There is a prison in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, that is commonly referred to as a ghetto, or a prison town. There are walls surrounding a huge complex. Inside the walls are buildings, with a large open courtyard in the center. Prison guards apply nominal controls over the lives of the prisoners of Palmasola. It is the prisoners themselves who run the show. They even created an organization called the Disciplina Interna that governs their affairs, if govern is the correct term. There are few rules, with “stay alive” at the top of that list.

No food is served; lucky prisoners are permitted to receive visitors bearing gifts. Those who have no one outside usually fight, steal, beg, or die. There are small grocery stores run by inmates for anyone who can pay. Most of the 3,000 inmates do not live in cells, so they sleep on the streets; if they are spiritual enough, or crafty, they can go to morning prayers at the church run by clergy (who themselves are prisoners) and be granted permission to stay the night.

Prisoners with money on the outside can buy a private five square-foot cell, and be the envy of those who want the same. The poorest of the prisoners, who cannot support their families outside, have their wives and children join them on the streets of Palmasola. Those visitors can come, get a full body search, and be granted access. They get a stamp on their arms; only if they can produce that stamp on the way out do they get to leave.

It is a rough, lawless place where the drug trade is brisk and the cocaine is allegedly the finest you can buy. In the words of someone who just visited her husband, “If you didn’t go in a drug addict, you will almost certainly leave as one — if you leave at all.”

The prison is home to murderers, rapists, thieves, drug dealers, smugglers, and users. Major crimes and minor ones warrant imprisonment in Palmasola. One offense that is almost certain to get you tossed into this harsh wasteland is upsetting the government of Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales.

Needless to say, if you are Jewish and observant, Palmasola is definitely not the place to be. There is no kosher food there, and nowhere among the many churches within its walls does a synagogue stand.

So what does an observant Jewish man do when he gets incarcerated in Santa Cruz, and what could he have done to be put there in the first place?

For 11 months now, an American man from Borough Park, Brooklyn, has been in Palmasola prison. In the interest of full disclosure, I represent his wife in her efforts to call attention to what clearly is a huge injustice.

Jacob Ostreicher, a 53-year-old father of five and grandfather of 11, was arrested in June 2011 on suspicion of money-laundering. Unlike in the United States, where one is innocent until proven guilty, the Bolivian prosecutor claims that Ostreicher was jailed because he failed to prove the money he used for a land deal was obtained legally. The Bolivian government, for its part, cannot prove that it was illegal. After more than 25 hearings, what is most evident is that there is no evidence — at least none that the government thinks will stand up in court.

The facts are simple. In 2008, Ostreicher’s Swiss money manager and some other investors purchased Bolivian cattle and rice fields for about $20 million. They hired a local woman to manage the business, and the woman allegedly embezzled the money, investing it with a drug trafficker.

It was after Ostreicher filed charges against the woman for theft that his problems escalated. He was arrested on suspicion of laundering drug money when he went to authorities to file a grievance against the woman, who is also now in prison.

The last significant legal proceedings yielded an odd result. The defense received a letter from Interpol saying that Ostreicher was not wanted anywhere, so in September 2011, the judge on the case believed there was sufficient evidence to release him. That judge ordered Jacob’s release, but only six days later reversed his decision. Miriam Ungar, Ostreicher’s wife, said that the judge later claimed that he was threatened with jail time unless he reversed his decision. That judge was promoted and a new judge was assigned to the case. He resigned after five scheduled hearings. There is no judge currently assigned to Ostreicher’s case.

Ungar is now campaigning to get her husband released. She says that neither Sens. Charles Schumer nor Kirsten Gillibrand pay attention to her husband’s case, and that the same is true of her congressman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler. She believes that if New York’s congressional delegation pushes the United States State Department to act, that could move the scales of justice for Jacob.

An American sits in a dangerous prison in a country with few ties to the United States, but has not been officially charged with a crime. Yet no official here seems interested in doing something about it. Last week, in an effort to call attention to his plight, about 400 of Ostreicher’s friends and family members came out to the Bolivian Mission to the United Nations to rally for his freedom.

Among the supporters was Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who represents Ostreicher’s neighborhood. There also is a Facebook site devoted to Ostreicher’s case, a Twitter feed, and a campaign website at http://www.freejacobnow.com. If supporters can get 25,000 signatures in one month’s time, a petition will be brought to President Barack Obama’s desk.

It is bizarre that a U.S. citizen is being held — without formal charges being filed, much less any kind of a trial conducted — in harsh conditions in a foreign prison, and our leaders do not seem to care.

Hikind yelled out over the megaphone at the rally, “How cheap is American citizenship today that a United States citizen can sit in a Bolivian jail without being charged for a crime and no one lifts a finger?”

It is a very good — and extremely sad — question.

A Quinnipiac poll in April showed Gov. Chris Christie to be the most popular potential Republican vice presidential candidate, thanks to his budget cuts and standing up to government employee unions. The state’s governor has a problem, however, specifically an Islam problem, that can and should get in the way of his possible ascent to higher office; he has sided time and again with Islamist forces against those who worry about safeguarding United States security and civilization.

WASHINGTON — For decades, the Jewish community here in the United States has debated the advisability, constitutionality, and necessity of government aid to parochial schools, Jewish and otherwise. With the United States still experiencing tough economic challenges, however, we find our schools under greater financial stress than ever. This reality, alongside the solidification of court rulings upholding government aid programs and a current of broader education reform, has positioned 2012 to be a year in which we see signs of a sea change within the Jewish community over this perennial issue.

Since the mid-1950s, the majority view within the Jewish community has opposed government aid to parochial schools on the grounds that it diverts funds from the public schools, somehow “breaches the wall of separation” between religion and state, and runs counter to the communal responsibility to support our own institutions.

A well-known D.C. maxim advises that any economic stimulus must be timely, targeted, and temporary. So as legislators begin drafting the 2012 Farm Bill, why are some proposing to cut a program that responds in direct relation to need, supports recipients for an average of just nine months, boasts an extremely low payment error rate and in the process generates $1.79 for every $1 spent?

In the case of SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps — it is because we have let a politically devised gross mischaracterization define how most people understand the program.

The destruction of Solomon’s Temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. was the first great national tragedy in Jewish history. During the subsequent exile, four fast days commemorating the calamitous event were added to the Jewish calendar: the 10th day of the Hebrew month of Tevet, when the siege of Jerusalem began; the 17th of Tammuz, when the walls of Jerusalem were breached; the Third of Tishri, marking the assassination of the Gedaliah, governor of Jerusalem; and Tisha b’Av, the Ninth of Av, when the Temple was destroyed.

WASHINGTON – The news that a Mormon temple in the Dominican Republic recently conducted a posthumous proxy baptism of Anne Frank, the most famous diarist of the Shoah, clearly caused some offense in the Jewish community. Evidently the baptizers believed they were saving Anne’s soul.

Of greater significance, however, is what Mormons tried to do to save Anne’s life.

Millions of Americans know the story of the German Jewish teenager who hid for more than two years in an Amsterdam attic until she and her family were discovered by the Nazis and sent to the death camps. Anne Frank’s heartbreaking diary is required reading in schools throughout the United States.

Morris Ayin is dead and Pesach will never be the same.

Once upon a time, Morris was a macher. It was he who often decided what was proper and what was not. When I was a child, for example, I was told that it was not permissible to put a bar of pareve margarine on the table during a meat meal “because of Morris Ayin.” I didn’t know Morris myself, but I was impressed that he commanded such authority.

KEEPING THE FAITH: One religious perspectIve on issues of the day

Near the end of fourth grade, when we were rounding the far turn on a lightning exploration of the Babylonian Talmud tractate Bava Metzia (fourth-graders don’t often go in for the kind of hot and heavy debating that slows progress of Talmud study to a delightful crawl), I discovered who Morris really was. He wasn’t a person, at all, but a principle of Jewish law, “maris ayin” (more correctly maris ha-ayin, or marit ha-ayin in modern pronunciation), which translates as “for the sake of appearances.”

The issue in that case was one that would normally cause a fourth-grader’s eyes to glaze over. A person had prematurely designated certain grains as an offering for the Temple, and then set a cow to the task of husking the grain by trampling over it. The problem is Deuteronomy 25:4, which states: “You shall not muzzle the ox when he treads out the grain.” That’s fine if the grain belongs to the person whose cow is doing the trampling, but once the grain has been designated for the Temple, it no longer belongs to that person — and that means he cannot let the cow eat any of it.

No problem, states BT Bava Metzia 89b-90a. Put a feedbag on the animal and hang some grain on the outside of it, so people walking by will know that the animal can eat the same kind of grain it is trampling.

My eyes lit up — no, not over the notion of a cow stomping on grain, which is a concept way beyond the capacity of a fourth-grader on the Lower East Side who never saw a cow or unhusked grain up close and personal. No, my eyes lit up because I finally understood why we couldn’t put pareve margarine on a fleishig table: We didn’t want to give anyone walking by our window the wrong idea, that we were mixing meat with “milk.”

The problem, of course, was that our window was on the fifth floor of an apartment building on the corner of Clinton and Grand streets, so anyone walking by it was more likely to give us the wrong idea. When I asked my father about this seeming perplexity, he gave me the definitive answer for everything that didn’t make sense: “That’s the way it’s written.” It sounds a lot more Sinaitic in Yiddish.

As I learned several years later, this time the answer was on the money. In BT Shabbat 64b and several other places in the Talmud it states: “In every instance in which the Sages prohibited [something] for marit ha’ayin, [the thing] is forbidden even in inside rooms.” In other words, it was prohibited even if no outsider was likely to see it.

This was not a universally accepted opinion (the Academy of Hillel had some misgivings, for example), but it did become standard.

Perhaps the most relevant examples of the principle are to be found in BT Avodah Zarah 12a. Three situations are presented. In one, a person gets a splinter in his foot while walking by an idol. In the second, a man drops some loose change in front of the idol. In the third, there is a spring of fresh water immediately in front of the idol. In all three cases, the man would have to bend down, and this could appear to someone else to be him bowing down to the idol. Unless he can bend down in a way that makes it clear that he is not paying homage to a pagan deity, he may not bend down until he is out of the object’s presence. (Similarly, if the mouth of the idol is a fountain and water is spouting forth, a person cannot drink from it because someone may think he is giving the false god or goddess a kiss.)

The Talmud then wonders why the three cases were necessary, when one would have sufficed to make the point. Not so, comes the answer. If just the splinter case was mentioned, we could assume that bending down was banned because he could walk a few feet away and then deal with the offending sliver. So we are given the case of the coins, which could only be retrieved in front of the idol. Ah — but perhaps the prohibition attends because it was only money. So we are given the case of the water. It could be argued that someone who is dying of thirst would be permitted to bend down and get a drink, but he may not do so nonetheless.

This brings us back to Pesach (and you thought this was just “idol” chatter). If a person dying of thirst may not bend down before an idol to drink from a pool of refreshingly fresh water, why is it permissible to bring into our homes faux versions of such impermissible foods as spaghetti, macaroni, breakfast cereals that mimic popular chametz varieties, breakfast pancake mixes, pizza dough mixes, bagel mixes, sandwich roll mixes, and so on? This year, you can even buy Panko-style “breadcrumbs,” and there are a host of gluten-free mixes that will whip up “pie crusts” and “dinner rolls” by the oven-full.

This is Pesach?

Pesach itself is unique; the food restrictions and other distinctive features that accompany it are designed to emphasize that uniqueness. We wipe that out when the only difference between yesterday and today is that our bagel is not as chewy and our Cheerios taste a bit off.

At the very least, all this suggests to what lengths we will go to get around the spirit of a law while clinging hypocritically to its letter (and at what expense; check out the prices on these “clones”).

The big questions these days are whether Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and, if yes, when.

That Iran’s having nuclear weapons poses an existential threat to Israel is clear from its statements, although doubts remain as to whether Iran actually would do so considering the danger to the rest of the region. Nuclear clouds know no borders.

On the other hand, to the extent that the missiles that began raining down on Israel last weekend from the south — some this week coming perilously close to Tel Aviv — are being hurled by Iranian puppets presumably with Tehran’s approval, a case can be made that Iran has already launched a war against Israel, albeit a conventional one. How does Israel respond, according to Jewish law, and, if a military response is permitted, what are the rules of engagement?