Orthodox Jewish Outreach

"Machon Shlomo was founded in 1982 with a small student body and a small staff, in an apartment building that stood at the entrance to a fledgling Jerusalem neighborhood called Har Nof. At the time, the community consisted of a dozen newly finished buildings perched atop a mountainside, flanked on either side by forest and miles of undeveloped land. The only road to the main city was a dirt path. It was this unassuming location, far from the bustle of the city and the distractions of tourism, that the yeshiva’s founder, ...., hand-picked as the site where motivated students could build themselves to achieve greatness." Those words are from the Machon Shlomo website. They are an attempt to glamorize what was an unhealthy situation.  Har Nof is a normal community now. Back then it was a construction site. There was no bookstore, pizza shop, or falafel store. In Israel, that means it was not an actual neighborhood. We had few neighbors and had no simchas to attend, no bar mitzva...

A few of the outreach groups engage in deceptive recruiting. They present themselves as non-denominational and unaffiliated with any branch of Judaism. This alone doesn’t make any of them into cults, but it’s a start. The staff photos on several of the outreach sites hide yarmulkes , even awkwardly framing the photos of many of the rabbis from the middle of the forehead downwards. The words Orthodox, Torah, mitzvahs, commandments, soul, spirituality, and even God are not obvious or don’t appear at all on several of the websites. What you see instead are references to Jewish heritage, tradition, identity, and wisdom – vague terms which any branch of Judaism might pursue but which mean one thing to Reform Jews and something entirely different to Orthodox ones.  Here’s an example :  DATA helps you to explore your Jewish heritage through engaging, thought provoking learning experiences in a warm and inviting atmosphere. DATA is a non-profit, unaffiliated Jewish learning cent...

  "the mission of shar is to allow every participant the opportunity to make decisions in life on how they should live their lives."   Rabbi Raphael Butler   President of Olami and Afikim Foundations The Shaar - YouTube   That can’t be the mission. I know the yeshiva world. The mission is to turn them into yeshiva men, who follow their rav and the gadolim. Maybe at the end of that, there’s a decision to make about going back to work or staying in learning, but that’s probably about it. Portraying the mission as choice is deceptive, designed to get people to lower their guard by portraying the program as the opposite of what it really is. It could be that this one man really has this intention, but there's no way the organization follows it. I'd be shocked. And I know that's not the general environment at Shaar Yashuv which is where the Shaar is located.