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How Long Until the Following Question Is Asked About AMERICA?

November 4, 2019 – ו׳ במרחשוון תש״פ by Hyehudi

Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?

For half a century, memories of the Holocaust limited anti-Semitism on the Continent. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest examples of rising violence against Jews. Renewed vitriol among right-wing fascists and new threats from radicalized Islamists have created a crisis, confronting Jews with an agonizing choice.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG

APRIL 2015 ISSUE

“All comes from the Jew; all returns to the Jew.”

— Édouard Drumont (1844–1917), founder of the Anti-Semitic League of France

The Scourge of Our Time

The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, the son of Holocaust survivors, is an accomplished, even gifted, pessimist. To his disciples, he is a Jewish Zola, accusing France’s bien-pensant intellectual class of complicity in its own suicide. To his foes, he is a reactionary whose nostalgia for a fairy-tale French past is induced by an irrational fear of Muslims. Finkielkraut’s cast of mind is generally dark, but when we met in Paris in early January, two days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, he was positively grim.

“My French identity is reinforced by the very large number of people who openly declare, often now with violence, their hostility to French values and culture,” he said. “I live in a strange place. There is so much guilt and so much worry.” We were seated at a table in his apartment, near the Luxembourg Gardens. I had come to discuss with him the precarious future of French Jewry, but, as the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo killers seemed to be reaching its conclusion, we had become fixated on the television.

Finkielkraut sees himself as an alienated man of the left. He says he loathes both radical Islamism and its most ferocious French critic, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s extreme right-wing—and once openly anti-Semitic—National Front party. But he has lately come to find radical Islamism to be a more immediate, even existential, threat to France than the National Front. “I don’t trust Le Pen. I think there is real violence in her,” he told me. “But she is so successful because there actually is a problem of Islam in France, and until now she has been the only one to dare say it.”

Suddenly, there was news: a kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes, in eastern Paris, had come under attack. “Of course,” Finkielkraut said. “The Jews.” Even before anti-Semitic riots broke out in France last summer, Finkielkraut had become preoccupied with the well-being of France’s Jews.

We knew nothing about this new attack—except that we already knew everything. “People don’t defend the Jews as we expected to be defended,” he said. “It would be easier for the left to defend the Jews if the attackers were white and rightists.”

I asked him a very old Jewish question: Do you have a bag packed?

“We should not leave,” he said, “but maybe for our children or grandchildren there will be no choice.”

Reports suggested that a number of people were dead at the market. I said goodbye, and took the Métro to Porte de Vincennes. Stations near the market were closed, so I walked through neighborhoods crowded with police. Sirens echoed through the streets. Teenagers gathered by the barricades, taking selfies. No one had much information. One young man, however, said of the victims, “It’s just the Feuj.” Feuj, an inversion of Juif—“Jew”—is often used as a slur.

I located an acquaintance, a man who volunteers with the Jewish Community Security Service, a national organization founded after a synagogue bombing in 1980, to protect Jewish institutions from anti-Semitic attack. “Supermarkets now,” he said bleakly. We made our way closer to the forward police line, and heard volleys of gunfire. The police had raided the market; the suspect, Amedy Coulibaly, we soon heard, was dead. So were four Jews he had murdered. They had been shopping for the Sabbath when he entered the market and started shooting.

I asked Finkielkraut a very old Jewish question: Do you have a bag packed?

France’s 475,000 Jews represent less than 1 percent of the country’s population. Yet last year, according to the French Interior Ministry, 51 percent of all racist attacks targeted Jews. The statistics in other countries, including Great Britain, are similarly dismal. In 2014, Jews in Europe were murdered, raped, beaten, stalked, chased, harassed, spat on, and insulted for being Jewish. Sale Juif—“dirty Jew”—rang in the streets, as did “Death to the Jews,” and “Jews to the gas.”

The epithet dirty Jew, Zola wrote in “J’Accuse …!,” was the “scourge of our time.” “J’Accuse …!” was published in 1898.

The resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe is not—or should not be—a surprise. One of the least surprising phenomena in the history of civilization, in fact, is the persistence of anti-Semitism in Europe, which has been the wellspring of Judeophobia for 1,000 years. The Church itself functioned as the centrifuge of anti-Semitism from the time it rebelled against its mother religion until the middle of the 20th century. As Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Great Britain, has observed, Europe has added to the global lexicon of bigotry such terms as Inquisition, blood libel, auto‑da‑fé, ghetto, pogrom, and Holocaust. Europe has blamed the Jews for an encyclopedia of sins. The Church blamed the Jews for killing Jesus; Voltaire blamed the Jews for inventing Christianity. In the febrile minds of anti-Semites, Jews were usurers and well-poisoners and spreaders of disease. Jews were the creators of both communism and capitalism; they were clannish but also cosmopolitan; cowardly and warmongering; self-righteous moralists and defilers of culture. Ideologues and demagogues of many permutations have understood the Jews to be a singularly malevolent force standing between the world and its perfection.

Despite this history of sorrow, Jews spent long periods living unmolested in Europe. And even amid the expulsions and persecutions and pogroms, Jewish culture prospered. Rabbis and sages produced texts and wrote liturgical poems that are still used today. Emancipation and enlightenment opened the broader culture to Jews, who came to prominence in politics, philosophy, the arts, and science—Chagall and Kafka, Einstein and Freud, Lévi-Strauss and Durkheim. An entire civilization flourished in Yiddish.

Hitler destroyed most everything. But the story Europeans tell themselves—or told themselves, until the proof became too obvious to ignore—is that Judenhass, the hatred of Jews, ended when Berlin fell 70 years ago.

Events of the past 15 years suggest otherwise.

We are witnessing today the denouement of an unusual epoch in European life, the age of the post-Holocaust Jewish dispensation.

When the survivors of the Shoah emerged from the camps, and from hiding places in cities and forests across Europe, they were met on occasion by pogroms. (In Poland, for instance, some Christians were unhappy to see their former Jewish neighbors return home, and so arranged their deaths.) But over time, Europe managed to absorb the small number of Jewish survivors who chose to remain. A Jewish community even grew in West Germany. At the same time, the countries of Western Europe embraced the cause of the young and besieged state of Israel.

The Shoah served for a while as a sort of inoculation against the return of overt Jew-hatred—but the effects of the inoculation, it is becoming clear, are wearing off. What was once impermissible is again imaginable. Memories of 6 million Jewish dead fade, and guilt becomes burdensome. (In The Eternal Anti-Semite, the writer Henryk Broder popularized the notion that “the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”) Israel is coming to be understood not as a small country in a difficult spot whose leaders, especially lately, have (in my opinion) been making shortsighted and potentially disastrous decisions, but as a source of cosmological evil—the Jew of nations.

An argument made with increasing frequency—motivated, perhaps, by some perverse impulse toward psychological displacement—calls Israel the spiritual and political heir of the Third Reich, rendering the Jews as Nazis. (Some in Europe and the Middle East take this line of thought to an even more extreme conclusion: “Those who condemn Hitler day and night have surpassed Hitler in barbarism,” the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said last year of Israel.)

From The Atlantic, here.

Top Twin Octets For October

November 4, 2019 – ו׳ במרחשוון תש״פ by Hyehudi

Here is what our general readers read:

And here is what our email subscribers liked best:

(Don’t worry; I can’t tell who reads what!)

Enjoy!

‘The Things Money Can’t Buy’ – Eretz Yisrael Is for the Discerning Investor!

October 27, 2019 – כ״ח בתשרי תש״פ by Hyehudi

It’s a Package Deal

Various Perspectives and Experiences of English speakers Living in Eretz Yisroel

I want people to know that life in many places here in Eretz Yisroel—the lifestyle, values, and education system—is very different than that in America. I love this life, but it is different, and it does have its challenges. People shouldn’t come here thinking they can continue living just like they did in America, only with the perks of living in Eretz Yisroel. Sometimes the challenges actually “are” the positives. That’s because life here is just “different.”

Many communities in Eretz Yisroel are more polarized, and the penalties for non-conformity are higher. Adults who hate labels and stereotypes and see themselves as a unique mix of the best of multiple worlds will have a hard time in those communities. Take a city like Beitar for example where I live—even if they befriend like-minded people, no chinuch system here supports that attitude. Children need clarity, harmony between home and school, and a peer group to which they feel they belong. From my observation, the children of adults who try to raise their kids in the almost non-existent middle ground (i.e. between Chareidi and Modern Orthodox), usually wind up going up or down spiritually—and unfortunately, down is much easier than up. When I was in seminary, somebody advised me that if I wanted to live here, I should pick the group that I wanted to be part of and conform to their standards. It was good advice, and I took it.

It’s harder to acquire gashmiyus but easier to acquire ruchniyus. It’s harder to make money, but easier to get the things that money can’t buy.

People here live in more crowded conditions and smaller apartments. This fosters more interaction with neighbors. As a general rule, Americans value self-sufficiency, while Israelis value chessed. Borrowing, lending, and helping neighbors is a way of life, including passing along things that you don’t need, from leftovers to clothing and from furniture to appliances. My older children spend a lot of time outside, riding bikes, building forts, and otherwise keeping themselves busy with their friends. They are certainly not plugged into screens. This lifestyle also fosters independence. Children in Eretz Yisroel are more independent than their American counterparts. Our six and seven-year-old boys are able to travel to their local schools by themselves on public buses.

It’s a simpler and more wholesome life. I feel like I’m raising my kids in a previous generation. Also, I’m raising my kids in a Chareidi bubble. While at some point our children will encounter the bigger world, the values and norms of that world will be abnormal to them.

A word about finances: Tuition, childcare, and healthcare are substantially cheaper here. Just to shock you, cheider is around 300 shekalim (about $85) per month, while if you send your girls to the “public” Beis Yaakov schools (as opposed to private schools), there is no tuition. Over three months of paid maternity leave is no joke either. If you live in a place like Beitar, you can easily live without a car. The standard of living is also lower. Then again, income is also substantially lower. (This is especially true if the husband is learning, which is more common here than it is in chutz la’Aretz).

I don’t know how to describe it, but there is just more spirituality in the air. Emuna, bitachon, and yiras shomayim come a lot easier here. I think that this is a function of Eretz Yisroel itself, plus of the nature of the Chareidi community here.

This focus on ruchniyus leads to some major differences in the boys’ chinuch system. The American system tries to produce well-rounded students who know some kodesh and some chol and are somewhat prepared to both learn and work. In contrast, the Israeli Chareidi system in many communities is designed to produce talmidei chachamim. It’s a higher-risk, higher return investment. A kid who makes it will go so much further than he would in America (at least in the Torah-studies department), but there are more kids who don’t make it, and would need extra parental input to make them happy with being well-rounded, shiur-going, working men. It is definitely true that “success” is far more narrowly defined for boys here, especially during their school years. As for adults, roughly half of the men in Beitar work. It is also true that at least in the Litvish world, learning is considered the most prestigious.

I speak as the mother of two boys with ADD/ADHD who works very hard to help them succeed within the system. One started Ritalin and is now one of the top boys in his class and loving the experience. The other is in a kita mekademet, a special education environment within a regular school, with smaller class sizes, more individual attention, built-in therapies, etc. I am very glad that this classroom exists within a regular cheider, with no extra costs involved. When I lived in L.A., no such option existed. There are definitely many ways to help children who are struggling, although some of these struggles would be alleviated by a more flexible system.

It is a package deal; but I chose this package, and I’ve never regretted it.

Finally! An American-Style Kehillah Coming to Beitar B!

In America, your shul is also your social kehillah and support system, but in Eretz Yisroel’s Chareidi Litvish community, this is not so common. First of all, the Israelis usually have a lot more family support. Secondly (perhaps consequently), Israelis tend to have a shtieble mentality, where they daven each tefilla wherever it happens to be most convenient, as opposed to seeing themselves as belonging to a particular shul.
American immigrants, usually without nearby family, sorely lack this support. Thus, so far, Beitar addresses this need with the mere presence of other chutznikim. The Beitar N’shei has a few melave malkas each year, organizes meals in case of need (after birth, etc.), and operates a very popular email list. In Beitar A, there are two English-speaking kehillos, Rabbi Friedman’s Yeshivas Birkas Mordechai and Rabbi Stern’s shul, Ohel Torah. As for Beitar B, my husband’s friend, Rabbi Zevy Stark, is building an American-style shul/kehillah.

– Shira Yael Klein, Beitar Illit

This article is part of our Eretz Chemdah series featuring Anglo-Chareidim living in, settling, and building up Eretz Yisroel. A joint project of Avira D’Eretz Yisroel, Kedushas Tzion and Naava Kodesh, coordinated by Yoel Berman – info@naavakodesh.org.

Reprinted with permission from Naava Kodesh.

The Aliyah Experience – Yoel Berman Speaks

October 25, 2019 – כ״ו בתשרי תש״פ by Hyehudi

Present and Future

Various Perspectives and Experiences of English speakers Living in Eretz Yisroel

October 10, 2019

Present and Future

I came from Los Angeles as a bochur to the Mir Yeshiva, and then got married here in Eretz Yisroel.

I continued learning in the Mir, while my wife worked for Otzar HaChochma, the world’s largest digital seforim library, in its beginning stages of amassing and scanning thousands of seforim.

We then moved to Modi’in Illit, where, with the help of our parents for the down payment, we purchased our first apartment. As is common in this country, we bought “on paper,” paying the contractor in installments as the apartment was built. Meanwhile, we rented down the block. It was an interesting experience watching the progress of the construction of our apartment.

My wife then worked at ImageStore doing document digitizing and electronic archiving. It was one of a few companies which started the trend of creating workspaces tailored for large numbers of Chareidi women interested in working together, close to home in a sheltered environment. Next door to ImageStore was another such company, CityBook, which provided jobs to many native English speakers living in Modi’in Illit by outsourcing for American companies.

While my wife worked, I continued as an avreich in a small kollel in Kiryat Sefer where we would hear shiurim from HaRav Moshe Mordechai Karp shlit”a (author of the popular Hilchos Chag BeChag series). The group comprised a real mix of Litvish, Chasidish and Sephardi avreichim both from Eretz Yisroel and abroad.

When one of my neighbors started teaching safrus, I jumped at the opportunity. I always had creative and artistic leanings, as well as an attachment to the written words of the Torah. The idea that I can actually create a physical object which would be imbued with kedusha also appealed to me. As I had dreamt about having my own real kosher Megillas Shir Hashirim for reading at the time of Kabbolas Shabbos, I figured that instead of spending the money (which I didn’t really have) to buy one, I might as well invest in learning the trade.

That decision served me well, as I have been able to turn this occupation into a livelihood as our family has grown.

My father bought the first Megillas Esther I wrote. He reads from it every year for many family members, including his mother—my grandmother. I remember hearing how excited she was to see the megillah, proud that her grandson was a real sofer. It was even more interesting to hear it from her, as a member of the generation that wanted to see their children as doctors and lawyers.

After some years in Modi’in Illit, a married cousin with several children followed suit and came to join us from Los Angeles. There weren’t enough Americans in the neighborhood to make it comfortable enough for her, so they ended up moving to a more Anglo neighborhood in Yerushalayim, where her husband also learnt safrus. Even though they ended up moving back to the U.S. after a number of years here, her husband still makes an income from the trade he learnt here—writing Sifrei Torah, tefillin and mezuzos.

I ended up moving up north with my family to a new Chareidi kehillah in the neighborhood of Giv’at Hamoreh in Afula. What allowed for our move is the fact that safrus is an occupation that is not dependent on location. It was an amazing experience to take part in the growth of a new community in Eretz Yisroel, contributing our talents and efforts to make it happen. After several years there, we moved to Yerushalayim to be closer to my aging grandfather who had meanwhile immigrated here, where, utilizing the connections I have made up north and elsewhere, I am involved in promoting the more-affordable communities of Eretz Yisroel for the Anglo-Chareidi community, mostly in the north and south of the country.

Being the oldest in my family, I was the first one to establish myself here in Eretz Yisroel. Several siblings thereafter followed me, with three sisters currently living here with their families and other siblings coming to visit occasionally including when they are here on their post-high school or seminary stint. My parents also come to visit and to share in simchas.

I think my parents see Eretz Yisroel as the future not just of the Jewish people in general, but of our family specifically. Having grandchildren that are playing in the streets of Yerushalayim and elsewhere in Eretz Yisroel makes them feel strongly connected to this amazing part of our nation’s history that is playing out now. When, at the end of the Pesach Seder, they say “l’shana haba’ah b’Yerushalayim,” it is a Yerushalayim that is much more tangible to them, not just some esoteric concept. They’ve been here, they are represented here, and they have a future here.

I am proud to be part of that future.

The Security Situation

When, as a bochur, I decided—with my parents’ approval—that I was to go to learn in Eretz Yisroel, there were several relatives who expressed concern about the security situation in Eretz Yisroel.
It was just a few days before I was scheduled to leave home that my father and a few of my siblings went to do some shopping. While at the store, a gun-wielding teenager forced everyone into the freezer while he cleaned out the cash registers. (The cashier led them instead into the refrigerator.) Although, Boruch HaShem, the traumatic ordeal lasted just a short while, without any injuries, I was thereafter not subject to any dissuasion due to security concerns…

– Yoel Berman, Yerushalayim

Reprinted with permission from Naava Kodesh.

CHOTAM: A Religious Zionist Organization OPPOSING Women in the IDF…

October 23, 2019 – כ״ד בתשרי תש״פ by Hyehudi

Can Women Serve In The IDF According To Halacha?

By Tzvi Fishman – 19 Elul 5779 – September 19, 2019

Women have been serving in the IDF since its formation. For many Jews, the site of a woman in uniform is a source of pride. Many are unaware, though, that women serving in the army is halachically problematic according to all mainstream poskim – both charedi and passionate Religious Zionist.

In light of recent reports of an increase in assaults against women in the IDF, as well as reports that some religious women are being persuaded to join the army against their better judgment, The Jewish Press decided to interview Avner Porat, policy director of Chotam, a Religious Zionist organization that aims to place Judaism at the center of public life in Israel.

The Jewish Press: Chotam insists that a young religious woman “doesn’t belong in the army, not because of a lack of capability, but because of her obligation to protect her future spiritual standing.” What do you mean?

Porat: While women can successfully perform a wide range of activities, the army is no place for a woman – especially if she’s religious. The mission of an army is to conduct warfare and kill the enemy. This requires attributes opposite to the female character, which is noted for nurturing and giving.

Military service is characterized by callousness and abrasiveness, which can cause lasting emotional damage. Furthermore, the environment in the army is largely non-religious in nature with men and women together day and night, week after week. This immodest situation can adversely affect a person’s religious devotion.

Regarding male soldiers, the situation cannot be avoided because necessity demands that our country have a powerful army. Today, however, with Israel’s increasing population, Tzahal could get by without female soldiers.

Ever since Israel’s pre-statehood battle for Jewish independence, women have fought in the army. What’s changed?

In Israel’s War of Independence, we didn’t have a choice. We were very few in number. We were vastly outnumbered by Arab forces, and everyone who could hold a rifle was needed.

Today, that isn’t the situation. We have far greater manpower, and very often soldiers complain about having nothing to do. Many countries get by without a law requiring women to enlist in the military. We could, too.

What’s the halachic basis for Chotam’s assertion that women don’t belong in the army?

The Gemara states, “It’s a man’s nature to make war, and it’s not a woman’s nature to make war” (Ketubot, 2:2; see also Chinuch, 520, 5-7).

Don’t our Sages also teach, “Everyone goes forth to battle in a milchemet mitzvah, even a groom from his room and a bride from her chuppah” (Sotah 8:7)?

Gedolei Yisrael explain that this means that women support their husbands who go to war and help in the community during wartime – not that they actually serve in the army (Radbaz, Laws of Kings 7:4). The only exception is [if lives depend on them serving] like during Israel’s War of Independence.

Furthermore, all leading poskim today – in both the charedi and Religious Zionist community, emphatically emphasize the conflict between army service and the laws of modesty – which is one of the foundations of Torah.

Many assume that leading rabbis in the Religious Zionist camp support women enlisting in the IDF.

They are mistaken. Every leading Religious Zionist Torah authority forbids young religious women from enlisting in the army. Rav Shlomo Aviner has stated that women are not permitted to serve in the army just like they are not permitted to violate Shabbat.

Some people claim that Rabbi Shlomo Goren, of blessed memory, the first chief rabbi of Tzahal, permitted the enlistment of female soldiers, but he did so only in specific individual cases. Every other chief rabbi of Israel prohibited women from enlisting in the military. Outside of rabbis in the liberal camp of Religious Zionism – who are famous for expressing opinions contrary to the accepted halacha – the rabbinic opposition to women in the military is almost unanimous.

In the past, we publicized a statement signed by dozens of Religious Zionist rabbis who agreed with the Chief Rabbinate’s opposition to religious women enlisting in the IDF, and called upon women to volunteer for Sherut Leumi National Service instead. Among the signers were:

Rav Yaakov Ariel, rabbi of Ramat Gan; Rav Aryeh Stern, chief rabbi of Jerusalem; Rav Nachum Rabinovitch, rosh yeshivat Maale Adumin; Rav Elykym Levanon, rosh yeshivat Elon Moreh; Rav Menachem Bornstein, director of the Puah Institute; Rav David Chai HaKohen, rosh yeshivat Bat Yam; Rav Yehoshua Shapira, rosh yeshivat Ramat Gan; Rav David Avichiel, rosh yeshivat Ramot; and Rav Menachem Perl, director of the Tzomet Institute.

By law, religious girls graduating high school in Israel have to choose between two years of Sherut Leumi and IDF service. How does Chotam attempt to influence their decision?

We send lecturers to schools and ulpanot, and we distribute a variety of pamphlets and literature on the subject. An animated film we made to dramatize the issue went viral on the web.

We also strive to expose organizations that attempt to infiltrate the Department of Education and schools with propaganda programs promoting army enlistment for women.

Which organizations?

There are many pluralistic groups who want to turn Israel into an “enlightened,” Western liberal country. One of their strategies is to encourage religious girls to enlist in the army.

There are rabbis with liberal orientations who lend credence to this campaign. To our chagrin, there also are policy makers in the IDF who, instead of focusing on military matters, engage themselves with widening the enlistment of religious girls by using pressure to carry out their machinations.

Bluntly stated, they take advantage of the idealism and goodwill of these girls, and brainwash them into believing that service in the IDF is far more worthwhile and exciting than national volunteer service in hospitals and kindergartens.

Is it true that religious girls are sometimes inducted against their will.

Indeed, that occurs. According to the law, a girl who testifies before a beit din that she keeps Shabbat and kashrut, and that her religious feelings and beliefs are in conflict with the atmosphere of the army, is supposed to receive an automatic exemption.

However, for the past several years, the military powers-that-be have decided that in every instance where there is a doubt about a girl’s commitment to Judaism, the girl must be summoned to a hearing where she is subjected to an investigation before a final decision is made.

What kind of investigation?

Girls report that the means employed can be offensive and emotionally humiliating. Seventeen-year-old girls are often called to appear at an enlistment center without pre-notice where they are related to with suspicion and doubt and questioned in a harsh manner as if they committed a crime.

If a young girl doesn’t know what the blessing is for lighting candles on Yom Tov which falls on Shabbat, does that mean she isn’t religious? Who has the chutzpah to decide if a girl is truly modest in her ways? In some enlistment centers, cellphones are taken away and checked for “evidence” to prove that the girl is not religious – Facebook photos and the like – which is forbidden by law.

What gives an investigator the right to tell a girl in high school that because she worked as a waitress in a restaurant frequented by men and women, she can serve in the army just as well alongside men? They have also claimed that if the girl is a baalas teshuvah and gets along with her secular mother, she can get along with non-religious soldiers just as well. What’s the connection?

The IDF reports that a greater percentage of Religious Zionist girls are choosing to enlist in the army today than in the past. What are the numbers and why the increase?

Notwithstanding the erroneous and misleading claims of the IDF, which are geared to draw more female enlistment from the religious community, the percentage hasn’t risen in any drastic way. Approximately 2,400-2,700 religious girls enlist each year, which represents 30 percent of the religious high-school graduates.

Some religious girls report that serving in the army didn’t affect their level of religious observance at all. Some even say that their army experience strengthened their characters. Is it possible that Chotam’s fears are exaggerated?

Any girl who enlists in the army does so in defiance of leading Torah authorities – and that in itself is a religious problem. Furthermore, parents, teachers, and many girls themselves relate that army service affected their level of religious commitment in a decisively negative manner.

Doesn’t Sherut Leumi pose its own set of problems – having to work in mixed secular environments like hospitals, for example.

Girls who want to contribute to the nation via Sherut Leumi must surely check out where they will be stationed. But there is a big difference between Sherut Leumi, where girls can’t be forced to do things against their will, and the army, where a soldier has almost no freedom of choice. Either you do what you are commanded or you face punishment.

When a girl in the army encounters a problem, it is very hard to help her from outside. The military system doesn’t allow it.

Reprinted from The Jewish Press.

Tzvi Fishman is a recipient of the Israel Ministry of Education Award for Creativity and Jewish Culture. His many novels and books on a variety of Jewish themes are available at Amazon Books, including four commentaries on the teachings of Rabbi Kook. Recently, he has published “Arise and Shine!” and “The Lion’s Roar” – 2 sequels to his popular novel, “Tevye in the Promised Land.” In Israel, the Tevye trilogy is distributed by Sifriyat Bet-El Publishing. He is also the director and producer of the feature film, “Stories of Rebbe Nachman,” starring Israel’s popular actor, Yehuda Barkan. He can be contacted via his website: www.tzvifishmanbooks.com

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