Luke Ford

No Orthodox Jew fully lives up to the demands of Orthodox Judaism.

A lenient ruling here means there’s one less thing Orthodox Jews are doing that breaks the Torah.

If you won’t use a key card on Shabbat, you are going to cause major inconvenience and aggravation for the hotel. After a certain level of aggravation is reached, goyim won’t want Jews around.

Forward: Consider the key card: a piece of plastic no bigger than a business card, flimsy and seemingly innocent. And yet it’s also possibly the trigger to a cascade of changes that could transform the experience of the Sabbath by making a bevy of other devices, from iPads to stoves to cars, permissible on the traditionally low-tech day of rest.
That’s the discussion that has been making the rounds in some Orthodox circles the past few weeks, after a recent rabbinical ruling loosened the prohibition on the use of a magnetic key card in, for example, a hotel on the Sabbath.
“It was a long battle, Shabbat fought back valiantly, but she ultimately lost the fight against technology,” Ysoscher Katz, head of Talmud studies at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, an Orthodox rabbinical seminary in the Bronx, wrote on his public Facebook page.

Forward: Brooklyn’s Orthodox community is mourning the apparent suicide of 22-year-old construction worker Yakov Krausz, whose body was discovered Wednesday in an elevator motor room, the Daily News reported.
His death marks at least the 26th suicide of a young adult in New York-area Orthodox community over the past ten months, according to Zvi Gluck, founder and director of the Orthodox social service group Amudim.
Members of the Boro Park Shomrim, a private Orthodox security patrol, organized a frantic search for Krausz on Wednesday afternoon after he missed a meeting with his wife, according to reports.
The Daily News reported that Krausz suffered from depression.
“I am completely out of words right now,” wrote activist Boorey Deutsch, a relative of Krausz, in a public Facebook post.
As news of Krausz’s death spread, friends circulated a parody version LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” created for Krausz’s 2013 wedding.
Amudim’s Gluck, who has been tracking suicides among men and women under the age of 35 in the Orthodox community in the New York area since last Rosh Hashanah, said that the Orthodox community needs to cultivate greater awareness of mental health issues.
“Once we can, as a community, accept that mental illness, sex abuse and addiction is as big a problem as it is, we can create programming to provide services,” Gluck said. “We have to acknowledge that this is a problem that exists.”
Krausz’s suicide comes just weeks after Rebecca Wassertrum, 28, died after jumping off of the George Washington Bridge. That followed the July 2015 suicide of ex-Orthodox coder Faigy Mayer and the November 2015 suicide of Mayer’s sister, Sarah Mayer.
Gluck said that, until recently, any death of a young person was blamed on an “aneurysm.”
“It’s the shame factor that’s killing the next generation,” Gluck said. “That’s what we’re trying to take away.”