Chasidic counselor Nechemya Weberman was sentenced to 103 years in prison for sexual abuse of a teenage female patient over several years.
Gafni was appointed to the Wisdom Chair at Stephen S. Wise two years ago — despite anecdotal allegations that he had a history of sexual misconduct. The temple\’s senior rabbi this week issued a short statement denouncing Gafni.
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni\’s dismissal came last week after four women, including students of his and a staff member, filed complaints of sexual misconduct against Gafni with the police in Israel.
Seldom has the boredom, tension and camaraderie of men and women at war been portrayed more realistically and economically than in this film, which has been a surprise hit among Israeli moviegoers, soldiers and civilians.
Back when Rod Lurie was the meanest film critic in L.A., he used to gush about actress Joan Allen on his KABC radio show. The guy who once called Danny DeVito a \”testicle with legs\” lauded Allen as \”the greatest working actor in the world.\” \”I\’d manage to slip that in every other week,\” admits the Israeli-born critic-turned-director, whose debut film, \”Deterrence,\” revolved around a Jewish U.S. president in crisis. Allen had heard all about the fawning critic, so she was receptive when he offered to write a screenplay for her in 1998.
Our family\’s Esther was an 11-year-old girl, a petite and doe-eyed child with a profound sense of physical and temperamental modesty. She attended a large urban middle school, and this was her first year moving from class to class, her first year of boy-ask-girl school dances, her first year changing clothes in a locker room.
When Diane Arieff turned in her cover story on the best-selling \”Kosher Sex,\” I smiled with unquestioned approval. After all, opening doors and windows for Jews of all persuasions — observant as well as secular — seemed healthy and desirable.
In Leviticus, male sexual relations are considered an abomination,punishable by death. \”A man shall not be with another man as if with a woman. It is an abomination,\” reads one passage. But, as with all things biblical and Jewish, the Torah passages are open to interpretation. And interpret they did last week at University Synagogue at a panel discussion on Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist views on homosexuality and bisexuality.
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