The UOJ Vault - June 2009 - 1,324,564 Views
Don't take my word for it!
Don't believe a word I say - unless I can logically and factually back it up. And the same goes for anyone with a message, any message from any messenger. It's either true and can be established, or it's hyperbole and rabble-rousing by clown-type imbeciles, costume and all, with nothing else to say but "trust me", I know what's best for you, your children and everyone that I/we deem a Torah-true Jew.
This has been the mindset for at least two decades, certainly since the passing of Rabbi Yaakov Kaminetzky z"tvkl. And Rav Yaakov saw this era coming, the era of Yiddishkeit being distorted and shredded by people with absolutely no sense of reality, and the lack of understanding and caring that what was good for the individual, the yachid - was good for the klal - the masses --- and not the other way around.
So, if thousands of kids were herded through a flawed yeshiva system, a system that did NOT care for the individual child, but rather thrived on numbers, and raised funds based upon being the "biggest" yeshiva, with great numbers of kids in their system, the individual - mostly regular great kids, very normal kids that needed unconditional love and attention, would get lost in the shuffle.
Rav Yaakov understood that, Rav Elya Svei did not. The Lakewood gang did not and we are now paying the price; thousands of families that were emotionally forced to engage in this fraud called kollel, are now poverty stricken, and a great deal of them, their parents, and their children paid with their souls. This community induced poverty was a desperate attempt by the Establishment to reel in the masses under the control of a few. If you need organizations and yeshivas to sustain you and your family, who would bite the hand that feeds you?
Entire families are disenchanted with Judaism, not just children. I guess the Agudath Israel can now develop a new government sponsored program -- call it Project NO - and have it headed by one of their own, someone who talks the talk, walks the walk, but when it comes down to the underlying failures of the program, for the inability to comprehend and address the real issues, old and new, he will toe the line of the establishment, rather than standing up for the brutal reality, and those victimized and re-victimized.
It was not that long ago when an acquaintance of mine, a true ben Torah with a large family living in Lakewood, took a chainsaw, and decapitated himself. Other contemporaries of mine have confided in me that they despise what has become of them, and hate waking up in the morning. They have been totally neutered, by them having to rely on their wives supporting them, and regularly signing documents to enable them to receive Welfare in one form or another.
A bright high school buddy of mine died oh so young, by intentionally destroying his body with food and alcohol and God knows what else he consumed to put himself out of his misery. He was not a flunky kindergarten rebbe, he founded and headed a large school.
Another former yeshiva friend, was instructed by his rosh yeshiva to go on a taanit dibbur, stop speaking entirely, until he purged himself from his inclination to gossip and speak loshon hara. He cracked up and spent years in a mental institution. He lives in Lakewood, the last I heard was that he is permanently emotionally disabled.
These are not isolated cases, there are countless horror stories similar to the above that I am aware of.
My educated and informed guess is that Shua Finkelstein in Lakewood put himself out of his misery, because the Lakewood Mafia protected his molester. His molester is part of a family that donates large sums of money to Lakewood - Beth Medrash Govoha. The Lakewood philosophy of dealing with child-abusers in a "respectful and dignified" fashion, in my opinion, played no small role in Shua's death.
It is no coincidence in my mind, that David "Fifi" Zahler, who over the last years developed a close relationship with Moshe Eisemann on the Ner Israel campus in Baltimore, intentionally jumped to his death. Nobody dares to say this publicly, that's why I will.
The System is broken, it collapsed under its own fraudulent weight; the evidence surrounds and envelops you, but you refuse, or are too petrified to deal with this reality!
"Once we could say we didn’t know. Now we know." Borrowing from David Zwiebel's "confession" -- David, we now know as well, you and your organization, Agudath Israel, are pitifully corrupt and morally inept, nobody should be trusting any important life and death issue to you and your cohorts! And that's believing for a brief moment that in fact you now know because you really know or because you were "forced" to know, rather than choose to know. In either case, evidence of sexual child-abuse in Orthodox Jewish schools and camps has been festering out there for some fifty years, including in your own summer camp and in hundreds of your directly affiliated schools, and yet you did nothing to protect these violated children, and did everything to protect the vile child sex-abusers and the criminal, despicable rabbis that protected them.
You all have lost any moral authority on this issue -- and worse, you all deserve to be held criminally negligent and responsible for the thousands of troubled lives and God only knows how many related, self-destroyed lives by children who could no longer bear the pain.
So, I'll have none of your continued lies; when I chose to dig deep into the authenticity of what else you and the likes of you were selling; I became aware of the extent of your involvement in covering up these unspeakable crimes, and I, to my horror, discovered that except for a handful, the rest of you are petty, conniving, mind-thieves without a scintilla of a moral conscience.
The message is so apparent -- none of these rabbis should be able to dictate to you what's in your best interest -- because they are destroying our Jewish heritage to cover up their own crimes, where "d'racheha darchei noam" should be first and foremost; instead they are damning our children and ultimately us, all of us, to an unsustainable and self-destructive life that is causing misery and desperation to the vast majority of Orthodox Jews. We must set up a bulwark that will prevent the espousing of poverty and misery as a way of life, foolproof systems of protecting our children, in and out of yeshivas, from those that would destroy them by enfeebling their minds with their self-manufactured religious rubbish, and not protecting their physical and emotional well-being that were entrusted to their care; that not only is the antithesis of everything Jewish, but it is anti-Jewish!
Rabbis and their underlings, that would protect pedophiles and their enablers at the expense of our children and our families -- whether the crime occurred yesterday or forty years ago, must be treated as amongst the greatest enemies that ever faced the Jewish nation.
These rabbis stand stark naked before us -- and it is ugly! They must be taken down!