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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Women do it for themselves in Beit Shemesh

January 9, 2012 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, Entertainment, General, Israeliness, Life, Music, News, Pop Culture, Religion, Social Justice 

YouTube Preview ImageWhen the going gets tough, the only solution is to… organize a flash mob.

Residents of Beit Shemesh, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, have been stigmatized recently by the behavior towards women of certain haredi elements within certain neighborhoods of the city.

In recent weeks, an ultra-Orthodox man spat on an 8-year-old girl for “immodest” dress, and a subsequent protest for women’s rights drew national attention, featuring speeches from national political leaders. Beit Shemesh has an unorthodox makeup (no pun intended), in that the older, main area is a largely mixed, working class community of Sephardic old timers and their offspring. However, new suburbs of the city have become magnets for a different population – one area is filled with national religious English-speaking immigrants, and another is one of the most haredi in the country, outside of Mea She’arim.

Dance organizer Miri Shalem, who works for the city’s community center, decided to organize a women’s flash mob to protest of the violent extremist actions of “the group of crazies,” and to show that there is another side to Beit Shemesh.

So, last Friday morning in the city square, more than 250 women of all sizes, ages and religious identification got down with Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” in an impressive display of organization, rhythm and fun.

“Today the women and girls demonstrated our unity in public and I hope we will continue to do this in the future in order to improve our city,” Shalem said.

Bring on more flash mobs!

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A very merry Christmas

December 27, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, Holidays, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Religion 

It’s always a little shocking how Christmas can just come and go around here with little awareness that it’s been and gone. Sure, there are the Christmas decorations on the southern end of Hebron Road, heading toward Bethlehem. And there are the occasional articles or public service announcements about where to pick up one’s KKL Christmas trees, or storefronts decorated with Christmas-like ornaments. There’s also my upstairs neighbor who decorated his window box plants with Christmas lights that twinkle from 6 pm to 10 pm most nights. I’m not sure where he got the idea — he’s a fairly born-and-bred Israeli — but the awareness is out there.

I had an interesting conversation with a local minister about Christmas in Israel, and how it characterizes itself in this land of many Jews, whether identified or not. Reverend David Neuhaus, the Latin Patriarchal Vicar at the Saint James Vicariate for Hebrew Speaking Catholics in Israel, said the following in Expeditions:

“It’s really more meaningful in Israel,” says Neuhaus. “Christmas is ultimately religious here because there’s nothing commercial or social going on, and there’s so much of that elsewhere. And then you’re celebrating it here, where everything happened.”

These days, it’s a diverse crowd celebrating Jesus’ birth. You’ve got foreign workers from all over the world, Christian Arabs, missionary types, pilgrims, and the smattering of Israelis who just like to attend Christmas Mass, which smacks of ‘chul‘ — the world out there — for them. Indu, a Sri Lankan woman I know, lit up when I asked her today about her Christmas. While it was bittersweet because she wasn’t with her four kids and family, she got to go to Bethlehem twice, on a van chartered by her and her friends.

“It was mobbed,” she told me. “So many people celebrating together.”

A different kind of Christmas, which is hopefully a good thing.

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Hanukkah at the Dead Sea

December 26, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, Food, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Religion, Travel 

The country is in full Hanukkah mode this week. Arriving late afternoon at a Dead Sea hotel for an overnight stay, we were kicking ourselves for forgetting to bring our Hanukkia with us in order to light candles.

But soon after checking in, and returning from a quick walk to the Dead, we returned to the hotel, and found tens of guests in the lobby with hotel staff lighting around 15 different hanukkiyot. We joined them – some observant, some not, some even non-Jewish tourists (and without any separation between men and women) – and then participated in singing a few Hanukkah songs. A hotel worker wheeled out a tray of fresh sufganiyot and passed them out to everyone.

Even though I appreciated the gesture, I’ve already eaten my share of fried dough and jelly for the next few years, so I passed, and headed to the hotel spa. Not a bad way to spend the sixth day of Hanukkah.

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Nostalgia Sunday – The sevivon spin

December 25, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, design, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Religion 

Hanukkah’s traditional motifs are the menorah, sufganiyot jelly doughnuts, potato latkes and the dreidel spinning top. Here in Israel, the latter two have lost in popularity in recent years. Face it, in terms of speed, color and excitement, playing dreidel pales in comparison to even the lowest freebie computer game. (And for some reason, deep-fried balls of dough dusted in sugar or coated in gooey frosting have gained on the hearty potato pancake. This probably due to effective marketing. It’s certainly not because one’s caloric content and health benefits outweighs the other’s).

Some years ago, to salvage the industry, dreidel-makers began producing more upscale and eclectic versions for collectors of contemporary Judaica. Styles encompassed everything from modern contemporary to silver and gold filigree and, of course, chocolate. The sevivon, as it’s known in Hebrew, has become less of a children’s game, more of a conversation piece.

In secular Israel, toy stores very often sell round tops at Hanukkah time, which is, of course, a mistake. A true sevivon has four sides, each emblazoned with a letter: nun, gimel, heh and peh — ness gadol hayah poh, a great miracle happened here. This, as opposed to the Diaspora, where the fourth side of the dreidel is marked with a shin for the word sham — a great miracle happened there. Clearly a Hanukkah holiday symbol throughout the generations.

But all that is just spin, if you’ll pardon the pun. The true origins of the dreidel have less to do with Hanukkah and more to do with keeping the children occupied, as is often the case with a week-long holiday. According to an essay (in Hebrew) by Israeli collector Rachel Bar Lev, “We all played sevivon in our childhood… but collectors know that the picture is far more complex: playing with tops is universal and prevalent in all continents of the globe. The top is not Jewish in origin and its connection to Hanukkah is late. In addition, tops appear in a range of shapes, sometimes with accessories to assist.” Bar Lev notes that archeologists have found tops dating back to as early as 2000 BCE.

“The tops most widely known in Israel are those with four sides, but in the world there are also tops with six and eights sides… Tops are also used in gambling. On such tops you can find letters instructing the player to pay the others, take the winnings, etc… So, for example, in Italy, the letters P,O,M,N are on the sides, meaning Pone ‘put’ (pay into the pot); Omne, ‘all’ (you won it all); ‘Medium’ (half, take half the pot); and ‘Nihil’, zero, nothing (you lost).”

“The Hanukkah sevivon, whose identifying characteristics are four sides, spindle and point, came to us from Germany. On Christmas in December, German children would play with tops to win nuts.” The tradition spread to the neighboring Jewish communities; Bar Lev says that it was the Jews of Poland who brought the dreidel game to the pre-State Land of Israel. “We find the German influence on our sevivon in the letters engraved on it – N,G,H,S – which encapsulate the instructions in German for playing the game.”

“As part of the ‘conversion’ process, the sevivon’s acronym was Hebracized to nun, gimel, heh, shin and received a new meaning: ness gadol hayah sham… intended to mask the game’s non-Jewish origins… As the years have gone by, it turns out that this creation of a link between Hannuka and the spinning top has been so successful that many tend to believe that the sevivon has always been a Jewish game.”

A note about the word “sevivon”. The root word is “svv” (“to turn”) and, according to Wikipedia and other sources, it was invented by a 5-year old Itamar Ben-Avi, the son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who was the driving spirit behind modern Hebrew. However, the first usage of the word in print was on December 24, 1897, by journalist David Isaiah Silberbusch, who credited himself with the new term.

The poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik created a different word, “kirkar” (from the root “krkr” – “to spin”) and author Mendele Mocher Sforim created the word “hazarzar” (from the root “hzr” – “to return”) but neither of these were adopted.

Dreidel, by the way, comes from the Yiddish word “dreyen” (“to turn”). This is similar to German word “drehen”, which means same thing.

Dreidels have become so identified with Hanukkah, they appear in all things Hanukkah-related, including the American-Israeli Hanukkah stamp, the first stamp ever issued jointly by Israel and the United States.

Referring to the joint Israeli-US stamps, Bar Lev writes, “We can see the dilemma of which acronym to use in the First Day Issue envelopes. We find sevivons with the letters N,G,H. But the side that is supposed to have the letter P (for stamps issued in Israel) or S (for stamps issued in the US) — is hidden. Thus is created a philatelic item familiar to children in Israel and the Diaspora as one.”

A lovely PowerPoint presentation about spinning tops — Jewish, Israeli and non — is available for download here, courtesy of the wonderful Nostal.co.il site.

Proving that kids today do still play the game: just today, 15 children from New York, accompanied by their parents on the UJA-Federation of New York’s Winter Family Mission to Israel, met with 20 Ethiopian children at the Mevasseret Zion Absorption Center near Jerusalem to eat sufganiot and make glitter glue dreidels together.

Photo: Ilan Halperin, courtesy of UJA-Federation of New York.

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