11 more students have come forward to make allegations about
Finkelstein; three more have come forward to make allegations about Rabbi Macy Gordon, who resigned from his
teaching job at the OU's Israel Center in Jerusalem over the scandal.
The Forward continues its report from last week on the child sexual abuse at its affiliated high school during the 1970s and 80s.
Here's the most important part of today's article:
…[I]nterviews with current and former staff members of Y.U. and with high-ranking RCA officials, as well as with several former high school students who say they were abused, indicate that Y.U. and the RCA have known about some of the allegations against at least one of the alleged abusers, Rabbi George Finkelstein, for a decade or longer.
The Forward has spoken to 14 men who say that Finkelstein abused them while he was employed at Yeshiva University High School for Boys, in Manhattan, from 1968 to 1995.
From the mid 1980s until today, however, Y.U. officials and RCA rabbis have dismissed claims or kept them quiet. Some of these officials allowed Finkelstein to leave the Y.U. system and find a new position as dean of a Florida day school without disclosing the abuse allegations. Later, an RCA rabbi and a Y.U. rabbi warned the Florida school that Finkelstein could be a threat. And when Finkelstein’s next employer, the Jerusalem Great Synagogue, asked whether the allegations that dogged him were true, Y.U. assured the synagogue that there was nothing to worry about.
Maurice Wohl, the synagogue’s president at the time, “spoke to the responsible authorities at Y.U, who denied the charges outright,” Zev Lanton, the synagogue’s director general, said in a statement. “Later, the same authority, upon visiting Israel, offered similar denials, both to the chairman of the board of the synagogue and the vice president.”
In response to a Forward request for the identity of that Y.U. official, Lanton replied that the synagogue would “take outside advice” before responding.…
11 more students have come forward to make allegations about Finkelstein; three more about Rabbi Macy Gordon, who resigned from his teaching job at the OU's Israel Center in Jerusalem over the scandal.
Former YU high school student Mordechai Twersky told the Forward that in 2000, he asked Rabbi Michael Broyde, a Modern Orthodox rabbi and law professor who was recently shortlisted for chief rabbi of England, if he should bring charges against Finkelstein in the Beit Din of America, the RCA's rabbinical court that Broyde had served on. Twersky claims that Broyde told him that his allegations against Finkelstein were “not flagrant enough” to merit a beit din case.
Broyde told the Forward that he does not remember that exchange with Twersky.
“I don’t even know who Mordechai Twersky is,” Broyde told the Forward. “If he said he was sexually assaulted, I would have said to call the police.”
Twersky points out that he and Broyde were in the same constitutional law class at Yeshiva College in 1983. During the end of the 1990s, Beit Din of America hired Twersky to do public relations work that involved “working closely with Broyde on the marketing materials for their newly established rabbinic court,” Twersky told the paper.
Another student says he got YU Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Hershel Schachater and Rabbi Basil Herring to warn a Florida school about Finkelstein. Schachter did not return the Forward's phone calls. Herring refused to comment on the record. Neither man went public with the allegations or notified police.
It's clear that Rabbi Norman Lamm, other Yeshiva officials, and other senior Modern Orthodox leaders covered up the abuse and manipulated or intimidated victims and parents who came forward to report the sexual abuse to them.
The remaining question is why Yeshiva University and the Modern Orthodox community is doing nothing about that.
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