Free Republic

Shas declared war on missionaries on Tuesday when the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party proposed a bill stating that anyone attempting to convert Jews should be imprisoned. “Every time he (Rabbi Ovadia Yosef) hears of a case where someone falls into missionary hands, he feels great sadness and asks us to try and save at least one soul in Israel,” Yakov Margi, Shas Knesset member said. Shas views missionaries as not only people who come from abroad and evangelize, but any person or religions sharing their faith in an attempt to especially convert Jews. Margi proposed that those preaching conversion should be...

In the "crime and punishment" part of The International Campaign to Save the Nation and the Land - associated with an offshoot of the Chabad movement - the sin is "the crime of the disengagement" and the "expulsion" of 10,000 people from their homes. The punishment takes various guises: removal from office, resignation, illness, a commission of inquiry or a criminal conviction. The campaign called "There is Justice and a Judge," which the organization embarked on recently, asserts that everyone who was a partner to the "crime of expulsion" or did not act to prevent it has received or will...

Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, chairman of ZAKA and former operations officer for the Ultra-Orthodox community, hit the Jewish man who kissed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it was reported on Monday. The violent incident occurred last Friday in Poland during a mass visit of Orthodox Jews to the country in order to honor Hassidic Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk. When the visitors arrived at Lizhensk on Friday morning, they heard that Moshe Arye Freedman, a member of the fanatic anti-Israel group Neturei Karta, was present as well. Freedman recently made headlines when he was photographed kissing Ahmadinejad during the Holocaust denial conference in Teheran...

As a member of the Jewish ultra-Orthodox community, David wore a long black coat and a black hat covering his Jewish skullcap. He spent 10 hours a day studying the Torah, the Jewish holy book, and the Talmud, rabbinical discussions on Jewish law, ethics and customs. David says that he used to want to be a rabbi - but that was then. Now, David, 24, wears blue jeans and loose-fitting T-shirts. He no longer believes in religion, saying that he is completely secular. He is currently at university and hopes to become an engineer. David - who does not want...

Rabbi Wosner, one of the leading hassidic rabbis, publishes plea in Hamodia newspaper. This comes on the heels of the court’s ruling that a Jehovah’s Witness conference may take place at the Congress Center in Haifa The leading hassidic authority, Rabbi Shmuel Wosner, called through the “Hamodia” newspaper to pray on the Fast of Esther for success in the struggle against “the edict of destruction and the spreading of missionary activity in the holy land”. The Rabbi is responding to the court’s decision to allow the Congress Center in Haifa to host the Jehovah’s Witness group. Two weeks ago, the...

Islam is growing fast among African Americans, who are undeterred by increased scrutiny of Muslims in the United States since the September 11 attacks, according to imams and experts. Converts within the black community say they are attracted to the disciplines of prayer, the emphasis within Islam on submission to God and the religion's affinity with people who are oppressed... King, who wears his hair in dreadlocks, converted after visiting Africa for the first time and in Gambia read the Koran and realized its teaching chimed with his own beliefs, not least in fighting injustice. "For young African Americans, there...

Haredim outraged by El Al 'trick' The haredi community is up in arms that the El Al airline has apparently desecrated Shabbat, only six weeks after an agreement binding the airline not to fly on Shabbat was signed between the two parties. A new crisis between the airline and the haredim appears imminent. Everything began when an El Al flight from Toronto to Tel Aviv was forced to land in London on Friday, due to technical difficulties. Despite the late hour, the flight continued as planned. Because Shabbat was approaching, El Al authorities decided to transfer the flight to their...

In a normal country, discussion of the issue would have immediately climbed to the top of the agenda. Here it is difficult to compete with the huge headlines generated by the Zeiler Committee and with the nerve-racking drama that ended with the security forces successfully preventing a terror attack in Tel Aviv. Thus two important decisions made by the Israeli government this week were pushed aside: The extension of the Tal Law and the establishment of a civilian national service authority... The simple and cruel truth must be told. The yeshivas serve as "cities of refuge" for those who don't...

LONDON (AP) - Scientists say conclusive data shows there is no question circumcision reduces men's chances of catching HIV by up to 60 percent - a finding experts are hailing as a major breakthrough in the fight against AIDS. Now, the question is how to put that fact to work to combat AIDS across Africa. The findings first were announced in December, when initial results from two major trials - in Kenya and Uganda - showed promising links between circumcision and HIV transmission. However, those trials were deemed so definitive that the tests were halted early. The full data from...

Public funding for NGOs undergoing a quiet revolution By Moti Bassok According to an audit performed by the Accountant General, NGOs received billions of shekels illegally in 2006. The audit revealed that in a large number of elementary schools, nearly all in the ultra-Orthodox school system, students were held back a year - but only on record, which enabled the institutions to obtain extra budgeting. This practice continued for six years, and resulted in a hefty amount - NIS 50 million of ill-begotten funding. In another instance, the principal of a school was arrested one year ago, following a complaint...

It began as ...she boarded a city bus ...Moments later, an ultra-orthodox man ... started yelling and calling her names ..."morality squads" that patrol Jerusalem's orthodox streets to root out "immodest behavior" ... attacks by "bleach patrols" - groups of ultra-orthodox men who throw bleach ...a recent rabbinical ruling forbids Haredi women from pursuing post-secondary education

Twenty years before most scientists expected it, a commercial company has announceda quantum computer that promises to massively speed up searches and optimisation calculations. D-Wave of British Columbia has promised to demonstrate a quantum computer next Tuesday, that can carry out 64,000 calculations simultaneously (in parallel "universes"), thanks to a new technique which rethinks the already-uncanny world of quantum computing. But the academic world is taking a wait-and-see approach. D-Wave is the world's only "commercial" quantum computing company, backed by more than $20 million of venture capital (there are more commercial ventures in the related field of quantum cryptography). Its...

Yogi Berra's saying, "It's deja vu, all over again," best describes a gnawing sensation that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. In the 1970s, the State of Israel began to settle Jews within the heart of Arab populations in the West Bank and Gaza, even as it completely ignored relative differences in birth rates between the populations. During the past few years, we have been experiencing the consequences of that leadership blindness. It is still not clear how we will extricate ourselves from that trap - and yet, here we go again. The cost of ignorance this time may be...

Haredi extremists in Jerusalem discover reason for troubles befalling Israeli people: Immodest clothes worn by women. For months, activists go door to door collecting clothes that don't hold up to rabbis' modesty standards. Thursday confiscated clothes set ablaze, pamphlets with list of forbidden clothes distributed The war against immodesty waged by haredi extremists escalated Thursday night as clothes deemed "immodest" were set ablaze in Shabbat Square. The "clothes of impurity" were burned in a barrel in the center of the stage. Rabbis who spoke at the rally stood nearby admonished the crowd that congregated around the site. Burning clothes to...

If you miss me at the back of the bus, you won't find me nowhere. Come on over to the front of the bus, I'll be sittin' right there. That was the theme song that African-Americans sang during the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in their successful attempt to integrate that city's public transportation system. More than a half-a-century later, thousands of miles away, Israel's haredi community is trying to resegregate a bus system - not along racial but sexual lines. Recently, the press carried a story about a woman who was beaten on a Jerusalem bus for refusing to...

A woman who reported a vicious attack by an ad-hoc "modesty patrol" on a Jerusalem bus last month is now lining up support for her case and may be included in a petition to the High Court of Justice over the legality of sex-segregated buses. Miriam Shear says she was traveling to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City early on November 24 when a group of ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) men attacked her for refusing to move to the back of the Egged No. 2 bus. She is now in touch with several legal advocacy and women's organizations, and...

NEW YORK -- They sent congratulatory telegrams to Hamas, their rabbis advised Yasser Arafat (and took a fee for their trouble), and they stood outside the White House wagging signs -- "Judaism Has No Right to Rule over ANY PART of the Holy Land" -- to protest a November visit by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. But even by the standards of Neturei Karta, these most ultra of ultra-orthodox Jewish Hasids took a step into the world of the very strange, if not the meshuga, or crazy, when they showed up as honored guests at a conference of Holocaust skeptics...

Retired New York Police Department Det. Pat Kehoe still remembers a phone call she got more than 20 years ago, from a person making allegations that a rabbi was sexually abusing children in his neighborhood. "I never received a call like that in my whole career in the New York City Police Department. Never," Kehoe told Cynthia McFadden in a recent interview. "I'll never forget it because unfortunately it was my birthday, November 21 1984. I was working in the Brooklyn Sex Crimes squad and I received an anonymous call from a male who started to say that there was...

I received an email that I suspect many on FR will have also. For those who have not, here it is: Last week, while traveling to Chicago on business, I noticed a Marine sergeant traveling with a folded flag, but did not put two and two together. After we boarded our flight, I turned to the sergeant, who'd been invited to sit in First Class (across from me), and inquired if he was heading home. No, he responded. Heading out I asked? No. I'm escorting a soldier home. Going to pick him up? No. He is with me right now....

THESE days everyone is an expert on Islam. All it takes is to reach for your Koran and find a Sura to prove that Islam is exactly what Bin Laden says it is. Even Pope Benedict XVI has recently taken to quoting the word of Mohammed to address the prophet’s legacy, as has the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, who discovered this line in his belated reading of the Koran: “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush ...” And there you have...