A virtual currency called “Bitcoin” has become popular in the past few months. Traded digitally, it can be used instead of money. Today, the Bitcoin is trading at about $530.00.
“Every time I go to buy something the person behind the counter doesn’t have change,” Tzvi Ben Yakov, a Bitcoin service provider in Israel told The Media Line. “The Bitcoin can be divided into eight decimal places – that’s tiny tiny pieces of a Bitcoin.”
In some ways using Bitcoin is like using a credit card, but with lower fees.
“Here in Israel, there’s only one credit card clearing company and they decide what the fees are,” Ben Yakov said. “With Bitcoin, the fees are so small that you don’t even notice them. You can transfer Bitcoins for free.”
While Bitcoins are a universal virtual currency, some countries, including Iceland, Cyprus and Spain, also have their own particular type. Now Israel is set to join that club, with the launch of “Isracoins” this week.
“The idea is to create a currency for the citizens of Israel that will help the Israeli economy,” Amnon Dafni, one of the six founders of Isracoin told The Media Line. “There is no competition in the banking system here so fees are very high and every time you want to move money it costs a lot of money.”
Dafni is active in the social protest movement that began in the summer of 2011 when hundreds of thousands of young Israelis protested in Tel Aviv against the high cost of living. Those protests have fizzled out, but the cost of living remains a major issue for many here. Relative to average salaries, the cost of buying an apartment is higher in Israel than in any of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.
Like Bitcoins, Isracoins are cryptographic, meaning they are created by a computer that anyone can download. Once the system gets underway, 72,000 coins will be released daily up to a total of 4.8 billion over several years.
To encourage its use, Dafni says they will give away 100 coins to each of 2.8 million Israelis over the next few months. The first 50,000 businesses that agree to use the virtual currency will get 500 coins. He says “dozens” of businesses have already expressed interest and hundreds of Israelis have already gone online to download the necessary software.
Some are skeptical that the Isracoin will be able to break the strong banking monopoly in Israel. In Iceland, the alternative currency was used to bring down inflation. But the Israeli currency, the shekel, is the strongest it’s been in years.
“The developers of Isracoin are trying to create something new, but it’s a bit of a publicity stunt,” Orr Hirsachague, a technology reporter for the Ha’aretz newspaper told The Media Line. “But that doesn’t mean there is no chance that it will work.”
Israelis are well-plugged into technology and Israel has a large amount of high-tech start-ups. In the past year alone, there have been more than two dozen start-ups with tools to use Bitcoin. The idea of a digital currency could be accepted here faster than in many other countries.
At the same time, the Bitcoin has shown itself to be very volatile. In late 2013, it hovered around the $1,000 mark for one Bitcoin. In September it was $150, and is now about $530.
In a recent statement, Israeli monetary authorities warned the public that the Bitcoin is unsupervised, and could be used for fraud. Because it is transferred digitally and anonymously, they also warned it could be used for money-laundering and other fraudulent activities.
The only way we can discuss prayer is on the basis of self-reflection, trying to describe what has happened to us in a rare and precious moment of prayer. (Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel; The Insecurity of Freedom: Prayer as Discipline pg. 255)
This is the great paradox of prayer. As Rabbi Heschel says a few lines later: “You cannot, of course, analyze the act of prayer while praying.” Doing so would be to violate the sacred nature of prayer as total immersion (See pg. 255 in the Essay Prayer as Discipline for more on this). On the other hand, we cannot afford not to spend time self-reflecting on our prayer experiences. Like anything else in life, events that we let go by without contemplation, leave little impact on us.
So, we have no choice but to find time after we have prayed to try our best to recollect how we were feeling when we prayed. Maybe this is the companion to Adonai Sifatai Tiftach….” said before we pray. That statement is actually a request for help that we pray with Kavannah.
After we have prayed, we should look back to see if it worked. Was there a particular time during Tefilla that I felt moved? Was there a particular time I felt distracted? How can I duplicate the times i found moved and minimize the distractions?
We should also do this institutionally. if there was a particular teffila that had the community engaged, consider the elements and see if they can be duplicated on a regular basis. And, if there are elements of tefilla that do not engage the people, it may be time to envision a different approach.
Meaningful prayer is so difficult. We can attain success in prayer more often if we take time to reflect on how we pray, what works and what does not.
The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has pitted Jewish leaders from both countries against each other, touching off a discordant exchange between prominent rabbis on opposite sides of the border.
The discord had been brewing since the onset of the protests in Ukraine in November, but it turned public earlier this month after Russia deployed its military in Crimea in response to what President Vladimir Putin claimed was a “rampage” of anti-Semitic and nationalist groups.
Putin’s claim sparked angry reactions from Ukrainian Jewish leaders, many of whom said it was a false justification for aggressive Russian actions that were more dangerous to Jews than any homegrown nationalism.
On Monday, one of Russia’s chief rabbis, Berel Lazar, hit back, urging Ukrainian Jews to stay silent on matters of geopolitics and reiterating concerns about anti-Semitism in the post-revolutionary government — concerns that he further suggested Ukrainian Jews were too afraid to voice for themselves.
“The Jewish community should not be the one sending messages to President Barack Obama about his policy or to President Putin or to any other leader. I think it’s the wrong attitude,” Lazar told JTA.
The revolution in Ukraine, a country with bitter memories of Soviet domination but also a large population of Russian speakers, erupted last fall after President Viktor Yanukovych declined to sign an association agreement with the European Union. Svoboda, an ultranationalist political party that Ukrainian Jewish leaders consider both anti-Semitic and dangerous, played a prominent role in the uprising that eventually ousted Yanukovych from office last month.
Amid the revolutionary turmoil, several anti-Semitic incidents occurred, including the stabbing of a religious Jew in Kiev; several street beatings of Jews; the attempted torching of a synagogue and, at another synagogue, the spray-painting of swastikas and “Death to the Jews.”
At a March 4 news conference in Moscow, Putin said Russia’s “biggest concern” was “the rampage of reactionary forces, nationalist and anti-Semitic forces going on in certain parts of Ukraine,” warning that Russia would make further incursions if minorities were endangered.
In response, Josef Zissels, chairman of the Association of Jewish Communities and Organizations of Ukraine, or Vaad, and 20 other leaders of the Ukrainian Jewish community sent Putin an open letter in which they disputed the existence of unusual levels of anti-Semitism in post-revolutionary Ukraine and accused Russia of threatening the security of Ukrainians.
“Your policy of inciting separatism and crude pressure placed on Ukraine threatens us and all Ukrainian people,” the letter said.
On Wednesday, Vaad placed the letter as a full-page ad in The New York Times and several other newspapers.
To Lazar, a senior Chabad rabbi who spoke to JTA this week at the biannual conference of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe in Budapest, the Vaad letter was a case of Jewish leaders involving themselves in issues that don’t directly concern the Jewish community.
It was a sharper version of previous calls for Jewish silence on the Ukraine crisis, including a March 17 statement co-signed by Lazar and 47 other Russian and Ukrainian rabbis, many of them affiliated with Chabad.
“Religious and community leaders should stay out of the political sphere,” the letter said. “Do not forget: Any thoughtless word can lead to dangerous consequences for many.”
But several Ukrainian Jewish leaders said that by using anti-Semitism to justify his actions, Putin had left them no choice but to speak out.
“We were not the ones who brought the Jews into the debate to make it a Jewish question,” said Yaakov Dov Bleich, one of Ukraine’s chief rabbis. “Putin did it by his cynical abuse of anti-Semitism as a justification for his actions.”
Meylakh Sheykhet, Ukraine director for the American Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union, told JTA, “Jewish principles of justice and truth [compelled Jewish] Ukrainians to fight lies, falsifications, radical pro-Russian propaganda orchestrated by Putin.” Had Ukrainian Jews said nothing, Sheykhet said, “It would resonate as supporting Putin, and Jews would be seen as a fifth column in Ukraine.”
Ukraine’s interim government has a Jewish vice prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman, but also three Svoboda ministers. One of them, Environment Minister Andriy Mokhnyk, in an interview last year accused Jews of destroying Ukrainian independence. Mokhnyk also defended party members’ insistence on using the word “zhyd” as the standard Ukrainian-language designation for Jews, despite complaints by Ukrainian Jewish leaders that the term is derogatory.
“This party, Svoboda, they are part of the government,” Lazar told JTA. “So you have ministers who are open anti-Semites, which are part of this interim government. This is a concern.”
Vyacheslav Likhachev, a Vaad spokesman and the organization’s researcher on anti-Semitism, said ultranationalists have little power in the interim government. The revolution, he added, has not resulted in a substantial increase in anti-Semitic attacks. Likhachev also suggested, as have other Jewish leaders in Ukraine, that some of the attacks may have been pro-Russian provocations, a suggestion brushed aside by Lazar.
“No one knows for sure,” Lazar said. “But in the last 15 years, I’ve never seen in Russia anything similar. And sadly, in Ukraine, and in certain parts of Ukraine especially, there is a history of anti-Semitism.”
Lazar is considered very close to Putin, leading the Russian president on a tour of the Western Wall in 2012 and attending receptions at the Kremlin, including an event on March 18 at which the formal process of annexing Crimea was begun. Several Ukrainian Jewish leaders dismissed Lazar’s statements as coming from a Kremlin mouthpiece.
“When Lazar speaks, it is as a person holding an official position, that of a religious leader in contemporary Russia. And as such, it is impossible for him or any other person in his position to express views that do not align with the Kremlin’s official line and propaganda,” Likhachev said.
Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky, one of the main Ukrainian figures in Lazar’s own Chabad movement, declined to sign the March 17 letter. He suggested the difference between the Ukrainian and Russian leadership owes something to the varying goals of those countries’ respective Jewish communities.
“Rabbi Lazar takes very good care of Russian Jews,” Kamenetsky said. “What he says corresponds with their goals. His excellent ties with the government are very beneficial to Russian Jewry and to Jews in remote places who, thanks to those ties, are protected.”
Ukrainian Jews, Kamenetsky said, “want something different. We want a free, united and European Ukraine.”
Boruch Gorin, a spokesman for Lazar, told JTA that Lazar’s attendance at the March 18 event was ceremonial and did not imply the rabbi had any position on Russia-Ukraine relations.
Anyone who has budget-traveled to South America or Southeast Asia knows them well: They descend upon your hostel, campground or nature clearing like a pack of wild party hyenas, shouting all night in a puzzling loogie language and leaving a trail of empty bottles and garbagestuffs in their wake. Their head and facial hairs grow wilder and tanglier than the psychedelic ayahuasca vine in spring. The male variety is actually a lot like the “>the Israeli trail rager to end all trail ragers was busted by Peruvian police.
The local police department's head of tourism, Cmdr. Juvenal Cereceda, told me over the phone that after receiving a noise complaint from park authorities, cops found around 60 tourists — all Israeli, with the exception of one American and one Argentinian — and a few natives in the throes of a “peyote party” in a secluded corner of the park. Among those, two Peruvians and seven Israeli youngsters between the ages of 20 and 23 are currently being held at the police station for selling drugs at the party. (Cereceda said they'll come before a judge on Tuesday.)
“I've never seen a party like this,” the commander said of the bust.
According to “>A video report of the raid (embedded at the bottom of this post) also shows police pulling various water-bottle bongs from the wreckage.
Shit just got weirder from there. “Several tourists were caught having sex in rooms equipped for seances,” surrounded by “lots of used condoms,” reports La Republica. And in a basement of one of the structures, police found 21 fragments from ancient Inca artifacts, believed to have been “unearthed during the construction of the property” and never turned over to the proper authorities.
Cereceda also said that bottles of spray paint found at the scene could be connected to recent vandalism at several archaeological sites in and around Cuzco.
Park director Oscar Montufar is viewing the party as an assault on Peru's cultural heritage. He told La Republica that “the Mulluqocha sector is very near to the monuments of Sacsayhuaman. Furthermore, it is close to an Inca kocha which was a center of worship.”
“>MyNakedTrip.com, pictured above.) In its report on the “late-night drunken, drug-addled sex orgy,” left-wing daily “>reportedly reached out to them after their epic party got crashed.
Yet something tells me that once these fools do crawl back to the Holy Land, they'll be greeted with hundreds of startup job offers and celebrated as all-time Legends of the Trail Rager.
Here's their walk of shame, immortalized in history by a Peruvian TV news crew:
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday denounced as “villainous” the leaking of a recording of top security officials discussing possible military action in Syria to the video-sharing site YouTube.
Turkish authorities ordered a shutdown of the site.
Erdogan's foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu called the posting, an audio file with photographs of the officials involved, a “declaration of war” – an apparent reference to an escalating power struggle between Erdogan and rivals.
The anonymous posting followed similar releases on social media in recent weeks that Erdogan has cast as a plot by his political enemies, particularly a Turkish Islamic cleric based in the United States, to unseat him ahead of March 30 elections.
But it took the campaign to a higher level, impinging on a highly sensitive top-level meeting of security officials.
“They even leaked a national security meeting,” Erdogan said at a campaign rally. “This is villainous, this is dishonesty … Who are you serving by doing audio surveillance of such an important meeting?”
Reuters could not verify the authenticity of the recording.
The account posted what it presented as a recording of intelligence chief Hakan Fidan discussing possible military operations in Syria with Davutoglu, Deputy Chief of military Staff Yasar Guler and other top officials.
Speaking to reporters in Konya, Davutoglu confirmed the meeting took place and said: “A cyber attack has been carried out against the Turkish Republic, our state and our valued nation. This is a clear declaration of war against the Turkish state and our nation.”
Turkish authorities said they had taken an “administrative measure” to impose a block on YouTube, a week after they blocked access to microblogging site Twitter.
Erdogan has been the target of a stream of anonymous internet postings suggesting his involvement in corruption. He denies the allegations and accuses a former ally, Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, of unleashing a campaign to undermine him ahead of Sunday's elections.
Gulen, who has a large network of followers in the police, denies any involvement in the postings and in police graft investigations impinging on Erdogan and his family. Erdogan denies graft allegations.
The foreign ministry said the recording was of a crisis management meeting to discuss threats stemming from clashes in Syria and that elements of the recording had been manipulated. The leakers would face heavy punishment, it said.
“It is a wretched attack, an act of espionage and a very heavy crime to record and leak to the public a top secret meeting held in a place where the most delicate security issues of the state are discussed,” it said in a statement.
The conversation appears to centre on a possible operation to secure the tomb of Suleyman Shah, grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, in an area of northern Syria largely controlled by militant Islamists.
Ankara regards the tomb as sovereign Turkish territory under a treaty signed with France in 1921, when Syria was under French rule. About two dozen Turkish special forces soldiers permanently guard it.
“NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUE”
Turkey threatened two weeks ago to retaliate for any attack on the tomb following clashes between militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an al Qaeda breakaway group, and rival rebel groups in the area, east of Aleppo near the Turkish border.
“An operation against ISIL has international legitimacy. We will define it as al Qaeda. There are no issues on the al Qaeda framework. When it comes to the Suleyman Shah tomb, it's about the protection of national soil,” a voice presented as that of foreign ministry undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu says.
When the discussion turns to the need to justify such an operation, the voice purportedly of Fidan says: “Now look, my commander, if there is to be justification, the justification is, I send four men to the other side. I get them to fire eight missiles into empty land. That's not a problem. Justification can be created.”
The foreign ministry said it was natural for state officials to discuss defending Turkish territory.
“In the meeting it was confirmed that Turkey would take necessary steps decisively to protect the security of our personnel at the Suleyman Shah tomb and Turkey's will to defend it in the face of an attack was reiterated,” the statement said.
A source in Erdogan's office said the video sharing service was blocked as a precaution after the voice recordings created a “national security issue” and said it may lift the ban if YouTube agreed to remove the content.
Google said it was looking into reports that some users in Turkey were unable to access its video-sharing site YouTube, saying there was no technical problem on its side.
The ban on Twitter had already sparked outrage in Turkey and drawn international condemnation. Shortly after the YouTube move, the hashtag #YoutubeBlockedinTurkey was trending globally, although some users defended the latest government decision given the sensitive nature of the recordings.
Reporting by Daren Butler, Ece Toksabay, Can Sezer and Evren Ballim in Istanbul; Tulay Karadeniz, Orhan Coskun, Humeyra Pamuk and Jonny Hogg in Ankara; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Ralph Boulton and Andrew Roche
When I began practicing law more than four decades ago, divorce in the Los Angeles Orthodox Jewish community was rare — and the giving of a get (Jewish divorce) by the husband was quietly arranged in the local rabbi’s study without fanfare, creating only a few social ripples in the fabric of a close-knit community. Get refusal, or get extortion was almost unknown. (One blatant exception was when a rabbi’s son was finally forced to give a get after eight-plus years of recalcitrance, but only after he was allegedly beaten and thrown into a newly dug grave in New York, whereupon he “willingly” gave his wife a get).
While I was generally aware that a Jewish marriage was not dissolved by a secular divorce until the husband gave the wife a get and freed her to remarry, the possibility of a husband withholding a get and leaving the wife an agunah (a woman chained to a dead marriage) was not something that occurred in my law practice until several years after I opened my office in 1972.
Around 1976, I began receiving an increasing number of cases where husbands refused to give a get for vengeance, or to extort money, property or even custody rights to their children, in some cases whom they may have molested. The result was taking into consideration the grave threat of forcing a woman into a state of agunah if the civil case did not proceed as the husband demanded. I quickly learned that under Jewish law, by virtue of “acquiring” a wife, the husband also had unfettered rights to keep her chained to him until he decided to free her, or until his death could be verified. This gave power to the abusive husband to prevent the wife from ever remarrying or having children with another man, even when he himself remarried and had children in his new relationship.
This imbalance in power afforded the husband creates numerous problems in affecting a civil divorce settlement or judgment, as well, because no amount of legal creativity can force the husband to free the wife from the Jewish marriage bonds. Get refusal and get extortions became so much a part of the Orthodox divorce scene that, being the only family-law practitioner in Los Angeles who also knew the intricacies of the Jewish divorce law, I was compelled to write legal articles, train lawyers and judges to watch out for the problem, and create some solutions.
The delicate balance of the civil law rights to equal property division, as well as spousal and child support and custodial determination, was constantly being jeopardized by a husband’s threat to withhold the get and leave the wife an agunah. I often felt like I was walking a religious tightrope, where any misstep could doom my client.
There are many highly legitimate reasons for a woman to want a divorce that even the most traditional families can accept: marriage to a man who is physically or emotionally abusive or who molests children, or who is discovered after marriage to be homosexual, or who is an adulterer, or who remarries without giving his wife a get, or who disappears, just to name a few. Yet, in an Orthodox marriage, a man marries his bride via a kinyan (an acquisition), and he essentially possesses her until he decides to free her by giving her a get, which, by Jewish law, he must give willingly and without coercion.
If the marriage is legitimately Orthodox, not even the rabbis can free a woman from her marriage — only the husband can. A woman who remarries without a get from her former husband is deemed an adulteress, and the result is that her children — and all progeny from her subsequent relationship — are punished, deemed mamzerim.
The word mamzer is often loosely translated in English as “bastard” or “illegitimate,” but it actually signifies a child from an incestuous relationship. Jewish law does not recognize the concept of “illegitimacy,” so children of an unmarried Jewish woman, for example, are considered legitimate and can freely marry other Jews, but a mamzer is forbidden to marry anyone except another mamzer. This Jewish law remains very much in practice among today’s Orthodox Jews. I have been presented with a number of cases where young people who are about to marry Orthodox suddenly discover they cannot because they were fathered by a man their mother married without having obtained a get from her former husband. In Israel, the rabbinate even keeps a record of known mamzerim to prevent accidental illegitimate marriages into the Jewish community.
The converse, however, is not true. A man who fathers children with another woman without giving a get to his first wife does not beget mamzerim — his children remain legitimate and able to marry other Jews. That is simply because, biblically, a man was allowed many simultaneous wives, and the subsequent rabbinic prohibition of polygamy does not prevent the legitimacy of the husband’s remarriage.
While there are other intricate Jewish divorce and marriage laws too numerous to mention here, it is worth noting that there is no reciprocity, because while a woman can refuse to accept a get from her husband, this power is illusory because neither the husband, nor his children, would suffer any consequences if he remarries without his first wife’s acceptance of the get. Additionally, men can always avail themselves of the law of heter meah rabbanim, “the release by 100 rabbis,” that allows him to remarry despite the failure to legitimately end the first marriage. Such a heter is not available to a woman. The most recent example of this is the well-publicized refusal by an Orthodox man, Israel Meir Kin, to give his first wife a get, even though he married another woman on March 20 in Las Vegas, and no amount of public condemnation from members of the Orthodox community prevented him from doing so. Thus, Kin’s first wife languishes in limbo, unable to remarry or even to date, while her husband proceeds happily with his new marriage, which was performed by an Orthodox rabbi.
These cases of get extortion or get refusal were so rare 50 years ago that they were only whispered about, like the word “cancer” during coffee klatches. But they are now a burgeoning industry. Even the great-grandson of the revered Rav Moshe Feinstein (the great rabbi whose liberal decrees helped free women to remarry when they couldn’t physically prove the deaths of their former husbands in the Holocaust) refused to give his young wife a get for many years, holding her captive to his demands for hundreds of thousands of dollars from her family until she exposed this travesty in the New York Post a few months ago.
On International Agundah Day last year, I participated in a panel discussion held in Los Angeles and sponsored by Get Jewish Divorce Justice Inc. More than one-third of the 100-plus attendees acknowledged having family members or close friends who have either been refused a get or have been extorted for their right to freedom from an abusive Orthodox marriage. It was sickening to hear of women whose husbands demanded millions of dollars from the family; rabbis who shamefully participated in “bargaining” for the amount the husband would accept for the get. A growing industry of physical coercion (the only halachic, albeit criminal, means of forcing a man to “freely” grant a get to his wife) has gained worldwide attention with the recent arrest by the FBI of Rabbi Mendel Epstein, who is accused of hiring thugs to threaten the use of electric cattle prods on the private parts of recalcitrant husbands. A recent survey in Israel revealed that at least two-thirds of married women are fearful that asking for their legitimate share of property or custody of their children could leave them in marital limbo, because their husbands can refuse to give a get. (This is despite the fact that the Israeli rabbinate can lift the driver’s and professional licenses of recalcitrant husbands, or even jail them to coerce a get, though it rarely avails itself of this power).
Numerous solutions have been advanced to counter this problem. Currently popular is the “prenuptial agreement,” which is really an arbitration agreement, granting power to the beit din (Jewish court of law) to decide whether the husband should give his wife a get, as well as to impose a daily support amount he owes her for as long as they are separated and he fails to give a get. While some approaching marriage shy away in horror at the idea of anticipating a possible divorce via such an arbitration agreement, the 2,000-year-old ketubbah — regardless of its artistic presentation — is itself already a prenuptial agreement that specifies the husband’s monetary obligations to his wife in case of divorce or his death. The “arbitration agreement” is nothing more than a monetization of the husband’s obligation to give his wife a get and the wife’s obligation to accept it.
But even this is not a panacea, because, among other shortcomings, it fails to insure a woman’s freedom should the husband not care about the penalty, either because he is too rich or too poor, or if the husband disappears, is mentally disabled, or if he dies without heirs but leaves behind a brother who refuses to free the hapless widow from the levirate marriage requirement (requiring that she should marry her brother-in-law).
Another agreement, the tripartite agreement, essentially annuls the marriage should the husband refuse a get if the couple has lived separately for at least15 months (the children of such annulled marriages remain legitimate in Jewish law). While this agreement is probably the best antidote to an agunah problem, it is largely unknown and rarely used because Orthodox rabbis have been taking years to rally around its legitimacy. (I always recommend signing both the arbitration and tripartite agreements — like chicken soup, it can’t hurt.)
In the meantime, every Orthodox marriage ceremony remains fraught with the possibility of entrapping a woman in a dead marriage from which she cannot escape without her husband’s consent. There is a secret not many rabbis will acknowledge, but which is well-known and whispered in increasingly louder chorus in the agunah-activist community: Currently, the only failsafe solution to preventing a woman from becoming an agunah is to prevent the marriage ceremony from being deemed Orthodox. In other words, to prevent the kinyan of the bride. As long as there is a “flaw” in the Orthodox ceremony, such as unkosher witnesses or a double-ring exchange, etc., the power of the husband over the wife is never acquired, and a get becomes superfluous. The children of that marriage will still be deemed legitimate under Jewish (and civil) law, and the marriage deemed valid under civil law (assuming it is done with a civil marriage license), but the bride will not become the acquisition of the groom, and thus he cannot exercise a power over her that an Orthodox ceremony grants him.
I do not advocate this draconian solution lightly. I have an Orthodox background, and I am proud of my pedigree as an alumna of both the ultra-Orthodox Satmar Yeshiva (Bais Rachel) in New York and Bais Yaakov School for girls both in New York and in Los Angeles. My own marriage ceremony was attested to by 10 ultra-Orthodox rabbis. Our son was raised Orthodox, and he attended Orthodox yeshivot until his graduation from high school, and we are continued members of an Orthodox synagogue.
It is probably because I know the community from the inside, and because I understand the angst such a drastic recommendation will engender, that I speak out now to condemn what I have increasingly witnessed as blight on the community, and the danger to its daughters.
I have been vilified, cursed, disdained and worse because I, together with a number of agunah activists, have dared to voice opposition to Orthodox ceremonies that entomb the wife and vocally excoriate rabbis for their impotence or unwillingness to permanently obtain foolproof solutions to free a woman from a dead Orthodox marriage. Conservative marriages do not encounter this problem, as Conservative rabbis are empowered to annul marriages where the husband refuses to give a get, yet Orthodox rabbis who have bravely advocated similar solutions have been condemned and marginalized by their rabbinic brethren.
Until Orthodox rabbis have the courage to come up with permanent and legitimate solutions to eradicate this problem, there is only one way parents can definitively inoculate their daughters against this epidemic and assure them they will not be locked away in limbo at the mercy of their husbands: Do not allow them to marry in an Orthodox ceremony.
Alexandra Leichter is a partner in the law firm of Leichter Leichter-Maroko LLP and is a California State Bar Certified Family Law specialist. E-mail: Contact@LLMFamilyLaw.com
Hurrying by the parking lot at the Lakeside Event Center in Las Vegas, Israel Meir Kin and his new wife, Daniela Barbosa, avoided eye contact with a group of about 30 demonstrators who had been waiting for them. Dressed for their wedding in a suit and gown, respectively, the couple could not move fast enough. The sight of them was enough to enrage a gathering from the Los Angeles and Las Vegas Modern Orthodox communities, who stood waving signs and shouting slogans denouncing the union.
“Give her a get,” one of the protesters shouted at Kin, referring to the Jewish bill of divorce, which requires a husband to willingly agree to divorce his wife — in this case, Lonna Kin — in order for a Jewish divorce to become official.
In the Orthodox community, Lonna Kin, a resident of Monsey, N.Y., will be unable to marry again or have Jewish children without a get. Israel Meir Kin has refused to grant this to his estranged wife unless she goes with him to a beit din (religious court) of his choice.
Israel Meir Kin’s March 20 wedding to Barbosa in Las Vegas, where he lives, has added fuel to the ongoing, often-heated debate within the Orthodox community over Jewish laws governing divorce, and the occasion prompted leaders from Los Angeles’ Modern Orthodox community to travel to the protest. Those present were all in agreement that he is in the wrong.
“He is adding outrage to outrage by getting married, doing the very thing that he is preventing his wife from doing, and he is violating the laws of polygamy,” said Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky, leader of the Modern Orthodox B’nai David-Judea Congregation in Pico-Robertson.
Lonna Kin said in an interview with the Journal that, as conditions for giving the get, her former husband, who could not be reached for comment, is demanding that she pay him $500,000 and give up custody of their 12-year-old son. “He’s extorting me for half a million [dollars] and for custody,” she said. She also claimed he has been making these demands “for the past 10 years.” Lonna Kim also said she had to give up custody of a child in a previous Orthodox divorce. She said she would never agree to do so again.
The protest was organized by the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot (ORA), and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department had been notified in advance. ORA describes itself as “the only nonprofit organization addressing the agunah crisis on a case-by-case basis worldwide.” “Agunah” is the Hebrew word for “chained wife,” and Lonna Kin is the agunah in this situation, ORA says, as she cannot remarry as long as Israel Meir Kin does not provide her with a get. If she were to remarry without it, she would be ostracized according to the laws of the Orthodox community.
The Kins finalized their civil divorce in 2007, so, according to civil law, both are free to remarry. In Jewish terms, however, while Lonna Kin remains tied to her former husband, Israel Meir Kin claims to have a heter meah rabbanim — the permission of 100 rabbis — a decree that allows him to wed Barbosa even though he is still technically married to Lonna Kin under Jewish law, according to ORA.
Women do not have access to the 100-rabbis alternative, which is supposed to be employed only in extreme cases. ORA claims this is not one of those cases.
Lonna Kin, who works as a realtor and grew up in Los Angeles, expressed her gratitude for the protest in a phone interview after the event.
“That support was incredibly empowering for me,” she said. “Because, first of all, women in this position, a lot of women are agunot, and I speak to other people, and I try to help other people. They tell me how they feel, they think nobody cares, and, unfortunately, there’s a lot of women going through divorces, and it’s always, ‘He said; she said,’ and it’s not about that, it’s not about right or wrong.”
Lonna Kin
Lonna Kin, 52, called get refusals “a major crisis … in the Orthodox community, that someone can refuse a get for so many years, use extortionist tactics and afterward get married while the woman is still chained.”
In her youth, she straddled both the secular and religious worlds, attending Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy and Beverly Hills High School. She said she met Israel Meir Kin, who also grew up in Los Angeles, in her late 30s, when the two both had children from previous marriages who were attending the same summer camp. They married in 2000. “He seemed like a nice person,” she said.
Yet, after they wed, she claimed, “He was extremely controlling, very mean to my children, a very difficult person altogether, all around.” The couple separated in 2005.
For a group of Los Angeles students at the protest, it was a moment of activism and learning: Yaakov Sobel, a ninth-grader at Los Angeles’ Shalhevet High School, held high a banner that read “Shame on You Israel Meir Kin.” Sobel was one of six Shalhevet students who traveled together to Las Vegas on March 20, riding in a van that departed from their campus at noon. They had come, with their parents’ permission, for the sole purpose of speaking out against the wedding.
“I’m here to support the Jewish idea in general that a woman deserves a get,” Sobel said.
Rabbi Ari Segal, Shalhevet’s head of school, was also there, chanting as the newlyweds stepped into the parking lot. Segal said his students have been studying laws surrounding Jewish marriage, and the protest was an experiential learning opportunity for them.
For his part, Kanefsky had come to teach. He told the protesters that the conflict between the Kins illustrates the importance of Jewish prenuptial agreements. These agreements, he said, are paramount to any union, in that they obligate two people entering into a marriage to agree that they would, in the event of their divorce, settle the matter in a reputable beit din.
Israel Meir Kin reportedly has agreed to give his wife a get only on the condition that she appear in one particular beit din, one that the ORA claims is known for being corrupt.
Irrespective of which beit din, Kanefsky said, a spouse should allow for a get without any strings attached.
“We’re saying he must give an unconditional divorce,” Kanefsky said.
Israel Meir Kin’s unwillingness to grant the get has drawn widespread condemnation. In 2010, three Orthodox rabbis issued a seruv, an order of contempt, against Israel Meir Kin, denouncing his refusal to provide a get to Lonna Kin. The panel of rabbis included Rabbi Avrohom Union, who is associated with the beit din of the Rabbinic Council of California.
The seruv has affected Israel Meir Kin’s standing in the Orthodox community in Las Vegas. Rabbi Yisroel Schanowitz, the rabbi at the Chabad of Summerlin/Desert Shores, where Israel Meir Kin occasionally comes to pray, does not allow him to be counted to make up a minyan and would deny him the opportunity to be recognized with any awards, according to Kanefsky, who spoke with Schanowitz on the day of the protest. Schanowitz did not participate in the protest, and the Journal could not reach him for an interview.
Students from Shalhevet High School travel to Las Vegas to protest the wedding of a man who refused to grant his previous wife a Jewish divorce.
Israel Meir Kin, a physician’s assistant, currently lives in Vegas. The Chabad he occasionally attends is located in an upper-middle-class neighborhood overlooking an artificial lake, in the same shopping center as the venue where the March 20 wedding was held. The shul was not involved in the ceremony.
Israel Meir Kin did not respond to the Journal’s request for an interview.
“We don’t know what is going to happen when we get there,” Kanefsky told a reporter at Los Angeles International Airport earlier in the day, before departing for Las Vegas. “I am the sort of person who likes to know everything before he does it, so this is unusual for me.”
Rabbi Kalman Topp of Beth Jacob Congregation commended those who turned out for their commitment to an important cause.
“It’s great we all came here — some of us, hundreds of miles — to come together to say we are not going to stand for this,” Topp told the crowd.
Police officers on the scene frequently had to remind the group, which also included members of the Las Vegas Orthodox community, to remain out of the street. Otherwise, the protest was civil throughout. It did not disrupt the wedding.
Rabbi Nachum Meth of the Las Vegas Kollel was among the locals at the protest. Meth said a man who refuses to give his wife a get is attempting to exert psychological power over his spouse.
“It is the last form of control that a husband has over his wife or ex-wife,” he said in an interview. “He is trying to control her destiny.”
Kanefsky, the only person representing B’nai David-Judea, said he had informed his congregation only a day or two prior to the event. Topp, meanwhile, was joined by a few members of Beth Jacob. The participation among Shalhevet students might have been greater if not for homework and tests, Segal said.
Not all responses to agunot situations have been like this one.
Past media reports have included rabbis resorting to kidnapping and violence as means of coercing the husbands into granting their wives a Jewish divorce.
Forgoing such illegal actions, ORA nevertheless relies on what its assistant director, Meira Zack, referred to as “pressure tactics.” Last Thursday was such an example, said Zack, whose passion on behalf of agunot was apparent from the beginning of the protest, when she led a chant to energize the crowd.
But what of the Jewish law that says that a get must be given “willingly”? Would the external pressure faced by Israel Meir Kin jeopardize the validity of a get, should he ever decide to give one to Lonna Kin?
Rabbi Jeremy Stern, executive director of ORA, says no, pointing to a concept of “constructive consent,” which he says was developed by the Jewish sage Maimonides.
Drawing on a study conducted several years ago by Barbara Zakheim, president and founder of the Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse, Stern estimates that there are currently 462 agunot living in the United States. He points out that while all of them are self-identifying agunot, there is no clear consensus on what an agunah is.
“Different people give different definitions,” Stern said. “Some say a woman is considered an agunah once there has been a ruling by the beit din making that determination. Others say it’s once she has a civil divorce and doesn’t have a get. Others say it’s when she’s been separated for a year and still doesn’t have a get, then she’s an agunah.”
Kin and his new wife, Daniela Barbosa, leave the wedding ceremony.
Adding to the difficulty in quantifying how many agunot there are, Stern said, “There’s no official registry of agunot or even of Jewish divorces. There’s no registry of gets or anything like that, or people applying for a get, because this is all outside the legal system. In civil law you can see how many applied for divorce from the courts and how many court cases are still [outstanding], but in Jewish law you can’t do that because there’s no official Jewish court system outside of Israel, no registry, no real way to define how many agunot there are.”
As a result, the ORA has developed criteria to help in the determination, taking on the cases where a beit din has issued a seruv against the husband and “where the woman has done everything she can through the rabbinical court process, and that has concluded without securing her a get,” Stern said.
ORA also considers taking on cases in which the “rabbinic court has failed or stalled for whatever reason,” Stern said. “So for example, if she says, ‘I want to go to this court,’ and he says, ‘I want to go to this court,’ and the two can’t agree on what rabbinical court to go to, and he cannot compel her, she cannot compel him, then you’re stuck, at a deadlock.
“We’ll get involved in those cases as well, to facilitate those processes to move things forward and ensure that a get is given,” Stern said.
ORA handles about 50 agunah cases at any given time. Currently, several of these are in Los Angeles, Stern said, but he would not provide further information about them.
It is hard to discern how prevalent the issue is in Los Angeles. Topp told the Journal that there have been “a few cases in the synagogue,” where sanctions punishing recalcitrant husbands “would have been helpful.” He did not elaborate further.
Kanefsky said he knows of one congregant from B’nai David-Judea who denied his wife a get, but that took place before he was the rabbi of the congregation, where he has served for approximately 20 years.
In 2013, the Los Angeles Times published an article on recalcitrant husbands who have fled from Israel, where their actions could lead to jail time, to U.S. cities where the separation of church and state keeps them safely out of the way of the criminal justice system.
Stein believes that criminalizing get refusal would solve the problem, providing incentive to adhere to a law that obligates them to give a get upon marital separation.
Rabbi Yonah Bookstein, a Modern Orthodox rabbi in the Pico-Robertson area whose responsibilities include officiating weddings, believes that allowing third parties, such as the beit din, to intervene in certain situations and issue the get — husband involvement or no — would solve the problem.
Most importantly, Bookstein says the community’s leaders need to find a solution to this crisis.
“I think that because of the prevalent abuse going on right now, that our rabbinic sages should be entrusted to find a halachic [according to Jewish law] avenue to solve this growing problem … it seems that there is an uptick in this problem as the divorce rate in the Orthodox [community] has grown,” he said.
In the meantime, several rabbis, including Kanefsky and Topp, are trying to increase awareness of the issue on the community level. In September, an Pico-Robertson event will ask already-married couples who have never signed halachic prenuptial agreements — either because they did not exist at the time of their union or because the rabbi who officiated their wedding did not ask them to — to sign halachic postnuptial agreements.
Kanefsky highlighted the importance of this gathering. “It will be an enormous, consciousness-raising event for the whole city,” he said.
I sometimes feel wistfully nostalgic for a Hollywood that no longer exists. I can’t pinpoint when it existed, or even describe it exactly — to define it would diminish it — but I can tell you that it flourished during a “golden age,” a classic era, and that it was impossibly dreamy and glamorous.
Back then, chiffon-wrapped chanteuses crooned in elegant nightclubs, men dressed for dates and were handsome and valorous, and women wore crimson lips like a sultry second skin. It was a time of radiance and radicalism, when Hollywood’s royals went “to the mattresses” for Israel.
I was reminded of this while reading screenwriter Ben Hecht’s opus oratory on the Holy Land (yes, he actually calls it the Holy Land), over 21 typed pages he titled “Speech at dinner at Slapsy Maxie’s, L.A., financed by Mickey Cohen.” It was recently rediscovered at the Newberry Library in Chicago and reprinted in the Jewish Review of Books (and yes, he’s talking about that Mickey Cohen).
Turns out, sometime in 1948, just after the establishment of the State of Israel, Hecht gave this soaring and sensational speech about the need to support Israel to a very peculiar and powerful crowd. The setting was the famed nightclub on Wilshire Boulevard, just east of Fairfax, frequented mainly by gangsters and their glamorpusses.
“I addressed a thousand bookies, ex-prize fighters, gamblers, jockeys, touts and all sorts of lawless and semi-lawless characters; and their womenfolk,” Hecht later wrote of that night. His 45-minute treatise was a fiery Zionist call to action, pleading, exhorting and disquieting.
“I am going to speak of unhappy things tonight,” he began ominously, explaining that Menachem Begin, then-commander of Israel’s militant Irgun, had personally cabled him from Tel Aviv for a favor.
“He asks that I do what I can to arouse among the Jews who are not fighting in the Holy Land, the knowledge that without them the Holy Land will be lost. And with it will be lost forever the hope of the Jews taking their place as equals in the human family.”
Hecht uses every tool in his writer’s box to appeal to his audience’s deepest emotions and sense of history. He recalls the horrors of Hitler’s Germany, the valiant heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and, finally, the Jewish fight for self-determination in Palestine. Although, as Stuart Schoffman wrote in a preface, Hecht could be “fast and loose with the facts”; and he was bitterly scornful toward the British, whom he viewed as colluding with the Arabs. “These were the same British who whistled the Grand Mufti and his colleagues back from their Hitler honeymoon — and spread a red carpet for their re-entrance into Palestine,” he wrote.
But weren’t those the days! When a fervently Zionist firebrand employed movie premiere metaphors to speak of the Middle East!
“It really makes you wonder,” a former entertainment journalist wrote to me in an e-mail. “Where are all the rabble-rousers today??”
Instead of dancing at Slapsy Maxie’s, they’re dining at the Beverly Wilshire. Instead of spouting fire, they’re sticking to formalities. The order of the day isn’t action — it’s accounting.
At the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s gala dinner on March 18, the Jewish titans of entertainment were all in tow: Haim Saban, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Ron Meyer — even the mini mogul-in-the-making, Brett Ratner. But the cause that night was not as central as the celebrity Humanitarian Award honoree, Ted Sarandos, Netflix chief content officer, the man with whom even billionaires are angling to do business.
The rhetoric was never as rousing as Hecht’s, save for Rabbi Marvin Hier’s annual appeal from the podium. I tried to imagine Israel’s Superman Saban going all Mussolini-like on the stage, urging the audience to press Congress on Iran.
I tried to imagine Katzenberg publicly pushing for peace talks, vowing to use his direct line to the president to apply added pressure.
And I wondered if Weinstein could use his trademark toughness to talk Netanyahu out of subsidizing more settlements. And if Meyer, the longest-running studio chief in Hollywood history, would turn Yossi Klein Halevi’s “Like Dreamers” into this generation’s “Exodus.”
But the evening’s real rabble-rousers didn’t hail from the Hollywood power set; they were the Medal of Valor recipients — and they weren’t even Jewish.
Mike Flanagan deserted the British Army to help Israel’s fledgling armed forces during the 1948 War of Independence.
The families of Massimo Paruccini and Mercedes Virgili helped hide a Jewish family from the Nazis in their quaint Italian town.
And the Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal was forced to forfeit his prize money for a top Arabic literary award because it was discovered he had attended a writers festival in Jerusalem. But rather than retreat or recant, he raised his voice against what he called “the prison of intolerance” toward Jews and Israel in the Arab world, warning that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism seem once again to be “reaching proportions of history’s tragic past.”
Sansal’s message was menacingly familiar.
“All these unpleasant things I have said to you not to arouse futile angers against villainy past and gone,” Hecht declared in 1948. “I have said them only to point out the danger in which the Jew stands today.”
No Jews were in danger last week in the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire.
“>MyNakedTrip.com, pictured above.) In its report on the “late-night drunken, drug-addled sex orgy,” left-wing daily 
