News Roundup – Fri. 2/26

Strawberries, the Internet, Lipa Schmeltzer, and Track 5 on Michoel Schnitzler’s latest album have all been banned. So what’s a desperate rabbi to do? Ban salmon fish, it seems. Rabbi Moshe Karp from Modiin Ilit, Israel is seeking support from rabbis to proclaim salmon, halibut, flounder, and other fish treif. According to Karp, Anisakis, a parasite that matures from larvae in the visceral cavity of a fish, renders the fish uneatable to the faithful. With a name like Karp this fishy business seems like a Purim joke. But Karp ain’t kidding. Lucky for us, most U.S. rabbis aren’t taking the bait. The sages of the Talmud, they claim, were aware of this parasite and declared it inoffensive. The Talmud rocks, man. Kick-ass salmon-loving rabbis.

Rabbi Elazar Abuchatzeira, the kabbalist from Be’er Sheba, Israel, has a magic number and it ain’t eighteen. 100,000 seems to be his number of choice, for which, when counted in dollars, he hands out blessings right and left. If the blessing isn’t fulfilled, he’ll have you pay another $100,000 to make it work. But some people are upset. The rabbi is a fraud, they say. He claims to bless them, but really he curses them. One man’s daughter even died because of it. Anyeurism, shmanyeurism, what do the doctors know? We need to stop this guy from cursing.

A neo-Nazi skinhead turned Orthodox Jew is indeed fascinating. Pawell, a young man raised in Poland as a baptized Catholic, discovered that both he and his wife – also a former neo-Nazi – had Jewish roots. Now he wears a Chasidic hat and she wears a sheitel. He is studying to be a shoichet, he says, noting that he has some experience with knives. Despite his embrace of a new kind of extremism, we think it’s a better choice than neo-Nazism, and for that Pawell has our respect.

Circumcision without use of anesthesia is criminal mutilation, plain and simple. So ruled a Finnish court, ordering the parents of a newborn to pay the child 1,500 euros for pain and suffering after the circumcision went awry and caused excessive bleeding. We’re all for the cessation of outdated and superstitious practices, but we find such a court order odd nonetheless. If raising a child – which we assume the parents will – isn’t worth 1,500 euros, we don’t know what is.

Michael Rebenwurzel, a 27-year-old Hatzolah member from Brooklyn, thought he hit a deer in the Town of Fallsburg in July of 2008. As it turns out, he killed 50-year-old Julio Torres, who, incidentally, was not a deer. Torres was a father of two children, whose mother, Salvadora Negron, cried as her statement was read in court: “Rebenwurzel never showed any remorse or compassion for our children or even offered condolences,” she wrote. “Instead, he acted with arrogance, as if he had only killed an animal. When he looked at me, he looked as if I were nothing.” Rebenwurzel’s windshield had blood and body fragments after the accident. But he didn’t bother to investigate. After all, who stops his car after hitting a deer?

Disclaimer: Unpious.com is neither fair nor balanced. We are totally partial to snarkiness, cynicism, sarcasm, and Mendelsohn’s pizza.