No more lying for “religious” girls?

February 8, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Politics, Religion 

IDF insignia

We know a girl named Liat who lied to get out of doing army service. Despite living a secular lifestyle, she told the army she was religious, which gave her an automatic exemption. She then made matters even worse: instead of signing up for national service, which most non-haredi religious girls do, she instead fled the country where, last I heard, she was selling Dead Sea products in a Florida mall.

Liat’s story was the subject of many Shabbat conversations in our family, with the clear consensus being that, if not quite a traitor, she was still committing some serious ethical breeches through her dubious decisions.

Now it looks like Liat and others like her won’t have it so easy. A new bill winding its way through the Knesset (it’s now being prepared for its second and third readings by the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee) would force girls caught lying about their religiosity to enlist…or even be put on trial.

Currently, there are three conditions for girls to be exempted from military service for religious reasons: keeping kosher, not traveling on Shabbat, and the more fungible category of having a “religious lifestyle” in their home. Girls studying in religious schools get an automatic exemption without even having to apply; students in non-Orthodox schools must testify before a local rabbinical committee.

While I’m 100% in favor of cracking down on liars, there are echoes in the proposed bill that remind me of recent outrages regarding conversions, where the rabbinical authorities have retroactively annulled conversions where the convert has been “caught” no longer keeping Shabbat, for example.

To be sure, no one (well, almost no one) wants the religious police checking into your private business. But the conversion debacle is not the same as this new bill; it’s more a matter of contemporary religious extremism never before mandated in Jewish Law, while army service is a national, (nearly) universally accepted law.

Naturally, any change having to do with the religious status quo raised quite a ruckus in the Knesset. United Torah Judaism MK Moshe Gafni spoke out against the legislation, saying it “reeks of underhanded opportunism” and is unacceptable, according to The Jerusalem Post. He called for the bill to not apply to national religious and haredi girls. Is he suggesting that those sectors never lie either? Or just that girls shouldn’t serve in the army, period?

Coalition chairman Ze’ev Elkin from the Likud countered that the bill would only apply to girls who lie (or who stop being observant after receiving an exemption), and therefore wouldn’t affect haredi girls anyway (unless they are sinning in their hearts, wink, wink Jimmy Carter circa 1977).

According to the IDF’s Manpower division, hundreds more girls will join the IDF, should the bill pass. How’s that for honesty?

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Foto Friday – Never Forget

January 27, 2012 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, design, education, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, News, Politics, War 

Keeping The Memory Alive (Children in the Holocaust) is a poster contest being mounted across the world to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is today (Friday).

An international panel of distinguished judges, comprising experts in both design and in Holocaust Education, selected the 16 best posters from more than 300 submitted by design students from France, Israel and the Czech Republic. They were asked to present works on the theme of Holocaust commemoration, with an emphasis on the nature of memory and the plight of children.

The three finalists designed posters that stood out for their originality, beauty, and meaning.

The work by Veronica Novakova, a designer from the Czech Republic, portrays a well-known childhood punishment. “Traditionally, to correct a child’s errant behavior, an adult will force the ‘naughty’ child to write his misdeed over and over again, until he ‘learns his lesson.’ In this case, the misdeed is written by a child who is forced to denounce his friendship with a Jewish friend.

Designer Martina Cejpova also explores the effect the Nazi anti-Jewish policy had on children. “In her poster, she depicts a universally-recognized image from childhood: a hopscotch board, chalked onto the pavement. This particular game, however, is marred by a hateful symbol of discrimination drawn onto its cross-arms – the yellow star. Its inclusion here indicates that the insidious and pervasive hatred perpetrated by the adult world has also filtered down to the world of children, destroying their innocence.”

French designer Boris Grzeszcak deals with another theme in his work – the nature of memory. “His black-and-white poster presents a striking image of a scarred tree cut to expose the rings. A deep gash cuts to the very core of the trunk, where the word “emet” (truth) is written in tiny letters… [The artist says,] ‘The truth resides in the act of remembering and above all, never forgetting these dramatic events.’”

Peter Chmela of the Czech Republic says, “This poster wants to show the impotence of Jewish children against the Nazi soldiers. I tried to illustrate this theme with a big contrast between soldier and child.”

Yael Boverman, Israel: “The object that a survivor carries throughout a lifetime enables him or her to keep their memory alive. The closet symbolizes a collective closet, reflecting the repressed memories of the Jewish people as a whole. For every survivor, the memory is forever present under the thin veil of everyday functioning, represented by the new shirts, but at the bottom of the stack, there always lies the shirt kept from a different time – the persisting memory of a past that refuses to be abandoned.”

The project is funded by the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF), together with Yad Vashem, Israel; Mémorial de la Shoah, France; and the European Shoah Legacy Institute, Czech Republic; in cooperation with the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme.

In addition to the posters, there is also a lesson plan that provides tools to aid students and teachers in discussing the more universal aspects of memory — as well as the challenges facing those who use the visual arts to commemorate the Holocaust today.

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Nostalgia Sunday – Archives to Arad?

January 22, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: education, General, History and Culture, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Politics 

Machinations are afoot that could affect historical research in Israel. Last week, employees of the State of Israel National Archives announced a labor dispute between them and management over the privatization of the State Archive’s storage facilities.

At issue: a 2006 decision to transfer the contents of the Archive’s warehouses from Jerusalem to Arad, to storage facilities managed and operated by a private contractor under the BOT (build-operate-transfer) model. The installations are due to be begin operations in 2017.

As reported on Friday by Megafon News, (a new independent worker-owned online Hebrew-language publication): “In addition to the protest measures taken by the archivists, Tel Aviv University researcher Maya Mark [has] published an online petition against the move, that has already been signed by more than 700 people.” Actually, at this point there are over 1,400 signatures. Israelity readers are welcome to add theirs but please read to the end before signing it, as there are two sides to this story.

“The petition lodges serious complaints against the State, the Ministry of Finance and the State Archive’s management who are responsible for the privatization initiative… Mark claims that ‘such a move is in contrast to the state’s obligations to maintain responsibility for the spiritual and cultural treasures that are important to its citizens’”.

The petition also claims that transferring the materials to Arad comes in direct conflict with the Archive’s central main mission: to make the materials accessible and available in the public domain. Mark: “After the transfer to Arad is complete, any research request will require transporting materials a long way from Arad to Jerusalem and back. Researchers will have to wait a whole day and even more to get service, “says Mark. Read more

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No cultural boycott of Israel for Janis Ian

January 7, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Entertainment, General, Music, Politics, Pop Culture 

Janis Ian in Israel in the early 1980s with top DJ Yoav Kutner

Thirty years after last performing in Israel, 1970s-era singer/songwriter Janis Ian is coming back this month. And it appears that Israelis haven’t forgotten her. Although she was only booked for one show in the Tel Aviv showcase club Reading 3, it sold out quickly, prompting a second night to be added, and then a third show as a matinee.

It brings Ian a warm and fuzzy feeling – “the promoters were no more surprised than I was, it’s fantastic,” said Ian, adding that she’s looking forward to returing to Israel.

“The older I get, the more I realize that I might not get another opportunity, so I take that into consideration when I accept offers to perform.”

Janis Ian today (Photo: Peter Cunningham)

When asked if she had any problems, as a humanist American liberal, coming to perform in Israel, which has been the target of a cultural boycott among a small percentage of artists, Ian said absolutely not.

“I try really hard not to comment on other countries, when I’m not there to experience what goes on there. I have enough problems commenting about my own country,” she told me.

“Nobody’s pressured me not to come, and anyway, I don’t believe in cultural boycots, so it’s not an issue for me.”

Which is a good thing for the fan who will be flocking to Reading 3 on January 20, 21 and 22 to see Ian perform her long list of hits, including “At 17,” “Jesse” and “Society’s Child.”

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Nostalgia Sunday – A look way back

January 1, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Blogging, education, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Politics, Pop Culture 

It’s the first day of 2012. A good day to check what was happening in Israel a decade ago, courtesy of the wonderful Wayback Machine, an online historical archive of preserved web pages going back to 1996. The Wayback Machine crawls the Internet, taking “snapshots” of websites which are added to the archive. Visitors to the Wayback Machine can then type in a URL, select a date range, and view the archived versions.

On December 16th, 2001, when Wayback Machine visited The Jerusalem Post, the headlines were concerned with an IDF crackdown on the Palestinian Authority in the wake of shelling from Gaza, a falling Cost Price Index and relations with PA Chairman Yasser Arafat. JDate was the dating site of choice for Jpost readers.

The lead story on Ynet on December 17th, 2001, (only available in Hebrew at that time), was about victims of a shooting attack. Other stories included the opening of a second McDonald’s franchise in Jerusalem and the Bank of Israel’s fight against forged checks while online messaging pioneer ICQ offered up its ultimate tip guide and Ynet ruminated over who would be its choice for Person of the Year. Cupid.co.il was the premier dating site for Hebrew-speaking Israelis at that time.

That same day, December 17th, 2001, Haaretz also ran the story about the West Bank attack victims. US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said the US had no plans to invade Iraq and Arafat called for an end to violence against Israel. (It must have been true ’cause it was in the papers!) And JCupid, the English-language version of Cupid.co.il, was offering an end to lonely singledom.

Wayback didn’t crawl Globes around January 2002. It visited Globes on November 8, 2001, at which time the financial news headlines were concerned with, among other things, the acquisition of cement block maker Ytong, the public sector workers strike and the short-lived reopening of troubled Phoenicia Glass Works. There were no dating ads; the one advertiser was a bank.

Israelity didn’t get started until 2005. When it did, it looked like this:

And what of our own Israel21c? Unfortunately, due to its archive structure, the Wayback Machine isn’t able to reconstruct its “snapshot” — good thing I made a screenshot some time ago for another posting!

The Wayback Machine is operated by the Internet Archive, which collaborates with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. It’s great fun to go in and crawl around.

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