• Matzah and Nudity: a winning combination?In one last round of Passover-related news, a 27-year-old yeshiva student in Israel went into a supermarket and got totally undressed, save for a sock on his cock. He was protesting the recent Israeli ruling that allows chametz to be sold during Pesach in places that are not public—including supermarkets and pizza places. The nude student was arrested by Israeli police for suspicion of performing an indecent act in public.
  

• In Jerusalem, Israel's national water company, Mekorot, has shut off the pipeline that brings water from the Kinneret because of crumbs of bread that fisherman on the lake drop into the water. During Passover the water in Jerusalem comes from local reservoirs and wells.

• Tonight in Tel Aviv a number of Conservative, Reform, and independent congregations will be gathering at the beachfront for a cross-denominational prayer to commemorate the splitting of the Red Sea, and to ask for the speedy release of the three captive Israeli soldiers Gilad Shalit, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser.

In non-Pesadik news:

• A New Year’s card that Anne Frank sent in 1937 has been found in an antique shop in Amsterdam.
  

• Jdate was nominated for a social networking Webby.

• A Florida human rights board ruled in favor of a woman who wanted to put a mezuzah on the doorframe of her condo. Laurie Richter was told by her condo association that if she didn’t take her mezuzah down she could face a $1000 fine, but the Broward County human rights board found that the Port Condominium could not make that demand. The condo association could face up to $11,000 in fines.

• Proving once again that dorky Jews can be sexy, a Brandeis University group called Students for Environmental Action (SEA) has put out a calendar called BARE: Brandeisians Advocating Real Environmentalism, which features 25 student models posing nude with strategically placed fruits, bicycles and computer chords. The calendar costs $10 and helps raise money for the group’s annual organic and locally grown food banquet. Maybe they should hang out with that yeshiva student in Israel…

• The Conservative movement’s halachic policy committee will be voting in May on a rabbinic legal opinion having to do with providing workers with a fair wage. Debate has already begun to get heated, with some rabbis saying that paying fair wages puts Conservative Jews at an economic disadvantage, and others saying that it’s an issue of social justice and cannot be compromised.

• This week saw two stories of rabbis involved in sexual abuse scandals. Rabbi Yehuda Kolko, who was accused of sexually molesting a number of young boys at Yeshiva Torah Temimah in Flatbush, pled guilty to three lesser charges of child endangerment and got three years of probation. It’s not clear why Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes was willing to drop so many charges in the high profile case.

• The chief rabbi of Kiryat Bialik in Israel is finally under house arrest after he was arrested more than a month ago on charges of sexual abuse and committing indecent acts with female Religious Council workers. The charges go back at least 18 years. 

Everybody's favorite pope since the last one has alighted on our shores to give spiritual counsel and serve a little Jesus-body buffet to New World Catholics in the flesh, so to speak. Jehovah's own consigliere isn't ducking hard questions from the media, either, expressing deep shame at the church's sex-abuse scandal and reiterating a zero-tolerance policy on pedophilia (the RCC courageously says "no goddamn way" to raping children). But that's not all. The Pope feels raped children's pain. "It is a great suffering for the Church in the United States, for the Church in general, and for me personally," he said. Benedict, as far from an intellectual slouch as one can be, is flat-out stumped about "how it was possible that priests betrayed in this way their mission to give healing, to give love of God to these children." Christopher Hitchens responds:

[T]he Pontiff has utterly mis-stated the nature of the clerical pedophilia scandal. The scandal is not the presence of pedophiles in the church, but the institutionalization of child-rape by the knowing protection and even promotion (by non-pedophiles) of those who are guilty of it. The most grievous offender in this respect is Cardinal Bernard Law, currently an honored figure at the Vatican. This expression of contempt for the victims makes the Pope himself a direct accomplice in the very atrocity that he affects to denounce.

That's the right thought, but wrong on specifics. Bernard Law, the former ArchlizardPope Benedict: Totally mortified and really just red-faced about all the child-fucking of Boston, merely aided and abetted serial rape in greater Boston and environs. The church's policy of covering up rapes, stonewalling investigators, and moving rapists to new parishes with fresh supplies of seraphic young flesh (because who'd want to get a hold of a barely pubescent boy who's already been spoiled?) was catholic in scope, and came straight from John Paul II's Curia. Specifically, from the powerful leader of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the successor institution to the Inquisition, a certain Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, whose name mysteriously vanished from the broadsheets at just about the time Benedict was elected. (I'm pretty certain of that timing, but you can check Lexis Nexis if you don't believe me.)

Whoever he was and wherever he's gone off to, that guy was "the most grievous offender" in the church. Bernard Law was just the Oasis of enabling child-rape, to Ratzinger's Beatles. Still, Pope Benedict was nowhere near the scene at the time, so his bafflement over the whole affair is understandable.

David Prashker: drops the F-bomb and gets firedTwo Jewish educators are out of jobs—and one is on the run—due to allegations of molestation and...dirty poems.

The first infraction seems fairly minor: David Prashker, director of the Toronto Leo Baeck Jewish Day School, was all but forced to quit his job in the wake of a scandal involving poetry he wrote decades ago and published on his personal website. Though the poetry has since been removed, the National Post summarizes it:

One poem explored a young man's heady sexual encounter and used the word "f---" several times, another included the verse "the first act of killing is the hardest" and "the second time is remarkably straightforward." It is not clear when the poetry was written--Mr. Prashker's Web site references material that dates back to 1973 -- and it has since been removed from his personal page.

Was Prashker foolish to publish such poetry on his personal website? Arguably, yes. If the poems in question were written years before he entered the school system though, it seems a tad unfair to penalize him. Writing some angsty poetry and dropping the f-bomb in 1973 isn't exactly the kind of thing that should get a man fired in 2008. If anything, it's the poor judgment demonstrated by putting his crude verse on the internet makes him seem like an idiot—not to mention a bad leader for a Jewish (or any) school.

On the opposite end of the spectrum we find Malka Leifer, former principal of an ultra-Orthodox school in inner Melbourne. The wife of a rabbi and mother of eight is being accused of all kinds of craziness, including the allegations that she "shared a bed" with her students, and that she molested girls at school and at camps. Parents also claim that one victim has attempted suicide.

Within 24 hours of being fired from the school, Leifer left Australia for Israel, and some parents seem to think the school paid for her flight.

There are also claims that Mrs. Leifer left Australia with up to $100,000 borrowed from a family within the community, two days before she flew to Israel. She is also alleged to have taken about $20,000 from a pool of money earned from some students' part-time jobs. The money, managed by Mrs. Leifer, was pooled in a community fund and then lent to people in need.

This is hardly the first case of teachers and principals being accused of molestation in Jewish schools. The Awareness Center has a frighteningly long list of similar cases from all around the world.

What’s striking about the gulf between these two stories is that in the case of Prashker it seems clear that a parent was out to get him, and would go to any lengths—including hacking into the school’s computer system—in order to defame the director’s name. In Leifer’s case, the molestation seems to have gone on for many years before girls spoke up, likely because of the stigma associated with sexual abuse in these communities.

The challenge facing the day school community is in creating an environment that's open enough that kids in day schools will come forward if something inappropriate is happening, but principals don’t have to be responsible for bad words (and bad poetry) they wrote decades ago.