[Avodah] Consumer Alert: Minhog Scams On The Rise! Mislabeled, Cheap Middle Eastern Imports Flooding In, Threatening To Overwhelm Natives!

[Lisa Liel]

At 12:42 PM 6/16/2011, Prof. Levine wrote:
>At 11:42 AM 6/16/2011, Lisa Liel  wrote:
>
>> >At 03:10 PM 6/15/2011, Ben Waxman wrote:
>> >>It's called kibbutz galiyot and bitul hagalut. Get onboard professor!
>> >
>> >On board what?  Living in EY should not cause one to abandon
>> >Ashkenazic minhagim.  (BTW, the person who writes this blog lives in EY.)
>>
>>Of course it should.  Minhag goes by makom; not by ancestry.
>>
>>Lisa
>  If it is true that  Minhag goes by makom, not by ancestry,  then 
> why doesn't all of America follow the minhagim of the 
> Spanish/Portuguese Jews who first came here?   All of the shuls 
> founded in America until the middle of the 19th century followed 
> the Spanish/Portuguese ritual.

There was no distinct Sephardic community in the US the way there had 
been in Europe.  An Ashkenazi immigrant to a neighborhood that was 
overwhelmingly Sephardi should absolutely have taken on the Sephardi 
minhag.  That's how it's been done since Golus began.

>Did not the followers of the GRA who came to EY follow their 
>minhagim and not those of the Sephardim who were already in 
>EY?  Shouldn't they have followed the minhagim that were in effect 
>when they arrived, according to you?

If they settled amongst the Sephardim (which I don't believe they 
did), then yes, they should have.  More to the point, they would 
have.  But they set up their own geographically distinct communities.

The idea of Ashkenazim and Sephardim living in the same building and 
maintaining separate halakhic minhagim is repulsive, and a false 
understanding of Judaism.  I've heard that when thousands of Jews 
began returning to Eretz Yisrael at once, this question was 
addressed, and the decision was that people should maintain their 
communities until a unified halakhic authority could be set up.  Like 
the Israeli "constitutional convention" mandated in the Declaration 
of Independence, this body was not set up.  But the maintenance of 
communities wasn't, either.  Instead, people maintained ancestral 
minhagim while simultaneously mingling geographically, and split the 
nation in a way that Korah and his community would have been proud of.

Lisa