The first case involves Malka Leifer, a former ultra-Orthodox girls’ school principal charged in Australia with 74 counts of child sex abuse. The police announced in February that they were investigating Litzman on suspicion that he had pressured employees in his office to alter the conclusions of psychiatric evaluations that had deemed Leifer fit for extradition...

Police recommend Litzman stand trial for bribery, aiding alleged pedophile

 

Deputy health minister and UTJ party head could be charged over pressuring employees to prevent extradition of Malka Leifer to face 74 counts of child sex abuse in Australia

Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman at the ceremony for the opening of a new branch of his Agudath Israel party, ahead of the upcoming elections

Police recommended on Tuesday that Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman be indicted on charges of fraud and breach of trust for using his office to illicitly provide assistance to an alleged serial sex abuser, as well as on a separate bribery charge for helping to prevent the closure of a food business that his own ministry had deemed unsanitary.

The first case involves Malka Leifer, a former ultra-Orthodox girls’ school principal charged in Australia with 74 counts of child sex abuse. The police announced in February that they were investigating Litzman on suspicion that he had pressured employees in his office to alter the conclusions of psychiatric evaluations that had deemed Leifer fit for extradition.

In their statement, police said that the investigation, conducted by the Lahav 433 anti-corruption unit and the National Fraud Investigation Unit, had found enough evidence to put Litzman on trial over his involvement in the Leifer case, as well as for intervening to help several other sex offenders obtain improved conditions, including prison furloughs and other benefits, by pressuring state psychiatrists and prisons service officials.

In the second case, police said that Litzman attempted to influence officials in the Health Ministry in order to prevent the closure of a food business whose owner “he is close to” — a closure that had been ordered due to “serious sanitary findings found that led to the sickness of a number of people who ate from its products.”

In this February 27, 2018, file photo, Malka Leifer, center, is brought to a courtroom in Jerusalem.

Kan reported that breakthroughs in the police’s case came from the testimonies of various state psychiatrists. One of them told investigators, “I’m just a bureaucrat. A senior minister is sitting in front of me [making requests]. I know my place and I know his place and what is expected of me.”

Several psychiatrists told police that they feared they’d be fired if they didn’t follow Litzman’s orders.

Litzman, who possesses many authorities of a full minister despite serving as a deputy, denied any wrongdoing, maintaining in a response to the police recommendation that his office has a “clear open-door policy for assisting members of the public. This is without discrimination between populations and without clarifying the status of those who call for assistance. The deputy minister expressed confidence that no charges would ultimately be filed.”

In the wake of the police recommendation, it will be up to Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit to determine whether or not to indict.

Dassi Erlich, a Leifer accuser who launched a campaign to extradite her former principal back to Australia, said in a statement Tuesday, “We are feeling so grateful that the questions we continually raised through the #BringLeiferBack campaign resulted in one more step to achieving justice.”

In May, Channel 13 news reported that Litzman helped at least 10 serious sex offenders obtain improved conditions, including home visits and other benefits, by pressuring state psychiatrists and prisons service officials.

Earlier in the year, the TV channel had reported that police were investigating suspicions that Litzman and his chief of staff pressured a psychiatrist, Moshe Birger, to ensure that another imprisoned sex offender close to Litzman’s Gur sect of Hasidim was placed in a rehabilitation program. Participation in the program can lead to furloughs and early release from prison.

Police said Tuesday that they had not found sufficient evidence to prosecute Litzman on his suspected assistance to other alleged pedophiles.

Leifer, a former school principal who is wanted for alleged sex crimes in Australia, is known to have links to the Gur community, having once taught at a school in Israel affiliated with the branch.

Protesters demonstrate on March 13, 2019, outside the Jerusalem District Court during extradition hearings for Malka Leifer, a former girls school principal wanted for sexual abuse in Australia.

A Justice Ministry official told The Times of Israel in February that police had recordings of Litzman and officials in his office speaking to Health Ministry employees and pressing them to act on Leifer’s behalf.

In 2000, Leifer was recruited from Israel to work at the Adass Israel ultra-Orthodox girls school in Melbourne. When allegations of sexual abuse against her began to surface eight years later, members of the school board purchased the mother of eight a red-eye plane ticket back to Israel, allowing her to avoid being charged.

After authorities in Melbourne filed charges against her, Australia officially filed an extradition request in 2012. Leifer was arrested in Israel two years later, but released to house arrest shortly thereafter. Judges deemed her mentally unfit to stand trial and eventually removed all restrictions against her, concluding that she was too ill to even leave her bed.

Jerusalem District Psychiatrist Jacob Charnes

She was rearrested in February 2018 following a police undercover operation that cast doubts on her claims regarding her mental state, and has remained in custody since. The operation was launched after the Jewish Community Watch NGO hired private investigators who placed hidden cameras in the Emmanuel settlement, a Haredi community in the northern West Bank, where Leifer had been living, which showed the alleged sex abuser roaming around the town without any apparent difficulty.
 
Despite the seemingly damning footage, the trial has dragged on for an additional year, as the court continues to debate her mental fitness. The Jerusalem district psychiatrist responsible for evaluating Leifer, Dr. Jacob Charnes, has changed his mind three times regarding whether Leifer was fit for extradition, ultimately signing off an a legal opinion in which state psychiatrists found her fit for extradition.

However, when the psychiatrist was cross-examined by the defense on the evaluation late last year, he told the court that he recommended an additional evaluation of Leifer be carried out — a proposal that both sides have rejected.

A legal official told The Times of Israel that police suspected Charnes changed his medical conclusion after being contacted by officials in Litzman’s office. Though Charnes has been interrogated under caution in the case against the deputy health minister, police on Tuesday said they did not recommend he be tried.

The Jerusalem District Court will hand down a final decision regarding Leifer’s mental fitness for an extradition hearing on September 23. The Times of Israel learned last month that a separate court appointed medical board is slated to officially concluce that Leifer has been feigning mental illness, in a ruling that would likely impact the Jerusalem District Court’s decision.

Jewish Community Watch founder of director Meyer Seewald said in a Tuesday statement, “Our private investigation in 2017 only clarified what was obvious to so many: that Malka Leifer was feigning mental illness to avoid extradition. Considering she was doing very little to hide her ruse, it was apparent that Leifer was being protected by very influential people. The police recommendation clarifies that it was allegedly Litzman and his office that were diligently working to make sure Malka Leifer’s victims never received justice.”

Seewald called on senior lawmakers to ensure that Litzman is not made a member of the next cabinet after the elections on September 17.


https://www.timesofisrael.com/police-recommend-litzman-stand-trial-for-bribery-aiding-alleged-pedophiles/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2019-08-06&utm_medium=email

 

“It is going to be a cold day in hell when I step back into a Baptist church.” --- When Bible verses, prayer, hymns, faith, God-talk and church rituals are perverted into weapons for sexual assault and then hammered into shields for church cover-ups, they become neurologically networked with trauma, and this renders them polluted and often toxic for the survivors. This is the truth of the damage done by a faith group that enables abuse and turns a blind eye to clergy-predators in their midst.

Clergy sex abuse: the damage done when faith is weaponized (substitute out "church" for "yeshiva" or "shul"...)

“Get your hand off me!” I wanted to yell. But I didn’t.

More than a month after the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Birmingham, I am still processing something that happened there. After the For Such a Time as This Rally, abuse survivors and advocates gathered at a coffee house to decompress. It was a warm-hearted event, filled with a sense of “beloved community,” and I felt gratitude to everyone who was there. There was even a lovely candle-lighting ceremony honoring me for my years of advocacy work against sexual abuse and cover-ups in the SBC.

Then, as the evening drew to an end, one of the event’s organizers called on a prominent Southern Baptist woman to offer a closing prayer. Suddenly, the woman was standing right over me, and with me still seated, she put her hand firmly on my shoulder and launched into an out-loud prayer for me.
I froze.

“I felt powerless, unsafe, targeted, disconnected and manipulated.”

Ironically, this was a woman who has written extensively about sexual abuse in general and is a survivor herself, though in a different context – i.e., she is not a survivor of sexual abuse by clergy nor a survivor of religious institutional cover-up.

I’m sure her prayer was well-intentioned. Yet I felt the urgent need to shove her hand off me and run. I came pretty close to doing just that. But I restrained myself, and amid the panic of my hyper-triggered brain and body, I tried to figure out what to do.

I thought about standing to my feet and walking out of the room. But she was looming over me so closely that to even rise from my chair would have required pushing her aside.

I felt trapped. Trapped by the weapon of her hand-on-the-shoulder, wanting-all-to-hear prayer. Trapped by my own good-girl, don’t-make-waves upbringing. Trapped by past trauma.

I felt powerless, unsafe, targeted, disconnected and manipulated. In short, I felt mightily triggered.
My self-anger and self-loathing went from zero to 100 in a split-second, and I felt myself getting short of breath. It was as though a sink-hole had suddenly swallowed up the normal me, and I was suffocating.

So, despite my instinct to shove aside her hand and yell, I focused on breathing. I prayed that her sword of a prayer would be short and dull, and that I wouldn’t bleed out completely right in front of everyone. I stayed passive and quiet.

Now, here I am weeks later, still kicking myself for my failure to honor the truth of my own reality and my failure to set an honest example for other clergy abuse survivors who were in the room. I was inauthentic.

Why didn’t I have the courage to show up in the world exactly as I am – as someone whose adrenaline can surge mightily if confronted with triggering religious trappings? Why could I not be fierce with my own reality? Why did I not protest? Why did I not immediately stand to meet her eye rather than cower under her hand?

The answer, of course, is that I was having a PTSD reaction. Her hand-on-the-shoulder, standing-over-me style of prayer was too similar to what my SBC pastor-perp used to do when I was a kid. 

And then there were the weaponized prayers of so many others who used God-talk afterwards to try to silence me.

Intellectually, I understand a lot about my complex PTSD – I’ve been fortunate enough to have years of therapy – and yet, in that moment, cognitive understanding wasn’t enough to stop the cascading feeling of doom in my body.

“Once faith has been used to eviscerate, it doesn’t serve well as a healing balm.”

Right after the event, I talked with several other clergy survivors, and one of them likely told the woman how distressing her prayer had been for me. She sent a gracious apology for causing me stress, and I thanked her. Nevertheless, I’m still left reeling and trying to return to normal.
Once faith has been used to eviscerate, it doesn’t serve well as a healing balm.

I think this is something many religious people – even well-intentioned people – just don’t understand. For them, faith can be a powerful resource for healing in all manner of life’s travails, and they can scarcely imagine it otherwise. But for people like me for whom faith was weaponized for sexual assaults and church cover-ups, the rituals and indicia of faith can be a minefield.

This is one reason why many clergy abuse survivors sever all relationships with institutional faith. 

For the sake of health, sanity and self-preservation, we turn away from the minefield.

It’s why many clergy abuse survivors nodded in solidarity at the words of SBC survivor Anne Marie Miller: “It is going to be a cold day in hell when I step back into a Baptist church.”

And while many people understand that survivors are often triggered by being in the same place where sexual assaults occurred, what they often fail to comprehend is that a triggering “place” may be something as simple as the context of a prayer or a particular piece of scripture. It may be any sort of stimulus that brings about the feelings of trauma in a “place” in our heads, and that includes sights and sounds associated with church and faith.

When Bible verses, prayer, hymns, faith, God-talk and church rituals are perverted into weapons for sexual assault and then hammered into shields for church cover-ups, they become neurologically networked with trauma, and this renders them polluted and often toxic for the survivors.

This is the truth of the damage done by a faith group that enables abuse and turns a blind eye to clergy-predators in their midst.\

https://baptistnews.com/article/clergy-sex-abuse-the-damage-done-when-faith-is-weaponized/?fbclid=IwAR01H4EpoXfCrjrpCyEs7dcK3zF_Q2zHYWymccH60Ty-bMAfwncRRICyK0Q#.XUOuU8PPCeo.facebook