If You Tickle Us...

Channel 4’s news item on the programme

Guest post by “Pen Tivakesh” The so-called “unfortunate” Channel 4 Dispatches programme is about to hit the airwaves, and the UOHC has done it again. It has laid bare its wares and showcased its blatant disregard for anything but the safeguarding of its own precarious existence. Nothing is more indicative of this than Rav Padwa’s characteristically myopic and blinkered response which is bound to spread further the rot decaying the UOHC’s rickety construction. Rav Padwa: if it is indeed so important to you that our children are protected from harm, where on God’s earth have you been hitherto? Why have you to date cared so little for the pain and suffering of children and of victims of child abuse? Why have you shown them the door on numerous occasions citing their inadmissibility as witnesses owing to your own dark-age interpretation of Halacha ? If child protection is indeed so important to you, why do you still allow school teachers to beat their charges black and blue at the schoo

13 Shvat 5773 [24 January 2013] To Rabbis, Educators and Heads of Educational Institutions here [in London] UOHC and Child Protection Parents and educational institutions in our community dedicate themselves to bringing up and educating pure souls and to raise them and watch over them with sanctity and purity, and with the help of God have much success. Guarding our precious children and protecting them from all harm and abuse is of course essential. It is therefore incumbent on us to treat every complaint of abuse, God forbid, very seriously. We need to understand how to deal with this appropriately, [how] to institute safeguards to prevent such possibilities and to provide appropriate support to those who have been abused. There exists a special committee appointed by the Union to deal with cases of abuse, God forbid, of children in our community. Members of the committee are rabbis, educators and community members some of whom have have been trained in how to deal appropria

In the furore that has recently gripped us all a small news item in the JC back in October of last year may have been overlooked. Nothing ground breaking, if that's not a metaphor too far, since we're only talking about a tiny little baby of a few days old, born prematurely and which is dead anyway. It's not even relevant to its manner of dying but rather its burial and the inconsequential matter of a mother wishing to discover her baby's burial place. But still I think it's important enough not to have the story buried, if you'll excuse the pun, during this bad news period. It was the caring and feeling Adath that took charge of the cadaver and interred it out of sight hoping it would remain out of mind. Along comes mum several years later asking the outlandish question of where the dead body is bestowed. Trust our Adath to come up with a humane answer to this apparently insoluble query which may have taxed even the brains of Solomon. And true to character t

Guest Post (with a not altogether silent host) Dear "still not in the no" I have hesitated to respond to your inquisitive comments for I am fearful of incurring the displeasure of my Divrei Chaim brethren, and hope I shall not be banished from the DC magic circle for disclosing the clandestine mysticism oft-practiced in our cult. As you must have heard, we entrusted our entire life including our womenfolk and children to our Rebbe. Some even accorded to him the ancient right of droit du seigneur but it is said that our Rebbe, renown for his asceticism and self-abnegation, would exhort that the bride merely have him in mind during the Great Act rather than participate in it in person. We would pose to him all queries concerning our businesses and families for we knew Him to be the source of all knowledge. We would include even such esoteric topics as psychotherapy, tax avoidance and gynaecology and never would he fail us. Our Rebbe is a practitioner too of the ancient art