The Meah Shearim mother was indicted in the Jerusalem District Court on Tuesday and will face criminal charges of abusing her infant son.
Messages released from the Meah Shearim community indicate the violent riots seen due to the arrest of the mother would be renewed if she is taken into custody again or if the terms of her current house arrest are made increasingly harsh.
The woman’s 3-year-old son, who she allegedly neglected and abused, was released from the hospital and is currently living in Ramat Beit Shemesh at the home of an uncle, the mother’s brother. Mother and son are prohibited from seeing one another. She is remanded to her Meah Shearim home.
(Yechiel Spira – YWN Israel)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
28 Responses
Let’s see how many so called “charedim” will oppose this violence from the hands of these hooligans in shtreimel. I hope that with HaShem’s help the truth will come out.
#1 if this would happen to your sister and you knew she is innocent you would do the same rioting.
Reply to comment # 1: What has been bothering me for the longest time, is the non respect our own people refer to the Gedolia Hatorah of the Edah Hachareidus. It is undisputed that the Edah called for the protests, and even when violence erupted, they did not stop it, nor did they attempt to stop it. We as Bnei Tzion who follow the Daas Torah of the Edah, we HAVE an Halachic requirement to do so. You on the other hand may disagree, or may even follow other Gedolim that tell you differently, however it does NOT give you the right in any shape or form to mock us or any of our Rabbanim. With pride we will continue to follow their guidance, and if they again call for demonstrations, we will be proud to attend!
I AM charedei and fully support any action that doesn’t include destruction of public property. they should demonstrate against the Israeli communist goverment that treats charedim like dogs. Whether the mother is right or wrong is irrelevant, the police treated her much worse than they would treat a secular person charged with the same crime.
Why didn’t the Court wait for the findings of the Health Ministry Omsbudsman’s impartial investigation? Why the “Rush to indictment?”
The naked hatred of the seculars toward this Hareidi woman is glaringly obvious.
This time, roll out the tanks and seal off Meah Shearim, Geulah and every other chareidi enclave. No one leaves until there is absolute calm. They can riot in their backyards and destroy their own neighborhoods all they wish. The rest of society can continue with their lives without having to deal with the nonsense of chareidi riots. When all the dust settles, the Eida can then foot the bill for the clean up and repair of damages due to the riots.
#6 The protests do not necessarily have to be in Meah Shearim. It can be anywhere religious Jews live, like in Ashdod, Bnei Brak, other Jerusalem neighborhoods and even in Tel-Aviv.
If rioting is the only language the Sodom Court of Injustice understand, so be it. Before the riots 2-3 weeks ago, the mother was imprisoned for an entire week when she was supposed to have been released after 3 days. It’s the Rabbanim who called for protests as they realized that there is no other option to release her.
#6 has it right….. they can burn the street…. I hope they close the municipalities and let them buy garbage trucks. …. there is law and order, there are courts you dont like it go some place else.. protest but dont act like animals….. some of us serve to protect the nation while others are making it a circus. Some of the readers of this site are so raciest and really only care about there own. YWN should be ashamed.
#3 – when the eidah said to protest – did they say to start fires and destroy property? What type of protests did they call for? Violent ones or non violent ones? Are you really saying that those who went out and protested were following the words of their Rebeiim to the letter?
Klal yisroel cannot remain silent in the face of these atrocities against innocent jewish men, women, and children. If they lay a finger on this innocent Jewish mother, we are obligated to take to the streets in protest.
cantoresq…..PERFECT!!
#6: That is ridiculous! Your response smacks of am ha’aretzus – why, I cannot imagine that anyone would do as you have proposed, more so than someone might come into a bes ha’medresh without any clothes on! Your recommendation has as much substance as a Diet Sprite.
cantoresq,
Your blind hatred towards the charedim is so obvious.
You should rather seek some antisemitic blog.
Recognize that support of riots means that you don’t recognize government. Understand that when you promote rioting you must be ready to be dealt with the way organized governments deal with people who lead insurrections.
The Eida must be held accountable for any insurrection that takes place.
Chazal say that if not for Goverment a person would swallow his neighbor while still alive.
Sorry #3. No one alive today is big enough to tell us it’s OK to be mechalel shem shomayim or to destroy otherpeople’s property. And if they know that this will happen, then it’s still “psik raisha delo necha lei” and its still asssur.
To #3: First you write about the “non respect” of Gedolei Hatorah and the Eida”. Then you add that the Eidah are responsible for not stopping or attempting to stop the violent protests. If you beleive that the Eida is responsible, why are you blindly supporting them? The fact that the Edia did not condemn the violence from the beginning sent a terrible message to the frum and non-frum Jewish world. The Chareidim caused a huge chillul Hashem,and they should be condemned outright.
All you naive or anti-chareidi commenters:
Here’s one story out of many from M.A.M.A. (Mothers Against Monchhausen-by-proxy Allegations), reprinted fron The London Evening Standard.
LIES, DECEPTION AND THE DOCTOR WHO TRAPPED ME
BY DAVID COHEN
The cunning ploy to entrap Justine Durkin and prove that she was a potential child murderer began with a phone call. ‘Justine,’ said the consultant paediatrician at the other end of the line, his voice caring but grim, ‘I’m afraid tests show your daughter might have a life-threatening disorder. You need to bring her in for 24-hour monitoring. I’ve booked a bed.’
At that moment, the world of Justine Durkin, then a bubbly 23-year-old mother, imploded. Weeping uncontrollably, she packed her bags and headed into the hands of the doctors she hoped could save her sickly two-year-old daughter, Rosemary, who suffered from various unexplained ailments, including violent nocturnal coughing fits.
Waiting for her at the hospital was the eminent and then highly regarded consultant paediatrician, Professor David Southall. But, as she would discover – and as he would later testify in the family court – he was not being entirely honest with her. There were, in fact, no tests that showed a ‘life-threatening disorder’. It was all an extraordinary and elaborate con – cynical and cruel if it were to fail, brilliant perhaps if it were to succeed – dreamed up by Professor Southall to catch Justine attempting to harm or smother her child through secret video surveillance, and to prove his belief that Justine was a potential child murderer.
Totally unaware that Professor Southall was lying to her, Justine and Rosemary were shown into a carpeted private ward that was to be their home for the next five days. What Justine saw was monitoring equipment and a bed – Rosemary would be confined to it and attached to the monitors 24 hours a day – a second bed for herself, a television, and a chair.
But what she couldn’t see were the hidden video cameras that would secretly record her every word and action for the next 120 hours. For Southall had a plan: he intended to use this video-tape evidence to prove that she suffered from a condition called Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, a mysterious psychological ailment that involves harming – even killing – one’s child to attract attention to oneself.
But when, after two days in the room, no incriminating evidence had been obtained, Professor Southall decided to up the ante. What he did next, Justine says, defies belief. Her complaint against Professor Southall is the
subject of an upcoming public hearing by the General Medical Council into his purportedly ‘unethical’ behaviour.
It spells more bad news for the professor who, this week, suffered a humiliating hammer-blow to his reputation when the GMC found him guilty of serious professional misconduct in accusing the husband of solicitor Sally Clark of murdering two of their baby sons. Professor Southall had made his diagnosis after watching a TV programme about the case, without having had any medical involvement with the Clarks whatsoever.
The GMC – ruling that Professor Southall had abused his position and condemning his behaviour as ‘inappropriate, irresponsible and misleading’ – will deliver its verdict when it reconvenes in August. The panel has the power to strike off the paediatrician, although it is thought more likely to issue a public admonishment or suspend his registration.
Anything short of being stuck off, however, will trigger a purported eight more GMC complaints against Professor Southall, of which Justine’s case is one. Some of the complainants hope to expose just how ‘inappropriate,irresponsible and misleading’ the paediatrician’s behaviour has consistently been, ruining their lives, and those of their families, in what they say are
strikingly similar gross abuses of power.
They argue that Southall’s behaviour in the Clark case was not a one-off, but evidence of a trend in which Southall would stop at nothing to prove he is right. (To this day, Professor Southall clings to his view that Stephen Clark is a killer.)
But in Justine’s case, although he refused to see it, the evidence that he had got it wrong was staring him in the face. After two days of covert video surveillance at the University Hospital in North Staffordshire, he had
nothing to show for it. So what did he do?
‘He called me out of the ward,’ recalls Justine, 34, speaking exclusively to the Evening Standard from her GBP 500,000 18th-century farmhouse set in three acres of verdant Nottinghamshire countryside. ‘He sat me down, and told me that the word from Doncaster Hospital where Rosemary had been treated before being referred was that there did not seem to be anything wrong with Rosemary and that they thought I had been fabricating her illness.
‘Southall was quick to assure me that he believed me, but he said they would need proof she was ill soon, because there was pressure on him for the use of facilities and that unless something happened quickly, it would be hard to counter the view that I was making it up. I did not realize it, but he was trying to entrap me. He wanted to goad me into manufacturing proof of her illness. He thought by putting that pressure on me, I would try to smother or harm Rosemary when no one was looking.’
This extraordinary testimony – recounting entrapment techniques that even police officers would struggle to justify – is not even disputed by Professor Southall.
One week after the covert video surveillance ended, and without any concrete evidence of mistreatment, two social workers, armed with a written accusation of Munchausen’s from Professor Southall, came to remove two-year-old Rosemary from Justine’s care. They also took her son, Joseph, just four years old. At the time, Justine was living with her parents in Wroot, a small village in South Yorkshire, having recently become divorced from her husband, Nick Twiss, who was then a serving police officer in the North Staffordshire police.
A moment earlier, during our interview this week, she had been telling me that she has become ‘a tough old broad’ and that ‘this lady don’t ——’, but now, as she recalls the moment Justine was taken, her eyes redden, her face
collapses, and tears stream down her cheeks.
‘Something in me died right there,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. One day I’m told my daughter has a life-threatening illness, the next that I’m making it all up. Suddenly, these two social workers came to the door. They told me there had been a secret child-protection conference and that, on the advice of Southall, my children were to be taken away. They said they had already found foster parents.
‘At first, I resisted. I refused to let them take her, but they said they would call the police. I said, please, at least let me be the one to hand her over, to settle her in.’
For 11 months, until the case came to court, Justine’s children lived with their foster parents. Justine got to see them for two hours a week, but always with someone else there.
Then, in July 1994, came the court case heard in the family division. At issue was nothing less than whether Justine would get her children back. For the first time, she got to see the extent of the evidence for Munchausen’s
against her.
Although we cannot divulge what evidence was given in court, the outcome was that the judge totally quashed Professor Southall’s claim of Munchausen’s as entirely unsubstantiated. Despite Justine being exonerated, the judge
subsequently released the children into the care of their father. Justine would be able to visit her children under a supervision order, with the local authority acting as umpire between the parents should disagreement arise.
Justine was devastated. Havingbeing subjected to what she believes is the modern equivalent of a medieval witch-hunt, and despite being found not guilty of anything remotely to do with harming her daughter, she had wound up losing her children to their father who lived two hours away.
For years, she was allowed only limited contact with her children. She was confined, at first, to supervised contact of six hours a week, which developed over time to unsupervised weekends.
Justine was so shaken by what had happened that later, when she subsequently fell pregnant with her second husband, she had an abortion because she was terrified they would take the baby from her at birth.
‘Once you have been accused of Munchausen’s, once it’s on your notes, even if you’ve been cleared, you never know what they will do to you,’ she says. Again the tears stream. ‘That still hurts, to think I let Southall affect me
to that extent.’
But the cloud has a silver lining. Firstly, Justine fell pregnant a fourth time, and this time went ahead with the pregnancy, giving birth to Aidan, who is now six. And even more to the point – and this makes her beam with
happiness – two years ago Rosemary came to live with her after pleading with her father.
While we are talking, Rosemary, now 13, who is the spitting image of her mum, wanders in and sits on Justine’s lap. Soon, both of them are in tears.
‘We have so much time to make up,’ says Rosemary, gulping between sobs. ‘That man, Southall, has a lot to answer for. He took my Mum away. I think he should get his head sorted out. I don’t mean to sound nasty, but every child needs their Mum. I’d like to meet him face to face and ask him: why did you do this? Why did you deprive me of my mother? He doesn’t know how much pain he’s put people through. It seems he’ll do anything just to be proved right. I hope he gets sent to prison. I want everyone to know what he did – not just to us – but other families too.’
#6, Whatever your reason for despising the Yerushalmi chareidi community and all chareidim, it is not reason enough for your call for violent generalised tactics. Many good chareidi Jews suffer from the protests, and suffer much more from Israeli police violence and unjustified brutality. I would suggest you take back your words, before people might take you for an anti semite.
It seems that some people confuse the word riot with the word “protest.” The Eida may have suggested that people protest -civilly- but no Gadol condoned the violent destructive rioting that goes on at these gatherings.
For some reason, people think posting comments annonymously online gives them allowance to say whatever they want and with the most venom they can manage. Please reread your comments — you’re talking about other JEWS! You can fundamentally disagree, but it can never deteriorate into personal attacks about individuals or groups of people.
I don’t see the problem with the actions of the state. They first provided her with the opportunity to plead insanity but she rejected that option. The only choice they have left is to face the charges. Let her lawyer prove her innocent. The facts will speak for themselves and she will be judged accordingly. As far as I understood in the charedi papers, people weren’t denying the charges but were protesting what they felt was excessively harsh treatment on the part of the authorities. But her guilt or innocence? No one is taking sides yet because they don’t have all the facts. A smart move should she be proven guilty. Even “good” people abuse their children and hospital staff may try to cover up for their missteps. Both sides are possible. Wait and see what happens.
I understood the shabbos protests even though i disagreed with the method. Shabbos is kadosh and needs us to fight for her. But this protest? All it does is undermine the sanctity of the shabbos protest.
I really don’t undersrand what’s going on instead of rioting on the streets why don’t we all get together funds for a legal malpractice case against the hospital
Hashem yevarech es amoi basholom.
#6 Do u feel better now ??!! #3 well put. The bottom line is anyone who is familliar with the secular Israelli mentality knows that action is what ends up being the reason they change their minds. That is why today there are no autopsies, they dont dig up Kvarim, and the “parade” was cancelled from the holy streets of Yerushulayim to a closed indoor event. Its unfortunate this is the way it is, but this is their language. mere negotiations and calm gatherings dont seem to do the trick. They are the ones to blame for the cause of all the action. Besides for that there are many eyewitness reports as well as myself personally who witness calm gatherings being distrupted by the Yasam units and they were the ones who provoked many rioting protests. No Gedolim were ever pro rioting as hoodlums but they were pro protesting even if they led to getting themselves beaten up. Take Rav Amram Blau for example.
Boy, is there a lot of exaggerating going on.
1. The Rabbonim of the Eidah, according to reports, keep saying not to become violent.
2. The government forces do not always treat Chareidim any one way or other. By the way, this word “Chareidim” maeans “chareidim lidvar Hashem”.
Right? Not everyone can claim to be so who may dress certain ways, nor do the police or anyone really know who is or is not.
Why are people saying the truth will come out in court?
Does anyone really believe the court is more honest than the police?
For me, the courts and the police have the same value – none. I don’t trust either of them. Those who are relying on the court to get the full truth out and subsequently presumably release this woman, are making a very big and serious mistake.
If the Edah calls for it, peaceful protests should indeed continue, Of course any and all violence is completely out of the question, as always.
I agree with #30 the police and the courts are equally honest-at least as much as the KGB. There is a slight chance that some of the truth will be exposed in the court, now that the Eida has hired a professional lawyer. B’esras Hashem if this lawyer is worth his money and has lots of siyata d’shmaya mabe the libels and malpractice of Hadassah will be exposed.
To #20
1)In the USA and most western democratic countries a person is considered innocent until proven guilty.
2)She should’ve had the opportunity to post bail immediatly. like in the USA. (Example: most people arrested by the FBI in the big bust posted bail before Shabbos.)
3)In most US jails, a person has the opportunity to speak to a lawyer in much less than 9 days (which is how long this woman was in jail before she was allowed contact with the outside world.)