“We just can’t wait for more people to kill themselves to know that this is a massive crisis.”

 

Frustrated by haredi leaders, Orthodox activists push for stronger response to sexual abuse

Nearly 350,000 flyers expressing support for victims of sexual abuse were distributed in Orthodox communities across Israel by a group of volunteers Friday

 

(JTA) — On Friday morning, most of the people bustling through Beit Shemesh, a town in central Israel with a large haredi Orthodox population, were getting ready for Shabbat. Shoshanna Keats-Jaskoll had a different mission.

Keats-Jaskoll was handing out flyers with messages of support for victims of sexual abuse, in a public display of solidarity at the end of a wrenching week in many Orthodox communities.

At the beginning of the week, Chaim Walder, a celebrated haredi Orthodox children’s book author in Israel, died by suicide after being accused by numerous children and young women of sexual abuse. The Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel visited Walder’s family. Then, on Thursday, one of Walder’s alleged victims, Shifra Horovitz, also died by suicide, her friends saying she had been distraught by the response to his death.

For Keats-Jaskoll, a cofounder of the Israeli advocacy organization Chochmat Nashim, which fights extremism and sexism in the Orthodox community, and for many other Orthodox women, the litany called for a coordinated, public response. So she, who is Orthodox but not haredi, and a network of haredi activists and volunteers printed 350,000 flyers and passed them out in haredi areas before Shabbat.

Most of the reactions she got were from mothers thanking her for sharing her message, she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But one man told her he didn’t know anyone who had been hurt and questioned why she was giving out the flyers — keeping up the conversation for far longer than she expected.

“I think this is really hard for haredim, when you’re told to trust leadership and there’s a real cognitive dissonance: something is wrong, the leadership should be saying something, if they’re not saying something maybe it’s not true, but if it’s not true what does that mean?” Keats-Jaskoll said. “So I think they’re going through a real crisis of faith in a lot of places.”

The flyers that Keats-Jaskoll and others handed out spoke directly to that crisis of faith, and to the religious values of those whose confidence in their leaders might be teetering. They offered information about the rabbinic court that heard testimony against Walder, quoted rabbinic sources about the seriousness of sexual abuse and answered questions about why allegations first reported in secular media should be trusted in religious communities.

Since the allegations against Walder first appeared in November, the case has taken an unusual trajectory in the Orthodox world. After Eichler’s, a Jewish bookstore in Brooklyn, announced that it would stop selling Walder’s books in response to the Haaretz investigation, many other repudiations of Walder followed, in a flood that advocates for survivors of sexual abuse said seemed to represent a watershed moment for the community.

But after Walder’s suicide, it became immediately clear that any shift extended only so far. In a number of haredi schools, teachers reportedly spoke to students about Walder’s suicide as an example of the dangerous effects of “lashon hara,” or speaking negatively about another person, and parents were counseled not to discuss the issue in detail with their children.

At Walder’s funeral, Dov Weinroth, a lawyer and friend of Walder, called out the journalists at Haaretz who first published the allegations against Walder as “murderers.” And in the days after Walder’s death, multiple haredi Orthodox publications published obituaries of Walder that ended with the phrase “may his memory be a blessing” while failing to mention the allegations agains him.

Yet social media has given rise to a different kind of reaction: photos of Walder’s books in the trash and poignant accounts of difficult conversations between parents and children about abuse and what constitutes inappropriate touching. A social media campaign Monday generated a flood of complaints to haredi magazines about their coverage. And the crowdfunding campaign to print a second run of flyers has raised nearly $70,000 in just a few days.

“There’s a dissonance between how people are responding in their homes and the way the institutions are responding,” Keats-Jaskoll said.

There are signs that the dissonance is having an effect on traditional institutions. After being criticized for visiting Walder’s family, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau called for victims of sexual abuse to come forward. Weinroth, too, made an about-face, apologizing for criticizing the reporters who broke the story in a Facebook post Thursday that urged readers to “believe the complainants.”

“I picked up the phone and called Aaron Rabinowitz,” Weinroth wrote, referring to one of the Haaretz reporters who broke the story about Walder. “Truthfully this was the first time, and for a simple reason: to apologize. At the end of the day, I had never spoken with him but I got up at the funeral and demeaned him.”

Rabbi Natan Slifkin, author and director of the Biblical Museum of Natural History in Beit Shemesh who writes the blog Rationalist Judaism, compared the reaction to the Walder story to the haredi community’s reaction to the stampede at Mount Meron in April last year where 45 men were killed during an annual religious gathering.

“The fact that Walder, clearly emerging as a horrific predator, was glorified after his death by important charedi rabbis and politicians and newspapers, while those who attempted to scream about the dangers are being branded as evil gossipers who drove him to his death, is just too much for many people in the charedi community,” Slifkin wrote.

While calling out those who blamed the victims for Walder’s death and those who encouraged silence rather than shaming abusers, Slifkin noted the signs of change, including an editorial in Mishpacha magazine’s Hebrew edition, which, in an unusual move, spoke directly about the topic of sexual abuse.

“They [the victims] are not the guilty ones. They are not the abusers,” the magazine write. “To them we say in the name of the entire haredi community: our hearts are with you. We support you and we believe you, unconditionally. And we will do everything in our power as a community to build a safer and purer world for you.”

For Keats-Jaskoll and other activists in the haredi Orthodox community, the fallout from the Walder case is indeed a watershed moment — and one that has to do with a broader phenomenon of people taking matters into their own hands after questioning their religious leaders.

“I see more more and more and more people come to that realization of we have to do this, we can’t wait around,” Keats-Jaskoll said.

“I think COVID helped with that, I think seeing what happened with COVID with leadership denying what was happening with COVID and watching people get sick and die, it kind of took a lot of people and shook them up and say maybe our leadership doesn’t know everything,” she said.

She’s doing everything she can to help activists within haredi communities speed the change — while fearing that it won’t come fast enough for victims of sexual abuse.

“We just can’t wait for the next suicide,” Keats-Jaskoll said. “We just can’t wait for more people to kill themselves to know that this is a massive crisis.”

https://www.jta.org/2022/01/04/israel/frustrated-by-haredi-leaders-orthodox-activists-push-for-stronger-response-to-sexual-abuse?utm_source=JTA_Maropost&utm_campaign=JTA_DB&utm_medium=email&mpweb=1161-38711-462090

Thankfully, we have an enormous advantage over 1918 that offers hope. Whereas efforts to develop a flu vaccine a century ago failed, the coronavirus vaccines developed in 2020 largely prevent severe illness or death from omicron, and the companies and researchers that produced them expect a booster shot tailored to omicron sometime in the winter or spring.

"Kamenetzky argued that schools should not exclude unvaccinated students, as they currently do under public health laws. He also claimed that school janitors would be spreading disease if vaccines worked. “They are mostly Mexican and are unvaccinated,” the rabbi said. “If there was a problem, the children would already have gotten sick.”

Kamenetzky is dean of the Talmudical Yeshiva of Philadelphia and a member of the rabbinical board that guides Agudath Israel of America, the leading ultra-Orthodox umbrella organization. He spoke at the umbrella group’s annual gala in May. His wife, Temi Kamenetzky, gives lectures opposing vaccines.

Other prominent opponents of childhood vaccinations include former Playboy Playmate and talk show host Jenny McCarthy and Alicia Silvertsone, star of the 1995 film “Clueless.” The Centers for Disease Control says there is no link between vaccines and the development of autism, one common fear. 

 A 2013 measles outbreak that sickened dozens in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Boro Park and Williamsburg was caused, in part, by ultra-Orthodox parents who had refused to vaccinate their children, according to an alert issued by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene."

 

“I see vaccinations as the problem,” Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetzky told the Baltimore Jewish Times in a story published in late August. “It’s a hoax. Even the Salk [polio] vaccine is a hoax. It’s just big business.”

The 1918 flu is even more relevant in 2022 thanks to Omicron

Over the past two years, historians and analysts have compared the coronavirus to the 1918 flu pandemic. Many of the mitigation practices used to combat the spread of the coronavirus, especially before the development of the vaccines, have been the same as those used in 1918 and 1919 - masks and hygiene, social distancing, ventilation, limits on gatherings (particularly indoors), quarantines, mandates, closure policies and more.

Yet, it may be that only now, in the winter of 2022, when Americans are exhausted with these mitigation methods, that a comparison to the 1918 pandemic is most apt.

The highly contagious omicron variant has rendered vaccines much less effective at preventing infections, thus producing skyrocketing caseloads. And that creates a direct parallel with the fall of 1918, which provides lessons for making January as painless as possible.

In February and March 1918, an infectious flu emerged. It spread from Kansas, through World War I troop and material transports, filling military post hospitals and traveling across the Atlantic and around the world within six months. Cramped quarters and wartime transport and industry generated optimal conditions for the flu to spread, and so, too, did the worldwide nature of commerce and connection. But there was a silver lining: Mortality rates were very low.

In part because of press censorship of anything that might undermine the war effort, many dismissed the flu as a "three-day fever," perhaps merely a heavy cold, or simply another case of the grippe (an old-fashioned word for the flu).

Downplaying the flu led to high infection rates, which increased the odds of mutations. And in the summer of 1918, a more infectious variant emerged. In August and September, U.S. and British intelligence officers observed outbreaks in Switzerland and northern Europe, writing home with warnings that went largely unheeded.

Unsurprisingly then, this seemingly more infectious, much more deadly variant of H1N1 traveled west across the Atlantic, producing the worst period of the pandemic in October 1918. Nearly 200,000 Americans died that month. After a superspreading Liberty Loan parade at the end of September, Philadelphia became an epicenter of the outbreak. At its peak, nearly 700 Philadelphians died per day.

Once spread had begun, mitigation methods such as closures, distancing, mask-wearing and isolating those infected couldn't stop it, but they did save many lives and limited suffering by slowing infections and spread. The places that fared best implemented proactive restrictions early; they kept them in place until infections and hospitalizations were way down, then opened up gradually, with preparations to reimpose measures if spread returned or rates elevated, often ignoring the pleas of special interests lobbying hard for a complete reopening.

In places in the United States where officials gave in to public fatigue and lobbying to remove mitigation methods, winter surges struck. Although down from October's highs, these surges were still usually far worse than those in the cities and regions that held steady.

In Denver, in late November 1918, an "amusement" lobby - businesses and leaders invested in keeping theaters, movie houses, pool halls and other public venues open - successfully pressured the mayor and public health officials to rescind and then revise a closure order. This, in turn, generated what the Rocky Mountain News called "almost indescribable confusion," followed by widespread public defiance of mask and other public health prescriptions.

In San Francisco, where resistance was generally less successful than in Denver, there was significant buy-in for a second round of masking and public health mandates in early 1919 during a new surge. But opposition created an issue. An Anti-Mask League formed, and public defiance became more pronounced. Eventually anti-maskers and an improving epidemic situation combined to end the "masked" city's second round of mask and public health mandates.

The takeaway: Fatigue and removing mitigation methods made things worse. Public officials needed to safeguard the public good, even if that meant unpopular moves.

The flu burned through vulnerable populations, but by late winter and early spring 1919, deaths and infections dropped rapidly, shifting toward an endemic moment - the flu would remain present, but less deadly and dangerous.

Overall, nearly 675,000 Americans died during the 1918-19 flu pandemic, the majority during the second wave in the autumn of 1918. That was 1 in roughly 152 Americans (with a case fatality rate of about 2.5%). Worldwide estimates differ, but on the order of 50 million probably died in the flu pandemic.

In 2022, we have far greater biomedical and technological capacity enabling us to sequence mutations, understand the physics of aerosolization and develop vaccines at a rapid pace. We also have a far greater public health infrastructure than existed in 1918 and 1919. Even so, it remains incredibly hard to stop infectious diseases, particularly those transmitted by air. This is complicated further because many of those infected with the coronavirus are asymptomatic. And our world is even more interconnected than in 1918.

That is why, given the contagiousness of omicron, the lessons of the past are even more important today than they were a year ago. The new surge threatens to overwhelm our public health infrastructure, which is struggling after almost two years of fighting the pandemic. Hospitals are experiencing staff shortages (like in fall 1918). Testing remains problematic.

And ominously, as in the fall of 1918, Americans fatigued by restrictions and a seemingly endless pandemic are increasingly balking at following the guidance of public health professionals or questioning why their edicts have changed from earlier in the pandemic. They are taking actions that, at the very least, put more vulnerable people and the system as a whole at risk - often egged on by politicians and media figures downplaying the severity of the moment.

Public health officials also may be repeating the mistakes of the past. Conjuring echoes of Denver in late 1918, under pressure to prioritize keeping society open rather than focusing on limiting spread, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its isolation recommendations in late December. The new guidelines halved isolation time and do not require a negative test to reenter work or social gatherings.

Thankfully, we have an enormous advantage over 1918 that offers hope. Whereas efforts to develop a flu vaccine a century ago failed, the coronavirus vaccines developed in 2020 largely prevent severe illness or death from omicron, and the companies and researchers that produced them expect a booster shot tailored to omicron sometime in the winter or spring. So, too, we have antivirals and new treatments that are just becoming available, though in insufficient quantities for now.

Those lifesaving advantages, however, can only help as much as Americans embrace them. Only by getting vaccinated, including with booster shots, can Americans prevent the health-care system from being overwhelmed. But the vaccination rate in the country remains a relatively paltry 62%, and only a scant 1 in 5 have received a booster shot. And as in 1918, some of the choice rests with public officials. Though restrictions may not be popular, officials can reimpose them - offering public support where necessary to those for whom compliance would create hardship - and incentivize and mandate vaccines, taking advantage of our greater medical technology.

As the flu waned in 1919, one Portland, Oregon, health official reflected that "the biggest thing we have had to fight in the influenza epidemic has been apathy, or perhaps the careless selfishness of the public."

The same remains true today.

Vaccines, new treatments and century-old mitigation strategies such as masks, distancing and limits on gatherings give us a pathway to prevent the first six weeks of 2022 from being like the fall of 1918. 

And encouraging news about the severity of omicron provides real optimism that an endemic future - in which the coronavirus remains but poses far less of a threat - is near. The question is whether we get there with a maximum of pain or a minimum. The choice is ours.

https://www.chron.com/opinion/article/The-1918-flu-is-even-more-relevant-in-2022-thanks-16746114.php