It seemed for a while that the burqa and veil people, commonly called in the haredi media as kat ha'shalim, have decided to move to a low key existence as I think they were not mentioned in the media for a reasonably significant period of time after a string of very public negative activity that drew much attention to their group. That string seems to be over, as in the past week I have seen 3 different stories in the press about kat ha'shalim craziness.

In one story that hit the press, a young woman of 19 was whisked away from her home. She was eventually located in the cult and she was being set up to marry a convert 10 years her senior. the family got people involved and the wedding was supposedly stopped at the last minute.

Yad L'Achim and different "cult-buster" organizations should probably not just be looking for Jewish children of intermarriages with Arabs to save, or the classic cults in India or wherever, but should also be looking to save youngsters from getting caught up in this cult.

In a different story, reported in Bechadrei, another woman from the kat ha'shalim, this one in Bnei Braq, went into labor on a Friday night recently and  rfused to go to the hospital out of concerns of desecrating the Shabbos in the process. Clearly neither she nor her husband is learned, as if they were, even slightly, they would know that halacha allows them, even obligates them, to do what is necessary in dangerous situations. Regardless, she refused and they had the medic from Hatzalah deliver the baby in the home. After the birth she still refused to go to the hospital,  and a local midwife (the paramedic's mother) came over to examine the woman and the baby. Both were fine, BH. The local rabbis, appraised of the incident, were upset saying her behavior was against halacha.

While her reasoning was bad, if she had planned from the start to have a home-birth nobody would have said boo. Plenty of women opt regularly for a home-birth, though I think most of them go to the hospital after the birth to be examined, and  plenty more have home-births, or taxi-births, regularly that are unplanned. The fact that she chose to have a home-birth is not really a big deal, but her reason for it is a big deal - her decision to make up her own halacha against the Shulchan Aruch and against those who know better than her.

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