The Chassidishe Gatesheader

I second this. We men don’t have a clue of the amount of work our women do when we are not around.

Me, I do quite a lot in the house: I cook 4-5 times per week (including regularly for leil shabbos – she does for shabbos day), I hang most of the laundry. But the work she puts into washing dishes, cleaning the house, folding the laundry, keeping things organized, and often doing all of it, plus working 5 hours per day, is just amazing.

Same thing drives me crazy too. Don’t have any solution…

I also wear my tzitzis inside since I have 3 cats in the house – they think tzitzis are a lot of fun. My tzitzis, and my pants and legs, disagree.

Mods – maybe you can make this thread sticky until after Yom Kippur?

HaKatan – I agree with you in principle.

Simultaneously, however, I recognize that the vast majority of Zionists today – including nearly all plain Israelis, and including most of the political leadership – have no ‘evil’ intentions at all.

While I do not daven for the state, I am proud and not ashamed to be working at a company that is a major supplier of technological equipment to the IDF and others. I do not see any contradiction there. Religiously I do not like the state; however, it exists, and its demise would be incomprehensibly worse for everyone than its continued existence at this point.

So, I feel free not to daven for the state, not to believe in the state, and not to love the state. However, I do recognize that this state is what there is and we must support it, because there is no credible alternative. (Having the Turks take over, as in Health’s vision, is not credible, IMHO.)

If you’re going to do some form of sport or activity where you would be sweating so much that you would want to be without tzitzis, you are allowed not to wear them.

However, every serious frum rov will simply tell you if you ask him, that in that case, you simply shouldn’t do that sport/activity. Obvious solution.

As for me, there have been times in E”Y on extremely hot days when I went without tzitzis because I literally got sick from the heat quite a few times. I can’t stand heat very well.

This summer I’ll be in Switzerland, walking in the mountains. Depending on the temperature, I’m initially going to keep my tzitzis on as usual. Should it become extremely hot, there is always the option to put them in my backpack.

Go on the CR and correct other people’s grammar.

Move to Gateshead. We really don’t have such issues here. Maybe a miniscule handful of people do – but I don’t know them. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen anyone conforming to anything but the highest standards of tznius since I moved here.

Major difference, I suppose, is that in Gateshead we rarely see any non-chareidim (ie MO), since the kehilla is 100% chareidi. I think in America the chareidim are jealous of the MO who dress a lot ‘lighter’ than the chareidim, and they imitate them. In Gateshead it’s just chareidim and non-Jews, so I suppose it’s less confusing.

Having Rav Falk right around the corner might also make a difference, of course!

What I am quite worried about is that the western countries are all rampaging their armed forces. The UK’s Royal Army went from 160,000 in 1982 to 102,000 today and is now being reduced to 82,000.

In The Netherlands, I remember the armed forces (combined) used to count circa 80,000 a few years ago; now it’s about 65,000. They recently decided to stop using tanks at all. The Air Force’s F16s are almost falling apart and the government just decided to quit the JSF project, so probably soon there won’t be an Air Force either. The Navy is almost gone, with half of its ships gone over the last 10 years and the Naval Aviation branch being totally destroyed.

Now when a real war is going to break loose, the outcome is easy to predict: the enemy will win, because there won’t be anybody to even make a futile attempt to stop them……

Where is haifagirl?

This is funny. Sometimes it annoys me as well, but not to this extent.

Here it’s windy, rainy and just cold enought that without a coat you feel the cold. That’s 16C (60F) now, rising to 20C (68F) later today. Meaning it’s a pretty hot day, warmer than average for July-August around here. (This is not a joke.)

I’d have to side with Sam2 on this. This sounds very weird. I’m not a big posek, but I am quite certain also that davening with a minyan outweighs the importance of wearing a hat and jacket.

@haifagirl – “Work on self-improvement. A good grammar book would be a place to start.”

Sorry, but I have to side with MorahRach on this. While you are right, I think you’re slightly exaggerating in your quest to improve everyone’s grammar.

I don’t think the opening post was all that bad. Sure, it could be better, but the writer used – mostly – some form us capitalization and punctuation. That’s already better than most young people these days.

I know of someone named Tirtsa as well (Dutch spelling – with an S). Also another one in E”Y. Pretty common name, certainly more common than the others.

@147 – I was also thinking about the name “Machloh” yesterday. I’m not going to use that name for my daughter, though. Sounds like a recipe for a rather limited social life.

Don’t know whether they still exist. But I worked at IDT, for 3,5 years. Started less than a month (seriously) after moving to E”Y and stayed there in 3 different projects for a total of 3,5 years. Without them I would never have made it.

(They had, back then, jobs in not just English but in several other European languages as well – basically, every possible European language. We even had Finnish-speakers!)

I’m pretty far to the left on just about everything, except for foreign affairs / defense. The western world needs strong military forces and strong and effective intelligence agencies to deal with the threats facing it. Decisions such as the one recently made in the UK reduce the size of the Army from 102,000 to 82,000, and the fact that the Royal Navy has 0 aircraft carriers now, will soon lead to the UK losing the Falklands, because when the Argentinians invade again, there simply won’t be anybody to send there to fight back, as was done in 1982. The same applies to all other European countries and to the US as well.

Aside from these affairs, though, I am decidedly left-wing regarding anything else: economy, education, health care, transportation, international cooperation, environment, personal freedoms…

And I’m not going to vote for any party that goes against my beliefs in both issues (ie, defense/national security and the rest). Meaning I have never in my life found a party I can vote for with full confidence, and probably never will – though in the UK, Labor seems not to be too bad (they oppose the cuts to the military, which the Conservatives are carrying out).

Violating Kol Isha is such an incredibly big danger that the only way in which I can see frum women singing as acceptable would be in live performances at women-only events. Here in Gateshead there are occasionally such events. My wife is a member of the Gateshead choir (which isn’t really a fixed group, though), they perform at least once per year on Chanuka.

But any form of recording should not be allowed. Not on CD, and most certainly not online. I admit that this is unfortunate, but I believe the risk is far too large otherwise.

Absolutely not, except maybe for a few dropouts.

And then there’s Chabad which is another class altogether (another religion, some say) – some of them do go, though the majority don’t, since they would only want to serve in a Zionist army which the IDF obviously is not. (Being that the IDF isn’t going to put a bullet through the head of every single Arab in E”Y, which is what most Chabadnikim dream about every night.)

“Belgium has a large chassidic population and I think they speak french there”

Actually in Antwerp, the language is Dutch. (The Belgian version of Dutch is called Flemish – it relates to Dutch Dutch like Australian English relates to US English, meaning you can hear the difference but it’s still obviously the exact same language.) Though the frum community in Antwerp do speak a lot of French as well. But the general language of Antwerp – and the majority of Belgium, known as Flanders – is Dutch. The minority, in the southern part, called Wallonia, is French-speaking.

I think that when Avi K says he is an ‘observer’ of the Yerushalayim scene, he means that he sometimes sees chareidim at the Kosel.

Well, many of us don’t even go there. I myself haven’t seen the Kosel for something like 2-3 years (and I was living in Yerushalayim until 1 year ago). And in my 6 years in E”Y I have never been to Chevron, not even once – my rov told me not to go there, it is not accepted in the circles with which I affiliated when I was there.

Of course some would then simply claim that I must have been part of a miniscule extremist group, but in fact I’m talking about one of the largest, most important groups in Yerushalayim, and plenty of others follow the same rules as well.

I was always a bit of a strange duck, though, for having plenty of outside connections (I never limited my world to include only people with 1 specific hashkofoh). I respect everyone for what they believe – within certain limits – as long as they respect me. That includes Dati Leumim, Chardalim, Mizrachim, Litvaks, all various chassidim, and anything and everything in between. The only thing I cannot stand is those who twist the truth for their own purposes. (I am *not* accusing anyone of doing that here – just making a general remark.)

Rav Kook and the Satmar Rebbe (the Divrei Yoel).

@Avi K: “Englishman, The Litvaks in Israel speak Hebrew. I once was waiting in a governent office with an older immigrant from Russia and a Litvak. The Russian addressed him in Yiddish and he had a very difficult time trying to answer.”

Sure, there are those who speak Ivrit. There are also many who speak Yiddish. I know myself since we were neighbors and friends of quite a few of them in Yerushalayim. I must say that, from experience, it seems that Bnei Brak has more (monolingual) Ivrit-speakers while Yerushalayim has more primarily Yiddish-speakers.

I’m only occasionally here. Don’t want to get addicted to posting here.

WPA I don’t know, but the only way to crack WPA2 is brute-force it. So unless you’re stupid enough to have a password that would be in such a dictionary attack, you’re basically safe.