Word: ultra
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Israel has long struggled with the demands of modern society and the increasingly strident calls from the ultra-Orthodox to bring public life more in line with rigid Jewish teachings. There is no separation of church and state in Israel, where religious facilities - including those for the Muslim and Christian communities - are funded by the government but controlled by the religious establishment. There is a wary standoff between the state judicial system and the religious courts, leading to increasingly frequent showdowns over cases involving divorce and religious conversion. (Read how opposition to gay rights unites Israel's contentious faiths...
...roughly the same week that Saar decided to remove “al-naqba” from textbooks in Arab schools, a real “catastrophe” exploded in the usually quiet, solemn streets of West Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood. There, Jews of the ultra-orthodox Toldot Aharon sect protested en masse the arrest of a mother of five, taken into custody for starving her three-year-old son until he weighed no fewer than seven kilograms. Toldot Aharon is among the most conservative Hasidic sects that constitute Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox...
...those arrested was a Brooklyn man, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who was charged with trading in human organs. In Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox community this week, Rosenbaum, who claimed to be a real estate dealer, was described as a macher, or fixer, who assisted renal patients in finding appropriate medical treatment in the U.S. According to the official complaint, however, Rosenbaum planned to give an Israeli donor $10,000 and then charge the client who requested the kidney $160,000. The payment would be laundered through what Rosenbaum described first as a "congregation," then as a charity. According to published reports...
...cuffed and arrested after morning prayers filled the front pages under headlines trumpeting the discovery of the "Jewish laundry" used to bribe prominent New Jersey officials allegedly using Israeli charities. In particular, Israeli commentators seized on the connection between several of those arrested and prominent figures in Shas, the ultra-Orthodox Sephardi Torah Guardians Party, founded by the octogenarian Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who remains its spiritual leader...
...first time, however, that the Shas party has been embroiled in a corruption controversy. Two Shas ministers have been convicted on corruption charges in recent years. Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem, explains that some parts of the ultra-Orthodox community tend to disregard secular law, despite a tenacious adherence to the minutest detail of Jewish religious ritual. Says Halevi: "You have a kind of borderless community that in its best expressions maintains international charity efforts that are second to none. But the dark side of this is a mentality that...