Good Old Fashioned Political Power on Display - Adirei HaTorah

 

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.