אשמנו - We have been guilty. We have cared more for our reputations than we have for the victims of molesters in our midst. בגדנו - We have betrayed the innocent and the weak among us. We have ignored the pleas of those who have been victimized. גזלנו - We have stolen. We have stolen the childhood and the innocence of victims by not acting to remove people from positions of authority where they can continue abusing. דברנו דופי -We have spoken falsely. We have said that those who make such accusations are liars – when we either knew that this was not the case, or where we were unsure. We have misused the notion of Chezkas Kashrus to ignore our obligation to protect our charges. העוינו - We have caused others to sin. By allowing redifus to be swept under the table, we have allowed other molesters to further sin. והרשענו - We have caused others to do evil. By not acting upon what we had known we have caused others to pursue the victims and their supporters and to label them mosrim. זדנו - We have had evil hearts. We have planned revenge against victims of molestation and their supporters by excluding them from the communal institutions that we control. We have vilified them in our papers and publications. חמסנו - We have become violent. We have yelled at victims and their supporters and have fought against them. טפלנו שקר - We have attached lies. We have attached ourselves to sinners. We have allowed molesters to continue operating and have actively supported them. יעצנו רע - We have advised evil. We have told people who have molested others what to do to avoid being caught. כזבנו - We have lied. We have done so in crafty ways where we have taught ourselves to be deceptive people. לצנו - We have scoffed. We have made fun of those who have pointed out the fundamentally wrong issues of not cleaning up our act. We have labeled them mosrim, anti-Semites, and self-hating Jews who try to destroy our Torah Mosdos. מרדנו - We have rebelled against the noble principles of the Torah in allowing this shameful behavior to continue. ניאצנו - We have been scornful – causing Hashem to be angry at us. We have not cared to ascertain the truth or to protet Hashem’s nation from a grave internal danger. סרנו - We have turned from the path of the Torah’s truthful ideals and have created a Chilul Hashem. עוינו - We have intentionally allowed Chilul Hashem to continue by making Klal Yisroel look like they defend child molesters and that we do not protect the victims. פשענו - We have sinned/ rebelled. We have entirely ignored the psak din of Gedolim who have said that when there is clear Raglayim ladavar to molestation we must involve authorities צררנו - We have persecuted members of Klal Yisroel by only getting rid of the known molester from our school, but allowing him to move to other communities and continue. קשינו עורף - We have been stiff-necked and stubborn in this matter and still have not learned important lessons. רשענו - We have been lawless and wicked. We have created an environment where those who stand up for victims are looked at as troublemakers. שיחתנו - We have corrupted our communities with the incorrect notion that it is forbidden to protect victims from their oppressors. תעינו - We have strayed. We have strayed far from the ideals of Torah in supporting oppressors and even in saying, “We have other things to worry about first.” תיעבנו - We have done abominations. Our support for those who victimize others is a complete abomination in the eyes of Hashem. תיעתענו - We have allowed ourselves to be led astray. Because of this issue we have ceased our role in becoming a light unto the nations and are off-track. וסרנו ממצותיך וממשפטיך הטובים ולא שוה לנו ואתה צדיק על כל הבא עלינו כי אמת עשית ואנחנו הרשענו– We have turned away from your Mitzvos and chosen something unworthy of us. And You Hashem are Righteous in all that is brought upon us for You have done Truth and we have wrought evil.
Posted by RabbiH on September 13, 2013. Filed under Jewish News,NY News,Slider. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Australia's most senior orthodox rabbi, Moshe Gutnick, has formally apologised for child sexual abuse within the Jewish community.
In a written apology on the eve of Yom Kippur, he said the issue has been handled inappropriately with a culture of covering up abuse.
Rabbi Gutnick asked victims of abuse for forgiveness and urged them to come forward to ensure police can prosecute the perpetrators.
"We need to empower ourselves and victims to help to bring this scourge to an end," he said.
Talking to reporters, the rabbi addressed what he called a "cultural cover-up" with those inside the church refusing to contact the proper authorities in the belief sexual assault was a church issue, not a criminal one.
"I'm not talking about any specific incident or case. I'm talking about there was this idea of keeping the problem in house," he said.
"For something that was part of much of our thought processes and that again was completely wrong and we have to now be very open about what takes place."
He also acknowledged how a case he handled in 1987 has remained with him over the decades since.
"I received an anonymous phone call from a very young person telling me that they had been sexually abused," he said.
"At the time I reported it to the people involved but I didn't take it very seriously."
Rabbi Gutnick said he now regrets not taking action at the the time to catch and punish the perpetrator.
"If I would have done more, if I would have followed it up, if the perpetrator would have then been identified and caught, then there are many victims after that that would have been saved," he said.
In addition to the apology, the letter also addressed the behaviour of those inside the church, calling upon the majority of rabbi's to adopt a culture of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Tzedek, a group advocating for Jewish victims of child sexual abuse, has welcomed the letter, describing it as a ground breaking milestone for the Jewish community.
The founder and chief of Tzedek, Manny Weks, says an apology is an important step in the healing process for victims.
"I don't necessarily think that it is all of a sudden going to change overnight," he said.
"But it certainly does send out a very strong message that the peak body of the rabbinate and the orthodox community in Australia has taken an unequivocal position on this matter.
"It leaves no ambiguity on how they need to respond to this issue."
"ANY discussion of the biological basis of psychiatric disorders must include genetics. And, indeed, we are beginning to fit new pieces into the puzzle of how genetic mutations influence brain development. ........Our understanding of the biology of mental disorders has been slow in coming, but recent advances like these have shown us that mental disorders are biological in nature, that people are not responsible for having schizophrenia or depression, and that individual biology and genetics make significant contributions........"
Yosef Kolko, former Lakewood yeshiva counselor, seeks to nullify plea in
molestation case
BACKGROUND: PIECE BY RABBI BILLET A FEW WEEKS AGO CAUSED BELSKY TO CONVINCE KOLKO TO ATTEMPT TO WITHDRAW HIS GUILTY PLEA: In Part: "Parents of a boy in Lakewood, NJ pressed charges of sexual molestation against Rabbi Yosef Kolko. Rabbi Yisroel Belsky, the Orthodox Union’s halachic authority for kashrut, publicly accused those parents of “mesirah,” the crime of turning a Jew over to secular authorities. As a result, the complainants were driven out of Lakewood. A few months ago Rabbi Kolko confessed to his crimes. Nevertheless, Rabbi Belsky continues to condemn the complainants as “mosrim.” (And the lowlife, menuvel, degenerate Belsky accused the father of the child of being the real molester of his own child and not Kolko -- all this to cover for Kolko. There's not a greater twisted, evil person in the entire Jewish community than Belsky. How shameful that Yeshiva Torah Vodaath let's him walk in the building, never mind keeps him as the Rosh Yeshiva) --- UOJ) His position is contrary to the OU's position and that of its rabbinic arm, the Rabbinical Council of America, that child abuse must be reportedto the secular authorities.
The OU (and Yeshiva Torah Vodaath - I'm talking to you Chaim Leshkowitz - UOJ) has refused to publicly rebuke or take any action against Rabbi Belsky.
It is time that the OU.... publicly condemn his defiance of the rules of the RCA and the OU. Principles must trump kashrut revenues in a major Orthodox organization’s order of priorities. The existence of the Takanah Forum in Israel is refreshing. Nothing like it exists yet in the United States, though still our community has made some progress in recent years.
But the fact that communal leaders in these two cases are protecting and enabling abusers, or condemning legitimate accusers, underscores that our community still has a long way to go. And given the high stakes of life and death and mental health of our children, we can’t afford to wait. Things will only change if our community loudly and articulately demands it."
Rabbi Heshie Billet, a former president of the Rabbinical Council of America, is spiritual leader of the Young Israel of Woodmere.
TOMS RIVER — The lawyer representing a former yeshiva camp
counselor in a Lakewood sexual abuse case wants to have his client’s guilty plea
nullified, claiming the defendant was pressured by the community into admitting
guilt in the case.
Alan L. Zegas, a Chatham attorney representing Yosef Kolko, filed a motion to
withdraw his client’s guilty plea.
Kolko, 39, of Geffen Drive in Lakewood, had been scheduled to be sentenced in
the child sex-abuse case on Wednesday, but Zegas’ motion prompted its
postponement.
When reached by telephone and asked for the reasons why Kolko should be
allowed to withdraw his guilty plea, Zegas responded, “He was significantly
pressured to pleaded (guilty). There are other reasons as well that interfered
with his ability to make a voluntary, willing decision.
“Even when the plea was taken, there was reference to him feeling pressure
from the community,” Zegas said of his client.
When specifically asked from whom the pressure came, Zegas responded, “From
many sources. That will be explained in the brief.”
Superior Court Judge Francis R. Hodgson gave Zegas until Sept. 30 to file a
brief outlining the reasons why he should consider allowing the guilty plea to
be withdrawn.
Hodgson scheduled a hearing on the motion for Oct. 17. If Zegas doesn’t
convince the judge to allow his client to withdraw his guilty plea, Hodgson will
proceed to sentence Kolko that day, according to court officials.
The defendant could face up to 40 years in prison, although Hodgson, when
accepting Kolko’s guilty plea, told him he would consider capping any prison
term at 15 years.
Kolko pleaded guilty May 13 to aggravated sexual assault, attempted
aggravated sexual assault, sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a
child, a boy who was 11 and 12 years old when the abuse occurred in 2008 and
2009.
Kolko was the boy’s camp counselor at Yachad, a summer camp that is run by
the Yeshiva Bais Hatorah School on Swarthmore Avenue in Lakewood. He also was a
teacher at Yeshiva Orchos Chaim in Lakewood.
Kolko admitted performing various acts of molestation on the child only after
Senior Assistant Ocean County Prosecutor Laura Pierro told the judge that two
more potential victims of Kolko’s had come forward to authorities. Pierro said
the state would not bring further charges against Kolko related to the other
victims, in exchange for his guilty plea.
Zegas said some of the factors a judge would consider in deciding whether a
guilty plea can be withdrawn are whether the plea agreement was entered into
voluntarily and knowingly and whether the defendant had a full understanding of
the consequences of his plea.
Zegas replaced Michael F. Bachner, who was Kolko’s attorney during the trial
and guilty plea.
So it turns out that Y.U. is just one more religious institution among many in America in which young people were abused by people with authority, which failed to protect those whom it was responsible to protect and which now is doing the best it can to acknowledge its wrongdoing while protecting itself. No ohr lagoyim — light unto nations — here, just an administration and a board that is k’chol hagoyim: just like everyone else.
On August 26, the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, hired by Yeshiva University to look into allegations of past abuse at the university’s High School for Boys, finally concluded its eight-month investigation and released a report detailing its findings. As one of the high school students abused in the early 1970s and as one of the more than 145 people interviewed in the investigation — though not party to the impending multi-party lawsuit against Y.U., now $380 million — I am disappointed, though not surprised, by the report. Eight months, 6,300 hours of investigation, more than 145 interviews and the best that Y.U.’s administration and board could come up with was three paragraphs that said many people were abused at many Y.U. institutions but they could not give any details because of “pending litigation.” Of course some people are happy with this and some people are angry.
Kevin Mulhearn, a lawyer for the group of students that filed the lawsuit, called the report, as one would expect, “a gross disappointment,” while those abused students, willing to be quoted, were justifiably “shocked.” As someone who spent more than two hours being interviewed and rehashing what was so locked away that I never even mentioned it to my wife of 30 years, nor to my brother, who also attended the Y.U. high school and unbeknown to me was similarly abused — I can attest that it is shocking to have your traumatic experience summarized in a few legally cool paragraphs.
Y.U. President Richard Joel expressed in an equally expected way the school’s “deepest and heartfelt remorse,” and his hope that this “recognition” brings “comfort and closure.” This was an appropriately lawyerly response, with a concluding flourish referring to Yom Kippur, the High Holy Days season and forgiveness — as if this process has been anything like Maimonides’s wrenching prescription for genuine teshuvah, repentance.
There we have it — a report that offers nothing we don’t already know. (Though I want to make clear that the lawyer who interviewed me was thorough, extremely professional, compassionate and honest.) The report confirms that a part of Y.U.’s high school (and university) culture was predatory and that until 2001, the school’s administration simply did not do what any decent and morally evolved authorities are supposed to do: protect and ensure the safety of its students. No surprises here, and actually quite sad.
It seems the adversarial nature of our legal system is set up to ensure that truth and justice, let alone repentance and repair, are not really the issues. So we now have victims who are understandably suing for millions of dollars, though one wonders what amount of money can actually make up for the loss of innocence and the life-long trauma of being abused by one’s rebbe. And we have a leading Jewish institution that now must go into protection mode. No doubt for solid legal reasons it refuses to release the full report, will offer what I am sure are heartfelt but rote admissions of shame and then request forgiveness, in soulful, pretty Jewish language, for acts committed long ago.
What won’t we have? We will have no serious ethical or spiritual reflection about the relationship between patriarchal all-male adolescent communities and sexual predators. We will not have any conversation about the relationship between highly hierarchical religious cultures in which idealization and transference are common psychological features and lead to abuse of power. We will have no collective thinking about possible common causes for such abuse shared with other religious communities that have been guilty of similar crimes. And of course we will have no public conversation — by a religious and spiritual institution, no less — about the difference between legal categories of civil liability and the psycho-spiritual and psycho-social category of healing and teshuvah.
So it turns out that Y.U. is just one more religious institution among many in America in which young people were abused by people with authority, which failed to protect those whom it was responsible to protect and which now is doing the best it can to acknowledge its wrongdoing while protecting itself. No ohr lagoyim — light unto nations — here, just an administration and a board that is k’chol hagoyim: just like everyone else.
Last November, Nechemya Weberman, pillar of his community and unlicensed counselor of wayward children, swore to a standing-room-only Brooklyn courtroom that he had only been trying to save the life of the girl who’d once called him “Daddy,” who was now accusing him of raping her for years, beginning when she was 12 years old and in sixth grade.
Many observers thought he looked smug as he testified, and why wouldn’t he? With the vehement backing of most of the tightly knit, deeply insular Satmar Hasidic Jewish community in Williamsburg, the 54-year-old former driver for its spiritual leader, the Grand Rebbe Moses Teitelbaum, felt he could get away with anything.
After all, he always had.
Members of the Satmar collective, who consider themselves members of one of the world’s holiest communities, closed ranks to defend an accused child molester from the secular world — and cast out the girl who’d accused him.
She wasn’t their concern. She’d gone outside of the family.
Mirroring groups from the Catholic church to Penn staters, Satmars attacked the victim, more concerned with protecting itself from the outside world than with the evil within.
Some of Weberman’s supporters conceded that he may have sexually abused children, but were nonetheless more concerned with the indignity of one of their own facing a jury they saw not as peers but as a collection of anti-Semites and (some irony here) sexual deviants, and the prospect of one of their own ending up in a state prison, cut off from the community.
Because its members vote in blocs, as their spiritual leaders instruct, the group has outsized sway in election years — and could prove crucial in the current races for mayor and Brooklyn district attorney. Despite keeping the outside world at arm’s length, with a separate language, culture and dress code, their votes have helped convince elected officials to subsidize separate services, from ambulances to patrol groups to schools. Even criminal matters among Satmars are often adjudicated by rabbis rather than the state.
See, Satmar is a family — of parents, daughters, sons, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and in-laws, each belonging to the whole. Descending from Hungarian and Romanian Jews who fled their villages mostly during and after the Holocaust, they now live as a group in Brooklyn, close by but culturally cut off from their Latino, African American, Caribbean and hipster neighbors in Williamsburg. (A second Satmar community lives upstate in Kiryas Joel, the village with America’s highest poverty rate.) ..............
In an exclusive TV News 12 by
Tara Rosenblum, Yossi tells how he was sexually abused by Rabbi Herschel
Taubenfeld, a teacher in New York's Rockland County Hasidic community of New
Square (home of the Skver sect).
Yossi asked for help from the head rabbis
of New Square who maintain their own communal sex crimes unit called the VAAD.
The agency told him to see a therapist. Two months later, Yossi reported the abuse to the
Ramapo police. Yossi recounts how he was offered $100,000 to keep quiet
about the situation, which he refused. Taubenfeld admitted to the crimes, but religious leaders in the
community sent Taubenfeld to Israel to obtain an honorary rabbinical
ordination.
Taubenfeld was charged with 30 counts of
forcible touching, endangering the welfare of a child and third-degree sex abuse
yet avoided jail time in exchange for six years probation.
In the words of
Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis "Publicity is justly commended as a
remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of
disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."
-------------------------
Established halacha (Jewish Law) places a child molester in the category of
rodef (an imminent threat), in part due to a recidivism rate well in
excess of 50-percent. In his 2004 psak (ruling) on this issue, the late
Rabbi Shalom Elyashiv writes that one should report those who sexually abuse
children directly to the police and that doing so is of benefit to
society.
-------------------------
For additional information please visit our website at www.sfjny.org.
Every 10 seconds in the United States, a call is made about a child being abused, but the laws "always seem to be helping the adults," — a trend Michael Reagan hopes to change.
Reagan, himself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and child pornography, along with Childhelp, a national child abuse hotline, have declared a call to action to stop children from being victimized.
Reagan, the adopted son of the late President Ronald Reagan and the president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation, has spent the past 25 years raising awareness about the scourge of child abuse, after detailing his own experiences in 1987 through his book "On the Outside Looking In."
Story continues below.
"So many people really have no concept about how many kids are abused every single year," Reagan told Newsmax.TV. "Just to give you an idea, every 10 seconds, there is a call made about a child being abused. Five children die every single day because of child abuse, and 400,000 children will be taken out of their homes this year because of neglect and abuse. It is discouraged in America and it's the least talked about issue in America. We talk about always helping the children but we always seem to be helping the adults."
Reagan and Childhelp are pushing for all states to adopt Erin’s Law, a mandate to teach prevention education in every school in America. In addition, they want to implement Childhelps' "Speak Up Be Safe" program and to make the country aware of key resources available on Americans' smartphones and by encouraging them to call the Childhelp National Abuse Hotline, 1-800-4-A-CHILD. (1-800-422-4453).
Childhelp is a non-profit organization that works to meet the physical, emotional, educational, and spiritual needs of abused, neglected, and at-risk children. The organization is not affiliated with Child Protective Services or any government agency, political party, religious denomination, or other entities.
"Childhelp has a back to school program, a Be Safe initiative calling on Erin's Law to be passed in every state in this country that would require in fact the curriculum in schools to in fact teach kids about being safe," said Reagan, who was abused by a day camp counselor in the 1950s, when he was only eight years old.
"Don Havlik was the name," he said. "He died about seven years ago, and he had taken naked photographs of me as an 8-year-old child, and had me in fact develop the photographs when I was almost turning nine. [He] put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'wouldn't your mother like a copy of this?'"
Reagan said his life "absolutely ended" that day.
"I thought I was going to Hell, and I didn't know if people would see me as gay or heterosexual," he said. "My dad ran for governor, my dad ran for president, and I knew there were photographs out there."
Reagan kept his secret for the next 30 years, finally revealing to his father and First Lady Nancy Reagan in 1987 what had happened.
Reagan said his father reacted by saying "I'll go out and kick the guy's butt," and Nancy Reagan responded, "Honey, I don't think he has a butt anymore."
But, he told Newsmax, parents also need to be aware about what could be happening to their own children.
"As parents, we're so busy we've forgotten to raise our own children and somehow we're wanting to trust all those who we put our children in their care," he said. "Sometimes we need to be careful."
Havlik died at 83 about seven years ago, and his sister-in-law told Reagan the photographs had finally been destroyed.
"Now think about that, photographs taken in 1953, 1954 were not destroyed until seven years ago because these people use them as trading cards in their lives," said Reagan.
Reagan also said he disagrees with recent New Jersey legislation signed by Gov. Chris Christie that bars therapists from helping children overcome unwanted same-sex attractions, including minors whose attractions come from childhood sexual abuse.
"There's a lot of children who are in the homosexual community that are there because it's a safe haven for them having been sexually abused," said Reagan, "They're the ones who truly, in fact, need to have some help. So to opt them out of the situation is not the right thing to do."
Reagan also accused lawmakers of being a "bunch of old fogies sitting on Capitol Hill that really don't get it."
Sex trafficking is a $12 billion per year industry, said Reagan, and there are few places in the United States to help children who have been recruited into the trade.
"It's like America doesn't want to talk about it, because to talk about means we have to accept it," said Reagan. "But just to give you an idea, within 48 hours of your child running away from home, whatever the reason is – they're being sexually abused. Congress talks a lot about it but doesn't do very much about it."
Two prominent Orthodox rabbis — one a former president of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) — spoke out forcefully this past week on the need for transparency and justice on sexual abuse in the community, and criticized the Orthodox Union (OU) and the RCA for not taking a stronger stand against a well-known rabbinic authority on kashrut who defended a confessed pedophile.
Rabbi Heshie Billet, spiritual leader of the Young Israel of Woodmere and a former president of the RCA, wrote an Opinion column on The Jewish Week website. The piece, “Not Enough Progress By Rabbis, Leaders On Dealing With Sexual Abuse,” described the role Rabbi Yisroel Belsky, a major kashrut expert and halachic consultant to the OU, played in publicly defending a confessed sexual abuser, Rabbi Yosef Kolko, who taught youngsters at a Lakewood, N.J., yeshiva.
Further, Rabbi Belsky accused the parents of the victim of going to the police, and wrote that one who does so is guilty of being a moser, the rabbinic term for a Jew who informs on another Jew, and, wrote Rabbi Belsky, “has no share in the world to come.”
Under communal pressure, the boy’s parents moved away from the Lakewood community.
“The OU has refused to publicly rebuke or take any action against Rabbi Belsky,” Rabbi Billet wrote, calling on the major Orthodox group to “publicly condemn his defiance of the rules of the RCA and the OU,” which say child abuse must be reported to the secular authorities.
“Principles must trump kashrut revenues in a major Orthodox organization’s order of priorities,” Rabbi Billet wrote.
Mayer Fertig, chief communications officer of the OU, told The Jewish Week that while the organization has “high regard” for Rabbi Belsky in terms of his kashrut expertise, it “profoundly disagrees with his conclusion and whatever actions he may have taken” regarding the Kolko case, and has told him so in private conversations.
“In no way does Rabbi Belsky speak for the OU,” Fertig said.
Several sources say OU officials were embarrassed and angered when Rabbi Belsky publicly came to the defense of Rabbi Kolko several months ago in a letter distributed in Hebrew in Lakewood. But insiders acknowledge that no action was taken against him because his kashrut expertise is highly respected in the haredi community, a major market, and there is concern that if he were to be terminated or publicly called out, some haredim would look elsewhere for kosher supervision.
“You can make a strong argument that principle should trump all,” one OU source noted, “but it’s not a simple issue here, and the pragmatists want to keep it quiet.”
The OU is by far the world leader in the field of kashrut supervision.
Rabbi Efrem Goldberg, spiritual leader of the Boca Raton Synagogue in Florida, in his weekly column to congregants, referred to the Belsky incident without mentioning names.
Among other cases cited he wrote: “When a major Jewish organization retains a rabbi who continues to defend a pedophile who pled guilty in court, and continues to defend a letter he wrote stating that the victim who reported the pedophile is a moser who has no portion in the world to come, it is on the wrong side of this issue.
“We, the rabbinic community and the leadership of the Modern Orthodox establishment,” Rabbi Goldberg wrote, “are in profound need of collective teshuva [repentance].”
Similarly, Rabbi Billet wrote that “the fact that communal leaders … are protecting and enabling abusers, or condemning legitimate accusers, underscores that our community still has a long way to go.”
(Wikimedia)I thought the article would validate my husband’s experience. That’s why I emailed him the link to the decade-old New York magazine article about his alma mater, the American Boychoir School for vocal prodigies, where alumni from as late as the 1990s estimate that one in five boys were molested. Boys like Travis.
“It used to feel like an isolated incident that affected just me," Trav said.
It was the end of my workday on an October afternoon; I had just set my keys on the kitchen table. My coat was still buttoned.
“Now I know I spent nearly three years of my childhood at a boarding school not just with random pedophiles, but in a culture that allowed it.”
As his wife, how do I respond? That he survived? That he’s brave? That he’s a hero for letting me talk about it? That I will stand beside him with a personal mission and public vow that nobody will ever hurt him, physically or emotionally, again, the way they did during his 30 months as a choirboy from 1988 to 1990?.
Trav deflects these statements. He understands my protective instincts, but it makes him feel weak and uncomfortable when I say the words with such elevated drama. He is not brave, he says. Not a survivor, and certainly no hero. It doesn’t matter anymore, he says, so I suck in my breath and nod.
Mostly, I listen. I listen, and I do not laugh when my husband needs to secure the perimeter of our home each night. He keeps a machete by the nightstand. A long pillow divides our bed.
Trav believes his story is too familiar to be interesting. “I’m just another kid who got molested.” This breaks my heart to hear, but he’s not wrong about his story not being unique: The generally accepted estimate is that one in six men are sexually abused as children.
When high profile cases dominate the news, I feel for the victims, but I also scan for images of their partners and wonder how they deal with it. I want to ask what’s inside their medicine cabinets and if their husbands sometimes wince when touched, too.
I want my husband to sleep at night, and if it takes a machete in the bedroom, I‘ve learned not to mind.
Search for Americana singers in our state, and ................
How One Sex Abuse Case Tore Apart the Williamsburg Hasidim
The story of how the repeated sexual abuse of one Hasidic girl by a prominent man shook up her community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and tore apart their world. An excerpt from Allison Yarrow’s The Devil of Williamsburg.
Nestled within modern-day Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the hipster capital of the world, is an ultra-Orthodox community that claims to be the world’s largest sect of Hasidic Jews. In Satmar Williamsburg, there is no president, no Internet. Just God. Religious laws govern life. All of it. What you eat, what you wear, what you say, what you do. Many of these laws—strict laws—lord over relationships between women and men. So many laws that 12-year-old Rayna (the victim's name has been changed in this piece—her identity is sealed by the court as she was a minor when the abuses took place) could hardly keep track. She knew that socializing, dating, kissing, or even being alone in a room with a man who was not a family member were all forbidden. She knew that when women walk down the street, Orthodox men avert their eyes.
Nechemya Weberman attends a fundraiser in Brooklyn, where his supporters contributed to a legal defense fund for his trial on charges of sexually abusing a girl he was supposed to be counseling. (AP)
In a building not far from Williamsburg’s trendy clubs and local food stores, Rayna, her father, and a stranger are parsing her future on this day in 2007. Her father had brought her to Nechemya Weberman’s fifth-floor home office after school. Rayna had been seeing a boy, her first crush, and they were regularly texting and talking on the phone. The boy had approached Rayna. He made her feel giddy and shy at the same time. He was unlike the other boys she knew.
Rayna’s parents were distraught. Their daughter didn’t understand the gravity of what she was doing, they thought. Her mother, Emily, grew increasingly distressed as she listened in on her daughter’s calls with the boy. She and her husband feared this illicit relationship would threaten Rayna’s marriage prospects. After all, Rayna wasn’t like other girls. She was pretty and sweet. And she was a Satmar, a member of one of the world’s largest, most powerful groups of Hasidic Jews.
In Williamsburg, Nechemya Weberman was a revered leader and a counselor to wayward youth. Rayna’s parents respected him, and had entrusted him with advising Rayna’s older siblings before they left the nest.
Rayna’s strict yeshiva school had learned of her illicit behavior, and they too promoted Weberman as a therapist. The yeshiva would later threaten to end her education if she refused appointments with Weberman. Her parents were desperate. Their daughter’s future in the Satmar community was at stake.
That afternoon, Weberman sat in front of father and daughter at his table with his back to the windows. The men spoke to each other in Yiddish, the tongue Satmar Hasidim use in work, worship, and family life. When the men finished discussing business, all were quiet for a long time. Weberman sensed that the girl was upset, that she didn’t want to talk to him, but having counseled many before her, he believed he could get her to talk to him, to open up.
Rayna was upset. She and the boy were young and maybe even in love. They were doing nothing wrong, but no one understood. She sat silently and stared straight ahead. Her eyes landed on a computer, an uncommon sight in a Satmar home, because religious leaders forbid them.
The “outcome of abuse is in a way far worse than murder,” Rayna later wrote. “With murder, the person is dead and it is final. By abuse the victim experiences death over and over, again and again.”
Weberman asked her father to leave. An attempt at further defiance, Rayna didn’t even watch as he stood and walked out the door. Weberman told Rayna that her father would wait for her downstairs in the car, but that was not true. He tried to coax the distraught girl out of silence, inquiring about her school and family life, but her replies were clipped. She was furious—at her father for bringing her here, at this man who knew nothing of her struggles or her life. Rage boiled inside her thin frame. Sitting face to face with a Satmar man schooling her in atavistic Satmar rules was the last place she wanted to be.
“Why should I talk to you? You look like a Hasidic fuck. You look like my father,” Rayna said.
“I’m not like your father,” Weberman said. “You can choose whether you talk to me or not.”
They sat silently, for longer now. Rayna eyed the older man, with his salt-and-pepper beard and peyos dangling in front of his ears. They all looked the same to her, the gods and kings and kingmakers of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her whole life and being were dominated by these men—men who thought they were the holiest on earth. They wore the same hair, hats, and coats. Some spent all day praying in Satmar synagogues, or studying texts in Satmar yeshivas. Others were shopkeepers, bus drivers, or landlords. A regal few were spiritual counselors, like Weberman, bringing wayward kids and teens back from the brink of ruined lives.
“Why do you want to talk to a guy?” Weberman asked her, inching closer.
“I don’t know,” she said, but that was a lie. She had seen romantic love in the banned movies and magazines she devoured in secret. She dreamed of what she saw, handholding and kissing, the kind of love that might lift her out of the suffocating box she lived in.
She spent four hours at Weberman’s that night. He told her she was a beautiful girl, special and smart, and that he had watched her grow up. He said he would continue to watch and help if she would let him. Weberman said she would become even more beautiful, and strong, and one day she would be queen of a Satmar home all her own, loved like the great women of the Bible—Esther and Miriam and Rachel. This fantasy appealed to her, and as she listened, she softened.
He asked her questions, one after another, more than she could remember ever being asked before. How is your school? Do you have friends? Is your home a happy place? It seemed he cared for her, the way he asked the questions, his voice lilting up and his dark eyes on hers as he waited for her answers. So when he began to touch her, she thought he was trying to help her.
She yielded to his hands on her body, over her clothes first, then beneath them. He touched her breasts and her stomach, her neck and face, continuing to talk to her about the boy she was seeing, asking his name, what he was like, why she was drawn to him. Reminding her that young Satmar boys were dangerous, that they could jeopardize her path to becoming a prosperous Satmar wife and mother. Rayna knew this touching was out of her control, but what she didn’t know was how very wrong it was. She was not even a teenager. This man made her nervous, this friend of her father and counselor to her siblings, but he also validated her belief in romantic love, and listened to her as if he cared a great deal about her life.
After the appointment was over, it was dark outside.
“You’ll come see me again,” Weberman said. “We share a destiny.” He watched the beauty mark on her cheek as she nodded.
Rayna walked the 25 minutes home alone. The streets were bustling with Satmar night owls, who stroll Lee Avenue until the early morning hours. She would make this walk hundreds of times over the next three years, often not returning home until after midnight or one in the morning. Not only did her parents not seem to mind, they barely noticed. They had already raised her older siblings and married them off. Rayna often felt left behind and small in her large family. Here was a prominent man in the community who predicted a special destiny for her.
'The Devil of Williamsburg' by Allison Yarrow. 47 pp. Amazon Kindle Single. $2.
Nearly four years later, when Chani Segall heard of these late-night visits, and of Rayna walking home alone after them, she was shocked. “As a mother, where the heck were you and how did you let this happen?” asked the administrator at a religious girls school in Midwood, Brooklyn, where Rayna would later find a new family.
Rayna’s mother, Emily, claims she had no idea what her daughter had endured over those years.
“She never told me face to face until this got out. She never told me, she never told us. I couldn’t stop crying. I had vases of tears filled,” she said.
What began with the community elder hugging, touching, and kissing the girl he was hired to counsel grew bolder with progressive sessions until he was raping her regularly.
Rayna’s face reddens and she fills with tears recalling the specifics: Weberman forcing her to perform oral sex on him. Surprising her at her house and raping her in her own bed. Burning her with candle wax and matches, which left gruesome scars. Making her copy acts in the pornographic films he showed her behind a triple-locked door.
The “outcome of abuse is in a way far worse than murder,” Rayna later wrote. “With murder, the person is dead and it is final. By abuse the victim experiences death over and over, again and again.”
• • •
In December 2012, more than five years after the abuse of Rayna began, 54-year-old Nechemya Weberman was found guilty of 59 counts of sexual assault of a minor after an exhausting two-week trial. Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, who had long been criticized for reluctance to prosecute ultra-Orthodox sex abuse cases, now nabbed a victory with Weberman’s conviction within a year of Hynes’s reelection bid. The powerful Weberman’s 103-year sentence was a record for a Hasidic man convicted in a Brooklyn courtroom.
While past complaints of sex abuse in the ultra-Orthodox community centered on old men and young boys, this time the victim was a young, beautiful, and charismatic girl. Still, Rayna’s family was defamed and intimidated in their own community because she went public. The life of the man she married, Hershey, was threatened, and his business was destroyed. The intimidation, a legal fees fundraiser for Weberman, and the trial itself made national headlines. In past trials of Orthodox sex cases, court benches brimmed with the accused’s supporters, never the victim’s, but Rayna drew more supporters than victims before her. A community that once denied that sexual abuse festered within its ranks now had factions acknowledging it, combating it, and beginning to heal. Rayna changed everything.
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long. Allison Yarrow is assignment editor and a staff writer at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Her essays and journalism have appeared in Huffington Post, Slate, CNN.com, Poets & Writers magazine, and The Forward. She created and hosted the Yid Lit podcast, which interviews authors of literary fiction and nonfiction. Previously, as an associate producer at NBC News Productions, Allison produced health segments for a nationally syndicated program hosted by Hoda Kotb and long-form documentary hours for MSNBC. For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
אשמנו - We have been guilty. We have cared more for our reputations than we have for the victims of molesters in our midst.
Posted by RabbiH on September 13, 2013. Filed under Jewish News,NY News,Slider. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. 
