Yishuvim with acceptance committees

Imaonwheels

Thu, Feb 05 2009, 8:10 am

Quote:

A few people have mentioned that the vaads, if they decide they don't like you, can't necessarily throw you out of your home but can make you miserable. What sort of stuff does this entail? It doesn't take being part of a vaad to leave nasty notes on your door or throw rocks through your windows. Any neighbor can do that. But does the vaad have certain powers that they can levy unequally to those they don't like?

They can tell both schools and the moatzah (and many other work places) not to hire you.
They can have social services question your neighbors, schools and kids without you being present
They must sign applications for building permits
They also did not sign the mandatory yishuv agreement form that would have allowed us to get small business assistance from the Jewish agency
They can categorically refuse to allow your child to have any kind of part in ceremonies and youth group activities
Some people will even tell their kids that yours are NOT to be included

The meanest thing that happened to me was here around 4 years after we came. I was definitely a contributor and we did not have trouble with most people or the powers that be except two. The head of the building fund and the head of the vaad chinuch. The head of the building fund tried to refuse to allow me to buy a house but the rav overruled him and had him come and announce it to me at the yud tes kislev farbrengen.

But the head of the vaadat chinuch would not be appeased and they are the yishuv's first family. We had a hachnasat sefer Torah and every gan child but one was given a keter. He also sort of straggled alone aimlessly alongside the other boys because he was not placed in a row for the parade. He was 3 and his crime was that Ima sent him to the Chabad gan.

sequoia

Sun, Feb 15 2009, 5:50 pm

I have been reading this thread but I am still a little confused.
I have heard that there are "mixed" yishuvs. Assuming that means mix of secular and religious?
What kind of requirements or questions would exist in this case? I imagine they would not require families to be shomer shabbat?
This is all fascinating. Aliyah isn't in the cards now, unforunately, but I dream of it all the time.

BeershevaBubby

Sun, Feb 15 2009, 9:37 pm

sequoia wrote:

Basically they look into your financials, they make you take psychological tests and handwriting tests (all at your expense of course)...

The basic requirements and questions are about if you're religious, are you going to nit-pit about everything your secular neighbor is going to do and if you're secular it's often are you going to go out of your way to piss your religious neighbors off...

chanchy123

Mon, Feb 16 2009, 12:35 am

sequoia wrote:

They have these committes in non-religious yishuvim as well.
Basically, in small yishuvim (mostly under 100 families, many times under 30 or 50) every family can make a big difference in the chareter of the yishuv. So the yishuv has a committee that gets to know the candidate family and sort of see what their like. There are many ecological yishuvim (not only over the green line - a yishuv is really a miniscule town) so they want to be able to make sure they can weed out potential poluters etc. In order for the yishuv to have a say on who they want to accept or not they are required by law to have an "obejctive" test (usually yishuvim choose graphology because its cheap and doesn't take up much time) otherwise, they will not be allowed by law to deny admitance to anyone. They need an objective reason to deny admittnace. Also, most places want to make sure they are not taking on too many charity cases, so they may ask for proof of employment (and I've heard of places that ask for medical examinations and salary slips). Some places are just plain snobby.
But in most cases, they just want to able to see if the family is compatible to the yishuv. You wouldn't want a family that hates anything to do with religion or religious people in a 30 family mixed yishuv. You wouldn't want only dati families in a mixed yishuv - because then it wouldn't be mixed anymore. So on and so forth.