Rabbi Mordechai Aderet: Party crasher frightens guests.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Like biblical plagues raining down on them from an angry God, the white-bearded, black-hatted rabbi laid a string of curses upon the unsuspecting suburban partygoers. Banging a siddur on a table and screaming “Shema Yisrael,” the rabbi, accompanied by a four-man entourage — all of whom had burst into a Great Neck home — lit into those gathered for an evening of celebration, mixed dancing and traditional Iranian fare in honor of a little girl’s first birthday.

After “shrieking Hebrew oaths,” the “uninvited” rabbi launched into a “lengthy diatribe” during which he told those who chose to remain at the party that they would be cursed with “illness, bankruptcy and tragedy for eternity,” according to a petition signed by some of those in attendance.

“They just came right in like a storm, inside the middle of the party,” said a woman who attended the December party but, like many others contacted by The Jewish Week, asked to remain anonymous because she fears for her safety. “They started to curse everybody, saying — ‘You’re going to have tragedies, everyone who stays here.’”

Guests and their children were allegedly so frightened by the rabbi’s intrusion that many left, while others stood shaking and crying, according to those in attendance.

After the rabbi left, rumors began circulating around the community about the presence of naked women at the party. Those in attendance suspect the rabbi and his men of spreading the reports.

The actions of Rabbi Mordechai Aderet — and the sheer incongruity of medieval-like curses being hurled at well-off Persian Jews in Great Neck, of all places — have sent shockwaves through the local Jewish community.

Other rabbis in the community seem stunned by Rabbi Aderet’s alleged behavior. Those at the party drafted an emotional memo to a Great Neck bet din detailing their “deep distress, sadness and anger” over the rabbi’s actions. It urged the rabbis making up the religious court to “use your influence to prevail upon your colleague to cease and desist from his unauthorized, illegal and unethical harassment of members of our community.”

And the bet din, run by Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Haim, in turn circulated a letter among Great Neck rabbis that referenced the incident, but without mentioning Rabbi Aderet’s name, according to those who saw it. Only one rabbi is believed to have signed the letter.

“No one else wanted to even get near it,” said the one signatory, Rabbi Yamin Levy, who is vice president of yeshiva affairs at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School and serves as a part-time rabbi at a Great Neck congregation, Beth Hadassah. “Rabbis don’t want to go on record as appearing like they’re against a colleague.”

Reached by phone, Rabbi Ben-Haim said he would not comment on Rabbi Aderet, then hung up. Rabbi Aderet refused to speak with The Jewish Week himself but asked that the paper call one of his main supporters who would speak on the rabbi’s behalf.

In an indication of how controversial Rabbi Aderet has become in Great Neck, the congregant tapped to speak for him would not agree to use his name, saying that his business might suffer from the association.

“They [the partygoers] exaggerated the event in order to take revenge against Rabbi Aderet and the Orthodox Jewish community because they don’t want Great Neck to become Orthodox,” Rabbi Aderet’s supporter said. “They don’t want another Five Towns.”

The supporter, who accompanied Rabbi Aderet to the party, claims he was invited, though he could not produce an invitation. Partygoers say Rabbi Aderet was not invited and that invitations were sent out to all of those on the guest list.

Rabbi Aderet’s supporter suggested The Jewish Week call Rabbi Avraham Cohen of Torah Va Danesh, an Orthodox synagogue in Great Neck, for comment. When reached, the rabbi said through a secretary that he “doesn’t want to get involved.”   Continue reading…

The city’s first kosher wine bar is coming to the corner of Kingston Avenue and Lincoln Place, in Crown Heights.

by Sharon Udasin

A Crown Heights thoroughfare known for baby carriages, yeshiva bochers and the occasional Mitzvah Tank is about to be home to a trendy pizzeria and wine bar, the first exclusively kosher wine bar in the city.

Basil Pizza & Wine Bar, located at the corner of Kingston Avenue and Lincoln Place, is scheduled to open at the end of next week and will serve a variety of kosher wines, gourmet pizzas and Mediterranean-inspired dishes under the supervision of OK Kosher Certification.

The bistro will join an increasing number of Jewish businesses that are expanding north of Eastern Parkway, a section of Crown Heights also home to a large West Indian community as well as a growing population of trendy young professionals — those “spilling over from Park Slope,” according to the restaurant’s owner.

“I felt that there’s a real void for real quality food along with some ambiance that happens to be kosher,” said the owner, Danny Branover, who comes from a background in Israeli high-tech. “Typically the owners use line cooks. There’s no real creativity there.”

So Branover figured he’d take it upon himself to reverse this trend and meanwhile jump on the wine-bar bandwagon that has been overtaking the city.

“It’s much easier to teach a restaurateur about kosher code, versus taking an ultra-Orthodox, religious Jew and teaching him how to cook,” he added, laughing.  Continue reading…

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Swirl. Sniff. Swish. Spit.

Repeat 170 times. In four hours and change.

Welcome to the life of a time-stressed kosher wine taster.

In the basement of City Winery on a recent Thursday afternoon, five young wine connoisseurs made their way through 170 bottles of kosher wine — first aerating the wine with a gentle swirl, then swishing it around the palate, and ultimately spitting the liquid into silver wine-chilling buckets scattered across a table where they were seated.

The five men had gathered for an expedited wine tasting, where in 4 ½ hours, they’d plow through the daunting number of bottles and give each a ranking between 1 and 100. The point of the blind tasting — the labels were wrapped in white paper to conceal their provenance — was to determine which wines were the top 18 for The Jewish Week’s Kosher Wine Guide. Companies that planned to showcase their wines at an upcoming March 14 Grand Wine Tasting had sent over complimentary bottles to the group of judges.

“We’re going to try to do it fairly, quickly and give each wine a number — we’ll arrive at the top 18,” said Michael Dorf, owner of City Winery, who chaired the tasting group. “All we’re doing is getting a taste and spitting it out.”

Dorf instructed the others to refrain from jotting down notes and to try their best to stay within 50 and 100 points in their ratings, unless the wine was completely undrinkable. And then they embarked on a turbo-speed process essentially “emulating what the biggies do,” according to Dorf, a reference to high-toned wine tasters.

First up were the white wines, then the rosés, followed by the reds and finally, the sweet dessert wines. The reds claimed the majority of the table space, as reds are much more popular among consumers and get a much higher profit margin for producers, the tasters told The Jewish Week.

“Well, l’chaim, everyone,” Dorf said, officially kicking off the tasting, and sampling his first white wine.   Continue reading…

This weekend, while visiting a friend in D.C., I ventured for the first time to the Newseum, a 250,000-square-foot colossus that offers a window into hundreds of years of news headlines, news history and of course, the people behind the news. For a journalist, visiting this place is like unleashing a wide-eyed child in Disney World. Among other exhibits was a floor-to-ceiling wall of front pages following 9/11, a transplanted memorial version of Tim Russert’s office and the News Corporation News History Gallery — which features front pages from major events that occurred anywhere from 1455 to the present day.

Front page of The Westerly Sun, 1948. I apologize for the poor quality of the image. The room was dark, the newspaper was behind glass, using flash was prohibited and I only had my point and shoot camera.

As far as Jewish things go — because this is a Jewish blog of course — I was particularly impressed by one choice made my museum curators. In that News Corp New History exhibit, the front page chosen for 1948 was thankfully a commemoration of Israel’s statehood. However, the page chosen wasn’t from The New York Times, or The Washington Post or any other major world news outlet. Rather, it was from The Westerly Sun, a regional daily based in the southern tip of Rhode Island.

Being the Zionist I am, I was of course instantly filled with pride the moment I saw that headline, “New Jewish State Proclaimed in Tel Aviv.” But after giving the yellowing newsprint a second glance, what was even more meaningful to me was the choice of that specific Rhode Island paper. Selecting a small paper from a town in the smallest state of America shows just how omnipresent Israel’s independence was in 1948. At that moment, people everywhere, from major cities to rural towns, were recognizing the sovereignty of that tiny democratic Middle Eastern Nation — that Jewish nation. Jews throughout the Diaspora, from those in Tel Aviv to those in Rhode Island, had reason to celebrate.

And hey, Rhode Island is home to Touro Synagogue, the oldest American synagogue still standing (erected 1763), so the choice might be that much more significant.

Allison Josephs: Trying to “re-brand” Orthodox Judaism.

by Sharon Udasin

Allison Josephs sits in her bathroom in a green facial mask, relaxing in dark blue towel-turban and peeling cucumber slices off her eyes.

“Dear Jew in the City,” she recites. “My friend just told me that Orthodox people consider women dirty when it’s their time of the month. And that’s just so horrible — I mean, it’s a natural bodily occurrence. How could they make it into something so negative?”

Josephs, 30, is single-handedly trying to “re-brand” Orthodox Judaism, and in doing so has just finished broadcasting her first season of “Jew in the City,” a Web series (JewintheCity.com) that attempts to dispel negative myths often associated with religious Jewry and give it a hipper, more modern cast.

Many of these myths Josephs herself firmly believed as an adolescent, before she made the gradual switch from Conservative Judaism to Modern Orthodoxy during high school and her college years at Columbia. Among other questions, her series of two-minute Webisodes explores whether or not Jewish women are considered dirty during menstruation, whether woman in Orthodox Judaism are treated as inferior and the idea that Orthodox couples are never sexually intimate. The infamous “hole in the sheet” is one of her favorite topics.

“I’ve gotten asked that question by so many people,” said Josephs, who wears a trendily highlighted sheitel, chandelier earrings and a perfect manicure in most of the videos. “I wanted to handle the question in a modest way, but not dealing with the question doesn’t help either.”

In that particular episode, Josephs makes clear that Orthodox Jews are certainly not sexually “oppressed” and explains that “knowing someone in the biblical sense” is actually one of the holiest mitzvahs in Judaism. She surmises that the “hole” myth probably arose from a pair of tzitzit hanging on a clothesline, because tzitzit resemble a sheet with, well, a hole in the middle for the head.   Continue reading…

(I know I live in New York, but today I need to comment on an issue surfacing across the Atlantic Ocean — in the United Kingdom.)

If a new bill passes next month in the United Kingdom, British same-sex couples will soon be crushing glasses and signing ketubahs with the official blessings of their rabbis and families.

A group of Liberal Jewish rabbis and Anglican ministers have come together in favor of an amendment to the country’s 2010 Equality Bill, which would allow same-sex civil partnerships to take place in British synagogues and other religious institutions, writes Jessica Elgot, a reporter at The Jewish Chronicle in London. The Equality Bill, she continues, will be up for debate in the House of Lords next month, and currently has the support of Liberal Jews, Unitarians and Quakers. You can read through Parliament’s discussion of the bill here, by scrolling down to the paragraph just above sub-head “25 Jan 2010 : Column 1199.”

“[The amendment's] intention is to remove the prohibition against civil partnerships taking place in religious buildings,” the document reads. “I shall repeat that: it is to remove the prohibition against civil partnerships taking place in religious organisations. It is a straightforward amendment. It does not seek to force religious institutions to host civil partnerships and I would not intend it to. It simply has to be a matter for them to decide whether or not they wish to do so.”

As in most of the United States, gay marriages are still not recognized by law in the United Kingdom. But in Britain, where church is not separate from state, the government can take this prohibition one step further. Civil unions may be permitted throughout the country, but at the moment, these same-sex partnerships cannot occur within the boundaries of a house of worship.  That’s right, it’s currently illegal for a rabbi to unite two men or two women under a chuppah in England.

And now, at the behest of some forward-thinking Quakers, the House of Lords is aiming to repeal this ban.

While same-sex marriages are only legal in a few select states here in America, all religious institutions have the power to conduct same-sex civil unions if they so choose, and many have been doing so for quite some time. Synagogues all over the US perform same-sex marriages, like Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco, where marriages went from being not recognized by law, to being recognized, to now unfortunately not being recognized by law once again. In New York, Congregation Beth Simchat Torah performs many marriage ceremonies, even though gay marriage has never ever yet been legal in New York State. Even in Israel, where laws are strongly influenced by an Orthodox rabbinate, is doing a very good job welcoming theLGBT community into its fold.

Although the laws should certainly be changed to make same-sex marriage legal both here and in the United Kingdom, a religious institution should always be a place of refuge for every congregant it serves — no matterwhat the law says.  I hope that when the House of Lords takes this bill to the floor next month, the British government does decide to allow for marriages to occur within the synagogues, whether or not they are officially recognized by the country.

And in yet another progressive move for Britain, Schools Secretary Ed Balls recently decided that all secondary schools, including parochial schools, will be forced to teach “full, broad, balanced curriculum on sex and relationship education” — which includes topics like sexually-transmitted diseases, contraception, pregnancy, abortion and homosexuality, The Telegraph reported today. This means that religious schools — even Orthodox Jewish schools — will need to address topics like civil unions and same-sex parenting without any homophobia whatsoever.

I wonder how Britain’s haredi communities are going to respond to this…

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Sharon Udasin is a staff writer at The Jewish Week. Follow her on Twitter or e-mail her at sharon@sharonudasin.com.

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I also posted a lengthy comment in response to Jessica Elgot’s article here, on The Jewish Chronicle’s Web site.

“You see a lot of compulsive behaviors with the intention of undoing something that has been done wrong,” said Dr. Jeff Szymanski, the executive director of the International OCD Foundation. “I have to repeat it until it’s done perfectly.”

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

‘Mr. A” is a 43-year-old chasidic man who is so afraid to make mistakes in his daily prayers that he cannot bring himself to get out of bed until noon or 1 p.m. The reason? Obsessions he’s faced since his days in yeshiva, when he was consistently the last person to finish praying each morning.

“He thought he was just more religious than everyone in the class,” said Dr. Steven Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at SUNY Downstate, who was addressing a group of fellow therapists. “Patients who have religious obsessions often don’t recognize or admit that they have symptoms.”

Friedman was speaking to a group of 30 therapists — at least 20 of them Orthodox Jews — who had gathered for a three-day conference this week at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn sponsored by the Behavior Therapy Training Institute of the International Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Foundation. While the Institute holds about three of these meetings annually, this was the first conference tailored specifically to the needs of Orthodox Jewish therapists, who had been unable to attend regular Saturday programming.

Sessions last weekend were largely the same as any other Behavior Therapy Training curriculum, aside from Friedman’s Sunday afternoon lecture about “Religious Scrupulosity,” which targeted obsessions and compulsions rooted in Jewish ritual. In addition to discussing these specific behaviors and treatment techniques, the doctors focused on the unwillingness of many Orthodox Jews to even seek treatment, in a community where mental health issues are somewhat taboo.

“You can speak Yiddish like I do and you’ll still find that that won’t get you access to certain populations,” Friedman said. “Since the community is so small, most of them you know and it’s one degree of separation. If you give me the name of an Orthodox person in the United States, I can find someone who knows something all about them.”

“This is problematic when you do therapy,” he added.

OCD is a genetic disorder that equally affects men, women and children of all backgrounds, typically appearing between the ages of 10 to 12 or in late adolescence or early adulthood, according to the Foundation. On average, OCD inflicts 1 in 100 adults and 1 in 200 kids and teens, amounting to about 2 to 3 million adult cases and 500,000 childhood cases in the United States alone. Because OCD runs in families, there is a 15 percent chance that a patient’s child will also exhibit OCD, though not necessarily in exactly the same form, Friedman explained. For example, he said, a parent might be an incessant hand-washer, while the child might become a compulsive checker.   Continue reading…

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This article was also reposted on the blog FailedMessiah, and has many interesting comments below it.

Also reprinted on VosIzNeias, with additional comments.

Rochi Zarchi, a Chabad emissary in Puerto Rico.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Given the range of duties undertaken by a female Chabad emissary — from teaching Hebrew school to hosting communal holiday meals — leaving her community behind for even a few days is a difficult task. But for two emissaries who joined 4,000 of their sisters here for a convention last week, leaving their homes in the sunny Caribbean was particularly challenging.

When the Jan. 12 earthquake shattered Haiti, Rochi Zarchi of Puerto Rico and Michal Pelman of the Dominican Republic —along with their husbands Shimon and Mendel — immediately sprung into action to assist with the disaster relief effort. Day after day, Zarchi and Pelman prepared kosher food bundles and supply packages to ship to victims and rescue workers in Haiti.

“We’re not on site, especially because every island is its own island. [Haiti] is not a bridge away or a boat ride away,” Zarchi said. “But we did coordinate many different forms of support and food for everyone, as well as kosher provisions for the Jewish relief and Israel division. Seeing what’s been going on there, it’s unbelievable what a disaster can do.”

The Chabad Haiti Relief Fund, under the joint auspices of Chabad Lubavitch of the Dominican Republic and of Puerto Rico, received grants from both the American Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Coalition Disaster Relief that paid for convoys of food, water and medical supplies shipped to Haiti. Zarchi said that she and her husband prepared their contributions and sent them over to the Pelmans in the Dominican Republic, who in turn took care of getting everything to the final destination in Haiti.

Despite the islands’ relatively close proximity, San Juan, Puerto Rico, is still more than 400 miles away from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with an ocean and the Dominican Republic in between.

“It’s frustrating because, of course, you’re limited,” Zarchi said. “But we’re putting in a substantial amount of effort, and my kids feel so proud because their parents are involved. They see all the different Haiti relief funds, and they feel like they’re spearheading an effort.”  Continue reading…

by Sharon Udasin

A mumps outbreak in the Orthodox community, which began last summer, has spread beyond Williamsburg and Borough Park to include scattered incidents in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Far Rockaway, Queens, city Health Department officials say.

Far Rockaway pediatrician Dr. Hylton Lightman told The Jewish Week that he has seen about 20 mumps patients, most of them men between 17 and 23, as well as four or five girls and two mothers. Among his patients is a staff member at the Bnot Shulamith Elementary School in Woodmere, L.I.

Of particular concern to some doctors is that the age range of patients — who remain 80 percent male — now includes an older population of young adults, many of whom misplaced their immunization records after graduating high school, according to Dr. Jane Zucker, assistant commissioner for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. In the affected communities, 70 percent of children under 18 have received their two immunization dosages, but for young adults statistics remain unclear.

“People who are not vaccinated have a higher rate of complications,” Zucker said. “We want people who don’t know their status to go and get vaccinated.” This week, the Department of Health will host free vaccination clinics in Borough Park and Williamsburg with Jewish organizations.

The total of New York City cases has risen to 909 as of Feb. 8. Outside the city, the state now accounts for a total of 928 cases, with 317 occurring in Rockland County and 611 in Orange County as of Feb. 10, according to State Department of Health Spokesman Tom Allocco.

The most common symptoms of the mumps are fever, muscle aches and parotitis, the signature inflammation of the salivary glands below the ear. Rarer side effects can include meningoencephalitis (inflammation of the brain) and pancreatitis, which can cause abdominal pain and vomiting.

Original version here.