Watch some of this nearly five-hour video of a mass assembly that didn't get much coverage in the mainstream media. Yes, it is mainly a religious revival meeting, but if you read between the lines, it is also a powerful display of ultra-Orthodox political power.
Earlier this
month, some 25,000 ultra-Orthodox American rabbis, their financial backers, young novices, and
full-time adult yeshiva students gathered at the Wells Fargo Center in
Philadelphia for the third annual Adirei HaTorah convention.
The participants belong
to a stream of American ultra-Orthodoxy that follows the philosophy of Rabbi Aharon
Kotler (1892-1962), who was rescued from the clutches of the Holocaust before
the US entered WWII. Kotler, from his Lakewood, NJ yeshiva, advocated that adult
men should not work for a living but engage in full-time Talmudic and religious
studies.
The all-male Adirei HaTorah convention brought together an all-star lineup of mostly
Lithuanian-ultra-Orthodox clerics, including a guest
appearance by the elderly and frail Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetzky, whose yeshiva
operates out of Philadelphia.
I was thinking
about what it costs to bring together so many people who do not work for a
living. US nursing
home czar Eliezer Louis
Scheiner apparently bankrolled the gala event. Let's just say that Scheiner and his
partner Teddy Lichtschein's modus operandi in running their nursing home
network does not serve as a kiddush Hashem. Scheiner has helped organize
nursing home industry support for the Trump campaign. He personally donated
$750,000. The Trump administration was known for trying to relax federal regulations
over how nursing homes are run. You might say there was an implied quid pro quo,
but I could not possibly comment.
The Philadelphia gathering
heard from prominent religious figures. Among them was US-born Moshe (Milton) Hirsch,
88, an Aharon Kotler protege who traveled from the Holy Land to address the multitude.
Hirsch, who is a spiritual adviser to Degel HaTorah, the Lithuanian wing of the
Ashkenazi Israeli political party United Torah Judaism,
heads an Israel-based charitable outfit HaMeshivim, which supports full-time
yeshiva study for adult men and Lev Shomea which provides counseling.
In his homily (pick up around 2:56 in the
clip), Hirsch warned that "leftists" in Israel were intensifying
their fight against "Yiddishkeit" by cutting money to adult male
yeshivot. To make matters worse, these same leftists are demanding that able-bodied
ultra-Orthodox youth serve in the army or do some other form of national
service. Hirsch did not have to state the obvious: that in
Israel, this tumbledown lifestyle is mainly funded by the taxpayers thanks to
the disproportionate power of the two ultra-Orthodox political parties, United
Torah Judaism and Shas, and the connivance of Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud.
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I am open to running your criticism if it is not ad hominem. I prefer praise, though.