BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

Keli Ata wrote a good piece in March 2007 about the Israeli people, who endure daily acts of terrorism. She asked if their anxiety when they hear Arabic is the result of racism or PTSD? The answer, in my mind, was PTSD. Absolutely no question. I have had PTSD for 43 years now. Probably longer. PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) is joked about and claimed by a lot of people who may or may not have it. And the 'fluff' we can read on the web about symptoms is not the same as the hard diagnostic materials that clinicals & psychiatrists have access too. The latter is horrifying in its accuracy to sufferers. I didn't know I had it until about 1998. About 1 year into my being a mother and just a few months after I was diagnosed with serious hormonally-caused Post Partum Depression. When my counselor brought it up to me, she honestly thought I knew that I had it. I didn't. Nor did I think I was depressed. I just thought I was moody, like everyone always ac...

by Underground Panther in the Sky When I was growing up and I faced people in school on the bus, people who rejected and bullied me, soon I felt strange, like I had been marked. When kids from schools I had never attended, kids I never met spat on me, it felt like I had some invisible neon sign on my forehead -- I could not see it only bullies could see it. It felt bad like the mark of Cain. It was burned into my being by abusers. The contact I had with psychopathic evil that erased my self-hood as an innocent kid, in repeated blinding soul-shattering moments of senseless unspeakable horrors and betrayal, made a mark. If you care and can feel, and see too much of the evil in the reality we live through, too soon, too close it changes you forever. I knew this was true even when I was 6 years old. I just didn't have the words to express it than like I do now. It felt as if abuse had made a change within me, a message I did not want to send out, advertising the damaged goods -- I am w...

Absolutely Disgusting! Ariel man poses as rabbi, rapes woman to ‘repair her soul’ Yonatan Bassa, 38, posed as Rabbi, forced woman seeking counseling to have sex in order to 'repair her soul'; defrauded her of $18,000 by Vered Luvitch The Tel-Aviv District Court charged 38-year-old Yonatan Bassa of Ariel with rape and committing an indecent act Tuesday, after the latter had sexually assaulted a woman who had turned to him for counseling while he had posed as a rabbi. The indictment states that Bassa would claim to be a rabbi and give Torah lesson to Jewish penitents, or ba’alei teshuvah, even though he was never ordained. In March 2007, he was approached by a woman who had asked for his guidance and help in returning to the Jewish faith. During this first meeting he asked the woman for money to ‘redeem her soul’, and instructed her to stop psychotherapy as well as all psychiatric medication. Bassa’s charge obediently stopped taking her prescribed psychiatric medication, an...

The End of the Jewish Newspaper? by Meredith Kesner Lewis A story came across my desk today discussing the fact that Jewish newspapers are fighting to stay alive in a world dominated by the internet. At the recent American Jewish Press Association conference, journalists asked themselves: How vulnerable are Jewish newspapers to the economic and social forces buffeting daily papers? Does having a reliable niche audience shield the Jewish press from ruin? Might Jewish papers fade in this age of Google and blogs? (MORE) I thought to myself, what year did this conference take place? 2000? For nearly a decade now, the journalism world has been redefining itself in the context of the web. Those that have not adapted, have not survived. Darwinism at its best. Brandeis professor Jonathan Sarna noted that: We really do have some first-class Jewish papers that have set a new standard for Jewish journalism,” he says. “There are significant stories that broke in the Jewish press because ...