious. Emancipation, which spread throughout Europe during the 19th century,  made belonging to a religious community – and following that community’s laws – optional. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, itself a reactionary movement to the Enlightenment that preceded Emancipation, lost its state-sponsored coercive powers as did all forms of Orthodoxy. And Jews, no longer forced to be Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox, left Orthodoxy by the tens of thousands as a result.

Most Jews who came to America during the great wave of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were neither ultra-Orthodox or rabidly secular – they were somewhere in between. They were Jews with a respect for Jewish law and tradition, but they were also Jews who appreciated and enjoyed secular culture and the freedoms it gave them.

The Orthodoxy they found in America was more suited to this hybrid outlook than the Orthodoxy of Eastern Europe. Never subject to state enforcement of religious law, American Jews – even American Orthodox Jews – took any type of religious coercion badly.

These new immigrants developed their own versions of Orthodoxy, too, founding shuls grouped around country or city of origin. In part, they did this to preserve the unique customs they grew up with. But they also did it for coarser, more practical reasons. These new shuls also served as affinity associations, and the social networking they provided helped immigrants land jobs and acclimate to American life. These shuls were rarely coercive – you paid your dues and you helped out with a minyan when you were able, and you were in.

These old and new American Orthodox Jews founded yeshivas like Torah Vodaas in Brooklyn and what would later become Yeshiva University in Manhattan. They also founded or helped to found many of the leading national Jewish organizations of their day, including what we now know as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and other welfare organizations meant to help suffering Jews in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Despite this, and despite the fact that these same American Orthodox Jews would be instrumental in rescuing and resettling Eastern European Jews during and after the Holocaust, Teitelbaum rejected American Orthodoxy as impure and watered down by compromise and modernity.  He sought to impose Edah HaCharedit standards on it, demanding stricter forms of kashrut and the rejection of all secular values, including basic secular education. He created a community virtually walled off from the rest of society. And, when that was not enough, he created another in Upstate New York that now carries his name.To this day, when Satmar hasidim choose to leave Brooklyn or Kiryas Joel and the hasidic life, they often leave it illiterate in English. An entire organization, Footsteps, exists primarily to help these former hasids adapt to American life.

Yet the pull of a closed life and the allure of rebuilding a fantasy version of pre-Holocaust Satmar Jewish life was strong. Teitelbaum’s group grew to be largest hasidic court in America, although that growth has far more to do with the fertility and fruitfulness of its members (not to mention the difficulties those members face when defecting) than it does with the attractiveness of its lifestyle to outsiders.

Like the Edah HaCharedit, Teitelbaum and the movement he founded are ultra-Orthodoxy unvarnished, presented without PR agencies or concern for anyone else’s opinion.

Although he had opportunities to do so, Joel Teitelbaum never thanked the man who saved his life. Teitelbaum even refused to acknowledge that a Zionist had saved him. His pat answer when pressed was that he was saved by God, not by man, and would discuss the issue no further. Perhaps most shockingly, despite the failure of his theology and the success of Israel, Teitelbaum continued his anti-Zionist agitation, becoming the leading anti-Zionist in the world.

He showed little if any respect for the American Orthodox community that initially welcomed him, and he eventually shunned its leaders just as he shunned their schools, shuls, and organizations.

Many of the men and women who immigrated to pre-Holocaust America did so to flee men like Teitelbaum and the extremism that so often surrounds them.  That did not mean they threw their Judaism into the sea.  It meant they wanted to live a life free from religious enforcers and from antisemitism – a life where they could rise or fall based on their merits, not on their religious observance. In short, they wanted an American life, not an ultra-Orthodox one.

In a fit of rabid theodicy unmatched in modern times, Teitelbaum ultimately blamed Zionism for the Holocaust itself.

Undocumented workers, always one phone call away from deportation and a moment away from being summarily fired, are afraid to object to abusive working conditions. This makes them ripe for exploitation, as has been amply documented, and is one reason why US labor law does not allow employers to prevent illegal workers from unionizing. The May 12 immigration raid at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, the world’s largest kosher slaughterhouse, exposed the dark underbelly of illegal immigration. In response to this exploitation, the Jewish community has split in two.

One side, overwhelmingly non-Orthodox in affiliation, views the conduct of the Rubashkin family, Agriprocessors’ hasidic owners, as beyond the pale. It looks at the history of Agriprocessors and its owners and sees a clear, long term pattern of disregard for US law and halakha, Jewish law. It has demanded change, urged boycott, and rallied for justice.

The other side, overwhelmingly Orthodox, sees little wrong with Agriprocessors. It argues Agriprocessors is being mistreated; that liberal Jews, unions, and unnamed competitors are behind the raid and its media coverage; and that Jewish law governing treatment of workers should at any rate be divorced from Jewish law governing the preparation of kosher food. To these people, the many well documented sins of Agriprocessors and its owners, sins that stretch back many years in an unbroken chain, are irrelevant.

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Not too long ago, a woman sat in the ‘wrong’ section of a public bus. A group of men asked her to move to the back. She refused. The men became more insistent. She still refused. Infuriated, the men punched, kicked and beat her. The bus driver did not interfere or call police.

Did this happen in America’s Deep South? In Taliban-controlled Kabul? In some Third World backwater?

No. It happened in Israel, and it is not an isolated incident.

The men who beat that woman are ultra-Orthodox. The woman herself is Orthodox. Her ‘crime’? She refused to sit in the section of the bus designated for women.

Ultra-Orthodoxy demands strict separation of the sexes. Men and women sit apart at weddings, family dinners, public gatherings, and in synagogue. Unmarried ultra-Orthodox men do not converse with women they are not closely related to. They have never held a woman’s hand or stolen a kiss, let alone "hooked up." Married ultra-Orthodox men follow the same restrictions. Even contact with their wives is closely regulated.

This hyper-segregation has now spilled over into Israel’s system of public transport. The ultra-Orthodox are demanding – and getting – separate seating on public buses. And, even though compliance with this segregation is supposed to be voluntary, increasingly the ultra-Orthodox choose to act as if it were mandatory, and as if they have the legal right to use coercion and brute force to achieve it.

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A young boy is called up to his teacher’s desk in a yeshiva grade school.

“Stay after class, Shmuley. I want to talk to you.”

Shmuley stays, frightened that he has done something wrong and his teacher will punish him. Once the other boys have gone, his teacher – a rabbi – places Shmuley on his lap and uses his tiny, warm body to stroke his erection. When the rabbi is finished pleasuring himself, he tells Shmuley to leave. “But you be quiet. You don’t tell anyone what we did. It’s lashon hara, and it will hurt you and hurt your parents.”

Shmuley leaves, frightened and confused.

Later, after the fifth molestation or the fiftieth, after months or years have passed, Shmuley tells his parents.

His parents tell the school’s head rabbi, who responds by denying the boy’s report. He sternly warns the parents not to “talk lashon hara” (gossip) about Shmuley's teacher or about the yeshiva.

This is not the first time the yeshiva head has heard allegations about Rabbi X, and he knows how to effectively respond.

“It is lashon hara to do so,” the yeshiva head says. “And it will only hurt you.” Your other children will have difficulty finding marriage partners, the rabbi says, and Shmuley – well, Shmuley will be “damaged goods” – no one, except a girl who is also very damaged, will ever marry him. This is far from an idle threat in a community that thrives on arranged marriages and rabbinic control.

The parents leave, frustrated and frightened. Their eight-year-old son is now “damaged goods.” They approach another rabbi, powerful in their community, and ask his advice.

“Your son is a minor. his testimony would not be accepted in beis din (religious court). It is his word against Rabbi X – and Rabbi X is a very well regarded teacher. And, from what you tell me, even if what Shmuley said is true – and I doubt that – no violation of Torah law took place. Shmuley was not violated.

“So, my advice to you – my legal judgement, in fact – is to listen to what the head of the yeshiva told you. Do not speak lashon hara against him, or against his school – and most certainly, not against Rabbi X.”

The parents go to another important community rabbi and get a very similar answer.

Without community support to back them, and with the very real prospect of “destroying” their children’s lives by branding them “damaged goods,” the parents stay silent.

Shmuley isn’t given counseling because the stigma, if revealed, would be too great. The family lives with this terrible secret, an elephant always in the room but never spoken of, the tarnished Elijah’s Cup of every meal, every celebration, every enjoyment they will ever have. Rabbi X continues to abuse young victims from his desk in the yeshiva, protected by a presumption of innocence belied by the facts, by the silence of Shmuley’s family – and by a Jewish law.

This nightmare scenario has allegedly been repeated multiple times in Brooklyn, Monsey, Bnei Brak, and other ultra-Orthodox communities worldwide. How did this happen? How did a law meant to protect people from gossip become a club used by rabbis to beat defenseless children and their families into submission?

There is a long answer and a short answer to that question, and both can be summed up in same three words: The Chofetz Chaim.

Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan is the iconic figure of today’s ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Kagan wrote many books on Jewish law in his long life. The first – and what may in retrospect prove to be his most controversial – was the Chofetz Chaim, a compendium of the laws of lashon hara.

Nothing that Kagan wrote in Chofetz Chaim was really new. What Kagan did – to the dismay of a few prescient rabbis – was compile laws scattered is disparate sections of the Talmud and in codes of Jewish law, and publish them for the first time as an organic whole with his commentary woven in. Kagan wanted his “little book” to be studied by the masses. He lived his entire long life firmly believing the messiah was literally coming any minute. Legend has it that at one point, he went into training for the “event,” running the stairs in his home to keep his aging body in shape for the blessed day. He thought the study of these laws would speed the messiah’s coming.

But Kagan’s book did bring these disparate laws out of the shadows and into the spotlight of Orthodox observance. And that, by and large, has been a bad thing.

Kagan’s idealism surpassed his realism. And, because Kagan’s book contained no dissenting opinions, that idealism became the baseline Jews were expected to follow – without nuance, without shades of gray, without real compensation for corrupt judges, rabbis, and leaders. It was Jewish law written in a vacuum but enforced in real life, law without context and without soul.

Kagan was a founder of the Agudath Israel movement, whose American branch recently campaigned against mandatory background checks for religious school teachers and employees, and would itself be linked to inaction in the face of rabbinic sexual abuse.

He urged Jews (with a few notable exceptions) to remain in Eastern Europe rather than settle in Palestine or America, and would go on to write twenty more books on Jewish law and ethics before he died in 1933 at the age of 95, in the shadow of the Holocaust that took so many of his followers and townspeople.

Kagan’s reputation as a saint survived nonetheless, and he and his books serve as totems worshipped with almost childlike veneration by ultra-Orthodoxy. He is often cited as the posek acharon, the final decisor and codifier of Jewish law, and his name and works have been preserved by the New York-based Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation. His books are found in almost every Orthodox home, library, shul and school – and in quite a few non-Orthodox settings, as well.

Orthodox Jews would be quick to point out that Kagan’s laws of lashon hara are misapplied by the rabbis in Shmuley’s story. Orthodox Jews are correct – the law is misapplied. But, like Kagan, what they miss is the inevitability of that misapplication, and the certitude of it.

The ultra-Orthodox community is not a democracy. It has no system of checks and balances, no ombudsman to press the case of the powerless, no campaign finance laws or transparency. It has no elections and no governance. It is a loosely joined series of potentates run by pashas dressed in black frock coats, fedoras and shtreimels, who owe allegiance to no one but themselves, and who are answerable only to God. And, as history and common sense tell us, God doesn’t often demand answers from those still here on this earth.

Until ultra-Orthodoxy adopts a fully transparent form of governance with a working system of checks and balances, laws meant to protect reputations will instead often be used to destroy lives – especially the lives of the smallest and the weakest, especially the lives of children like Shmuley.