Xmas (Because I'm Jewish, so I feel weird saying the C word)

I know, I don't normally do holiday posts.  And it's not even time for the holiday yet.  But I just watched Steven Colbert's Chrismas Special (your welcome for the advertising Steve, won't even ask for any royalties) and it reminded me of where I spent Chrismas last year.  Poland looked like a winter wonderland for pretty much the whole time we were there, and the afternoon we spend at Cracow's Christmas Market in the market square (known in Cracow as the "Rynek") was amazing.  It didn't feel like the commercialized farce that I always assumed Chrismas was - there were actually carollers singing under a statue, they were selling hot cider and nuts and other Chrismas treats, and even though it was a market it didn't feel like a commercialized experience.  Which is strange but that's how it was, and I still feel good every time I think about that day.

So to all the goyim who read this (probably none, but you Jews can draw some relevance to your life as well):  This Chrismas you should use your traditions to create an authentic (and wonderful) holiday experience instead of just another excuse to have a big meal and give presents to people!

Checkin

Greetings friendly readers! Been a while. Don't feel the strong need to write, but I kinda feel like I should just in case there are 1 or 2 of you who actually do read this blog on a monthly basis or so. So here we go, my life as it now stands via blog post.

The Ken is running well enough, although attendance at events is rather low. I'm not sure how to fix this, and if I actually want to I'm going to need to put more time and effort into it, and right now as a college freshman I am nowhere near enough "in my groove" to start doing that. I haven't been able to act on any of my plans for the Bogrim, which is frustrating, but I'm sure we'll get some peula together sometime. Hopefully before winter seminar, but we'll see.

School is doing well. Socially still slightly frustrating since I don't really feel as if any of the groups of friends I belong to support me in the ways that I'd like them to, but maybe that's because I've tried not to tie myself down to one little click and have put forth a conscious effort to include people and hang out with lots of different ones. Still don't feel very connected to Judaism while I'm here, but that's beginning to get better methinks. And my grades have started to get better - thank God the holidays are over.

I still am not sure what to expect from my kvutza. I haven't been speaking here about the process we've been going through, but it's been about what you'd expect - everybody starts angry and shouting, and now gradually it's been starting to cool down on both the individual level and as a group. All in all seems to be heading in a positive direction. Or so I think, but I notice that only about 10 of us from my kvutza have signed up for winter seminar and I'm really worried. If nobody comes, how can I talk to them and try to figure out how I feel about all this? And how can we make the positive impact of our kvutza felt if noone goes to the only nation-wide movement seminar?

My biggest worry when I think about it - I've discovered there is no pre-made option available for me where I study engineering at Drexel and continue to have the ability to work at Machaneh. Problimatic to the max. We'll see how this goes though.

Hmm, methinks that sums it up fairly nicely. If you want more than that, drop me a line! Always makes me wonder, who actually reads this blog. So far the people that I know have read this are one former/current madricha of mine, a relative, and another habo who I have met only once (and who read it before I met him). Any others out there?

Till next time, and with much love, signing off.

Josh

It all comes back to haunt us...

So the Ken has been going well since I last spoke of it.  Seminar went great, the post-madatzim really have their shit together.  No disasters have happened, and the only thing that is both surprising and kinda scary is that I am the only bogrim madrich this year.  Woohoo?  I mean, it's a great opportunity to really try and show these kids what I have to offer, but at the same time it's really hard to do that without the support of a tzevet.  Oh well, I'm sure I'll be able to deal.

The only other challenge we're going through as an Eizor is Fall Merkaz. It's crazy expensive, and we only have limited funds available to give scholarships to the post-madatzim.  We've been talking to the Mazkirut Artzit about it, but they've been in Israel and will continue to be there for a while now.

Speaking of which, a little while ago I got an e-mail from Shawn Guttman entitled "URGENT! READ IMMEDIATELY!"  "Oh," I thought, "Maybe they've finally gotten us some more info on Fall Merkaz."  I read it, and my jaw hits the ground.  It says that everyone in my shichva who smoked pot is suspended from movement activities for 8 weeks pending a discussion they each have to have with the MA, and possibly if that doesn't happen for a year.  This includes at least 1 rosh eizor and 1 rosh ken, maybe 2, and several more active madrichim.

Yeah, stuff just got complicated.  We'll see what happens when the dust settles.

Josh

College revisited

So when I last spoke to you, college sucked.  Just wanted to report that that has changed, as I had hoped it would.  It took time, but I've made friends with lots of people on my floor and even a few from Hillel.  last night we had a floor wide slumber party, we go out to meals together all the time, and in general we just spend a large amount of time together.

All this is thanks to our RA, Rachel.  She has been wonderful, encouraging us to hang together and helping us to get used to living here in College.  She has been decidedly not lazy, which along with the fact that she is awesome has made her the amazing RA she is.

Aside from socially, college work is different from high school work.  Alot of things you can do, but that aren't technically required for the course - to me this is good homework since the professors are willing to let the students take responsibility for doing the work or not and know that if the students do the work the course will be easier for them.  I like that, it makes the homework worthwhile.  I must say though the biggest difference is how much it sucks to miss days of school in college.  The Jewish holidays will not be fun this year.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about that.  I'ma go eat lunch, write another blog entry perhaps, and then get to work.  Seeya in a few hours!

Josh

P.S. Drexel Hillel is awkward

College: a first outlook

Yeah, so college kinda sucks.  Somehow it's like being a high school freshman all over again - I don't understand how all these people relate to each other.  I don't see the patterns in who hangs out with who and what the hell is going on here anyway?!?  I'm sure I'll make friends, I just won't do it at the kind of events that are being held to encourage people to make friends.  I feel like I can see what the next few months will look like, and all I can say is that I'll feel much better about how things look when I can get the hell out of here and go dancing or to the ken.

Habonim's spoiled me, I think.  And I don't have the guts to make friends in such a new and uncomfortable environment.

Now that that's been established...

So kinda piggy backing off of that last post of so little time ago, I'ma talk now about the summer.

So the summer started with me going to help build the Na'aleh Gan, which was awesomely hardcore and let me spend some quality time with Koko and Niv, who I worked with later that summer, as well as Ilan Brandvain and Rebecca, who I didn't but with whom I had some contact on Workshop. It was awesome, really empowering to watch things grow over the course of the summer and the labor of digging really made me feel good about myself physically - I really do enjoy labor, at least as an occasional thing.

And then the summer proper started, and the contents of my previous post happened. Not gonna talk about it here, but keep it in mind when reading the next bits.

So Chalutz was going well aside from that, we were making changes and the whole process was just as empowering as I remembered from the previous year (although slightly less exciting because it was less novel). I got myself set up with a chug couples dancing under the nomer "Swing Dancing" which I was running with Yonah (actually did want it to be swing, but neither of us knew how and none of our guest stars pulled through. So it was couples dancing/rikud/Yonah is awesome) and everything was looking peachy until I found out my tzevet. In terms of people it looked like what I was hoping for at the time, strengthening old connections I wanted to be stronger and meeting new cool people. But the chanichim were the tzofim (going into 8th grade), and I had really been hoping for older chanichim.

No biggie. First session went by more or less smoothly, I made new good friends and connected a bit more with some people I already knew. It was like the Na'aleh I remembered, only I was less new and scared and stupid. Not not stupid, just less so. And then it ended, and we went into intersession. I landed a rikud chug that this time attracted exactly the people I was hoping for... and I got the tzofim again, after requesting the bogrim yet again this time putting the tzofim as my third and final choice.

Now I do understand that lots of people wanted the bogrim. They always do, and this year the bogrim were particularly awesome. (Geeze if any chanichim read this they probably would blow all the wrong things out of proportion. If you're a chanich, you'd better talk to me about what you read or you'll ruin my own opinion of my hadracha!) But the thing is, I didn't just want to work with bogrim because it would be awesome (and it would). I wanted it because I had so much to process from Workshop that I knew I would never get the opportunity to do so in peulot run for me. The only way I knew of to test the validity of some of what I learned is to teach it - if you teach correctly, teaching is like an idiot test, in that if there's something you can't teach to someone mature enough grasp the concept then you probably don't understand it well enough to evaluate it for yourself yet. I needed this kinda thing, 'cause the concepts I needed to test were all that I wanted to educate about right then.

The problem with all this is that I could not think of a way to make what I wanted to talk about relevant/understandable to 8th graders. Is it doable? I'm sure. But how can I find the applications of it if I don't even fully understand it yet? I didn't get to process these things on Workshop, and I wanted/needed to do so this summer. And I couldn't. And so it came to pass that although throughout the whole thing people were telling me I was "the ideal tzofim madrich" (whatever that fucking means) I didn't enjoy this summer as much as last year because I don't feel that I taught anybody anything but how to do Rikud, and as much as doing that helped me to get through the summer in more ways than one it's just not good enough to satisfy me.

There are lots of reasons for all this and I'm sure I brought part of it on myself. But I truly think I've moved on now. Because now I have a new Messima (which is what I treated Machaneh as): the Ken.

Yep, I'm Rosh Eizor Galil this year. One of 4, all people who I am relatively comfortable with, whom I have some seperate connection with, and who I respect and can view as allies in fulfilling different aspects of my goals. A kinda dream tzevet for me.

First of all, the Shaliach is Ron Alter who is moving from Na'aleh to Galil this year. Galil doesn't know how lucky it is! From what I've seen Ron is truly dedicated to the American-Jewish community as a whole, and has a unique combination of insights and viewpoints that let him appreciate Habo's strengths and weaknesses and how Habo could better acomplish it's goals where they intersect with his. He may not believe so much in creating an alternate society but he sure as hell sees how Habo can help the society and community it's in. It's more than a job to him, it is a Messima (although I dunno if he would call it that).

Next is Ben Profeta. He was Rosh Eizor when I was a post madatz, and he knows how Eizor Galil runs. And also, he's as into Israeli Dance as I am! I think my connection with Bpro is probably the most impersional (since I've never worked with him, working in the Ken as a post madatz I didn't really consider myself a Madrich so I don't think of myself as having been on tzevet with those people) but that doesn't change the fact that I knew going into this that I could rely on him.

And lastly, Nora Chong. Of the others I trust her vision for what the Ken should be most of all. I realize now that it's probably not gonna be what we wanted it to be on Workshop, but it's still gonna be awesome. And there's always next year. Despite this I still feel like Nora's not totally comfortable with me for some reason, and I don't know if I'm totally comfortable with her because of that. I feel like we need to sit down and talk, but I really don't know what about. Is she uneasy because she didn't know some of the things I wrote on my last post? Is she worried I'm gonna make a move on her? (I could rant for a year about how much easier it is to have meaningful non-sexual relationships with women when they're shomer negiah - once everybody accepts THAT's not gonna happen, everyone can relax more.) Whatever it is I hope it gets fixed soon. Having her there as someone to act as an ally and confidant would really make going through college so much easier, especially if I don't end up in a Bayit somehow next year.

Anyway, I feel like the Ken is going great. By which I mean that the Ken is going fine and I feel like I'm doing my part to make it that way - maybe even more than my part, because I have enough free time on my hand that I've put in possibly as many hours making sure things get done 10 times as thoroughly as they need be as everyone else (except Ron, for whom this is a full time job) has had time that they COULD be working on the Ken. Being in college will end this, but I think I've shown that I'm willing to put a significant amount of my free time into doing Ken work. This year looks promising, even though my post-workshop life got off to a rotten start.

Post Workshop Blues

Greetings my loyal readers. I always wonder who you are - I go long enough between entries in general that I often get a person or two tell me that they read this and I'm like "Woah, cool. And weird - I don't expect people I know to actually read what I write here."

Anyway, enough stalling. So Workshop, since my last entry, has ended. I was going to write that it's dead and gone, but I don't necessarily know that that's true yet. A couple things have come up to connect me to Workshop since it's ended, which makes me think that I haven't seen the end of the relationships that I formed and the "educational processes" that I started during that serendipitous year in Israel. These things have ranged from my beloved madricha Ruth Stevens calling to ask if I had anything cool about the jewish holidays to contribute to this years Boneh (to think, I might be able to affect the tochnit so soon after I'm off it! Awesome oppurtunity that I still haven't taken advantage of.) to Andrea Varsany starting a checkin on our listserve. Both of these were good things; not everything that reminds me of Workshop is.

The first thing that made me reevaluate the way I thought about Workshop was one of the latter categories, the negative. So I come to work at Na'aleh and people ask me some questions about Workshop like which kvutza I was in (Shesek, reppin' it up!) etc, when someone lets loose the words "I hear you guys smoked alot of pot." Now I don't know whether I had suspected it deep down or not, but any suspicions I had had were deeply enough suppressed that I was shocked. I asked em who had told em that, and they said they had just heard it spread around. God knows rumors spread quickly enough that that was almost undoubtedly true. From that point the conversation fades from my mind - what was left was a deep suspicion and sense of, for lack of a better word, betrayal.

So I talked with some people about it, enough to confirm that it was indeed true. It seems that it was a secret whose circle of those privy to it expanded slowly as Boneh and Kaveret wore on. Knowing all this gives me new tools to look back at times when people acted in ways I didn't understand, not as in acting like they were stoned (still can't recognize that) but by asking things like "Do you know what goes on in our kvutza?" or "Does it bother you that you don't know everything that goes on in this kvutza?" (which is an incredibly stupid question by the way, since if I knew enough to answer the question would be invalid). I started to realize that these were times when people did everything short of saying "Hey, you know people in this kvutza smoke pot right?" in order to try and clue me in on what's going on, to make me ask the questions and figure things out. And I'm pretty sure that my mind brushed close to a truth that it didn't want or know how to deal with a couple times, and maybe this caused a couple of the funks that I fell into on Workshop. And the way I came out of those funks I bet was by burying this deeper and deeper each time.

Why didn't I just follow what I logically should have noticed in all the time I spent in that house? I suppose I didn't want to add the complication of learning how to live in an environment with pot to my existing difficulties with fitting into the Workshop environment. And I dunno. Like it's still really hard for me to think about all this. I don't even feel angry about it any more (although I did at the time - before I realized that I should have figured this out I was damn furious and wanted nothing to do with my kvutza) I just feel... weird. Confused. Disconnected. I dunno what it is. Feelings that I haven't dealt with much since the early days of Workshop, or maybe since early in High School. Bah. Hopefully you know what I mean, 'cause I'm not gonna be able to communicate it to you any clearer than that. Moving on.

So yeah, that was kinda a rotten way to start the summer, especially considering that I had otherwise been feeling very welcomed, even somewhat competent since I had helped out during pre-pre-con during construction so I was more comfortable with Na'aleh's new site than most other people which made me feel good. But then this came, and if it hadn't been for some conversations I had with Xander and Ruth, and later with HPot, I probably would've written an angry letter to the listserve that would have been as likely to destroy any relationships I had had with members of my kvutza as repair them. Still haven't done much in the repair business - I've needed to prepare myself more before I'll be able to face some people enough to do it. I hope I'll have dealt with this enough - even after having talked it over a few different times with different people this still makes me upset enough to almost make me sick to my stomach with the whatever-they-are feelings.

What bothered me about it initially was probably what you'd expect - shame that I had been made a fool of in front of my tzevet and myself by having been ignorant of such an aspect of my kvutza's culture after having lived in it for months at a time, hatred of the ones who I'm always quickest to blame for things like this, confusion over how I had missed something like this but shame most of all. After a while I got over that, I've accepted what happened and if I don't like it I think I've started to understand why I didn't realize, and of course why it happened is probably as simple as why people smoke pot in general and just as unimportant to me. What still kinda shocks and upsets me to this day is that nobody told me when they found out.

Plenty of people who I thought would have told me knew, even as much as a month before the end. Looking back, as I said, I can see how most of them tried to tell me in their own ways. But when they saw that I didn't know what they were talking about, why didn't they just come right out and fucking tell me!?!?!?!? It's like what's been troubling me about communicating with people since forever. My weakest point failing me in my hour of most crucial need. But why, seeing that I somehow didn't understand and probably being bright enough to guess that I would be hurt if I found out third hand as was sure to happen, didn't anyone cut the bullshit (that is wrapped around most important things that people want to say to one another) FOR me and just tell me? Were they scared? Is it such a strong social taboo to tell someone about it? Did they actually think I would choose not to know if I let myself make a concious choice? Did they think I'd be able to fool myself forever? Did they just not care enough? I don't think it's the last one, but I just don't know. And what bites still. I just don't know.

Passover, and Judaism, on Workshop

One of the reasons I decided to go to Israel for a year was because over the course of my senior year of high school I started to suspect that I wanted Judaism to play a bigger role in my life. Many of the customs and practices I learned in Yeshiva interested me, and I wanted to look closer at them in order to better understand how the reasoning behind could still be relevant in modern life. All the sources for the inspiration I just spoke said that if I wanted to do that I should go to Yeshiva in Israel.
For various reasons that didn't end up happening, some in my control and some not. And so I ended up on Workshop, a program that was not designed to encourage people to investigate Jewish practice.

Looking back now I'm kinda glad that it did. If I had been given a traditional Yeshiva education before high school I would never have discovered the meaning that I did behind so many of the Jewish customs and forms of thought. Surely a program that gave me the tools to analyze Judaism in such a way had something to offer me.

This was about as far as I got for most of the program. To be sure on Boneh (the first portion of Workshop which took place on kibbutz Netiv Halamed Hei then) we took many hours of seminars on Jewish History. Most of what I learned there though I either already knew or didn't find terribly relevant to my life at the time or that which I had left behind back in the states. I don't truly understand why at least 10 hours a week were dedicated to a course that those who designed the tochnit should have known would not interest most of the participants. We simply didn't have the background to dedicate ourself to the course. Time dragged on, and I became less and less of the Jew that I was before Workshop.

Even though seminars got more interesting towards the end of Boneh as I began to learn about the history of Habonim (which I and enough other people felt was relevant to us that we could have peulot instead of lectures) it was in Poland that I began to have truly powerful experiences connected to my Judaism. It's ironic to me that although everyone disagreed with me whenever I brought up the Holocaust as a justification for Israel's existence Dror (the ancestor of Habonim Dror) found its legs in the Holocaust, and that was also how the program tried the hardest to connect us to our Judaism.


Winter chofesh and Habo History passed, and finally we were on Kaveret in Akko. Any plans I might have had of finding a chevruta and learning had long since vanished, my Jewish self dried out from months in the desert. All I had left at that point were the random Yiddish and Aramaic sayings that I had learned that kept popping into my head and reminding me of who I was and why I had came on Workshop. It was here that for the first time Habonim taught me on how to live my day to day life in connection to Judaism. This connection came in the form of Jez Aron; member of Kvutzat Yovel, terror of MBI ט'ז, and all around asshole who despite it all seems to me to be the closest thing Habo has to a rabbi. His Cultural Judaism course was the first acknowledgment that I had gotten that Habo realized that the way most of us on the program practiced Judaism was not one that would be able to survive for generations to come. He advocated an approach to Judaism of learning about and questioning Jewish laws and traditions and finding ways to make them relevant to your life. Finally, something aside from the "just do what feels good" approach that I saw in most of the other habos to one degree or another!

Nothing, however, could overwhelm the overpowering effect that Workshop culture was still having on me. My attempts at creating a Shabbat culture on Kaveret failed, mostly because I didn't see anyone who were willing to be my allies in it. Which brings me to the title story of this essay - Passover.

When we first started planning our Passover seder I had high hopes. I thought that perhaps everybody would work together to create a passover seder that was meaningful to all of us - unfortunately I somehow forgot how little meaning most Workshoppers found in Judaism. Followed the traditional seder format up to the meal, but most of the parts weren't interesting to most of the people and those parts that were weren't really meaningful to me. The seder was just as aimless as anything we had ever done. As a chevrati event it succeeded, but it did nothing to investigate what the Passover Seder means, either to any of us or to any of the Jews that had lived for the past 2000 years.

So now here I sit with 4 weeks of workshop (including one of chofesh) left ahead of me. I look at the task of teaching the people here to value Judaism, and I realize that if I can teach a single person that Judaism is valuable enough for them to invest more into fitting it into their daily lives it would be an incredible achievement. And so I begin to plan, not to work towards this goal which I would say now is beyond me but rather to try and work with an atmosphere more suited to such a task - Machaneh. Perhaps I can try and shape the teaching apparatus we use and the madrichim who run it that Judaism is actually something they need to teach, and help them to figure out how to do it. I say them only because if there's one thing that Workshop has taught me it's that I can't bring Judaism to Habonim alone. Until the time when Judaism becomes a part of a habo life, I leave you with this song.

When in Rome, by Nickel Creek


Where can a sick man go

When he can’t choke down the medicine,

The old Doc knows.

A specialist came to town, but he stays at home,

saying no one knows, so I don’t, Honey, when in Rome.



Where can a teacher go?

Wherever she thinks people need the things she knows.

Hey, those books you gave us look good on the shelves at home,

And they’ll burn warm in the fireplace, Teacher, when in Rome.



Grab a blanket, sister, we’ll make smoke signals.

Bring in some new blood

It feels like we’re alone.

Grab a blanket, brother,

so we don’t catch cold from one another

Oh, I wonder if we’re stuck in Rome.



Where can a dead man go?

A question with an answer only dead men know.

But I’m gonna bet they never really feel at home,

If they spend a lifetime learning how to live in Rome.

Kaveret, and kvutza life

So finally, the long awaited second half of the workshop tochnit is here. Has been here for quite some time, almost a month now. So now I've gotten here, settled in, started to call my lovely house in Akko home... and I'm still not happy. I'm happier living as I am than as I was in the states, to be sure. But I've discovered just how difficult it is to be living with 24 people, people with lifestyles (most of them, anyway) very different then mine, people who I can't simply ignore because I care about them because I'm in a kvutza with them. But I don't think that Kaveret is making me closer with my kvutza - I don't know them any better than I did when I started. All it is making me do is realize just how little some people care about many of the things I value, and how little I feel they care about me. Stupid kvutza.

Habonim Dror, the Tnuat Bogrim, and "wtf mate?"

So every member of HDNA knows the score, right? It's the North American chapter of the international movement Habonim Dror. And then there's this thing called the Tnuat Bogrim (graduate's movement) which some people might have heard of.

The relationship between these organizations can get complex at times. Things like funding and Israeli Shlichim flow down to Habonim from the Kibbutz Movement through Habonim Dror Olami (World HD). However, it is not World HD who runs most of our programming: in America we plan our own stuff (as might be expected) and in Israel the Tnuat Bogrim plan and run all the educational aspects of the movement, even though technically HDO has authority.

This is all interesting, but not really what I mean to talk about today. For you see, as those of you who read the Habonim Dror Olami website already know, the Tnuat Bogrim has recently declared that they will no longer be a part of HD Olami, and made a huge request to the national movements like HDNA - transfer control of your shnat (workshop) programs over to the Tnuat Bogrim.

Before we get into what this means, let me just ask one thing of you. Don't spread this around. By this I mean don't get on the phone or AIM to your best friend and be like "Yo HDNA is not gonna be a part of world habonim dror any more!" or something like that. I know little enough about what's happening that I probably shouldn't be blogging about this - meaning that you know even less than that, and starting rumors about this and creating panic is exactly what HDNA does NOT need around now.

That being said, here's what this power struggle means. If HDNA choses to disown the Tnuat Bogrim, they lose their educators. The Tnuat Bogrim runs MBI, and more importantly it runs Workshop - I'll get into why it's so irreplaceable, but for the moment just accept that it's fairly true. If, however, HDNA choses to follow the Tnuat Bogrim out of HD Olami it loses the political ties that bring it Israeli Shlichim, funding from the Kibbutz Movement and the Jewish Agency, to say nothing of it's existing connections to the other national movements (especially those in latin america). Again, though these connections could theoretically be reforged it would be a huge disaster to the movement to lose them.

All this brings the following question into the spotlight: why? Why does the Tnuat Bogrim feel the need for these extreme measures? The reason is one of ideology.

Ever since the 1970's the kibbutz movement has been on a downswing. Fewer and fewer kibbutzim were being founded, and more and more were becoming privatized as agriculture and defending the borders became less relevant to Israel's current situation. As a result of this aliya, which was the official goal of the movement up through the turn of the century, has been in a steady decline until in the 1990's nobody had made chalutzik aliya for 10 years and nobody running the movement was seriously planning to.

This eventually resulted in the creation of the Tnuat Bogrim - if you wanna learn more than that, either ask me or go on Workshop. The TB is made up of people who made aliya not to traditional kibbutzim but instead to "kibbutzei ironi" or urban kibbutzim, and instead of farming the land work towards reforming Israeli society. Work that is (in my opinion and theirs) both loyal to the ultimate goals of the movement as they have always been and relevant to today's society.

Unfortunately HD Olami doesn't agree with all this. Silvio Joskowicz, the world Mazkir Tnua (chief movement secretary), is a kibbutznik who has privatized along with the kibbutz he lives on, a kibbutz I had the privilege of sharing with him for a few months earlier this year. He has been mazkir for 9 years, where previously the mazkirut had passed from the hands of a spanish speaker to an english speaker every 4 years. And all in all the World HD office is run like the office of a corporation, with him being the CEO of aforesaid company and having final say in all matters.

Now this goes against our principles, because we believe in shituf (cooperation) and democracy. And the TB have tried to institute structural changes in order to put some checks and balances on Silvio's power, but all of these efforts have come to nothing over the past few years. Which brings us to what's happening now.

What happened about a week ago was that James and Mauri, representing the english and spanish speakers of the Tnuat Bogrim, put a letter on Silvio's desk in the world office with a list of structural changes. Some of these changes would have to be instituted before the TB would run any more programs for HDO.

Alot to take in, no? It hasn't been much easier following it day by day, less than 100 miles away from where it's all been happening.

Who's in the right, you ask? As I've already said, if needed my vote goes for the Tnuat Bogrim. But I think what will happen is that both sides will make some concessions and when the dust settles there will once again be only 1 habonim dror, hopefully a better one.

If you want more info on the current situation comment here and I have a list of all the major letters/public forum posts that I found relevant to the conflict to date that I can e-mail you. Several were in portugese or spanish so I used a free online translator to handle those, and then cleaned up the grammer by hand. I encourage you all to read it, either from me or on the HD olami forum topic about it, before speaking about it to friends - remember that even if you know what you want to explain to your friends, you need to know MORE than that to explain it well.

Ah well. I'd love to talk about this more, so feel free to comment or IM me about it. Hope y'all are doing well!

Aleh V'Hagshem!
Josh Marantz