Marvin Schick gets child sexual abuse wrong – again.
…We read of an “epidemic” of sexual abuse in yeshivas and this is a lie and itself serious abuse and the debasement of truth is greater still when false charges are made by an Orthodox assemblyman or a faculty member at Yeshiva University. I am intensively involved in yeshiva and day school education and over the years I have asked persons involved in various schools whether there has been abuse at their institutions. Overwhelmingly they have answered that there hasn’t been and I believe them.…
Marvin Schick is a foul man. I know this not only because of what he writes. I know this because of my personal dealings with him.
Schick once attacked Hella Winston based on what he claimed her doctoral advisor told him. Winston, along with her regular duties as a sociologist, now writes for the Jewish Week covering, among other things, child sexual abuse in haredi communities.
he false and libelous idea Schick was spreading was that Winston's 2005 book, Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels, would have been much worse if her doctoral advisor had not toned down the anti-Orthodox rhetoric and bias that supposedly riddled its early early drafts. Winston's work was to be dismissed as the work of a bigot, Schick implied, and not viewed as the work of a serious scholar.
The problem? The claim made by Schick was false.
William Helmreich, Winston's doctoral advisor told me he never made that claim and never told Schick anything like it. Further, as Helmreich acknowledged and Winston's publisher confirmed, Helmreich did not see Winston's book until it was already in galleys. He made no changes matching Schick's claim and suggested none.
I shared this information with Schick and pointed out that no matter how Schick's 'error' occurred – be it an intentional lie on Schick's part or simply a mistake – he needed to retract his attack on Winston and apologize. Schick did neither.
What Schick did do is claim illness, ducking interview after interview as others urged me to view Schick as a doddering old man who once had been good for Jews and now with age was less so. He's fading away, they said. He won't be writing like this much longer. He'll retire soon. Let him be.
I let the matter drop. But Schick didn't fade away.
Over the ensuing years I have written about Schick, almost always critically. I challenged the Jewish Week, demanding that Schick's column be labeled for what it is – and advertisement – and that its sponsor be named. The Jewish Week, claiming not to know how the line of text labeling Schick's work as advertisement was dropped, promised to reinstate it.
(The Jewish week also claimed the box around Schick's "column" was sign enough that it was not editorial content of the newspaper. I pointed out that standard is not followed by any major American newspaper I know of.)
The Jewish Week eventually did add a disclaimer, while softening the language to read, "This space is privately sponsored." But unlike most of the newspapers in America, which have policies that demand transparency for this type of advertisement, the Jewish Week will not reveal who sponsors Schick's screeds.
If it did reveal those names, the ire of people libeled by Schick could conceivably be directed to the people or organizations that paid for that libel to be printed. But like the Markey Bill that Schick and Agudath Israel of America oppose, transparency is too dangerous. If Schick were an honest man – and that he clearly is not – he would note the name of his sponsor at the close of each ad. What Schick will not do voluntarily the Jewish Week must do for him – especially when Schick uses that "privately sponsored space" to campaign against legislation that will help protect children and significantly cut down on child sexual abuse in religious schools.
Is the public entitled to know who pays for Schick's attacks against the Markey Bill? Yes it is. And the Jewish Week cannot hide from that fact.
Schick writes in this week's Jewish Week:
…We read of an “epidemic” of sexual abuse in yeshivas and this is a lie and itself serious abuse and the debasement of truth is greater still when false charges are made by an Orthodox assemblyman or a faculty member at Yeshiva University. I am intensively involved in yeshiva and day school education and over the years I have asked persons involved in various schools whether there has been abuse at their institutions. Overwhelmingly they have answered that there hasn’t been and I believe them.…
Note that Schick does not claim to have spoken with victims of abuse or their advocates, and he has done no investigation of these rabbis' claims. He simply accepts what these rabbis have told him as the truth and rejects what others – like those victims – say as lies.
For that matter, Schick does not tell us who these rabbis are. Did he ask Rabbi Lipa Margulies of Yeshiva Torah Temimah? Did Margulies tell him Torah Temimah – home to serial child molester Rabbi Yehuda Kolko – has always been free of child sexual abuse? Did he ask the Novominsker Rebbe, who has personal knowledge of child sexual abuse in haredi schools going back years? If so, what did the Novominsker tell Schick? "No abuse in my school?" Or did the Novominsker tell Schick the real truth? Or did Schick simply cherry pick who he asked to avoid asking rabbis who might answer yes?
Schick's stated concern is to protect rabbis from false claims of abuse. That is an admirable goal. But so is protecting children from rape and molestation. Having the title rabbi before your name doesn't grant you special consideration and doesn't put your reputation first and a child's life second.
Courts have a built in process to help protect the falsely accused, and despite what Schick writes, false sexual abuse claims that make it to court are rare.
No system of law can be perfect. Halakha understands this, even though Schick does not. It is the court's duty to do the best it can to ascertain the truth and to make sure that an innocent person is not punished. Most of the time the court succeeds, but sometimes it does not. This is true whether the court is secular or religious. Judges are charged with doing their best. If someone is wrongly convicted but the court did its best, the court is not blamed.
But Schick himself has no trouble hurling invective and even lies at those he wishes to hurt, those he views as threats to haredi Judaism, whether those "threats" are a sociologist reporting about child sexual abuse in the haredi community, an Orthodox politician confronted with massive evidence of that child sexual abuse, or a professor of law at Yeshiva University's law school who is working to legally right the wrongs that have enabled that child sexual abuse.
Those who pay to spread his venom need to be confronted. The Jewish Week must do the morally and ethically correct thing and publicly name all donors who pay and have paid for Schick's ads. If does not, those records should be subpoenaed as part of a lawsuit brought against Schick, or as part of lawsuits brought by victims against haredi sexual abusers.
Is the Avi Chai Foundation, which supports Jewish day schools and yeshivas, paying for Schick's ads? Do the same donors who fund Schick fund Agudah? Do they fund Torah Temimah? Do they have vested interests in seeing bills meant to protect children from sexual abuse blocked?
The public deserves answers to those questions and it will get answers. The only question is whether those answers will be given as they should be, voluntarily by the Jewish Week, or whether they come through other means.
But if takes court cases to get those answers, and if those answers lead back to any haredi organization that would financially benefit from the Markey Bill not becoming law, any moral voice the Jewish Week ever claimed to have will be lost.
That's the choice you're making, Gary. Make it well.
Abuse Breeds Abuse
By Marvin Schick
We have been treated to a torrent of articles alleging sexual abuse of children who attended Orthodox schools. The tone of the reporting is accusatory, with no heed paid to the actual record of these schools or to the norm that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty. This may be justified, especially where abuse is claimed, because the presumption of innocence refers to legal processes and standards to determine guilt and not to whether the accused has clean hands. Wrongful behavior is wrong not because it is subject to criminal sanction but because it is contrary to values and practices that are essential in civil society.
Yet, it is unsettling that the appropriate efforts to root out abuse and protect children often resemble a crusade. Crusades bring an excess of emotion and fear and with emotion and fear there is the heightened prospect of distortion and false accusations. I quote once more Justice Brandeis’ chilling statement about the wages of fear. Referring to the Salem Witch trials, he wrote, “Men feared witches and burnt women.”
That there have been incidents of sexual abuse in all schools, including the Orthodox, cannot be denied. There is also sexual abuse in home situations and I suspect that it is more common and serious than what occurs in schools. Abuse must never be excused or covered up. When there is credible evidence of abuse – credible here means a lower degree of proof than may be required for other claims of wrongdoing – immediate steps must be taken, including removal of the wrongdoer from the school or home and the notification of public officials.
We read of an “epidemic” of sexual abuse in yeshivas and this is a lie and itself serious abuse and the debasement of truth is greater still when false charges are made by an Orthodox assemblyman or a faculty member at Yeshiva University. I am intensively involved in yeshiva and day school education and over the years I have asked persons involved in various schools whether there has been abuse at their institutions. Overwhelmingly they have answered that there hasn’t been and I believe them.
My view of abuse was powerfully influenced by the articles Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in the 1990s for the Wall Street Journal. She detailed how dozens of teachers, day care workers and religious personnel were falsely accused and harshly punished. There were suicides, lives were ruined, families shattered as the crusaders ran amok and unchallenged in Washington State, Massachusetts, New Jersey and elsewhere.
It is appropriate to ask why in the many articles alleging abuse no mention is made that this is a field where there have been a significant number of wrongful charges. Does anyone seriously believe that every abuse charge is truthful? Should we not be concerned when teachers or professionals are wrongfully accused and their families thereby suffer horrific and lasting pain? It is possible to strongly condemn abuse and still be alert to the reality that some charges are errant or false.
I write this on a day when the Times published a letter by a Holocaust historian who refers to the “fallibility of individual memory.” There is abundant research demonstrating that even shortly after events have occurred, witnesses distort, often inadvertently, what they have seen. As time goes on, the tendency to embellish or exaggerate is enhanced and this is certainly the case when individuals try to recount traumatic events that may have occurred a long time ago. To this issue is added the problematic status of what is referred to as repressed memory, meaning the capacity to recall many years later in adulthood events that the person was previously not aware of and which may have occurred during childhood.
Legislation pending in New York to open new windows of opportunity to report abuse many years later is ill-advised, despite the apparently good intentions of its authors. In an act of principle and courage, the Rabbinical leaders of Agudath Israel have come out in opposition, highlighting the potential damage to institutions that can scarcely defend themselves against charges relating to events that may have occurred many years previously.
The Rabbis need to do more. They should declare that no matter what the circumstance, no part of a teacher’s body should come into contact with any part of a student’s body. Each school should schedule sensitivity sessions alerting faculty and staff to such restraints and also their responsibility to report when there are indications that a student has been abused at home. As I have suggested, I believe that home abuse is a more serious problem than what occurs at school.
There are those who will read these lines as a whitewashing of abuse, of downplaying the seriousness of wrongdoing when it does occur at schools. Without exception, when I have been asked to give guidance in abuse cases I have taken a strong position. My argument here is that any system of justice or moral code must strive to protect innocent people against false accusations. I should add that our society is awash in strong evidence that many individuals who were accused and convicted of murder – some even executed – were later proven to be innocent.
It is in the nature of a sin that it breeds additional sins. Abuse breeds additional abuse and this, too, is something that we should be concerned about.
[Hat Tip: LR.]