Page 109 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

few. All arrange for a few callers in advance to get the show going. On this basis
he surmises that Micol Halev is a small station, whereas its director claims it is
one of the biggest.

Pirate Radios and the T’shuva Movement
The pirate religious stations are linked with a range of grassroots and
street-level activities. We have seen the links with evangelists, but the case of
Kol HaChesed shows that these links can spread much further, and that their
multimedia capacity has the effect of shifting established social boundaries.
This is a nationwide broadcaster run out of Natanya by a group who resemble
a social rescue brigade. Asked about their mission the ¤rst word they say is
“family”—their vocation is to spread a message of love, of reconciliation within
families, and to do so in a language that is readily understandable to people
unfamiliar with Judaism. Their radio is at the hub of a range of activities: they
distribute didactic cassettes by giving a person one hundred of them to sell as
a good deed (mitzvah), they respond to requests for help and advice, on family
and education matters especially; they provide a marriage guidance service
whereby listeners can consult a rabbi personally or by telephone, off the air. And
every so often there are miracles: when a lady rang in saying she was having
dif¤culty ¤nding a husband, the rabbi on the air told her she should sell one
hundred cassettes—three weeks later she was married!
The station operates within the framework of a nongovernmental organiza-
tion (NGO) that is itself involved in many other activities—indeed, our inter-
locutors say that they could not operate without that framework. The NGO is
in the early stages of setting up a school for yeshiva dropouts who, having never
served in the army, fall between these two poles of Israeli society and ¤nd
themselves unequipped for making their own lives. Volunteers provide their
services as teachers, and the students serve a type of apprenticeship, but there
is an important condition for their participation: they must study Torah for
two hours each day. Another project takes in 120 school dropouts—in premises
that are rented out for private gatherings to fund the operation. Together with
other organizations they provide food boxes to one thousand needy families,
train orphans for their bar mitzvah, and help young women who might be
thinking of having an abortion—if necessary and possible, by arranging mar-
riages for them. Through the organization ¤fteen doctors provide weekly free
medical attention—and although this service is not paid for they bene¤t from
the advertising of their work on the radio station. Their radio also advertises
seminars—often residential and sometimes at no cost—run by Arachim (Val-
ues) an organization devoted to the cause of t’shuva and also to training activ-
ists and professionals in propagating the message.
Thus we can see how radios are linked with other activities and organiza-
tions, crossing boundaries that in the routine of everyday life would be much
thicker. The nonsectarian quality of the Kol HaChesed operation is seen in the
lack of interest in emphasizing Sephardi or Ashkenazi traditions and in the use

98 David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner