Changing Of The Guard
Jewish Press readers have been a mainstay of our annual outdoor Tisha B’Av Minchah service dedicated to our beleaguered brethren for the past 40 years. We began in 1977 at the Soviet UN Mission, and as our prayers were answered and the USSR began to collapse and Jews streamed out, we shifted to the Isaiah Wall opposite the UN, our focus expanding to Israel and Jews in danger worldwide.
After four decades, Rabbi Avi Weiss and I are stepping aside from coordinating this particular event. We are looking for motivated individuals or groups to carry on at the Isaiah Wall, either on behalf of Amcha-Coalition for Jewish Concerns or their own organizations.
Interested? Contact [email protected]. Of course, we fervently pray there will be no need, but until then we must plan ahead.
Glenn Richter
(Via E-Mail)
Mendacious Report
Re “Time to End the Charades” (editorial, Aug. 4):
One would have to be comatose or living in an alternate universe not to be shocked and angered by President Trump and Secretary of State Tillerson’s seeming validation of the annual report to Congress on terrorism.
The mendacious report gratuitously promulgates the notion that alleged misdeeds by Israelis rob the Palestinians of hope for statehood and that West Bank settlement construction and alleged settler violence are somehow equivalent to, and perhaps even justify, terror attacks on Israelis.
The editorial’s list of unfinished business facing the Trump administration will not be actualized if the Obama administration’s policies and mindset are allowed to remain in effect.
Fay Dicker
Lakewood, NJ
Who’s Going To Pay?
I was surprised that Marc Gronich’s always insightful “Albany Beat” column (July 21) missed Governor Cuomo’s recent announcement of his $5.6 billion Long Island Rail Road transformation.
Most of the projects he announced have already been under way since the MTA’s original $29 billion 2015-2019 Five Year Capital Plan was approved in May 2016. There is little new besides $1.95 billion for Main Line Third Track.
What Cuomo overlooked is important to riders and taxpayers who have to pick up the tab. No comment about the status of the $5.8 billion he still owes toward fully funding the $32 billion MTA 2015-2019 Five Year Capital Plan. Add an additional $1 billion he pledged in response to recent NYC Transit subway and LIRR Penn Station problems.
The MTA $29 billion 2015-2019 Five Year Capital Plan was increased by a $3 billion amendment to $32 billion. This amendment added $1.6 billion in MTA long-term debt. If costs grow, who will pay for the shortfall?
Stand by for higher fares and taxes in coming years to cover the costs.
Larry Penner
Great Neck, NY
Marc Gronich Responds: Thank you for bringing to my attention the transportation issues facing New York City. There are similar concerns across the state. I plan on writing about these transportation issues in a future column. I appreciate the feedback.
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Invisible Women
Gender Parity?
Shoshy Ciment’s “Invisible Women: Censorship By Some Orthodox Publications” (news story, Aug. 4) resonated with me on a number of levels.
As a professor of English at Touro College and University System, the theme of one of my courses is Gender Parity and how religion plays a crucial role in the way women are unfairly treated.
Ms. Ciment’s article is barely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In a world of male dominance, it is not merely the misogyny of the Torvald Helmers of the world (“A Doll’s House”) – whose goal is to abrogate every last vestige of women’s dignity – with which women must contend; now this denigration comes in the guise of religious precepts under which not only is a woman not to be seen for her contribution to society, she is not to be seen, period.
The sad part is that this narrow-mindedness subverts the essence of what the Jewish religion purports to uphold: respect for each other.
Gender parity, indeed.
Ronald Neal Goldman
Professor of English
Touro College and University System
We Do Not Cover Our Faces
I fear that we are adopting misplaced norms from other societies. In Hebrew, the word for face – panim – comes from the word pnimiyus. This is because a person’s face reflects the internal, not the external. That is why, although Jewish women are enjoined to dress modestly, we do not cover our faces. And yet these faces are banished from the pages of too many frum publications.
The slippery slope is frightening, and makes one question how much this has to do with tznius. From the commendable prohibition of featuring immodestly dressed women we have moved on to modestly dressed women, just their faces, little girls, and even illustrations.
I fear the message my young granddaughters will get when they read an illustrated children’s book about Shabbos where only the father and sons appear at the Shabbos table is not that they have a unique place in frum society – but that they have no place in frum society.
And this is the likely the message our sons and grandsons are getting as well.
Malke Borow
(Via E-Mail)
Rabbis Speaking Out
I have spoken to editors of several haredi papers and they have all informed me that, l’hefech, their poskim are completely OK with tznauh pictures of women being included, and that they, the editors, have adopted this relatively new policy purely out of business concerns.
In fact, a number of rabbanim have spoken out about this practice.
As Shoshy Ciment noted in her report last week, Rabbi Dovid Cohen, shlita, said explicitly (while on Rabbi Dovid Lichtenstein’s “Headlines” show) that not publishing pictures of women in not based on halacha or minhag but on “sales competition” among frum publications.
Rabbi Ilan Feldman of Atlanta has said, “The refusal to publish women’s pictures is the ultimate irony. In the name of modesty, women are turned into sex objects who cannot be portrayed at all in public. It is as if their physical existence is an invitation to sin. The ultimate degradation of women.”
Rabbi Yoel Schoenfeld has written, “Today it has evolved to the point where frum publications will not even carry cartoons or drawings of women…. To me this is highly offensive and even makes a mockery of our Torah way of life. Not to mention that I do not believe it is a healthy way to bring up our children.”
Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, who commented in Ms. Ciment’s article last week, has also written on the Cross-Currents website regarding the absence of pictures of women: “…we must have the courage to say that this is harmful, dangerous, and not for us.”
I am so pleased that The Jewish Press has had that courage, and that it has maintained our true mesorah and kept our nashim tzidkaniot in the picture.
Ann D. Koffsky
(Via E-Mail)
Erasing Women
Does the Eishet Chayil really exist? I’m no longer so sure.
Because if Jewish women are indeed revered as righteous servants of Hashem and important contributors to Jewish continuity, education, and family life, why do certain frum publications insist on downplaying their contributions to Jewish life and even erasing their very faces from their pages?
Gisele Strauch
Brooklyn, NY