Letter from Brooklyn: Jewish Community Still Behind On Confronting Sexual Abuse

Our community still lags behind the Catholic Church in addressing our catastrophe, due to the unwillingness of our leaders to apologize and to reach out  to survivors of abuse. Victims of abuse and their families who call police are ostracized and bullied. Mainstream Orthodox media do not report on cases of abuse, educate people about prevention or inform victims where to go for help.

Jewish Community Still Behind On Confronting Abuse

Asher Lipner • The Jewish Week

As someone who has worked with numerous survivors of sexual abuse in the Orthodox community over the past 10 years, I have been privileged to bear witness to the stories of people who, after having their voices taken away from them, become able to speak for the first time, in the course of their healing, about the horrors they have endured.

Many describe the pain of being forced to suffer in silence as even more traumatic than the experience of being sexually violated.  They are warned to keep quiet, lest they bring shame to the community and to themselves and “alienate people from their cause.” This puts survivors in an impossible Catch-22. After struggling, often for years, with their personal demons of pain, loneliness, anger, shame and sense of betrayal, when their healing requires them to give testimony to their victimization and to express their feelings about it, they are told in a million different ways, “Shah Shtill!”

But the problem is not going away, although tragically thousands of survivors are “going away” from us, by abandoning Judaism or even worse, being lost to drugs and alcohol, to mental illness and even suicide. Solving the problem necessitates exposing it to the light of day, and for that we need to reach out to survivors and to listen with empathy to their painful stories. If we do not learn from the mistakes of our past, we are doomed to repeat them.

It is with this in mind that I offer the following plea. 

Ten years ago, Jewish Week editor Gary Rosenblatt bravely blew the whistle on a decades-long cover-up of rabbinic sexual abuse in the case of Baruch Lanner, a top official of the National Conference of Synagogue Youth (NCSY). This, together with the roughly 40 articles about abuse and its cover-up published by The Jewish Week since that time, has undoubtedly paved the way for others to follow suit.

However, our community still shamefully lags behind even the Catholic Church in addressing our catastrophe, due to the unwillingness of our leaders to apologize and to reach out effectively to survivors of abuse. We are regularly bombarded in the media with rabbinic sex scandals, convictions of Orthodox child predators and lawsuits against yeshivas harboring molesters.  A leading Orthodox mental health agency fails to warn the community about abusers it “treats.” Victims of abuse and their families who report to the authorities are ostracized and bullied, much the same way that the victims of Baruch Lanner were, and district attorneys, seeking support from Orthodox communities, seem to ignore this criminal intimidation of witnesses. Mainstream Orthodox media do not report on cases of abuse, educate people about prevention or inform victims where to go for help.

Even as I write, the Queens Vaad Harabbanim continues to cover up for one of its own, who was forced off the Rabbinical Council of America years ago for allegedly molesting children, the Baltimore Vaad Harrabanim covers up for a rabbi in their community’s prestigious yeshiva who is said to have sexually abused students for decades, and the Lakewood (New Jersey) yeshiva’s rabbinic leaders are pressuring the parents of a victim of abuse who reported it to the police to drop the charges.

In 2001, the then-new executive of the Orthodox Union, the parent organization of NCSY, said about sexual abuse in the Orthodox community: “I would like to see the OU take a leadership role in raising awareness about this problem.” But while the RCA, the OU’s rabbinic arm, has made several public pronouncements warning the community of the epidemic and offering practical ways to combat it, the OU has yet to make a public statement, nor has it supported any of the legislative initiatives of the Jewish Board of Advocates for Children (www.jewishadvocates.org).

The OU does take the lead in many important areas, but it continues to refuse to publish the full report of the NCSY Special Commission. This, despite the fact that both the victims and the community have a right to know exactly what caused this tragedy, and that hundreds of thousands of community dollars were spent on the investigation.

So, the thankless fight to bring awareness to the community is left to the grassroots efforts of survivors of abuse like Joel Engelman, Mark Weiss, Joseph Diangelo and David Framowitz, and their supporters like Vicki Polin and The Awareness Center, Survivors for Justice, Mark Appel, Rabbi Nochem Rosenberg, Rabbi Yosef Blau and Rabbi Yitzchak Eisenman, Assemblyman Dov Hikind, The Jewish Survivors Network, JSafe, and JBAC, supported by the RCA. Also spreading awareness have been bloggers like Unorthodoxjew (UOJ), FrumFollies, FailedMessiah and LittleSheep, and courageous editors like Phil Jacobs (Baltimore Jewish Times) and Mayer Fertig (Jewish Star), in addition to Gary Rosenblatt.

Let us pray that all Jewish leaders will unite with us now to stop sexual abuse and act as a “light unto the nations,” so that nobody else will ever have to endure this terrible trauma.

Dr. Asher Lipner is a clinical psychologist, an ordained rabbi and a survivor of clergy sexual abuse.

Comments

[Pierre]

The Catholic church has no concept of Daas Torah like the Charedim have - despite what OTD orthodox think (you don't believe me, check the Catechism or at least wikipedia). They have a long history in the modern era of reconciling their beliefs and doctrines with historical change and development, to sciences and whatnot and a long history of apologizing for things and saying "we're not perfect"; observant Judaism has a much shorter history of even ascribing *significance* to history as such, and early on in 'Orthodoxy's formative years, they rejected those observant Jews who integrated historical consciousness with observance and belief (Frankel, Breslau Seminar, et al), and even mainline "Modern" orthodox still do so, so that the Charedim who are already revising the future won't think they're krum. For rabbinic leadership to say "We, your 'daas torah' leadership have done wrong over a long time and we will make amends in the long future", even if it was clearly, unambiguously and consistently done public - would only bolster peoples conviction in the peerless nature of those self-same rabbis - for admitting their human self-interest. "Torah is not in heaven" is not just a smarmy way of saying man has a big role in decision making (how it's usually sold by all denominations), it also makes for room for claims like "we are perfect" - because perfection is HERE, Torah is here, is what 'we' make of it (even the ref/cons blubber things like this) - you can change the rules of the game and claim success whenever and however you want. The absoluteness of rabbinic statements then has the pull and presence of Torah, even when their own 'confessions' aren't actually halacha and thus not technically 'daas torah' by the LESS charedi views...they leave it to peoples minds to say "what a great leader we have to admit mistakes"...Again, the catholics don't do this (Chesterton in "Orthodoxy", the chapter 'eternal revolution'), they have their own institutional problems and orthodox Jews have I think worse ones.

[seymour]

the problem is until some heridie rebbie declares that one should go to the police nothing will change.

People in those communities will not do a thying without their rebbies consent

[kathiego]

I must be living in the wrong place, Pierre, as I have never heard anyone proclaim their perfection from the Bimah or public forums. I agree with Seymour: unless the Charedi Rebbes say publicly over and over again that people who are molested or hear that their children are molested must go to the police, nothing will change and nothing will get done. Since Charedi don't believe that secular law has any place or authority over them they tell their followers that they, the Rebbes and Charedi leadership, will take care of any problems internally. This leads to cover-ups and more children being victimized as we have seen. It's too sad a situation so it will take leadership speaking out more and more on this issue, which they won't, until they are pressured into doing so by their followers.

[Alter Kocker]

It is my conviction, that the Rebbes will never publicly apologise for child molestation not because of Daas Torah, nto because they are convinced that there is an infalability of the rabbinate not even because they are unwilling to admit that the Orthodox community does have it's share of pedophiles.

If you admit to pedophilia in your community you open yourself to civil litigation. After seeing what the Catholic Church has done in both apology and pecuniary settlements of civil suits brought by the victims and their families, these so called community leaders are apoplectic over the potential settlements they will have to fork over once the civil litigation ball gets rolling. Gelt is their highest calling. Their attitudes with respect to right versus money is self-evident in the SMR case-they would rather support someone who was responsible for large amounts of tzedakah and sponsorship of many yeshivas, shuls and orthodox institutions rather than require that he operate in an ethical manner, and not commit theft from financial institutions or mistreat non-jewish labour.

There will not be acceptance of the existence of pedophilia in the orthodox community or a backlash against those who commit the most heinous of acts as the leaders of the community have many of the most self-serving rationales for not doing so.

[Abracadabra]

Standing ovation for Dr. Asher Lipner!!!!!

He is someone who lives smack in the middle of Boro Park, went to Lakewood Yeshiva in New Jersey, and stands up to what is right even with all the odds and the powers that be against his message and his mission!

We should all have that kind of courage to stand up for what is right and just.

[Abracadabra]

Dr. Asher Lipner has made a difference in promoting awareness and is helping to put pressure on community leaders - he is to be commended for all of that very hard work.

The problem is that without the Rabbonim on his side, the tide he is swimming against is very strong.

May he have the strength and fortitude to continue and hopefully succeed in his mission.

[Seraphya Berrin]

why are you all so such on "daas torah"? it is a very modern concept.

[Eliezer]

I was once told 20 years ago by an eminent child psychologist working in the Orthodox community that FIFTY PERCENT of children are molested in one way or another but that the vast majority get over it and move on.

In fact, I think that if monetary settlements were not in the offing, alot more Catholics would have moved on as well.

I am not condoning molestation. Quite the contrary: I think that the molesters should have the ever-lovin' shit kicked out of them and then be thrown off the Williamsburg Bridge.