The following item was published in one of the local Bet Shemesh whatsapp news groups I am in.

Kikar is reporting on an interesting battle taking place right now in RBS D, a similar battle to one that has taken place in many cities and neighborhoods with mixed populations - basically a power struggle for controlling the tone of the neighborhood or city.

Remember the "pay for protest" program that went live for Lag B'Omer, in which the thugs who were looking to fight with the police and thwart the official Lag B'Omer arrangement with a price list for forms of protest including getting beaten by police, getting arrested, etc?

this sign is crazy...

זה שהם עטופים בטליתות לא הופך אותם לצדיקים, הגיע הזמן להעיף את הקיצוניים שמטילים אימה בשכונות החרדיות מחיינו, חלאות ונבלות שמבזים ורומסים את הדת פעם אחר פעם, הבוקר זה קרה במירון, תיעוד קשה לצפייה של קיצוניים קורעים את קיר ההנצחה לזכר הקדושים שנהרגו, דרך ארץ קדמה לתורה, בושה. pic.twitter.com/CZhrggjdjl

— אריאל אלחרר (@ariel_elharar_) July 14, 2021

Sometimes arrests are funny.

Funny story. A Turkish media team parked their car in Mea Shearim to do some filming. The team members got out of the car to check out the area, and while they were out a local kannoi/extremist thug spotted the car with professional cameras inside. Assuming it was an Israeli news channel present for some local filming, he smashed the windows of the car with a rock and tossed in some rotten fish.

אלף פעמים הסביר ראש העיר לשעבר ח"כ משה אבוטבול לביהמ"ש שאין סיכוי שהשלטים יוסרו מהעיר אתמול שוב המחזה המביש של רה"ע עליזה בלוך והמשטרה מנסים להסיר שלטים וברוח מכת הצפרדעים הקיצונים רק הרחיבו והוסיפו עוד ועוד שלטים חדשים.
מי מוכן להסביר לשופט חנן מלצר שאיים במאסר שמשה אבוטבול צדק? pic.twitter.com/7sOUvbTAsG

— איתי גדסי (@itayg1) February 12, 2020

Actualic is reporting that the courts have given the City of Bet Shemesh another extension, this one for an additional 9 months, of the deadline for removal of the illegal "tzniyus" signs hanging in parts of RBS B.

The previous deadline had been 50 days from what happened to be the last elections of Bet Shemesh. After Dr Bloch won the elections and became mayor, she reasonably requested an extension to learn the matter and try to work her magic. Back in the day of the previous administration, the mayor had been warned by the courts that his inaction would earn him hefty fines along with possibly even jail time.

Now the City appealed the end of the deadline with a request for another extension, claiming that work is being done to resolve the matter and remove the signs peacefully and with full cooperation and dialogue among all parties. The appeal pointed to a number of details required by the court that have already been implemented (probably installation of security cameras, among other points). The court granted the extension, and the new deadline is set at September 30, 2020.

MK Moshe Abutbol (Shas), also the former mayor under whose watch this issue began, blessed the court decision for the extension thereby recognizing the complexity of the city of Bet Shemesh, Abutbol laments the fact that the courts did not show such consideration in his days, even threatening to put him in jail. Abutbol suggests that such unfair and unequal decisions are causing the people to lose faith in the justice system.

I don't know what Abutbol is complaining about. he too was granted extensions when he requested them, but Abutbol made no serious effort to resolve the matter - he did not even install the security cameras he had promised to install in the area. Bloch did it with nary a peep from the locals in that hotbed neighborhood of extremism.

About two and a half years ago, on Yom Haatzmaut of 2017, a 13 year old boy (man?) threw things at cars that had Israeli flags flying. He was involved in the usual rally/protest by the extremists, in Bet Shemesh, and was arrested when the police came in. he was charge dwith throwing things at a bus and at another car with a flag on it.

The wheels of justice turn slowly, but turn they do. Behadrei is reporting that the juvenile court finally handed down its sentence. 

The State wanted to have him punished with a harsh sentence, claiming that the infraction is so serious due to the danger involved that it could get up to 2 years in prison.The State wanted him punished with 200 hours of community service, along with a commitment to not do such crimes again.

It should be noted that the accused admitted to his actions, but skipped out on a number of hearings, failing to appear in court.

The defense attorney claimed that he comes form a closed community and has no cellphone, which made it difficult at times to locate him and inform him of upcoming hearings.

The interesting part is the following. An askan of the Eida Hachareidis, Rav Shimon Shisha, testified on his behalf saying that since the arrest, the young man has strengthened in his torah learning, studies mussar, all in addition to his regular learning schedule in yeshiva. He pleaded with the judge to take this into consideration, along with the fact that this young man hardly ever leaves the yeshiva now, and pleaded for a lighter sentence.

The judge accepted that the young man had accepted upon himself additional learning commitments to atone for his actions, but that he also must pay something back to the community for it was the community he harmed. He sentenced the young man to 100 additional hours of learning Torah, separate form the regular learning schedule. These 100 hours will have to be spent learning with students n the yeshiva who need help.

Interesting court decision. I hope that at least the experience he has gone through the past couple of years will have been enough to impress upon him the severity of his actions, as the punishment alone probably won't.

This afternoon a group of people, kannoim - extremists - went to RBS C2 (gimmel 2) to hold a protest on the property of someone who was digging out in his yard for the purpose of adding ona room to his home.

The reason for the protest, as reported by Kikar, is that they claim there is a very high probability of burial caves being present beneath the property, making expansion impossible without desecrating the graves. They also claim the kablan built around that problematic section and marked it off in the zoning as not being usable due to high probability of graves.

They went on to his property to protest, police were called in and put a stop on the entire thing.

Yes or no, I have no idea. Are there graves or not? No idea. Should he be able to dig and build (and presumably stop if he finds graves), I have no idea, nor do I care. I just want to know how the heck these kannoim found out about it! Every time someone takes a shovel to some dirt something beeps in the main office of the kannoim? I would guess a neighbor upset with the expansion plans, probably unauthorized and without taking the neighboring apartments into any consideration, reported it, but generally they report things like this to the Iryah, not to the thugs.

It looks like the honeymoon in Bet Shemesh is over.

Since the new mayor, Dr. Aliza Bloch, took over, the city has been relatively quiet. People are happy wit hte progress on many fronts, including general cleanliness, roads, schools, cultural, and whatever other things are going on. The mayor talks regularly about peaceful approaches to communities with dialogue rather than approaching issues form a place on conflict and competition... Even the number, and severity, of hafganot has significantly dropped and the city has been relatively quiet for the past 8-9 months or so.

That might all change at this point. The local news has recently been reporting on a number of issues that have caused rumblings, such as the population diversity expected between RBS Daled and Hei, such as some budgeting issues, etc. though nothing has really caused the problems that were supposedly expected to result from those rumblings. But now, with Bloch having removed a caravan used as a shul placed on public ground without permission, it looks like that explosion is on the way.

According to Kikar, the extremists are now waging threats to restart their fights throughout the city of Bet Shemesh as a result of what she did. According to activists from the extremist community, if this is the "order" Bloch has come to do and to overturn our neighborhoods, and destroy our shuls, she can continue doing so and we will put down the order throughout the city as we know how to do.

Threats were explicitly waged that if she continues to fight them in their neighborhood, they will go out and cause a big mess in the secular neighborhoods of the city.

So, it looks like the honeymoon is over.

It will be interesting to see how Bloch approaches this issue from here on out. Until now she has not really worked (at least not publicly) on the issues of their illegal activities such as graffiti and signs and illegal shuls and buildings and has only tried to help them, like all the other neighborhoods, with improving cleanliness, garbage collection, infrastructure improvements, etc. Now that she is taking up the main issue, we wait to see where it goes. Will Dr Bloch find a way to go back to her own approach of dialogue and find a way to keep things quiet and have them cooperate, or will she see that as futile and take the more heavy handed approach that generally ignites the city? Or she can choose to ignore it as much as possible and basically give them autonomy to do what they want as long as they dont bother too many other people.

Another factor might just be the onset of summer, the heat frustrates people, boredom of vacation, and perhaps this will all go away quietly at the end of the summer...

This is interesting..

Signs in Jerusalem, placed along the Ramot Road, have been advertising upcoming events with a variety of speakers and hosts. As we have come to expect already, pictures of the women were defaced with spray paint covering their images.

What is interesting is that this time they have started differentiating between Haredi women and secular women.

The ads with images of Henya Shochat, a Haredi woman, were left untouched, while all the other ads with womens images, such as Orli Vilnai, Emily Arrusi and Maya Roseman, were all defaced.

So now, the extremists, if it was them as the article in Kikar assumes, are allowing frum women's faces to appear in public, but not secular women's faces. Interesting.

What I don't know is how they knew which women were religious and which were not. I would not have known without googleing the names. Also, the pictures are just faces, not full body shots, and even the non-Haredi women do nto appear immodest, so I am not sure how they could tell or differentiate.

Often we find people blaming the victim when an episode crops up involving the extremists from Mea Shearim or RBS B. If the violent extremist thugs attack someone walking through the neighborhood, people say she should have been more sensitive to the culture of the place and worn longer sleeves, or not walk through at all, or the soldier should have known not to go there, or the like.

Kikar is reporting that today in Mea Shearim a young man was attacked, thankfully only by threatening mobs and screams but it did not get to actual physical violence, when he went to daven mincha in one of the local shtiebels. He was attacked because he was wearing olive green pants and someone thought he might be a soldier of the IDF, so he gathered the mob to throw him out.

The poor fellow left the shul, and the neighborhood, quickly, to avoid problems, so the thugs got what they wanted.

Should we blame him for wearing green pants? What was he thinking - dressing like a soldier! he was asking them to attack him! he provoked them by his insensitive attire.

There is no way to know what will tick off an extremist thug. One day it might be this, another day it might be that. There is no way to predict such a thing.

Thugs are thugs and should be dealt with appropriately. We needn't blame the victims, when it is the thugs causing the problems.

YWN and BS MehadrinNews are reporting on an employment conference/fair held for Haredi women in Bet Shemesh by the Link organization, founded by Chavi Ehrenfeld.

The conference was the target of protests. Haredi extremists heard about the conference and gathered outside the event in the Industrial Zone (by the Kinor David Wedding Hall) and cried their cries of shmad and how terrible this is.

Personally, I love the flat shrie of "gevalt" after each impassioned claim by the speaker. I always do.

As my friend Ben pointed out, this is actually a big change from the olden days when the protests would be held in Yiddish. Now they seem resigned to speaking, even in their traditional protests, in the modern language of Zionist Hebrew. I think they may consider the need to be understood more important than the tradition of talking only Yiddish and their rejection of the trappings of the modern State of Israel, though their mere presence alone should really be enough for that, so it is a good question as to why they are speaking Hebrew and not Yiddish.

a group of Haredim have been protesting outside the military court in Jaffa due to the detention of a young woman who did not declare herself religious and get her automatic exemption, thereby being considered AWOL when she did not respond to her draft notice. Behadrei calls them "extremists", and while one can never tell just from a few pictures, some look like they might be part of the extremists community and others might not be.

One of the signs being held in the pictures struck me. Someone is holding a placard saying that "the sefardi and traditional daughters are nobody's property. We will fight for their honor until the end".

I think that is very honorable of these people to protest on behalf of a sefardi woman as they would for an ashkenazi woman. Though it might just be an excuse to have a protest, but still at least they dont discriminate.

Now, if they would take the same approach regarding the issue of the seminaries refusing to accept sefardi students into their schools, causing a crisis of a different sorts, that would really be something. Being that they are so concerned, I expect to see pictures of them protesting outside the houses of the askanim, rabbonim and school administrators to defend the honor of the sefardi women. Maybe that would do something towards helping resolve the crisis.

There is some new fight going on with the extremists in RBS B now.

The extremists are upset about a female psychologist in town that has claimed to have approval for her work from the Eida Hachareidis, and she is treating a yeshiva bochur. To that end they spread pashkevilim around town saying that an open door is an invitation for thieves and they therefore are calling on people to harass her by calling her number, which they published, and if we do not do so, this will be just the beginning of such sins.

In response the psychologist says that they are just extremists and are looking for bad and not to actually help the community and that she consults with a rav at every stage. She claims they took their claims to the local neighborhood rav and insisted he sign a letter against her, which he refused to do. And, if someone wants to come get treated by me, they can/should ask their rav first.
source: Actualic

1. how do they know who is getting treated by this psychologist? This is information that is normally kept confidential.
2. Are they against all psychologists or just this specific one?
3. Are they upset at her because she is treating a yeshiva bochur and there is nothing wrong with yeshiva bochurim?
4. Are they upset because it is a female doctor treating a male yeshiva bochur? Do they protest against every other female doctor who does so?
5. Are they only upset because she isnt Eida approved though they say she claims to be?
6. Maybe the right way to deal with this is this exact issue - they should all get treatment from a psychologist, though perhaps not this one...

I was not aware that Modiin Ilit had any significant problems with extremists. Basically the entire city is borderline litvish extremist, but they don't really seem to have the yerushalmi extremists and the problems with them like we have in Bet Shemesh or they have in parts of Jerusalem. At least it does not make it to the news, more than the occasional tidbit.

It turns out they do, though clearly still far less than in other places.

After a number of problems, a police outpost was recently opened in Modiin Ilit.

The extremists are now protesting this, with protests outside the home of the mayor and by throwing their pashkevils all over the town. They are threatening to step up the protests as well.

The extremists consider it inappropriate for there to be a police station, even a communal station rather than a formal station, to be situated in a Haredi town.
source: Kikar

I am not quite sure what the problem is, though they describe it as bringing down the walls separating between secular and Haredi. Perhaps it is really a protest against having police close enough to arrest them when they make trouble or to stop their protests and attacks against innocent people.

The Admor of Vizshnitz Bet Shemesh came out harshly criticizing the extremists in RBS B.

Over Pesach, Deputy Minister Meir Porush had been invited to the kehilla and when he arrived he came under attack from hundreds of the extremists.

The rebbe criticized them, said Porush is a welcome guest and is someone who helps anyone who needs help, no matter who they might be, and even invited him again to his grandsons bris. The rebbe said Porush should not be afraid from this minority of people who are regularly destroying the city. He said it is fine and nice that they do not take money from the State but they cannot come out against people. They can debate ideas and argue against opinions and methods, but they cannot go personally against any person.
source: Kikar

I dont know why he waited 3 weeks or so before saying anything, but ok. I am sure he has his reason. What I do find interesting is that he said anything at all. We regularly hear excuses when refusing to condemn the extremists about how we have nothing to do with them, they do not listen to us, we are not them and they are not us, it is insulting to be lumped with them that we have to condemn them, etc etc etc. Sure enough, when someone want to he has no problem condemning them.

Further, this raises the question why only when it affected his small community could he say something, and not when it is more general, when they do things affecting the entire city. He even says in his attack on them now that they are regularly doing things that destroy the city. So why not condemn them at other times? Let them know, and let everyone else know, that what they are doing is wrong. Maybe if important people speak up they will eventually feel pressured to stop.