Tuesday, April 22, 2014

A00026 - Rivka Haut, Champion of the Rights of Orthodox Jewish Women

Rivka Haut, Dies at 71; Championed Rights of Orthodox Jewish Women

By 
    Rivka Haut via Phyllis Chesler
    Rivka Haut, a prominent champion of Orthodox Jewish women fighting for divorce in rabbinical courts and seeking to pray together as a group, died on March 30 in the Bronx. She was 71.
    The cause was cancer, her daughter Sheryl Haut said.
    In 1980, when she was living in Brooklyn, Ms. Haut organized one of the first public protests in the United States concerning Orthodox divorce, outside a building owned by a man who had refused to give his wife a document known as a get, which is needed for traditional Jewish divorces. Under Orthodox law, only the husband has the power to grant a divorce.
    Though Ms. Haut, a teacher and author on Jewish topics, did not question that tradition, she fought to make it easier for Orthodox women to obtain a get through rabbinical courts, where they are known as agunot (pronounced aw-goo-NOTE), Hebrew for “chained women.”
    “She took a personal interest in these women and she never even considered turning anybody away,” said Blu Greenberg, the founder of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. Ms. Haut would take calls day and night for decades, helping hundreds of women navigate the often dizzying religious procedures to receive a divorce.
    “In many ways she was my conscience and in many ways the conscience of the community,” said Rabbi Dov Linzer, the dean of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School, who leads a daily Talmud study group in which Ms. Haut participated for several years. “She would say to rabbis all over, ‘You’re not doing enough to help these women, and you could be doing more.’ ”
    Her aim, he said, was to help women “who were suffering.” It was not, however, to challenge Orthodox Judaism as a political activist, her daughter said.
    “Eventually people started to call her a feminist, but she had a pretty traditional role at home,” Sheryl Haut said. “For her it wasn’t about equality between men and women, but about women’s dignity and voice.”
    In the late 1970s, Ms. Haut also helped organize, in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, one of the first Orthodox women’s prayer groups, with women reading from the Torah scrolls, an activity long reserved for men.
    In 1988, while on a flight to Jerusalem for a women’s conference with the American Jewish Congress, she decided to convene the first all-female prayer service with a Torah scroll at the Western Wall, considered one of Judaism’s holiest sites. There, women in the group, wearing prayer shawls, publicly led prayers and read from the Torah.
    Their actions drew immediate protests from ultra-Orthodox religious leaders. The demonstration, however, caught the attention of Orthodox women worldwide, and a movement grew under the name Women of the Wall. A group has continued to meet at the site monthly despite continued cries of protest in Israel. Last May, thousands of Orthodox Jews, including women and girls, tried to block members of the group from praying at the wall.
    “We did not know — how could we? — that we were beginning a new chapter in the history of Jewish women and prayer, yet we felt the momentous nature of our act,” Ms. Haut wrote in “Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism’s Holy Site” (2002), an anthology of essays she edited with Phyllis Chesler. “It was an extraordinary experience for me, combining both public and private prayer at that sacred site.”
    Ms. Haut was born Renee Rivka Makowsky in Brooklyn on May 13, 1942, the eldest daughter of Teddy and Esta Makowsky. She attended high school at the Yeshiva of Flatbush.
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    After graduating from Brooklyn College with a degree in English, Ms. Haut received a master’s in Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, a Conservative Jewish institution, in part because no Orthodox seminaries offered advanced study programs for women, said Tamara Weissman, Ms. Haut’s younger daughter.
    She later taught courses at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and the Academy for Jewish Religion. She dropped her given English name when she became more involved in advocating on behalf of agunot in the early 1980s.
    Besides her daughters, Ms. Haut is survived by a sister, Arlene Talerman, and six grandchildren.
    Ms. Haut moved to the Riverdale section of the Bronx after the death in 2001 of her husband, Rabbi Irwin Haut, who was also a lawyer and the author of a book about the agunot.
    She was a co-author of several books on Jewish topics. In one, a prayer book titled “Shaarei Simcha: Gates of Joy,” she and Adena Berkowitz included traditional Jewish blessings but also liturgy written by them — the first by Orthodox women to be published in modern times.
    “To be involved with writing prayers and creating rituals gave her joy,” Ms. Weissman said.
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    Monday, April 21, 2014

    A00025 - Adrianne Wadewitz, Wikipedia Editor

    Adrianne Wadewitz, 37, Wikipedia Editor, Dies After Rock Climbing Fall

    By 
      Adrianne WadewitzPeter B. James
      Adrianne Wadewitz, a scholar of 18th-century British literature who became one of the most prolific and influential editors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, died on April 8 in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 37.
      The cause was head injuries sustained in a fall on March 29 while Ms. Wadewitz (pronounced WAH-de-wits) was rock climbing in Joshua Tree National Park, said Peter B. James, Ms. Wadewitz’s partner.
      She had taken up rock climbing only in the last couple of years, and on her personal blog she described the thrill of creating “a new narrative” about herself beyond that of a bookish, piano-playing Wikipedia contributor.
      The bulk of Ms. Wadewitz’s work at Wikipedia concerned biographies of women, particularly writers and thinkers from the era that she studied to earn her Ph.D. An early contribution, or “edit,” was in 2006, when she “punched up the intro” to the article about Jane Austen, to note Austen’s “masterful use of both indirect speech and irony.”
      More than 49,000 edits later, Ms. Wadewitz had created a whole library of articles about figures like the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, the children’s book writer Mary Martha Sherwood and the “woman of letters”Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Each of these biographical articles was labeled a “featured article” — the highest praise her fellow editors could give — appearing on the site’s home page.
      “It is a huge loss for Wikipedia,” said Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation in San Francisco that runs Wikipedia, who has made a priority of getting more women to edit it. “She may have been our single biggest contributor on these topics — female authors, women’s history.”
      Ms. Wadewitz defied many of the stereotypes of a Wikipedia editor — young, male, tech-obsessed. But she was typical of Wikipedia editors in “being persnickety, fact-obsessed, citation-obsessed,” Ms. Gardner said.
      While Wikipedia is famously the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, the bulk of the unpaid work is done by a relatively small number of people willing to devote the time to do the research, navigate the editing system and learn the community mores.
      The reward for contributors like Ms. Wadewitz, Mr. James said, is that their work can reach a large audience. “She had a succinct way of saying it,” he recalled. “As an academic you could write a paper on a particular topic, and it might be read by dozens of people, whereas if you write a prominent Wikipedia article it might be read by millions of people.”
      Adrianne Wadewitz was born on Jan. 6, 1977, in Omaha and grew up there and in North Platte, Neb. She attended Columbia University, graduating in 1999 with a degree in English. She earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2011. At her death, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Digital Learning and Research at Occidental College.
      Besides Mr. James, she is survived by her parents, the Rev. Dr. Nathan R. Wadewitz and Betty M. Wadewitz.
      This summer, she was to take a full-time position in the digital humanities at Whittier College, integrating online skills with liberal arts research and education.
      Ms. Wadewitz’s interest in rock climbing played out on Wikipedia. Her last editing was to improve an article about Steph Davis, a prominent female climber and wingsuit flier. In Ms. Wadewitz’s hands, the article became filled with personal details, spectacular photos, a highlighted quotation and 25 footnotes.
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      Monday, April 14, 2014

      A00024 - Irene Fernandez, Champion of the Oppressed in Malaysia

      Irene Fernandez, Champion of the Oppressed in Malaysia, Dies at 67

      By 



        Irene Fernandez in 2012. Rahman Roslan for The New York Times

        Irene Fernandez, a champion of the oppressed in Malaysia whose indefatigable advocacy for better treatment of foreign migrant workers prompted her government to denounce her as a traitor and human rights groups to shower her with awards, died on March 25 in Serdang, Malaysia. She was 67.
        The cause was heart failure, Human Rights Watch said.
        Ms. Fernandez abandoned a career as a teacher in her early 20s to fight for social causes. She helped organize the first textile workers union in Malaysia and campaigned for women’s rights, improved consumer education and safer pesticides.
        Her signature crusade was for the rights of the poorest and most marginalized people in her relatively rich country: the migrant workers who do the dirty, ill-paying jobs most native Malaysians shun. Foreigners account for more than 16 percent of the work force in a population of 29 million people, and more than half the foreigners are in the country illegally.
        Coming from Indonesia, the Philippines and other Asian nations, these illegal workers toil in homes and at palm oil plantations and construction sites. Ms. Fernandez unearthed evidence of their being beaten and nearly starved. In an interview with The New York Times in 2012, she characterized the situation as “slavery days coming back.”
        As much as their labors are needed, the illegal workers irritate many Malaysians, as their counterparts do in many countries. Some Malaysians join government-sanctioned volunteer groups to seek them out.
        In September, the government began a campaign to arrest and deport 500,000 of these workers; it said their collective use of social services and public education was expensive and went against the government’s policy of relying less on unskilled labor.
        Ms. Fernandez condemned the deportation drive, partly because it failed to distinguish refugees from other foreign workers, she said.
        She achieved her greatest prominence in 1995, when she interviewed more than 300 migrant workers being detained by the government. They told her of rapes, beatings and inadequate food, water and medical care. In March 1996, after a newspaper printed a memo she had provided detailing her findings, the government charged her with “maliciously publishing false news.”
        Her criminal trial dragged on for seven years, one of the longest in Malaysian history. Stanley Augustin, the prosecutor, accused her of blackening her country’s reputation.
        “The court must take into account the interests of the nation,” he said. “Freedom of the press is not freedom to say anything you like. It must be confined and cannot hurt the public or national interest.”
        She was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison, then released pending appeal. In 2008, an appellate judge reversed her conviction.
        In 2012, Ms. Fernandez again outraged her government by telling an Indonesian newspaper that Malaysia was not safe for foreign workers because it did not have a legal framework or specific laws to protect them.
        “When she says something like that, doesn’t she realize that her actions do not help the country or the Malaysian people?” Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin said in an interview with The New Straits Times, an English-language Malaysian newspaper.
        Ms. Fernandez’s parents were Indians who moved to Malaysia to work on a rubber plantation when the country was under British rule. She was born there on April 18, 1946.

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        She traced her awareness of social and political issues to her childhood. As the daughter of a plantation supervisor, she was told not to play with laborers’ children. “I always found that a big conflict in me,” she told The Times.
        She became a teacher, but at 23 left the security of a government job for the uncertain life of an activist, working for various labor and rights groups, including the Young Christian Workers Movement.
        In 1991 she formed the organization Tenaganita (the name means women’s force in Malay), which ran shelters for migrants and victims of human trafficking. It eventually expanded its efforts to include men.
        Ms. Fernandez’s many awards include the Amnesty International Award in 1998, the International PEN Award in 2000, the Jonathan Mann Award in 2004 and the Right Livelihood Award in 2005.
        Her survivors include her husband of 35 years, Joseph Paul; two daughters, Katrina and Tania; a son, Camerra Jose; and two sisters, Josie and Aegile.
        She never lost her taste for battle. During her trial, she told The Los Angeles Times that she was ready for jail.
        “It will give me an opportunity to write a report on jail conditions and see what changes need to be made,” she said.

        *****

        Irene Fernandez (18 April 1946 – 31 March 2014) was a Malaysian human rights activist. She was a PKR supreme council member [1] and the director and co-founder of the non-governmental organization Tenaganita, which promotes the rights of migrant workers and refugees in Malaysia.
        In 1995, Irene Fernandez published a report on the living conditions of the migrant workers entitled "Abuse, Torture and Dehumanised Conditions of Migrant Workers in Detention Centres".[2] The report was based in part on information given to her by Steven Gan and a team of reporters from The Sun, who had uncovered evidence that 59 inmates, primarily Bangladeshis, had died in the Semenyih immigration detention camp of the preventable diseases typhoid and beriberi.[3][4] When Gan and his colleagues were blocked by Sun editors from printing the report in the paper, they passed it to Fernandez.[5]
        She was arrested in 1996 and charged with 'maliciously publishing false news'.[5] After seven years of trial, she was found guilty in 2003 and convicted to one year's imprisonment. Released on bail pending her appeal, her passport was held by the courts, and as a convicted criminal, she was barred from standing as parliamentary candidate in the 2004 Malaysian elections.[citation needed]
        In 2005, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "her outstanding and courageous work to stop violence against women and abuses of migrant and poor workers".[6]
        Irene Fernandez's appeal at the High Court resumed on 28 October 2008. On 24 November 2008, Justice Mohd Apandi Ali overturned her earlier conviction and acquitted her, ending the thirteen-year case.[7][8]
        She died on 31 March 2014 of heart failure.[9]
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        A00023 - Melba Hernandez, Confidante of Castro

        Melba Hernández, a Confidante of Castro From First Volley, Is Dead at 92

        By 
          Melba Hernández and Fidel Castro at the 1999 burial of a fellow revolutionary, Jesus Montane, whom she married. Jose Goitia/Associated Press
          When Melba Hernández met Fidel Castro in the early 1950s, she likened it to a religious experience. “I felt secure,” she said. “I felt I had found the way.”
          In an interview with Tad Szulc for his 1986 book, “Fidel: A Critical Portrait,” Ms. Hernández continued, “Fidel spoke in a very low voice, he paced back and forth, then came close as if to tell you a secret, and then you suddenly felt you shared the secret.”
          Ms. Hernández, who became one of the first four members of Mr. Castro’s general staff, and who died at 92 on March 9 in Havana, went on to share many secrets with the man she helped make the Cuban revolution — beginning with its opening volley, an attack on the Moncada army barracks in southeastern Cuba on July 26, 1953.
          For her revolutionary services, which included helping to start the Cuban Communist Party, Ms. Hernández was named a national heroine, among many other honors. After the Vietnam War ended on terms most Communists liked, she was her country’s ambassador to the united Vietnam.
          “For our people, she is one of the most glorious and beloved combatants of the revolutionary process, an everlasting example of the Cuban woman,” the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, on which Ms. Hernández served, said in a statement.
          In her later years, Ms. Hernández, her face crowned with snowy white curls, occasionally appeared at official events, accompanied by one of the Castro brothers. Fidel stepped down as president in 2006, citing ill health, and passed command to his younger brother Raúl.
          She was a presence throughout the Castro era, beginning when Fidel Castro was abandoning plans to run for Cuba’s national legislature as the candidate of a non-Communist party in favor of covertly plotting to overthrow the government. Both were young lawyers dedicated to serving the poor and dispossessed.
          That idealism turned deadly at the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, on the southeast coast. More than 130 outnumbered, outgunned rebels — accounts differ on precisely how many — failed to capture military arms, their objective. As many as 60 were killed in the fighting or as prisoners. About 18 police officers and soldiers were killed.
          What was a disaster in human terms helped put the little-known Mr. Castro at the center of the opposition to the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Six years later, Batista was overthrown by Mr. Castro’s so-called 26th of July Movement.
          To disguise themselves, the rebels needed army uniforms, and Ms. Hernández persuaded a sergeant to give her more than 100. At the insurgents’ hide-out on a rented farm, she sewed insignia of rank on their sleeves. She brought rifles or shotguns (accounts differ) to them in a florist’s carton.
          With Haydée Santamaría, the other woman in Castro’s original top leadership, she ironed the uniforms in dim light the night before the attack. The women prepared a chicken fricassee dinner that reverberates through Cuban revolutionary history as the last meal of either heroes or cannon fodder. They passed out glasses of milk.
          Mr. Castro initially vetoed sending the women on the mission, but was persuaded to dispatch them as nurses to help the wounded. Both were arrested when the mission failed.
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          The two were released from jail after serving five months of a seven-month sentence, and the still-imprisoned Mr. Castro used them as his trusted agents on the outside. He smuggled out letters written with lemon juice, which they made visible by ironing them. They oversaw the publishing of the text of Mr. Castro’s courtroom defense of himself and his revolution under the title “History Will Absolve Me.”
          The women led demonstrations demanding amnesty for their compatriots. On May 15, 1955, Batista released Mr. Castro and the others.
          By this time, Ms. Hernández had moved to Mexico to make contact with movement members exiled there. Her immediate assignment was to dissuade Batista opponents from supporting the former Cuban president Carlos Prío Socarrás, who had been deposed by the dictator.
          In July 1955, Mr. Castro joined Ms. Hernández and other top leaders who had assembled in Mexico, among them Raúl Castro, Che Guevara and Jesus Montane, whom Ms. Hernández later married. They bought a dilapidated yacht, the Granma, and made plans to use it to return a small expeditionary force to Cuba.
          Leaving from Veracruz, they arrived at Playa Las Coloradas, Cuba, on Dec. 2, 1956. Three days after the rebels had set off from the beach for the Sierra Maestra, they were ambushed by government troops. No more than 20 of the 82 who had come on the Granma survived.
          But the tiny invasion signaled the beginning of the guerrilla campaign that would lead to victory on Jan. 1, 1959. Ms. Hernández, who was not on the Granma, joined the insurgents later.
          Maria Hernández Rodríguez del Rey was born to middle-class parents on July 28, 1921, in the town of Cruces, in west-central Cuba. She earned degrees in law and social sciences from the University of Havana and worked as a customs lawyer for the government after graduating. Like Mr. Castro, she belonged to the Ortodoxo Party, which condemned the Batista government as corrupt and fruitlessly tried to enact peaceful changes.
          As the movement turned to armed insurrection, Ms. Hernández, one of the earliest recruits, joined what Mr. Castro called his “general staff.” Other members were Ms. Santamaría and her brother, Abel, Mr. Castro’s second in command.
          Ms. Hernández described the months leading up to Moncada as “militancy 24 hours a day” and said Mr. Castro had told his troops that “they had no right to get tired.” She told Mr. Szulc that “indiscretion, any kind of indiscretion” — including being only seconds late for a meeting — was cause for expulsion.
          Mr. Santamaría was killed at Moncada. Ms. Santamaría committed suicide in 1980. Mr. Montane died in 1999. The official Cuban news media reported that Ms. Hernández had died of complications of diabetes. Information about her survivors was not available.
          Ms. Hernández was showered with honors. She served as a deputy in the national assembly and in various governmental posts. In one, she oversaw women’s prisons. It was not clear whether she was in charge in later years when the Organization of American States and others accused Cuba’s penal system of human rights abuses.
          She was also secretary-general of the Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America, a Cuban political movement to promote socialism in the third world.
          Mr. Castro’s extensive correspondence with Ms. Hernández had its human moments. In July 1955, when he was in Mexico and she in Cuba, he complained that he could not find a good cigar.
          His political advice was blunt. In a 1954 letter from prison on the Isle of Pines in Cuba, he told her not to make unnecessary enemies, a possibility given her feisty nature. “There will be enough time later,” he wrote, “to crush all the cockroaches together.”
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