mentalblog.com comments:
have you noticed that the only graphic they found appropriate for her web site is Mama Rochels grave. Very telling. The cult of death as a glue for the entire edifice.
"[...] she advises single Jewish women to live out their lives like nuns if the guys do not match up to the "Ben Torah" image that is demanded of real Neve alumna to marry."
She might be right...
For the record, the "P.S. Ynetnews: Sex and the holy city.
Jerusalem Post: You've been Aish'd..." was added by Tzemach and if one looks at those two articles it's important to note that what those two articles are talking about and describe is NOT Tzipora Heller and the "Neve way" at all.
In the "Sex and the holy city" article it seems to focus not so much on secular people who may want to become more observant. It's more about already religious kippah sruga yuppies and generation xers who are sleeping around and going with the "why buy when you can rent or get if for free" attitude. It's about a jaded and sexually frustrated group of people who just can't move on with life and either become irreligious or marry someone and either build a bayis ne'eman beYisrael or just live happily ever after having sex with their spouses and raising a family.
In the "You've been Aish'd" article its all about how NCSY http://www.ncsy.org/ which is the youth outreach division of the OU http://www.ou.org/ and Aish HaTorah http://www.aish.com/ are reaching out to and capturing the hearts and minds of mostly young Jews to become more religiously observant. Both NCSY and Aish rely on fun, happy experinces and exciting programs.
But Mrs. Tzipora Heller is a different kettle of fish. She neither preaches a philosophy of fun nor acknowledges the lighter side of life, even though she cracks some good jokes for the audience during her lectures, but her themes and goals are anything but funny!
While NCSY and Aish wake up the teens and young adults they touch, Mrs. Heller on the other hand is preaching the doctrines of submitting to "gedolim" and "da'as Torah" and giving heavy doses of mussar that in essence relies on inducing guilt that will require remorse and facing the darker side that many young secular women are not ready to do. It is a kind of well-calibrated "shock therapy" whereby she is forcing her masochistic female minions to confront themselves and it is not a happy or fun filled process. Using well-practiced psychobabble, pseudo-lomdus and emmiting a mental message of "submit to my will or you die" she corals whoever she can into her web of fear, and once stunned like captive prey, from there they are then hopefully to be transferred to Neve in Israel where the insititution can then do its job on a grand scale.
The women then lose all sense of self and indentity (if this sounds like brainwashing as under the North Koreans, it is) and the longer the women remain students at Neve, the less chance there is that they will ever reconnect with their past natural and effervescent ("happy American") lives that in all probability carried lots of joie de vivre ("joy of living" or a "feeling of healthy enjoyment of life"). Welcome to the Neve Baalas teshuva, somber and serious (and really silly)!
In other words, while Mrs. Heller and Neve will kick the living daylights out of the young women they seduce making them into "hashkafically correct monsters" who will insist that their husbands as if they were Lubavitchers, subit to the outside rules and roles of Mrs. Heller herself, whom they will call like a guru and not budge from her advice, " da'as Torah" and "poskim".
While NCSY, rooted in the world of Modern Orthodoxy with more relaxed rabbis and outreach workers (the joke is that they call "NCSY" = "Negiah Can Save Yiddishkeit") and like Aish HaTorah that has figured out how to make Judaism "sexy" as it can seduce some of Hollywood's best staying away from the austere and darker side of Yiddishkeit.
Why does it have to be that the choice of becoming frum has to be either joining the shallow-heads like Aish or the heavy handed Heller?
Surely there is something in the middle? Or somewhere else maybe...?
how much of this is the despair of being so unattractive, sharing this feeling of despair with others.
Tzemach asks: "how much of this is the despair of being so unattractive, sharing this feeling of despair with others."
Who knows.
But one thing is for sure she was never attractive, except to her husband, one of the earliest kiruv workers employed in Ohr Somayach in Jerusalem, with whom she has a huge family, well-over ten kids. A veritable baby-machine, perhaps to overcompensate for other obviously missing feminine charms.
Welcome to the "sexy-less" and quantifiable asexual baalas teshuva paradigm. At least most FFB women don't go for this obvious "castration of females" baloney in the name of "doing teshuva" and becoming frum! Even God commended the Israelite women of Egypt for remaning attractive to their enslaved husbands in Egypt to boost their spirits, retain their effections and encourage them to copulate.
As a lubavitcher who was born on the neve campus and lived there for 16 years of my life...
i agree with every single word said against neve yerushalayim! The neve staff denies its students of the simple fact that there are many other sects of judaism other than litvishizm..
their entire goal is to turn the students into lifeless robots with a lack of self identity...
Thank god for all the other BT instituions!!
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