Prime Ribs, Israel — Beit Shemesh Attack
A 27-year-old woman was attacked last week while she was hanging posters on behalf of her employer. Natali Mashiah was in the Ramat Beit Shemesh neighborhood when she alleges that a group of Haredi men called her a “slut,” a “shiksa,” and smashed her car’s windshield and windows while she was inside of it. They also threw a rock at her head, punctured the tires and poured bleach inside the vehicle, she said. Police arrested three suspects at the scene.
The financial newspaper Globes is asking why social justice protest leader Stav Shaffir, recently profiled in the Forward, reportedly accepted VIP perks, such as accommodations at a 5-star hotel and an chauffeured Audi, while recently in Munich for a conference.
Knesset State Control Committee chairman Ronnie Bar-On is calling for broader implementation by rabbinical courts of a law that allows rabbinical judges to impose punitive sanctions on men who refuse to give their wife a Jewish divorce document, or a get.
Rabbis and communal leaders from the Masorti-Conservative movement recently led the first-ever mixed-gender prayer service held at the Knesset.
Images of women continue to be erased or blurred in advertisements and in photographs published in the religious media. The latest examples: the face of Maj. Gen. Orna Barbivai, the head of human resources for the IDF, was deleted from a photo of a Knesset panel appearing on the Haredi news site Lada’at; and television journalist Sivan Rahav-Meir’s face was blurred in an ad for an upcoming panel discussion in Rehovot in a newspaper aimed at a national-religious readership.
Galei Tzahal radio is paying a NIS 38,000 ($10,130) settlement to Ortal Ben Dayan, a university student who complained of sexual harassment by a professor. Irit Linor, one of the station’s program hosts, called Ortal a “whore” on the air.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
