Not Kedai for most people--Moving to the secular state of israel (SSOI)

Freed Israeli hostage Mia Schem accused a Tel Aviv fitness influencer of drugging and raping her inside her own home earlier this year – a fear she carried while in Hamas captivity following the Oct. 7, 2023 attack. Schem, 22, addressed the high-profile case in a nationally televised interview with Channel 12 last week as speculation about the alleged sexual assault circulated for weeks after the trainer was briefly detained in March. “This was my biggest fear my whole life, before captivity, during captivity,” she told the outlet, according to Haaretz. “And it happened to me after captivity, in my safest place.” She claims the unidentified man, from whom she had received three previous training sessions, told her he wanted to introduce her to a Hollywood producer to discuss turning her harrowing story of survival while in Gaza into a movie. The producer reportedly failed to show up at a hotel lobby, so a second meeting was booked at Schem’s home, she said in the interview. The train...

I just returned from a levaya at the military cemetery. I found the experience sickening. A kid is dead because rebels against HaShem replaced avodas HaShem with militarism and the task of combating one's yetzer hara with that of battling the "enemies of the Medina" which they imagine under every rock. But the whole ceremony consists of militarism and talk of battling the anti-Semites for which it is worth giving up one's life. Soldiers carry the coffin that is wrapped in a flag. They stand at attention through the whole ceremony, standing next to other flags. It's flags and flags and flags. The father said that his son "gave his life fighting evil" and battling those who want to commit genocide. These people lock themselves deeper into folly no matter what happens. Aveira goreres aveira. I had some bochurim from the Brisk yeshiva over for Shabbos. They see themselves as anti-Zionists. I shared with them the words of the Brisker Rav that two things are c...

 Want to know what life is like in Israel? Look at the topics in the newspaper. Here's what's above the fold: There you have it, the topics of the day: IDF, corpses, Hamas, Gaza. That's life in Israel.  Let's try the JPost now: Oct. 7, IDF, Defense minister, hostages, and other wars. Compare to the Boston Globe: Immigration, national parks, health insurance, higher education, jobs, bicycle laws, Senate race. Live the dream!

I define a friend as somebody whose door you can knock on any time and he's happy to see you and spend a little time with you. Somebody with whom you are friendly does the same when you meet him on the street. Beyond that are acquaintances and people with whom you are polite. I have in Israel two friends and seven people with whom I am friendly. Every one of them has been arrested!! No, I don't hang with criminals. One guy was arrested for trying to put out a garbage can fire. The policeman tackled him and then choked him with such ferocity that his neck hurt for weeks. He spent two days in jail where he was denied food and bathroom usage, which is typical. Then just to mess with him they moved him into a cell with Arabs. This is the sweetest, nicest, most harmless guy. That was the first time he went to prison. He was arrested another time for being in the vicinity of a protest. That time the police beat him mercilessly nearly to unconsciousness. He was bathed in blood. That w...

Greek mythology has 12 major deities - the Olympians - and on top of that is has primordial deities, Titans and Titanesses, Gigantes, Personified concepts, Chthonic deities, Sea, Sky, Agricultural, Sleep, Charity, and Rustic deities, Muses, Deified mortals, and other assorted deities. You got to hand it to the Greeks, they had a fertile imagination.  Of course, really they are building off of the big world that Hashem created. Since they didn't believe in Him, they operated from their fears and concerns and invented deities and many legends around those.  That's how it works with idol worship. A person chooses to wrap his mind, which is formidable in all humans -- it's a gift from Hashem -- around the life that he sees. The result is mythology.  So it goes with Zionism too. The quantity of mythology in Zionism is Greek like. Aliyah salesmen in America manipulate you into moving to Israel or longing to move there via tactics that you come to see as mythology once you get h...

I have a friend, an Anglo, who is the most harmless, mild guy that you'll ever meet. He has an autistic son who often acts up in public. The kid got a small injury as kids will do, as autistic kids in particular will do. A fool called Magen Dovid rather than Hatzalah. MD called the police. As I have mentioned, calling the police on people is the national sport over here. The police arrested the father, shackled his hands and feet, and stuck him in a small prison cell with 15 other guys for two days. He said the guards were brutal. He saw a judge who gave him 5 days of house arrest, and now he has to go again for a hearing. This is an Orthodox Jewish man, with kippa and tzitzis. He keeps Shabbos. He davens. He works. He's a gentleman.  Is this the country you want to live in? You call this coming home?  Fifty years in America and I knew only one Orthodox Jew who was ever arrested, and that's because he had a crazy ex-wife who would tell the police that he violated a totally ...

 Since the kids don't have backyards, they play in the parking lot and build their little huts in same. There are no tree houses, just forts full of used wood and cardboard that are found in the garbage. It makes for an ugly site, like shacks on the outskirts of Rio or Manilla. Since this is shared space, the shacks often get torn down despite the hard work. 

Portugal's GNI per capita is 26,620 Israel's is 52,940. The gross national income (GNI), previously known as gross national product (GNP), is the total amount of factor incomes earned by the residents of a country. It is equal to gross domestic product (GDP), plus factor incomes received from non-resident by residents, minus factor income paid by residents to non-resident. So you'd think that Israel is the far more affluent country, but it isn't. Part of the reason could be as Thomas Sowell says that 90% of what we have comes from what came before us and Portugal is hundreds of years old.  It could be because Israel wastes so much money on the military and people spend more time fighting each other than building a civilized society. Whatever the reasons, Portugal is a much nicer place to live, not just because the people are sweethearts, but the architecture, transportation, parks, culture, etc. are way, way better. There is no comparison. So don't go by GNI, go by ...

I just spent two days in paradise, which means that I was not in Israel and wherever I was seemed like paradise in comparison. So where was I? Frankfurt and Portugal. You may try to say that you can't compare a vacation to normal life, but this was hardly a vacation as I only had two days to pack in all kinds of racing around in a foreign country. That's all the vacation time I get, 2 days in the last 4 years. Two days of international travel with the passport control, worrying about losing passports, racing to getting connecting flights, and dealing with foreign languages is not a vacation.  Frankfurt was a layover for 4 hours where I raced out of the airport after an hour of getting off the plane and processed and quickly checked out the Jewish part of the East side. I had one hour to enjoy. Then I raced back to the airport two hours before the flight and took off to Portugal where I raced around again to get kosher food, figure out how the transportation worked, and went to ...

  6,500,000   Israeli New Shekels  =   2,007,803   US Dollars Make aliyah and join the other olim who live in 2 million dollar homes and brag about how non-materialistic they are. 

 The kitchen is small and cruddy, like this: So are the appliances. Here's your oven. You can fit two medium sized dishes in there. Do you have a large family? Do you like to have guests? I hope they don't need food.  Here are the flames on your stove. What could you heat with these pathetic things? That's as high as it goes, and it's the highest one of the four. One doesn't work at all. 

Last night a friend of mine and his rabbi went to a wedding in Beitar. On the way back at the check point the soldiers stopped the car, swung the door open without requesting that the driver open it, and demanded identification while yelling "achsav, achsav!!" (now, now--achtung, achtung). They said they were looking for bochurim with arrest warrants for evading the draft. I'm thinking of those Haredim who told us, "Don't worry. There's a draft exemption. They always find a way to keep it going." That's from the "you'll be fine" book of contemporary Jewish thought, where caution is thrown to the wind about parnassah, medical insurance, anything practical. So we learn how wrong they were. My thought was that the exemption will not go on forever. As the Haredi population grows, the Hilonim will not tolerate it. Doesn't help that the Dati Leumi/Modern Orthodox are a pack of traitors who side with the Hilonim. We learn also how wrong we...

One of the aliyah con-artists who pushed me to move to Israel told me that "everyone here speaks English." What's amazing is that he lived in Beitar where it seems to me that maybe 10% speak English enough to form a sentence. It's probably less. He happened to know a few olim from his neighborhood and talked only to them as he came to Israel after retirement as do many aliyah pushers and didn't have to work.  This week I went to see a neurologist who didn't speak English. Yes, even the doctors don't necessarily speak it, although I'll admit that a higher percentage do. The man looked over my tests results and explained his interpretation in words that I could not understand. I have no idea what he was saying. How's that for coming home? Who else didn't speak English? The secretaries who booked my next appointment.  Also yesterday I received a call from an accounting firm. Guy didn't speak English.  Not just that but instruction books, ingre...

I have mentioned that in Israel you must mail letters from the post office. There aren't many of them. If you don't have a car, you can spend a half-hour getting to the Post Office. I did that the other day and the mail slot was so small I couldn't get a letter in there. I had to go to another post office. Here's what the mailbox outside your building looks like: More doors that don't close. The mail falls on the floor. This will never get fixed. Nothing gets fixed here.  There are more normal PO boxes a few blocks away. The Post Office delivers there. The box is small and easily gets overstuffed and since it's a few blocks away you don't always get there in time.