Friday, May 12, 2023
The more she learned about the community, the more disgusted Ojalvo became, she says. “In some ways it simplified the story for me. There are sex abusers in that community and they are being protected.”
Name Of The Father: New film on sins of a Charedi cult leader shown on BBC
A documentary about abuse in a sect that sparked outrage in Israel is to be shown on the BBC
Moishe Shick in a scene from In the Name of the Father
W
hen the documentary film Name of the Father aired in Israel a few weeks
ago, it led to dozens of phone calls from men and women who had suffered
sexual abuse in a Charedi community — and spurred national debate about
how the country’s extremist communities can be better policed.
Now the three-part series, which details the rape, violence and
child marriage that have taken place in a Strictly Orthodox Breslov
community, has been adapted into a documentary for BBC’s Storyville. And
it’s a harrowing watch.
In the 1980s, the Brooklyn-based Rabbi Eliezer Shlomo Shick,
also known as the Mohorosh, set up his own town in Yavniel, in the north
of Israel.
Moishe Shick in Brooklyn
A
charismatic speaker who often cried when he lectured, he mainly
populated it with former secular Jews. Many of them had been in jail and
had converted to his cause. Eventually, around 400 families lived in
the town.
From his main base in America, the rabbi kept a tight control on
his community. Closed-circuit cameras tracked members' every move, and
they would write letters to him over the fax machine that he would
answer in detail.
He
succeeded in making every member of the community feel connected to him
and when he died, in 2015, they continued to adhere to his rules. To
this day, the ill-educated and poor community that is fed by the town’s
soup kitchen, cannot envisage life outside it, says the film’s director
Bat-Dor Ojalvo.
She stumbled across Yavniel while working on another programme
exploring rape and how the Israeli police deals with the crime. “I soon
realised we were looking at a cult,” she tells me.
When the first episode of the programme aired in Israel, Ojalvo
got a phone call in the middle of the night from the Mohorosh’s only son
Moishe.
He’d been cut off by many in the community after his
father was recorded, on his deathbed, calling his son a murderer. “He
said he wanted me to hear the whole truth, from his perspective,” says
Ojalvo.
It
was the first of what would be five years of transatlantic calls
between them, as Ojalvo pieced together her film, which features Moishe
and other former and existing members of the Yavniel community. “For the
first 18 months, I didn’t’ trust him,” she tells me.
“I said ‘I’ll check every piece of information you give me. And if I find out you are a liar, it’ll be on television.’ ”
Moishe is compelling to watch. He grew up being treated like a
hero simply because of who he was, but as he tells his story, we learn
that his father always made him feel inadequate. Far worse, he did
nothing to stop him being sexually abused by the son of another
prominent rabbi.
Through Moishe, Ojalvo slowly found other former members of the
community who shared heartbreaking stories of sexual assault, of rape
and of being married off at the age of 13. In the programme, girls also
recount being told they were whores if they showed a single bit of
flesh.
“It was a very emotional experience to record what had happened
to these people but they said to us, ‘we don’t have a voice so please
shout for us,’ ’’ she says.
As payback, the director and her team received frequent death
threats with assurances that people knew where she lived and also the
names of her children.
A scene from In the Name of the Father
One Yavniel leaver featured in the programme had their house set on fire.
The more she learned about the community, the more disgusted
Ojalvo became, she says. “In some ways it simplified the story for me.
There are sex abusers in that community and they are being protected.”
After the series had finished, she got a phone call from an elder in the community.
“I asked my husband to record the conversation because I was
sure the man was going to say he was going to kill me,’ she recalls.
‘But he told me, ‘I am standing with you and I would like to tell you
that one of my great granddaughters was sexually abused.’
“I didn’t tell him that it was likely to be many more than one,
or that I knew one of his daughters had also been sexually abused as she
had also rung me.’”
Since the series aired in Israel, some child marriages planned
by the community have been stopped. But for Ojalvo and her colleagues,
what is required now is wholesale change from Israeli authorities. They
have been working closely with them, she says.
“There is no point in just going after the children who are
being pushed into marriage,” she says. “You have to go for the head of
the snake.”
‘In the Name of the Father’ is on BBC4 at 10pm on May 16, and on the BBC iPlayer after transmission.