New kosher wine, clothing and YouTube too
It’s been busy week for the kosher market. Ynet reported on three new certifiably kosher products, including one online.
Tulip Winery goes kosher
The first is the most mundane. Tulip, a well-regarded boutique winery, will be kosher by the fall. The reason, says the winery’s CEO Roee Yitzhaki, is purely financial. “We did the math and realized that we lose 8,000 holiday gift baskets each year because our wine is not kosher,” Yitzhaki told Ynet.
The transition hasn’t been cheap ($421,000 has been invested so far) or quick (it’s taken four years).
YouTube gone kosher
Less time in development is the new Glatube, an all-kosher alternative to YouTube. Indeed, “it’s exactly like YouTube, with one exception: No promiscuity,” says Sharon Bokobza, the site’s creator and a student at an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva belong to the Breslov Hassidic movement.
Glatube (which is a play on the words “glatt kosher”) already has 1,000 clips uploaded, most of them religious music and classes by heavily bearded rabbis. Bokobza promises there will be no images women and absolutely no women singing (he’s employed a team of kashrut “supervisors” who vet each video). There is apparently a clip of a cat playing the piano. A klezmer tune I assume?
Make sure to get kosher clothes too
The final entry in our purity parade is another form of kosher supervision, this one for clothing stores in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim and Geula neighborhoods.
“The Committee for the Sanctity of the Camp” sends haredi women across town to inspect clothes and then gives those stores that are sufficiently modest their official certificate of approval.
How do all these fit together? Well, I’m planning on spending a nice evening watching Glatube, sipping a glass of kosher Tulip wine, while my wife is adorned in officially sanctioned modest clothing. Care to join me?
Looking at things (ir)rationally
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, War
Signing in at the induction site
Sending a kid off to the army is alot like coming to live here in the first place – a big leap of faith. It’s not really a rational decision – although for many, alot of thought has surely gone into it. But most of us assume that things will work out in this country, and there is some reason why we should be living here.
With the army as well, there’s the rational and irrational. Of course we need soldiers to protect our country – moreso here than just about anywhere else. Rationally there’s not much of a choice -unless you’re haredi, or Arab, or … well, let’s not get into that can of worms.
Heading to the bus with a lollipop.
In fact, one could argue that sending your child to the army is the ultimate objective in making aliya – we conceive little Israeli babies in order to increase the Jewish population of Israel and stock the fighting forces.
Obviously, like alot of people we knew who made aliya with us way back when, there was a naive hope we possessed that by the time we had kids and they turned 18, there would be no need for military conscription, and there would exist only a voluntary army like in the US. That dream seems as far off today as it did 25 years ago.
The point of no return for tomorrow's soldier.
Bidding farewell to Sarit yesterday, amid the other families hugging their child-turned-soldier for the last time (the next time we hug them, they’re not going to be the same people – even if it’s only two days later for Shabbat), I was touched by the irony of it.
We spend 18 years of our child’s life protecting them from harm, nurturing their soul, giving them a sense of security. Then one day, you simply hand them over to a body where there’s going to be bullets, tanks, explosions – things that you’ve been avoiding like the plague until now.
It’s hardly a rational thing to do for a parent, isn’t it? But unfortunately in the reality of Israel, for anyone who cares about the country, doing anything else would be irrational.
Foto Friday – Menachem Kahana lifts the haredi veil
Filed under: Art, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Religion
The haredi world is one that secular Israelis find alternately fascinating and disturbing, filled with rituals and mystery. Photographer Menahem Kahana, who works for French news agency AFP, has been documenting the ultra-Orthodox community for years.
In a new exhibit, now on at Tel Aviv’s Eretz Israel Museum, Kahana presents a body of work begun in 1995, when he happened upon a spring where some young haredi men were swimming.
Over the years, as he continued his documentation, the community opened up to him: synagogues, celebrations, and rituals both usual, such as weddings…
… and unusual, such as the pidyon ha-ben in which first-born sons are redeemed by their families from service to the High Priests of the Temple…
…and the peter hamor, which which first born donkeys are as well.
And everyday life, too.
Click on this link to learn more about Kahana’s work.
Would-be women of the IDF busted shirking and snogging
Filed under: A New Reality, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Religion, War
The way the Israeli army interfaces with religion is not so straightforward, which makes sense in a land where the separation between synagogue and state is still being sorted out. The IDF’s Rabbinate came under scrutiny this winter for attempting to boost soldiers’ morale on shaky theological grounds.
And the Rabbinate is notorious for being stingy when it comes to handing out shaving exemption papers for soldiers looking to be able to wear beards based on their interpretation of Biblical commandments, sometimes telling soldiers that they’re “not religious enough” to qualify for the exemption. But if it’s a rabbi’s goal to foster observance, he ought to embrace the individual’s interests, regardless of that individual’s flaws or hypocrisies.
In a society where we are constantly being pigeonholed due to what we’re wearing on our heads and elsewhere on our bodies, I don’t know about you, but my inclination is to say, “Please don’t put me in a box. I’m a real person, not a tidy category.”
Of course, embracing the religious grey area gets trickier when we’re talking about exemption from serving in the army altogether. Ditching the draft is relatively common among Israel’s Orthodox, for better or for worse, and the mechanisms for obtaining exemptions on religious grounds are relatively straightforward, making pleading religious a tempting option even for those who might not necessarily truly have theological qualms with the experience of being a soldier.
After years of turning a blind eye, more or less, to this phenomenon, the IDF is getting smart and trying to crack down on young women who “lie” and plead religious. Sure, it’s possible that a young woman who is too observant to serve, whatever that means, might experience a lapse in faith, but in general, if the army’s detectives catch you making out with someone, you should probably suit up.
“We need those girls, Lt. Col. Gil Ben Shaoul, deputy commander of Israel’s military recruitment center,” told The Associated Press.
The Israel Defense Forces says the surveillance program began last year and has caught 520 young women, many who admitted they did not deserve the religious exemption and signed up for military service.
….Catching the draft-dodgers is fairly straightforward: It takes one weekend, said Ben Shaoul. The young women are usually caught driving on Saturday, drinking or smoking.
Many who attempt to shirk the draft justify doing so on the grounds that women aren’t given “real” opportunities in the IDF.
“I served for two years doing nothing. All the girls do nothing,” said Shiran Cohen, 24, a university student. She said she was assigned to check on ammunition stockpiles during her service, but was frequently sidelined by men in her unit.
Although being a woman in the army can’t be easy, this excuse simply doesn’t hold water. I have fond memories of my days serving in the IDF’s Shiryon (armored corps) unit, where everything I learned about tanks was taught to me by women.
On the first day of tank training, the training officers took me and my fellow conscripts out to the open field and gave us a powerful demonstration of tank maneuvering and weaponry. The audience loved it. When the demo was over, the tanks pulled around and parked by the bleachers where we sat. The hatches opened, and out came four women from each vehicle. Surprise surprise. The bleachers shook with hooting, extra applause and jumping up and down as a special reaction for the ladies. It was a bit embarrassing, and it might serve to highlight how rough it must be to get respect as a woman soldier, but the point is that the opportunities are there for those who are motivated to go after them.
Image of Israeli modern Orthodox teenage women courtesy sethfrantzman from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
Foto Friday – Yuval Nadel
Filed under: Art, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Religion
The world of haredi observant Jews is one that most secular Israelis never get a chance to see – and if they do, they find it alien, even threatening. Photographer Yuval Nadel, an Israeli-born Jew with a secular up-bringing, became familiar with and learned to appreciate and respect the people who lead a religious lifestyle.
In a collection of photographs called “Custom, Prayer and Ceremony – The Jews of the Land of Israel”, he documents that meeting between secular and religious without trying to explain the lifestyle or Jewish customs. “As a photographer, it was important for me to show the religious experiences of Israeli Jews from my personal point of view,” he says.
The photographs presented in Nadel’s book were taken over four cycles of holidays and intermittent days between 2004 and 2008. Nadel writes that his journey began at the annual festive Lag B’Omer commemoration at Mount Meron. “I was captivated. Over the next four years, I traveled around the country to the various outposts and locations where Jews perform their mitzvot (commandments), ceremonies and prayers… I arrived to these places as a photographer, as a bystander observer and yet as someone participating in the experience. It was so, because that’s how I was received…”
While most such books “fall prey to the sin of anthropology… based, at worst, on patronizing voyeurism and at best, on intellectual curiosity,” writes Israeli journalist Kobi Arieli, an observant Jew, “Yuval Nadel’s approach arises out of a positive attitude that is nurtured and grows with each image… This book is a story about love and light, which is why it is both good and enjoyable.”
For his part, Nadel says, “If these photographs can contribute even slightly to help unite Jews through exposing a beautiful side of the world of observant Jews in Israel, I will have reaped my reward.”
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