Functions
Agudah serves as a leadership and policy umbrella organization for Haredi Jews in the United States, both those affiliating with the Hasidic and the non-Hasidic Mitnagdim/Lithuanian Jewish camps.
Agudah in the United States has been very successful in the difficult task of retaining its major Hasidic factions, with members from the Ger Hasidim in America working together within the organization and its non-Hasidic Lithuanian rosh yeshivas as partners. Agudah represents the vast majority members of the yeshiva world, sometimes known by the old label of misnagdim, as well as sectors of Hasidic Judaism; all are commonly known as Haredim or "ultra-Orthodox" Jews representing Torah Judaism in North America. Not all Hasidic Jewish groups are affiliated with Agudath Israel. For example, the Hasidic group Satmar dislikes Agudah's relatively moderate stance towards the State of Israel.
Agudah has ideological connections with both the Agudat Israel party and with Degel HaTorah (Hebrew, "Flag of the Torah"), two Israeli Orthodox Jewish political parties that have representation in the Knesset (Israel's parliament). In Israel, Degel and Agudah are in a political coalition called United Torah Judaism (UTJ).
AIA is also a part of the World Agudath Israel organization, which convenes international conferences and religious conclaves.
Read more about this topic: Agudath Israel Of America
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)