If You Tickle Us...

In normal societies and communities, when planning a new settlement, you might design colourful posters to attract young families, you might include some photographs or an artist's impression to entice the curious, you might hold a public meeting to gauge the interest and answer questions, you might invite people to nominate themselves to form a steering committee and you could even hold elections for this committee. In due course you would inform people who have expressed an interest on how the settlement is progressing, the range of available housing, the public facilities, educational institutions and so on. If this is how it would operate in normal circumstances amongst normal people then say what you like about us but normal we are not. Perhaps I should rephrase that for though we are no less or more normal than anyone else that is not the conclusion you would reach reading the above notice. This notice announces a 'new' settlement in Westcliff for "general-...

Note to Hamodia: 1. If you’re going to run an article on Ofsted it might be an idea not to use pictures of kids with longer hairstyles, shorter peyos and blue and patterned yarmulkes. Their schools are hardly affected and since you’re so proud of our tradition why not use the more traditional look. 2. It’s really useful being told the Latin etymology of words but perhaps also a few words on English and how it’s taught, or rather not taught, in our local chadorim would come in handy. 3. The absence of chareidi Ofsted inspectors – chareidim make up about 0.03% of the UK population – is indeed a scandal of biblical magnitude but may we also know why past chareidi inspectors could never find fault with chareidi schools. Even you’ll admit that they’re perfect only 99.9% of the time. 4. If you want your informed readers to truly believe in your campaign it would be useful to have a quote from a named person. Surely you can do better than a quote from some Interlink spinsheet, thoug...

We're in the eye of a storm once again and it's now happening with such frequency that storm is almost the new balmy. Laugh at us if you must but if excitement means x had a baby girl after 6.9 boys followed by "Wow!that'sjustsomoiredik", and pushing at the boundaries of knowledge is discovering from the reverse phone search at the back of the Shomer Shabbos the name behind the mobile number advertising second hand tin foil dishes and glatt kosher slippers which will cover you toe to ankle so that when in a floor-length housecoat if you stretch your hand to fix that net curtain after an extra-long peep it still won't show even a hint of varicose veins, if that is how excitement is defined then you should appreciate why a tornado once in a while gives us the frisson of cold water to a weary soul . But let's not run away with this one despite the whiff of Salem and McCarthy about it and not to mention Tehran and Raqqa. As this blog has said time and again, ...

    Think what you like of Osher Gratt and his dreams but you cannot deny that he leads from the front, he has put his name on the line and, by way of interviews in the popular Kol Mevaser telephone newsline, he tends to address the public directly. He has also invited the public to subscribe and join his New Jerusalem. True he seems to have a weakness for officialdom, doesn’t appear to be the best team player and falls headfirst for anything with a grand name to it. From the country’s ‘top managing agents’, to titled architects through to the Bank of England and a major property company all have been enlisted for you know what though not where. And this for a community whose idea of great architecture is the maximum extension you can get into your back garden while avoiding encroaching on your neighbour’s land. But never mind, he is a dreamer and you must take them as they come. It’s a shame that the whole world may be told of the location of this utopia except for those wh...

Scribblers the world over, just like rabbis, utilise the intersection of the outgoing and incoming year to provide a stock-take of where we are and some analysis on where we may be heading and so let me not shirk in my duty and I'll get straight to the point. The greatest issue facing our communities is not housing benefit cuts or Ofsted school inspections in the UK, education challenges to yeshives and metzitze be'peh in the US or coalition shenanigans and the compulsory draft in Israel. The greatest challenge is our youth that has given up any hope on our intractable and blinkered system and is voting with its feet in increasing and confident numbers. Technology is neither the symptom nor its cause though it suits our leaders to blame everyone but themselves for the state we are in. The world around us is changing and rapidly so. Our model of bringing up boys in total ignorance to be supported by a mixture of state beneficence for the majority and inherited wealth for the...

Actually the opposition to the local section of the London Cycle Superhighway (currently in construction) is more malodorous than melodious though unchained and unhinged this lot of killjoys certainly are. Mind you, they're not much different to their forbears who saw in the arrival of the railway tracks the advent of degeneracy and no doubt had they been around in Edison's days they would have ordered him to switch off the light. So immersed are they in awaiting the redemption that they cannot contemplate other improvements in their sorry lives and so they worry that a cycle route through 'our' area may herald the arrival of something clean and fresh to replace the old and staid they are so fond of. And as to where it might lead, that is one route they would rather not go down, but to them it's quite enough that it takes you beyond the confines of Stamford Hill, Go- forbid. There's not much point trying to persuade such kind of the advantages of a cleaner,...

UOHC Memorandum and Articles of Association This it seems is the Holy Grail of the UOHC constitution which they have to date spoken about incessantly but have never put out for show. Sorry but there’s too little time to have a thorough analysis so here’s a brief runthrough of first impressions. Joe’s fingerprints seem all over it in the disproportionate power to the unelected, unaccountable, more-dead-than-alive Adath Yisroel Burial Society; the founding members include none of the large chasidic groups and instead are made up of Reb Chunes, Schiffshul Ltd (aka ‘69’), good old Adath again and the Padwa family slipping in surreptitiously in all but name; no provision for removing an alleged renegade on the Rabbinate itself; a new member of the Rabbinate as well as the Av Beth Din himself is elected rather than appointed at his father’s graveside; each 50 married male members of a shul send a male delegate up to a maximum of 4; and finally a shul can be expelled if “its continued m...