Exposing Child Sexual Abuse in the Jewish Community.
Paul Martinka
In an a daytime city street attack in Williamsburg, New York, someone threw bleach into the face of an ultra-Orthodox rabbi who had been calling out members of the community for committing acts of child sexual abuse.
The target of the attack, Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg, was hospitalized and now has impaired vision in one eye.
In a burst of news coverage, the attack, and the recent conviction of a prominent member of the Brooklyn's ultra-Orthodox community who had repeatedly sexually abused a girl who had come to him for counseling, are drawing attention to a painful story that has been slowly coming to light within the Jewish community--a story which we thought was not ours.
For much of the last decade, as incidents of widespread child sexual abuse have come to light in the Catholic community, Jews looking past a haze of schadenfreude, have nervously glanced over their communal shoulders, hoping that disclosures of abuse would somehow bypass our community.
Having raised three boys within the Jewish community, I have felt the fear of abuse, wondering if the hands in whose care we have put our children, on religious retreats, youth group overnights, and summer camps, could be trusted.
As prevention, we always told our kids, if anyone touches you inappropriately or asks you to do something to them, tell us immediately. But I always wondered, in addition to the developmental and psychological destructiveness of such an incident, and the anger, how would the news of such an awful event play out communally.
What would happen to the whistle blower? Would the organization investigate, support our claim, aid in the prosecution of those accused? Or just cover-up? A New York Times piece in May of this year about the Chassidic community in Brooklyn, gave me some insight into the devastating effects that can accompany going public with an incident of child abuse.
Mordechai Jungreis, who is Hasidic, after discovering that his mentally disabled teenage son had been molested in a Brooklyn mikva (ritual bathhouse), filed a case with the police. After the accused man, also ultra orthodox was arrested, Jungreis found that not only did friends snub him on the street, but he and his family were thrown out of their apartment.
Jungreis also found that his answering machine began to fill with messages of people cursing him for going against the tradition of mesirah, which forbids the act of turning in a fellow Jew. In accordance with this point of view, by going public against another Jew, and not taking care of the matter through rabbinic authorities, he had committed an act of "chillul Hashem," a desecration of God's name.
But what about the desecration of a child? Why isn't that the higher concern?
Many Orthodox authorities do not interpret mesirah this way, and notably Chabad-Lubavitch has come out against it, and Rabbi Mark Dratch, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America and founder of JSafe, an institution supporting an "Abuse Free Environment" has stated, "We increasingly understand that our religious texts, traditions, and values must serve as resources of strength and support for members of our faith communities, not as roadblocks to their safety and security."
Still, as evidenced by the attack on Rabbi Rosenberg, those addressing the issue of abuse have themselves been abused. According to Rosenberg, an outspoken advocate for victims of child sex abuse in the Orthodox community, his attacker was the son of a man whom he had accused of molesting boys.
Rosenberg's website, which has a hotline in Yiddish, English and Hebrew to report abuse, goes right at the problem, exhorting its readers to "Call the appropriate law enforcement authorities" if someone molests a child.
For the Jewish majority who are not Orthodox, upon hearing this story, do we think: "It can't happen here"? If abuse did happen in our community, how quickly would we go to the authorities?
Most of us don't subscribe to mesirah, or so we think. What if the abuser was a family member, respected Hebrew school teacher, or summer camp director? Being fearful of wrongfully accusing, would we hesitate? Then internally debate? Grow nervous about the communal fallout? Give in to shame? Would we have the guts, like Rabbi Rosenberg, to go against our community?
Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate.In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."
