News Roundup – Thurs. 1/21

January 21, 2010

By Berl Blackman

Are Yeshiva bachurim turning into druglords? Well, that might have been the plan, but it seems the Israeli police nipped it in the bud. Eighteen Yeshiva students are being held for dealing and possessing MDMA, a drug related to Ecstasy and Crystal. Looks like some students needed some inhibition-lowering substances all the better to assert their arguments over a Birkas Shmuel. Who knew?

This is a bit too ugly to report, but also too important to ignore. A new religious text, Toras Hamelech, advises that non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and attacks on them “curb their evil inclination,” while babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed since “it is clear that they will grow to harm us.” What will the apologist’s say now? That the book was written in 800 B.C. and applied only to Amalekites?

Turns out some Chasidim do care about Haitians after all. After the Chasidim in Monsey and Spring Valley orchestrated a fiasco about hiring a new attorney for the East Ramapo School District, a move that polarized an already heavily polarized district, they seem to have come around and turned Eli’s Bagels (the proprietor of which, incidentally, was one of said fiasco’s orchestrators) into a relief-strategizing command center. The Chasidim provided the money (and hopefully some bagels) for a group of volunteers to fly out to Haiti. The cynic in me wants to say it was all for political expediency; after all, no Chasidim seem to actually have joined on the trip. But let’s give the Chasidim some credit for effort. If we’ll see more of it, we’ll know it’s real.

If you’ve ever been frustrated with the Jewish Press’s hard-right, unabashed Zionism, the Hamodia and Yated’s mediocre writing, and Der Yid and Der Blatt’s news of the latest Rebbe in town, you now have another option: The Jewish Star. Until now catering mostly to the communities of the Five Towns, the Star is planning to expand its circulation to include all of New York City’s Orthodox newspaper readership. What’s different about the Star? They don’t shy away from controversial news stories, such as those involving Leib Tropper and Avraham Mondrowitz. But does it have the oomph of Chaim Shaulsohn’s Panim Chadashot? And will they cover the feud between Mendel and Srutche? That’s all I really care about.

A Muslim security guard at Manhattan’s FBI headquarters is complaining that his supervisors don’t like his beard, and he would like to get $3 million for it. In a discrimination suit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court, Daoud Ibraheem claims he’s also forced to carry around a letter from his Imam proving he’s a bona-fide Muslim. Because without the letter they’d think he’s… what? An Orthodox Jew?

Another Jew puts on tefilin on a plane, another incident of non-Jews scared it’s a bomb. A plane from Laguardia Airport to Louisville made an emergency landing at Philadelphia International Airport after a passenger voiced concerns about a man having straps wound around his arm and running down his body. Accoridng to the report, “The man was questioned by airline personnel, who, reportedly, didn’t get answers to satisfy them.” Duh. He was probably in the middle of Shmoneh Esreh. Only later were airport personnel assured that the object in question was a “prayer device.” Perhaps it’s time to train airline personnel in the language of “nu, nee, ah, tsk tsk, uh huh.”