Wednesday, January 31, 2018

SAR is committed to our students- past and present. Beyond the reported incident, we encourage anyone who has information regarding any abuse, past or current, to report to either of us or to T&M through the contact channels listed below.



Important Message from SAR

SAR is more than a school - we are a community. We pride ourselves on the combination of excellence in education, love of Israel and commitment to mitzvot which have been transmitted to generations of students. We strive to instill in our students the midah of kol yisrael arevim ze laze, and take seriously this commitment to watch out for each other. 

It is our commitment to these principles that makes this letter so difficult. There has been significant media attention recently highlighting sexual abuse at private schools. Much of the abuse that has been brought to the forefront by the press took place many years ago and has only been uncovered recently. Sadly, it has come to our attention that SAR students may have been subject to sexual abuse at the hands of a former teacher/administrator in the 1970s. 

A recent email from a former student reported abuse that was perpetrated by Stanley Rosenfeld, a former SAR Academy teacher and administrator. Rosenfeld was the Assistant Principal for General Studies at SAR Academy in the 1970s. In 2001, many years after Rosenfeld left SAR Academy, he pleaded no contest to two counts of second-degree child molestation with no known connection to SAR.

As painful as this is for our school community, the pain for any of the victims of abuse is far greater. We are committed to being supportive to any victims of abuse, to understanding the abuse they suffered and the harm it has caused them, and to learning from our past experiences and using them to inform our present practices to protect our community. 

In order to ensure that we can properly understand the scope of abuse and support the victims of abuse, SAR has hired T&M Protection Resources to conduct an external investigation of claims of sexual abuse. T&M is an investigative firm, comprised of former prosecutors with extensive experience investigating allegations of sexual misconduct. In order for T&M to conduct this investigation, we are encouraging all members of our community to please report any information regarding abuse that may have been perpetrated by Stanley Rosenfeld. Reports may be made directly to either of us or to T&M. Contact information is listed below. 

SAR is committed to our students- past and present. Beyond the reported incident, we encourage anyone who has information regarding any abuse, past or current, to report to either of us or to T&M through the contact channels listed below.


We expect that the investigation by T&M will take at least several months and we want you to know that while the privacy of survivors is central to this process, we do intend to communicate our findings at the conclusion of the investigation. 

We are fully committed to the safety of our students and to continuing to implement best practices in these areas. As our students, parents and staff are aware, in recent years, SAR has implemented policies and training regarding sexual abuse and sexual harassment. Our commitment to our current students and the protections we have implemented does not minimize the commitment to understanding and addressing a painful past. 

We thank you for your assistance in this effort and in being responsible for the well-being of all of those in our community.


Rabbi Binyamin Krauss
Principal, SAR Academy

Rabbi Tully Harcsztark
Principal, SAR High School



Contact information:

T&M Protection Resources
phone:(646) 445-7705

Rabbi Binyamin Krauss
phone: (718)-548-1717 ext. 1207

Rabbi Tully Harcsztark
 phone: (718)-548-2727 ext. 1501




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Grooming. Such a chilling word. Such an apt one. Abusers introduce themselves as instructors and allies. They can lift your score. They can improve your grades. They can provide the guidance that you lack or the fun that you’re missing. Bit by bit, they ask for bigger chunks of your time and suggest increasingly private encounters. The pace of the journey varies, but not its arc or its destination.

Larry Nassar Is a Familiar Monster





When Judge Rosemarie Aquilina handed down her sentence on Larry Nassar last week, she spoke to and of him as a kind of monster we rarely see. She was wrong.

I know this because I remember Penn State, where an assistant football coach named Jerry Sandusky worked his way through boy after boy across year after year.

I know this because I haven’t forgotten what happened in the Boy Scouts of America decades ago.

And I know this from the extensive time that I once spent studying and even interviewing men who, like Nassar, were serial child molesters, except that none of them had the lofty title — “Dr.” — that he did.

No, they had loftier ones.

The honorific “Rev.” came before their written names. People addressed them as “Father.” They were Roman Catholic priests.

In researching and publishing a book about them, I learned a great deal about child sexual abuse — enough to recognize that as horrifying as Nassar’s violation of young female athletes was, he and his crime spree weren’t anomalous. They snugly fit a pattern. And taking full and proper note of that is the best way — the only way — to protect children from the other Nassars out there.

In Nassar’s case there were two primary institutions, U.S.A. Gymnastics and Michigan State University. Both behaved unconscionably. In the cases of the scores of priests whom I investigated, it was the Roman Catholic Church: its individual congregations, its dioceses, all the way up to the Vatican. The Boy Scouts organization was deemed so irresponsible that in 2010, a jury ordered it to pay $18.5 million to a former scout who had been abused in the 1980s. Athletic officials at Penn State, including the legendary head football coach Joe Paterno, disregarded warnings about Sandusky. In the short term, taking action is infinitely more uncomfortable and harder than simply wishing it all away.

It’s interesting that Sandusky’s name wasn’t more prevalent over the past week, as the attention to Nassar’s story and the efforts to wring some meaning from it intensified. The parallels are striking and instructive. Although Sandusky’s victims were boys, he, like Nassar, constructed his professional life so that he had steady access to children and appeared to be an altruist in their midst. He started a foster home, which evolved into a nonprofit group for troubled youth so large and well regarded that it received one of President George H. W. Bush’s “Points of Light” awards.

“Children constantly surrounded Sandusky, so much so that they became part of his persona,” Joe Posnanski wrote in his book “Paterno.” That same description applies to Nassar. It also applies to many of the abusive priests who went undetected and unpunished before the Catholic Church finally owned up to its failures and instituted necessary reforms.

Nassar had girls stretched out and pliant on his examining table. Sandusky roughhoused, wrestled and showered with boys in the name of sports. Nassar’s victims and their parents were awestruck by his ties to Olympic athletes, his floor passes to elite competitions, the mementos on his office walls. Sandusky’s victims were dazzled by his position smack in the middle of all of those football stars and all of that football glory.

In an article about Sandusky in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell observed that he “built a sophisticated, multimillion-dollar, fully integrated grooming operation, outsourcing to child-care professionals the task of locating vulnerable children.” Change “child-care professionals” to gymnastics coaches and Gladwell could have been analyzing Nassar.

Grooming. Such a chilling word. Such an apt one. Abusers introduce themselves as instructors and allies. They can lift your score. They can improve your grades. They can provide the guidance that you lack or the fun that you’re missing. Bit by bit, they ask for bigger chunks of your time and suggest increasingly private encounters. The pace of the journey varies, but not its arc or its destination.

And they concoct justifications for what they’re doing, trying to persuade their victims of its righteousness as they simultaneously persuade themselves. Nassar’s so-called medical treatments exemplified this, as did the actions of many priests. I recall one who told a boy that the touching was part of his confession and his purification. I recall another who told a girl that she’d been assigned the task of helping him, a professed celibate, to better understand human sexuality so that he could minister more effectively to his flock.

Many abusive priests invoked the permission of God. Nassar cited the demands of science.

An overwhelming majority of adults who treat, teach, coach and counsel children are nothing like these men. To distrust all of them would be a terrible mistake and grievous disservice, both to them and to the kids who stand to benefit mightily from their attention.

But to find easy reassurance in the station that an adult possesses, the privileges that he bestows and the cause that he serves would be a greater mistake still.

The reckoning last week in that Michigan courtroom — where survivors of Nassar’s abuse emerged from silence and isolation to confront him and the world with the damage that he had done — wasn’t like anything I’d previously witnessed. But Nassar? There were similar monsters before him. And there will be similar monsters after.



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