What will it take for Orthodox Judaism to hold sexual abusers accountable?
As other denominations attempt to address institutional sexual misconduct, Orthodox leadership remains notably absent
I’m
a survivor of abuse in the Haredi community and the director of a
survivor advocacy organization. Seeing the results of investigations
taking place in various religious denominations feels a lot like being
an “older single” at a wedding. You sit there wondering if it will ever
happen for you while well-meaning friends and relatives assure you that
it will, with pitying looks in their eyes.
With the release of a 288-page report of the investigation by the Southern Baptist Convention
into its mishandling of sexual abuse cases, I am once again left
feeling frustrated. While more and more denominations are conducting
investigations —notably Reform and Conservative Judaism—Orthodox Judaism continues to actively resist accountability.
Following the 2018 release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report
on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, then-New York Attorney General
Barbara D. Underwood launched an investigation into institutional
responses to sexual abuse. I was attending a marketing conference when
the news investigation was announced and I ran into a bathroom crying
with relief. I’d been hoping for something like that to happen in New
York so the extent of the problem of sexual abuse coverup in the
Orthodox community could be revealed. What I didn’t know at the time was
that the attorney general’s investigation was solely into the Catholic
Church. Three years in, that investigation has gone nowhere.
Over the years there have been
several attempts to study the prevalence and extent of the problem of
sexual abuse in the Orthodox community, but such efforts have been
resisted both by leadership and by community members terrified of the
consequences of speaking about their experiences, even anonymously.
Part of the problem is certainly the
fact that Orthodoxy is much more decentralized than Southern Baptism, or
even Reform or Conservative Judaism. That becomes even more true on the
religiously rightward end of the Orthodox spectrum, where there are
only loose central institutional coalitions like Agudath Israel.
However, even within the centralized institutions of Modern Orthodoxy,
we see this resistance.
In 2000, following numerous
accusations of child sexual abuse against former National Council of
Synagogue Youth leader Rabbi Baruch Lanner, the Orthodox Union released a
partial report of an investigation
conducted about the case. The OU had received a steady stream of
complaints over the years about Lanner and had continued to allow him to
retain his position at NCSY, and continue working with children. The
portion of the report that was released failed to mention any of the
names of the people responsible for the coverup in the Lanner case, but
conceded that “profound errors in judgment were made.”
To date, the OU has yet to release the full report.
Agudath Israel and the Orthodox Union
could, if they wanted to, conduct investigations into their own
organizations and the organizations in their respective networks to
examine how they’ve responded to institutional coverups of sexual abuse,
but that would first require Agudath Israel to change its policy
requiring survivors to ask permission of rabbis before reporting sexual
abuse to police. It would require that in the aftermath of one of the
most devastating sexual abuse scandals in the history of Orthodoxy, the mainstream rabbinic response wasn’t recommending that victims go to rabbinic courts for justice instead of the police.
So here I am reading about the
Southern Baptist Convention’s investigation, and the announced release
of a list of hundreds of known abusers within the SBC, wondering when it
will happen for us—when will Orthodoxy finally have its reckoning.
At ZA’AKAH,
an organization dedicated to advocating for survivors of sexual abuse
in the Orthodox community, of which I am the director, we receive dozens
of contacts a month from survivors in need of assistance, most of whom
fear the consequences of even disclosing the abuse they’ve suffered to
the people around them, let alone reporting to the authorities. Among
the survivors we work with who have pursued cases, many still face
extreme backlash. And lest anyone think this is an exclusively Haredi
problem, many of the survivors we work with are from mainstream Modern
Orthodox communities and have experienced similar retaliation.
The problem in our community is
systemic and it deserves to be investigated, but given the level of
complicity of Orthodox leadership in the problem, it’s unlikely to
happen anytime soon. Frankly, we as Orthodox Jews should be ashamed of
ourselves for how we’ve handled sexual abuse, and how we continue to
deny survivors the resources they need to feel comfortable reporting in
our communities. We should be ashamed that we’re so afraid of the truth
getting out about the decades of coverup that we’re complicit in that we
won’t even investigate it to realize the extent of the problem.
We consider ourselves a light unto
the nations, and Orthodoxy, in particular, considers itself the most
authentic form of Judaism. But if Reform and Conservative branches are
investigating themselves, and the Southern Baptist convention is
releasing a report into their own malfeasance, along with a list of
known perpetrators within their ranks, and we’re sitting here doing less
than nothing, what right do we have to call ourselves moral?
Asher Lovy is an abuse survivor and director of ZA’AKAH, which raises
awareness about child sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community,
advocates for legislative reforms and operates a Shabbat and Yom Tov
mental health peer-support hotline.
https://forward.com/opinion/503666/what-will-it-take-for-orthodox-judaism-to-hold-sexual-abusers-accountable/
