By LETTERS TO THE EDITORUpdated: APRIL 10, 2016 21:44Letters(photo credit: REUTERS)Hospital segregationRegarding the reports of segregation in hospitals (‘Condemnation of MK calling for segregated maternity wards pour in,’ April 7), most public areas have non-smoking areas. Perhaps maternity wards could have nonnoise/ party wards? ESTHER EHRMAN Bet Shemesh Separation is not segregation! Arab mothers and Jewish mothers receive equal treatment in hospital maternity wards. If some prefer quiet after giving birth rather than noise and partying, they should have it before going home to the stress of motherhood.JESSICA FISCHERMichmoretBefore he passed away two years ago, my husband was hospitalized a number of times in Meir Hospital. On one occasion his neighbor was a grandfather from Tira. We, as a family, tried hard not visit my husband all at one time and regulated our visits.However our neighbor’s seven sons and their wives and children came to visit him at the same time and were there for long hours. It got so crowded that the children, not finding space around their grandfather’s bed, pushed us out from the side of my husband’s bed.Not able to breathe I left the room to sit in the hall. It was full of families sitting on blankets eating and drinking and having a picnic. Of course, children were running all over, filling up the elevators for a joy ride.Please authorities, make order with visiting hours and the number of people who can visit a patient at any one time.JUDITH NATTRa’ananaIt seems that sheer hysteria has emerged because there exist opposing cultural differences in visitor behavior in maternity wards.“Racism” is the bellowed charge in a grand display of high morality. No matter that it smothers the still small voice of the mother who just gave birth and simply cries out for some peace and quiet after her ordeal.I propose a very simple answer for this whole issue: Let each hospital enforce a two or threevisitor- at-a-time rule. When more visitors arrive, they’ll have wait in a designated lobby. For a period of time,hospital security, rather than nurses, should enforce this until it’s understood as the norm. Also, no loud talking should ever be permitted so as to allow others in the ward to rest.Problem solved. Now let’s everyone get back to being civil.GERSHON DALINModi’inKotel prayerYour editorial (‘PM’s Kotel Moment,’ April 8) contains a serious error of fact. It states that, under the deal negotiated by the government and the Reform and Conservative movements for a changed status of the Kotel and of Robinson’s Arch: “Upon entering, each visitor would be given the opportunity to choose where he or she felt most comfortable praying,” you wrote.But that is blatantly untrue.Under this deal, the Kotel, the national holy site of the Jewish people, would be made a synagogue under official haredi control.The rabbinical administrator of the Wall, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, announced that the first act he would take as newly empowered rabbi of the site (a status he does not now have), would be to ban women’s group prayer there.Jewish women now have this right, recognized by Supreme Court and district court rulings.The deal would bulldoze that right. In exchange for giving the Reform and Conservative/ Masorti movements official control of the egalitarian prayer site at Robinson’s Arch, the haredi establishment would be given official control of the Kotel.There would be no ‘choice’ here for women, such as myself, who honor the wishes of anyone who wants to pray at Robinson’s but who will not do so herself, insisting on remaining at the site of millennia of Jewish devotion and memory, the Kotel. We would be forced either to adopt haredi prayer practice at the Kotel, which as women, means silenced, atomized prayer, without the option of donning a tallit and tefillin or reading from the Torah, or to go to a site with no meaning for us.This deal is terrible social policy.It should be renegotiated, not in the hateful way the haredi establishment is demanding but in a way that opens options and removes religious coercion from public space in Israel.SHULAMIT S. MAGNUSJerusalemI agreed with every word of your Friday editorial. But I have some questions. I an neither ultra-orthodox, Orthodox, modern Orthodox, Masorti, Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist.In fact, I am a convinced secular Jewish Israeli atheist – where do I fit in ‘at the Wall’? Is there any place reserved there for the likes of me where I can simply enjoy a quiet moment appreciating the archeological remnants of my mainly secular ancestors? By the way, this letter has been written and posted on Saturday YIGAL SHALOM HOROWITZ Beersheba Dear Nachman Shai, I read your article in The Jerusalem Post on Friday (‘The Western Wall battle, round two,’ April 8).You’re an educated man – surely you knowhow Christianity started, by it leaders who thought that the traditional Judaism of those days was too difficult to observe. They started to drop things like Shabbat, kashrut, circumcision and slowly they formed a new religion – just as the Conservative, Reform and liberal so-called Jews of today.Would you add or subtract from a painting of Rembrandt, or any other master? Of course not, nor can we change any of the Torah law.As for accepting non Jewish partners, this would be like a slow holocaust. We must be a “people who dwell apart” or there will be no Jewish People.JUDY FORDPetah Tikva‘Meddlesome’It’s about time that someone took columnist Douglas Bloomfield to task for his constant negative reporting on the activities of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Bloomfield’s latest, (‘Meddling,’ April 7), left me in utter disbelief. It would be quite a feat to differentiate between facts, fiction and hearsay that forms the basis of Bloomfield’s statements.In his scathing attack on Netanyahu, he wrote, ‘No foreign leader has plunged deeper into American partisan politics than Netanyahu, and over such a long period.’ Bloomfield seems to delight in portraying Netanyahu as villain, in practically all of his ‘Washington Watches’ columns. Coming in second on Bloomfield’s list is Sheldon Adelson, usually in conjunction with his criticism of Netanyahu.I would suggest that Bloomfield re-examine the ‘Meddling’ headline of his column and apply it to himself . His steady practice of bashing Israel, its head of state and its friends is despicable. There is a name for a person who indulges in such activities.ISSY RIEBACKKfar YonaFactual errors It’s no surprise that Bernie Sanders does not know how many innocent people were killed in Gaza (‘Sanders’s ‘weird and loony’ statement...,’ April 8). He is ill-prepared for the post he is seeking, and has little interest in foreign policy.What is important is this: Where did he get “10,000 innocent lives” which is off by a factor of seven, at least. Was it something he read, vaguely remembered from a briefing or a desperate stab in the dark? Probably none of those. If he really did not know, and knew he did not know, he could have dodged the question, or answered it without naming a number. The problem is that he thought he knew, or at the very least, he was sure he could get away with saying 10,000.Could we really have killed that many innocent people? What kind of people would that make us? Evidently that is the kind of people Sanders thinks we are.MIKE GOLDModi’in
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