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Thursday, January 24, 2013

Isolated Victims, From Williamsburg, Brooklyn to Notre Dame

What goes through the mind of someone who tries to bully a woman who says she has been sexually assaulted into staying quiet? What about adults who turn on a child who says that he or she has been hurt? Have they really persuaded themselves that the attacker is innocent, sometimes even as they try to shut down the most preliminary investigation? Do they believe fully that something happened, and would even concede that it was bad—just not worth punishing or embarrassing or even inconveniencing the perpetrator? Is the problem that doing so would disrupt the order of their own world, their office or family gatherings, their place of worship or locker rooms? Even then, why do they get angry at the victim, rather than at the perpetrator?

That is the great remaining question in a case in Brooklyn that concluded on Tuesday. Nechemya Weberman, who had been found guilty of fifty-nine counts of child sexual abuse, was sentenced to a hundred and three years in prison. The victim and her family, like Weberman, are members of the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg—which came together to lash out at her, not to protect her. The girl, who is now eighteen, testified in open court, even as Weberman’s supporters took photographs of her on the stand (for which they are now facing contempt charges). She described how she was abused for three years, starting when she was twelve, in what were supposed to be therapy sessions required by her school. With the door closed, Weberman forced her to perform oral sex on him and act out pornography. When she went to a different school and talked to its therapist, the story came out. Although Weberman’s trial is over, four other men have been charged with witness-tampering after they were, according to prosecutors, recorded alternately threatening and trying to bribe the young man to whom she is now married. Among other things, they allegedly said that they’d arrange for the café he managed to lose its kosher certification, and pushed the couple to leave the country. (They have pleaded not guilty.)

But the shakedown visits were only part of it. Almost more confounding than what some of Weberman’s associates are charged with doing in a private room is what the girl’s neighbors had no hesitation about doing in public. Her family was openly scorned. Thousands of people showed up at a local wedding hall to raise money for Weberman. According to the Times, “To promote the fund-raiser, his supporters hung posters on lampposts and brick walls around the neighborhood, accusing the young woman, in Yiddish, of libel.”

The real accusation seems to have been that she pursued charges rather than, say, talk to a rabbi. The Weberman trial came at a juncture when the failure of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office to prosecute child-sexual-abuse cases in the Orthodox community had become conspicuous. This was made clear by a two-part series last spring, in the Times, which drew on years of reporting by Jewish community papers and efforts by victims to be heard. The belief of rabbinical authorities that they, and not the civil system, should handle (or, too often, cover up) such cases was central, but the enforcement mechanism was the pressure of neighbors and colleagues, which could be frank in its cruelty.

In the Weberman case, prosecutors reportedly know of more alleged victims who were too afraid to come forward. The D.A.’s office had, for years, treated the fear of victims as an out, rather than as an impetus for their own action. In that sense, the witness-tampering case now pending might be as significant as that of Weberman himself.

This isn’t just about the Hasidic community, or even just closed religious communities more generally. Along with the news about the Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o—that his supposed girlfriend, a car-crash and leukemia victim, was a hoax—were reminders of the actual death of a real young woman, Elizabeth Seeberg. She said that a Notre Dame player had assaulted her; she was answered with texts telling her, “Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea,” and foot-dragging from the campus police. They only interviewed the player after she had killed herself. Victims remember what happens to victims—one reason that isolation can be an enemy of justice. Melinda Henneberger, who has reported extensively on the Notre Dame case, described an incident a few months after Seeberg’s death, in which a freshman told her R.A., who then drove her to the hospital, that she had been raped by a football player:

I also spoke to the R.A.’s parents, who met the young woman that same night, when their daughter brought her to their home after leaving the hospital. They said they saw—and reported to athletic officials—a hailstorm of texts from other players, warning the young woman not to report what had happened: “They were trying to silence this girl,” the R.A.’s father told me. And did; no criminal complaint was ever filed.

The freshman told the R.A. that she’d thought of what had happened to Seeberg. It is worth considering that “hailstorm of texts from other players” alongside the team’s participation regarding Manti Te’o. As Gail Collins of the Times noted, the original narrative of Te’o’s relationship glorified the image of “a girlfriend so lacking in neediness that you don’t even have to visit her in the hospital while she’s in a coma followed by leukemia”—or miss a practice to attend her funeral. Concurrent with that is the way even friends can turn on a woman who needs—and deserves—help. But there is something far more profound at stake than the choice between a person you’ve decided makes your life more complicated and one who, you think, makes it easier or just leaves it unchanged. The attraction of smooth surfaces—complicity disguised as politeness—can be the most corrupting thing of all, leaving one in dark and distorted place.

Why is the victim treated as the troublemaker? There is moral laziness, and a deferral to privilege, to tradition, or to one’s own interests, that disguises itself as loyalty, from Williamsburg to South Bend. And there is the illusion that being community-minded means protecting the strongest, rather than the most vulnerable members of a community.

Read More:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/01/isolated-victims-from-williamsburg-to-notre-dame.html#ixzz2IuZvzDUU

6 comments:

Tendler Part 1 said...

A number of years ago I learned in the Ner Israel high school (Baltimore). I come from a poor family of balei-teshuva. My parents divorced when I started learning in high school, so I was very stressed. One day a high school boy who was somehow related to the rabbis who run the yeshiva came up to me in the Beis Midrash and said, “Your parents are balei-teshuva. This means that your mother was mizane (prostituted) with your daddy. This means as stated in Rashi that your mother is a whore!” He laughed and everyone around us guffawed too. I jumped and punched him in the chest. The next thing I knew I was outside the Beis Midrash and they told me to see the principal rabbi Joseph or Yosef Tendler. He knew my family problems and why I punched that boy, but he said that I acted inappropriately and he had to think what to do with me. A couple of days later he called me up to his office and said, “The Beis Midrash is a makom kodesh (holy place) where the Shechina (Divine Presence) stays. You have desecrated this makom and have no right to stay here. The Greyhound bus leaves at six.” He pardoned the boy who insulted my mother in that makom kodesh, and I left Baltimore. I am not religious now.


Rabbi Joseph Tendler died last year (2012) on the 15th of Shvat. Now the Ner Israel Rabbinical College published his ethical musings on Chanuka in a book called “קונטרס נר יוסף, שיחות מוסר בעניני חנוכה מאת הרב יוסף טנדלר זצ״ל, הוצאה מיוחדת לכבוד הדינר השנתי, ישיבת נר ישראל באלטימאר, כסלו תשע״ג.” The Ner Israel rosh-yeshiva rabbi Aaron Feldman wrote an introduction to this book (דברי הערכה מאת מרן ראש הישיבה הרב אהרן פלדמן שליט״א) and rabbi Tendler’s son-in-law rabbi Azriel Hauptman wrote an introduction too (הרב עזריאל הופטמן חתן רבינו, קיום לדמותו של הרב יוסף טנדלר זצ״ל). Obviously they could not sweep under the rug many cases when boys were thrown out of NIRC by rabbi Tendler and their young lives wrecked. So these rabbis chose to whitewash rabbi Tendler. Rabbi Hauptman wrote, “If he had to expel a student from the high school, he would always find an appropriate yeshiva for him, and many times even after that he would learn with them on the phone to influence them, although they had left the high school” (אם היה צריך להוציא בחור מהמכינה, תמיד היה מוצא לאותו בחור ישיבה המתאמת, והרבה פעמים גם אחורי כן היה לומד עמהם בטלפון כדי שישפיע עליהם אף שכבר עזבו את המכינה). Rabbi Feldman went a step further: “It is so wonderful that when he had to use the decree of judgment — as a principle must sometimes do — for example to punish a boy or even to expel him from the yeshiva, he would take into his hand a nice cudgel to do that, and the boy would feel that the principal’s judgment came from love and not hate” (למרבה הפלא, גם כשהיה צריך להשתמש במידת הדין — כמו שמנהל מחוייב לעשות לפעמים — כגון להעניש בחור או אפילו להוציאו מהישיבה, לקח בידו תמיד את מקל נועם לעשות כן, והבחור היה מרגיש שהחלטתו של המנהל נבעה מאהבה ולא משנאה). My destroyed life shows that both rabbi Feldman and rabbi Hauptman have lied.

Tendler Part 2 said...

Rabbis who applaud rabbi Tendler say that the fact that he died on Tu-BiShvat shows how good he was to kids (little trees). The opposite is true. He died on that day because he had cut down many young lives/trees. It is ridiculous that thanks to rabbis like Feldman and Hauptman rabbi Tendler will be remembered as a good guy and not what he really was. Last year Phil Jacobs had an honest post about rabbi Tendler on his blog. So Phil got thrown out of Baltimore and his entire blog was taken off the Baltimore Jewish Times site. Fortunately it was reposted at UOJ’s blog where you can still read it (http://theunorthodoxjew.blogspot.com/2012/05/etans-disappearance-revealed-that.html?showComment=1338339168894#c3370781953641499995). I agree with that post one hundred percent that rabbi Tendler left behind the legacy of fear. And rabbi Tendler himself did not fear God. Read what holy Hauptman, his son-in-law, said, “When giving weekly ethical discourses to high school students he would always say that first and foremost he addressed himself because he himself wanted to learn ethics to uplift himself in his own fear” (תמיד היה אומר בשיחת מוסר שהיה מוסר מידי שבוע לבחורי המכינה, שהוא מדבר בעיקר לעצמו, שהוא רוצה ללמוד את המוסר בעצמו כדי שהוא יתעלה ביראת שמים שלו).


Rabbi Tendler taught others the fear of God but had little fear himself, covered up for the rich and pedophiles, built a large family that carries on his legacy of fear and posthumously became a holy man. And many young lives including mine he flashed down the toilet. If God existed he would never allow this yeshiva holocaust to happen.

Anonymous said...

Lipa is about to do the deep bend over. Brookly State Supreme Court judge has ruled against Torah Temimah regarding Kolko and their coverup.

http://www.vosizneias.com/122541/2013/01/25/brooklyn-ny-judge-rejects-yeshivas-bid-to-settle-abuse-case

ConfusedByYourIgnorance said...

It's been over 6 years since this was posted and commented on, but I came across this post randomly while searching for something and felt the need to say something.

It has been my experience that people who are "off the derech" have chosen that path because they haven't found a way to connect and have used whatever convenient excuse is open to them to disregard the frum lifestyle.

As a frum woman living in Baltimore, I've seen a lot of the atrocities in our community, but I've also seen a lot of the beauty. I'm generally a pessimist and tend to see negativity even in some of the most positive of circumstances, but I honestly think that the person who commented above blaming Rabbi Tendler for them not being frum is a load of BS.

I am in no way condoning Rabbi Tendler's behavior or actions, but using that as the reason you've chosen to not be frum is just an immense amount of weakness on your part. "If God existed he would never allow this yeshiva holocaust to happen." is a statement of ignoramus. We live in galus because our ancestors committed crimes that prevented them from maintaining a life of beauty and pure holiness, and because of our continuation (and escalation) of those crimes, we have not merited to earn that closeness and happiness back. Part of being a Jew, a frum Jew, is making choices. Every single day we make choices to do the right thing or the wrong thing. And in cases where people have more spiritual knowledge, they also have a greater yetzer hara weighing them down. Rabbi Tendler was clearly a learned man to earn the position of Rosh Yeshiva, and unfortunately he let his yetzer hara and ego win. But his support of the boys who were disgusting to you (also choices on their individual parts) does not represent all of yiddishkeit and does not have to affect your own relationship with God. The fact that you chose to allow that to happen is completely on you.

ConfusedByYourIgnorance said...

I grew up poor in a household built by two baalei teshuva who both have severe medical conditions that weren't really apparent when they got married, but have grown worse over time. This lead to a lot of anger and dysfunction in my home (starting well before I was born), especially when it came to matters of money, and they finally divorced when I was about a decade out of high school. Because of the medical issues, my parents had hard times finding and maintaining work to keep a roof over our heads and food on our table. And that's not to say there weren't additional challenges like being rejected by the very organizations that are supposed to support families in trauma and medical crises. In addition to my parents' issues, three of my siblings have learning disabilities that made schooling us a nightmare too. My siblings and I were constantly bullied by the frum kids in our neighborhood, and even when I attended Bais Yaakov and finally made a friend (in middle school), I never fully felt like I fit in.

But again, we're in galus. Nothing is supposed to be easy. Everything IS a struggle. And my relationship with God is a complex one, as I'm sure it is for many people. But it's davka the difficult things that convince me of His existence. It's the miraculous way that things are just so epically bad that there's literally no way this would just "happen" on its own. And of course God allows bad and even horrendous things to happen - it's those bad things that make us question and reevaluate; it's those things that allow us to choose to recognize that He exists. If things were good all the time, so easy, so obvious what's right and wrong, how quickly we would ignore His existence and forget to thank Him for all the good things He gives us every day. And yes, that's frustrating. And yes, it's often heartbreaking. But so many of the bad things that happen are CHOICES made by PEOPLE. And people are flawed. Immensely flawed. But it's those flaws that give us the room to grow - to figure out what needs fixing and actually work to fix those things. Sure, there are people who get so lost in the minutia of every day that they don't take the time to reevaluate their lives and figure out what needs fixing, but you can't base your life around what other people are doing. You are not them. And you can't use their actions as an excuse for your own.

For the record, I have a brother who is "OTD" and I feel very similarly towards him as I do towards you, previous poster. My brother had a lot of struggles in school, with teachers who didn't understand him and punished him for things he either didn't do or didn't understand, and he also experienced bullying and had a difficult home life. But he also managed to create a core group of friends who were an amazing support system for him. He found mentors for himself who are themselves remarkable people. He went to a good yeshiva and learned/shared amazing Torah. And then he walked away from it all citing "issues" with a couple of his Rabbeim as the catalyst. Particularly Rabbeim from his time in high school. Which he'd been almost a decade out of when he walked away from it all. His core group of friends is still frum, all of them married and (seemingly) happy and thriving, while my brother is living in a different state with his non-Jewish buddies, touring the country following bands with drugs and alcohol, and settling into a life that seems mostly meaningless. Every conversation with him comes back to his anger towards yiddishkeit and how he can't believe we still "do that sh**". And I do understand a lot of his frustrations, because I experienced a lot of that too. And I lived in the same home as him and have similar thought processes when it comes to a lot of our family "stuff", but what I don't understand is how he's let that anger consume him, and why he feels the need to mention it all the time.

Kind of like your comments above.

ConfusedByYourIgnorance said...

You chose to share your anger and frustration at several people who were not even mentioned in the article above. Your situation of being removed from NIRC, while heartbreaking in its own right, may have the similarity of being "oppressed" in the frum community, but is otherwise VASTLY different from this girl's story of sexual abuse and the vehement response of her (non-Baltimore) community for taking that kind of serious situation to the police instead of a Rav. Your comments made no mention of her or your empathy/sympathy because of your own situation. You literally just used the comments to share an unrelated story about yourself. And that is a problem. "He pardoned the boy who insulted my mother... and I left Baltimore. I am not religious now." - UNRELATED. If yiddishkeit had meant anything to you, that wouldn't have happened. You clearly had no connection and used that as an excuse to walk away from it all.

It's remarkable how the girl in the above story suffered this horrendous sexual abuse from someone who was supposed to be a mentor, a counselor, a trusted leader in her community, for THREE YEARS and didn't abandon her faith in God. You didn't need to leave Baltimore or yiddishkeit. If there'd been any meaning for you in it, you would have found another yeshiva and a family to board by. You would have made sacrifices to continue the life that your parents worked so choose for themselves and their family, despite their union falling apart. But your choices are your choices. Your actions are your actions. And I hope in the six years since writing your comments here, you've learned that and taken responsibility for your own life.

Despite my criticism of your life choices and posts above, I do wish you only peace and happiness