My life won’t change when the man who sexually abused me is dead
by Robin Maltz
7
In the beginning.
My childhood perpetrator is dying. He’s in his late 80s and has lived a long life of middle-class ease without being charged for his crimes against me and, very likely, other children — since there are several of us who won’t go near him.
It was an open secret in my family and I even told some neighbors but no one did anything about incest in the 1960s. In school, I drew strange and scary family pictures when I was six and was sent to the school psychologist. I don’t know the outcome. Nothing changed.
Before my mother married my stepfather, my grandfather was my sexual abuser. I told my mother about it when I was four, in the form of a question that made it very clear what was happening.
But my mother was sexually abused by him, too, a family legacy. She married a sexual abuser. I was the prey. They say men who sexually abuse children look for divorced women with children. That’s why it is more common for a stepfather to be a perpetrator than a father.
I met my real father, my biological father, on my 27th birthday. I looked for him after I moved to New York, 3,000 miles away from my perpetrator. I was his spitting image, though his blue eyes were watery with remorse and alcohol and cigarettes — and mine, well, I’d like to say they were cold as steel, but mine were big with fear and guilt. I didn’t like fathers. Any father. We never quite bonded.
It took decades to understand that as a child, calling my stepfather into my room, acting “seductive” and looking at Playboy magazines with him did not make my sexual abuse my fault — they were preemptive strikes, trying to manage what was inevitable. My connection to him was not identification, not compassion, not friendship, not conciliation — it was survival. When I understood this, I understood that I was not guilty.
When I was 11, I stood at the door of the yellow wallpapered kitchen while my mother made dinner. She looked at me and I said, “Mom, Dad is molesting me.” She sent me to my room and later gave me dinner in there. The next day I went to school and so on. I found the word in my elementary school library, but in what, where, I don’t know. Where would child sexual abuse be explained in 1967?
It disgusts me to say his name. I’ll say it once here: Vic, as in “victim” and “victor.” When I briefly tried out the incest movement of the '80s — group therapy, "Courage to Heal" talks — I got angry if anyone called me a “victim.”
At 15, I left their house, hitchhiked over the hill to Hollywood, became a groupie, then a prostitute, relied on lots of drugs and alcohol to get by, was raped repeatedly, had two abortions. At 16, I hitched to their house; it was dawn and I hadn’t slept in days. I was dirty and brushing my teeth with my finger. I went in my old room and fell asleep, my childhood doll by my side. At night, he woke me and told me to get in the Cadillac. I never drove with him. I dug in my heels before getting in a car with him. I was too exhausted to protest. He drove me to a psych hospital that accepted his insurance. I was committed for three months, and then I got out on a family visit and left for good.
My daughter was three months old when I took her out to California for a visit. He came into the bathroom as I put on makeup, the bathroom where, when I was a child, he had the key and entered when he wanted. As my shaking hand put on lipstick, he blocked the door and said, “I have daydreams of you visiting me on my death bed.”
That was the beginning of my haunting. I was plagued by visceral memories of what he did to me. With every shred of maternal instinct that I had been making up as I went along, I had to protect my child. I was 30 then, married to a wonderful man who knew nothing of my past until then. His response, and his parents’ response, made me brave.
I called my mother and told her he could no longer be part of my life. She said, “Get over the past.” I said, “If he tries to contact me or my family, you could never see your grandchild.” So often, women battle while the perpetrator goes free.
It’s 26 years later. My mother remained married to him; he never saw my children, never got a reply from his feeble attempts to seduce me from afar. My mother hates me because both her husband and her father cheated on her with me, because I didn’t play along through life like she did, because I made her have to control a man. He’s dying in her home now.
I’m twice divorced and have two children. They are incredible people. I did not give them the stable life I dreamed of, but very much love.
I’ve missed the life events that make a family because he was there. In most cases, I didn’t even know they happened until much later: the funerals of my grandmother and beloved aunt, the weddings of my cousins and my half-sister; the children of all of them, bar mitzvahs, illness, tragedy and joy. I can never have that back.
My friends and few family members are gleeful that he’s dying but I don’t feel anything. My life won’t change when he’s dead. Maybe my mother will reach out to me after a lifetime of privileging his well-being over mine.
There is no linearity here. Incest is not a story with a beginning, middle and end. It is the story of your life. Maybe you go to college, get married, have children, buy a house — the things in life that feel foundational, but underneath is the story, the backdrop, the sad story that was the beginning.
Noted Askan Shlomo Yehuda Rechnitz Came to Israel to Strengthen Chareidi Political Parties
SRULI BELSKY CRACKING UP (AGAIN!)
The Charedi media in Eretz Yisrael has been reporting that philanthropist Shlomo Yehuda Rechnitz arrived earlier this week with a small entourage of close associates to negotiate Achdus in the Charedi political camp. (LOL)
YWN – ISRAEL has been monitoring the visit and the events that let up to it, and is now able to share the facts with the Tzibbur at large.
Realizing this, and out of great concern, the Novominsker Rebbe SHLITA, Yoshev Rosh of Agudas Yisroel of America, as well as various other Gedolim (LOL) asked Shlomo Yehuda Rechnitz to goto Eretz Yisrael to intercede and convince Aryeh Deri to return to Shas to restrengthen them. (LOL) As the Oilam Hayeshivos eagerly await the outcome of the future elections, the Chareidim understand the importance of their own parties accumulating the most possible seats in the new upcoming Government. The recent sudden resignation of Aryeh Deri dealt a big blow to the Chareidi Shas party. If Shas’s numbers were to greatly diminish R’L, the ramifications to the Oilam Hatorah would be devastating. This comes on the heels of the outgoing 19th Government and its harsh Gezeiros against Yeshivos and Kollelim throughout Eretz Yisrael.
The Novominsker’s request was followed by a letter and phone call to Shlomo Yehuda from HaGaon HaRav Shmuel Kaminetzsky Shlita, a member of the Moetzas Gedolei Yisrael in the USA and Rosh Yeshiva of Philadelphia. (LOL)
Shlomo Yehuda complied, on the condition that he receive permission from Hagaon Harav Aron Leib Shteinman Shlita, which he received that evening. He was hesitant as to what he could accomplish, since he told the gedolim that even though he supports Sefardi Mosdos in the U.S. and Eretz Yisrael, he has never met with Deri, had no connection to him and was never involved with the $has party.
Undeterred and armed with Berachos from the Roshei Yeshiva (LOL), Rechnitz arranged for close associates Zvi Weinreb, Moshe Mendlowitz, Duvy Blonder and Yisroel Friedman to accompany him on this important Shlichus.
Shlomo Yehuda first headed to Bnei Brak where he met with Maran HaGaon HaRav Aaron Yehuda Leib Shteinman Shlita for two hours, seeking the gadol hador’s advice in tackling a problem (LOL) that Shas Rabbonim seem to have been unsuccessful in solving.
The necessary calls were made (LOL) and Aryeh Deri agreed to come to meet with Mr. Rechnitz in his hotel. This alone was no small feat, as since announcing his resignation as Shas leader, Deri has refused to meet with anyone or $peak to the media. Accompanied by his wife Mrs. Yafeh Deri, they met with Rechnitz and his associates for a short period to get comfortable with each other LOL). Then Mrs. Deri and the Rechnitz team exited the room, and Shlomo Yehuda and Aryeh Deri sat with one another and hammered out the issues for three hours. (LOL)
It should be pointed out that in addition to Rav Shteinman, Rechnitz has met with other gedolim in Eretz Yisrael as he strives to complete his mission and bring back a successful report to the gedolim shlita in the United States.(LOL) Following that first meeting, Rechnitz and Deri met again on Wednesday (with a shopping bag), 16 Teves, once again for three hours at the home of Aryeh Deri. Sources tell YWN that Rechnitz literally debated and pleaded with Deri to make the correct and nece$$ary moves to $ave the chareidi tzibur in Eretz Yisrael.
As he exited the room, Deri was quoted as saying “Even if nothing else comes of this, I acquired a great friend, (OMG)(LOL) yet someone I wouldn’t want sitting across the aisle” (or on my lap)
We now eagerly await Deri’s response,(LOL) which will undoubtedly have a profound impact on the role played by chareidi political parties in the 20th Knesset.
As a Bochur, Rechnitz 43 years old, learned in Mir Yerushalayim. In 1998, he incorporated TwinMed, LLC in Los Angeles with his twin brother, Yisroel Zev. Until today, they work and contribute Tzedaka together.
I learned that my daughter was engaged not from her, but from our family therapist.
Later, I learned that several hundred people attended her engagement party, none of them our friends or family. We were also shocked to learn that the wedding was all planned, scheduled to take place in two weeks.
A few days after her engagement, Jenny allowed us to meet her fiancé, a 28-year-old rabbinical student with a neatly trimmed beard and large yarmulke. They looked nice together, smiling and laughing to each other, and, despite the heaviness inside, I felt happy for her.
“We would really like to be involved,” my husband Barney said to them, almost pleading.
Jenny looked away, silent. Her fiancé shook his head. We were welcome to attend the wedding, but we would not be celebrants, only grudgingly tolerated guests.
All I ever wanted was to have a beautiful, close-knit family. Over two decades, my husband and I raised our children with the values important to us: hard work, love of family, and respect for all people. To us, high school sweethearts still in love after 40 years, our children–Jenny and her older brother Mark–were not only sources of pride and joy, but vital to our existence.
“My friends think I’m crazy for saying this,” my daughter declared in a speech at school during ninth grade, “but my mother is also my best friend.”
At the time, I felt overwhelmed with joy, love, and gratitude. Throughout Jenny’s years in high school and college, our bond grew only stronger. She was my closest confidant after my husband, and I could not imagine anything coming between us.
All of this changed when my daughter discovered Judaism.
Not a Judaism we recognized, which taught to respect one’s parents, to value hard work, and to see the good in all people, but a deeply intolerant kind, one that demanded not only that Jenny follow an infinite number of rules, but also disassociate from all who were different. Even from her own parents.
It began during Jenny’s last year of undergraduate studies, when she told me she was selected to take a weekly class in Judaism.
“Selected?” I asked.
“They’re paying me 400 dollars,” she said.
We thought it was a great idea. As a family, we hadn’t been particularly religious, but we wanted our daughter to learn more about her heritage. For a while she’d been dating a non-Jewish boy, and we hoped this class would strengthen her commitment to raising a Jewish family.
When Jenny first started to study about Judaism, we took pride in the fact that she was pursuing her passions. When she told us she wanted to start keeping kosher, we bought her a new set of kitchenware, and set aside one of our kitchen cabinets for her use. We gave her one of the three ovens in our large kitchen, as well as a dishwasher.
After she told us she wanted to start observing Shabbat, we drove her each weekend to the homes of her new friends for “Shabbatons,” gatherings of Orthodox girls who spent the weekend studying Torah, singing songs, and telling stories. When Jenny brought her friends home to us, we turned our home Orthodox–we prepared cut toilet paper and unscrewed the bulb in the refrigerator, and stocked up on paper goods so that she and her friends would not have to use anything from our non-kosher kitchen.
We also got to know her rabbi, gave him money, and donated to him all of our old furniture. We even invited him to our home to hold weekly classes for us and a group of our friends; we wanted to learn about what had so inspired our daughter to take on a lifestyle that was alien to us.
I admit, I was not always pleased with my daughter’s path. Her schoolwork had begun to suffer, and her demeanor turned increasingly severe, as if weighed down by some invisible force, a terrifying God who would crush her for eternity if she did not wholly immerse herself in the practices she was being taught. She began to wear a kerchief over her head, long skirts, and thick, seamed stockings. She had been a talented singer and dancer, interested in music and theater, but she forgot her previous interests. I would come home and find her in her room, swaying over a prayerbook, enunciating streams of strange syllables. I had an uneasy feeling that her new path might come between us.
Still, Jenny was an adult, and I respected her need to find her own way. In return, I wanted her to remain close to us, and respect our way of life.
When my daughter first told me about her interest in Orthodoxy, my husband and I hadn’t been overly concerned. We knew some Orthodox people, and they appeared to live balanced lives. I could respect those who practiced their faith differently. As it turned out, what my daughter was studying was a different kind of Orthodoxy. Her rabbi followed a fundamentalist ultra-Orthodox sect that saw any other way of life as empty and godless. It also taught that in order to be a good Jewish woman, our daughter had to disconnect from her past and everything associated with it.
It began with little things. At first, Jenny would no longer eat any food I prepared, even when I took pains to use only kosher ingredients and her own pots and pans. She soon stopped attending our holiday meals and when I threw a party for my husband’s 55th birthday, she refused to take part, as she could no longer be in the company of people who did not observe Shabbat as she did.
When I objected, she accused me of standing in the way of her happiness.
“You live empty meaningless lives!” she said. But our lives were not empty or meaningless, they had been filled with joy and beauty and the love of our family.
After we invited the rabbi to teach classes in our home, we realized where all her ideas came from. This young rabbi, too, tried to convince us–men and women several decades his senior–of the meaninglessness of our own lives.
When challenged, he condescended, “You can’t understand this, because you don’t live a Torah life.”
I searched the internet and discovered that Jenny’s rabbi didn’t act alone but rather, he was part of a concerted, worldwide effort to recruit non-Orthodox Jews to ultra-Orthodoxy.
The enterprise, known as kiruv, or “bringing close,” stems from the fervent belief that a Jew can only live a true Jewish life by adopting ultra-Orthodoxy. Today, it is executed with corporate-style efficiency. Thousands of “kiruv professionals” work across the U.S. and other countries, on hundreds of college campuses, “reaching out” to non-Orthodox students. Training institutes, both in Israel and the U.S., provide resources to the many Orthodox men and women who choose kiruv work as their life’s passion.
Jenny was swept up in this effort, and I wondered if there was anything in our power to stop it.
“My rabbi wants me to go to Israel,” Jenny said one day. “He says it’s the only way to be serious.”
It was my worst fear. Other parents had told me of their sons and daughters who went off to study at yeshivas in Israel, and their families were never the same afterward.
Furthermore, Jenny was still in school, attending a master’s program in psychology, which Barney and I had worked hard to get her into and we’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on tuition fees to avoid her the anxiety of having to repay student loans. Couldn’t she finish school first, and go to Israel later?
“My rabbi says I need to get away from you,” she said. “‘Your parents are torturing you,’ he says.”
What kind of people teach that in order to have a meaningful life, you must shun those who love you most? I wondered.
“You can’t stop me,” Jenny said a few weeks later. She didn’t need our money or our approval. Her rabbis would pay for her trip. They helped her file for a new passport and early one morning, a rabbi showed up in a car and sped off with her to the airport.
Once in Israel, our conversations grew stranger and shorter. There were months when I could not get in touch with her. Messages and emails went unanswered.
When Jenny finally returned home, nine months later, she was nearly unrecognizable. Gone was every glimmer of cheer from her personality, every sign of the affection she had once had for us. Still, she continued to live in our home. We bought her a car and gave her a credit card for her daily needs. Days would pass and I wouldn’t see her. She’d sneak in and out, eat her kosher food alone in her room.
During the times we interacted, she screamed at the slightest infraction against her–our home devolved into a veritable war zone. I knew that she, too, was in pain over the loss of our relationship, but none of us knew how to repair it. When we tried speaking to her about her behavior, she would turn abusive, scream and insult us for being horrible people and horrible parents who stood in the way of her happiness. Once, during an argument with Barney, she slammed a door into him and broke two of his toes, without offering so much as an apology.
“I will never let you know my children!” she screamed at me once during a particularly heated exchange.
She knew how to make her words hurt most.
On the day of Jenny’s wedding, at a basement hall somewhere in Brooklyn, Barney and I, along with our son Mark and my mother–the only members of our family to attend–walked into a room filled with ultra-Orthodox strangers. No one seemed to know who we were. When I asked to see Jenny, I was told she was being prepared and could not be disturbed. “I’m her mother,” I said to the stranger who gave me the information, and was met with a blank expression.
When I was finally allowed to see her, her eyes appeared vacant, as if she couldn’t quite remember who I was. A short while later, we walked her down the aisle to the chuppah ceremony, surrounded by crowds of men in black hats and women in black and white outfits. I looked at the people around me, and felt anxious and small and out of place. My daughter no longer loved me back, and these people, dancing and laughing and smiling, were rejoicing! These were the people who had turned her, who had made her hate us. I tried to find it in my heart to forgive them, but I couldn’t, and couldn’t bear to be there any longer.
No one appeared to notice as I made my way outside. I collapsed into our car and burst into uncontrollable sobs. Twenty minutes later, Barney and Mark emerged, and we all drove home.
For 10 days following the wedding, I lay in bed, nearly comatose. It is hard to describe this kind of grief, something we ordinarily experience only with the death of a loved one. My daughter was still alive, except I had lost her all the same. Until her wedding, I had held onto hope that we might rebuild our relationship, but it was now clear to me it wasn’t going to happen.
After Jenny’s marriage, she rarely called, but when she did I would drop whatever I was doing, desperate for a sign of her old love. It never came. It was usually to go shopping to buy her things, which I did, grasping at anything to spend time with her. But our relationship remained cold and perfunctory, cordial at best.
“Can I be there when the baby comes?” I asked her. “Please?”
“We’ll see,” she said.
When I finally got the call that she was in labor, I rushed to the hospital. Her husband stood in a corner, swaying and reciting verses from a prayer book. Jenny kept looking to him, as if pleading for him to comfort her, but he could not touch her, as Jewish law forbids a husband from physical contact with his wife during childbirth.
So it was I who held her hand, wiped the sweat from her brow, helped her with her breathing exercises. I was there to witness the birth of my first grandchild, a beautiful baby girl, and it was I who cut the umbilical cord.
I looked into my daughter’s eyes then, and I saw a glimmer of her old self. She appeared weak from the hours of labor but she was smiling, her eyes glistening as she held her daughter in her arms. And when she looked at me, I could see that, despite the distance between us, in that brief moment she finally realized: For some things in life, a girl will always need her mother.
New York state’s requirement that children be vaccinated in order to attend public school does not violate parents’ religious rights under the U.S. Constitution, a federal appeals court said Wednesday.
A three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan also ruled that students who receive religious exemptions from the vaccination law may be kept out of school during disease outbreaks, affirming a lower court decision.
The 2nd Circuit rejected claims by three New York City parents who said the individual right to religious liberty granted by the First Amendment trumped the state’s goal of preventing the spread of diseases in schools.
The parents claimed that a growing body of evidence showed vaccines can do more harm than good.
“That is a determination for the legislature, not the individual objectors,” the court wrote.
Two of the plaintiffs are Catholic and received religious exemptions from the vaccination law, the court said. They sued, however, after their children were barred from attending school during a chicken pox outbreak.
The third plaintiff, Dina Check, was denied an exemption by school officials who said her views on vaccines were health-related and not based on sincere religious beliefs. The court on Wednesday agreed.
An attorney for the plaintiffs did not return a request for comment.
Last month, Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, published a piece on Jezebel.com detailing her experience with sexual assault as a college student.
During a summer internship at an automobile plant in Warren, Ohio, after her junior year in college, Weingarten found herself feeling lonely and isolated. “I tried to find community to anchor my summer in Warren. I did what was familiar: I went to shul. One family invited me over for Shabbat dinner. Dutifully and hopefully, I went. They also invited a young man. He was nice enough. So, when this ‘nice Jewish guy’ invited me for dinner, I said, ‘Sure.’” She followed up: “A few days later, I went to his apartment. And that’s where it happened. He tried to rape me. I managed to get out after a struggle, but the emotional scarring was deep.”
Most commenters focused — rightly — on Weingarten’s bravery in sharing her story, with the Jewish detail going largely unnoticed. But as conversations about acquaintance rape change in this country, that “nice Jewish guy” (NJG) is a pivotal figure. According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), approximately two-thirds of rapes were committed by someone known to the victim (U.S. Department of Justice. 2005 National Crime Victimization Study).
On some level, we know, that the NJG is a stereotype based on the notion of meek, neutered male sexuality, but as a Jewish community, we still hold the idea close. We guard it, so tightly that the prospect of a Jewish man being capable of rape or sexual assault is considered impossible. (A Google search for “Jewish women and rape” yields a list of articles about the Holocaust and current antisemitism in Europe, implying that not only is rape a relic, its only perpetrators are non-Jews.) But in reality, Jewish men, despite what we’d like to believe, are not immune from the surrounding rape culture both off and on campus.
Weingarten, who was raised in a community that taught her she was “safe” around other Jews, ignored her misgivings about having dinner alone with a man she didn’t know. After all, she says, he was “nice enough.” Like many of us, she bought into the belief that the kind of man you could take home to your parents was not the kind of man who could rape you. Our society portrays rapists as dangerous men who lurk in dark alleys, not as nice boys who study Torah and might have met you through a mutual friend at a Shabbat dinner.
Weingarten is far from the only woman whose attacker came from within her community. Many of the women speaking out about their sexual assaults by Bill Cosby are African-American. Supermodel Beverly Johnson, who was the first black woman to appear on the cover of American Vogue, wrote in a Vanity Fair essay that one of the reasons she didn’t speak out against Cosby after he drugged and attempted to rape her was that she felt obligated to protect the image of the black community. Cosby himself has manipulated this idea, calling on “black media” to be fairer to him and implying that reporting rapes is less important that continuing to hold Cosby up as a black male ideal.
It’s impossible to know how many women have been raped by Jewish men. But too many women have anecdotes about a friend who was assaulted and never spoke up because “he’s such a great guy; no one would believe me.” Just look at what happened to some of the children who dared to publicly say that they were molested by rabbis or other trusted individuals in the ultra-Orthodox community — they were shunned by the communities who claimed to care about them.
As Weingarten says about her own decision to not report: “I thought it was my fault. I thought I should have known better. I should have been smarter.” The is just another form of Jewish guilt; the sublimated belief that we should be smart and virtuous. She adds, “One in four women will be sexually assaulted in college. Sadly, only a tiny fraction of the victims will file a report, in part because our culture tells them that they are to blame — the same culture that has kept me from speaking out for nearly 30 years.”
Currently there are activists working to empower rape and assault survivors on university campuses. (See Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia senior who’s been carrying the mattress on which she was raped around campus every day, to draw attention to the fact that the student who raped her is still attending the University consequence-free.)
However, there has been a heavy emphasis on what men are doing to solve the “problem.” Recently, Jewish fraternities were praised for being “ahead of the curve” at the University of Virginia, where a recent first-person account of a young woman’s gang rape at a fraternity house in Rolling Stone magazine has been attacked for shoddy reporting and fact-checking. “Historically Jewish Greek houses such as Alpha Epsilon Pi, Zeta Beta Tau and Sigma Delta Tau had been having the conversations for months before the explosive Rolling Stone story made national headlines,” JTA wrote. The story led off with congratulations for Jewish men for simply having “conversations,” rather than any of the women activists. Although it was a nice change from the victim-blaming, women-shouldn’t-go-out-alone-at-night rhetoric, nothing comes merely backslapping men for paying lip service to women’s issues.
The Real Man campaign, championed by celebrities like Gordon Ramsay and Ashton Kutcher, is another example of men congratulating each other for paying cursory attention to women’s issues. Men were encouraged to buy “I’m a Real Man” T-shirts, then photograph themselves wearing the shirts and post the pictures to social media. While the message was nice, it reinforced the notion that some men are “good,” while others are “bad,” a dangerous and simplistic binary that makes it hard to accept that “good” guys can assault women too.
Yet The Real Man Campaign’s online petition that amounted to nothing more than “hurting women is bad” got more attention than any real legislation or social change. It’s nice that The Real Man Campaign and Jewish fraternities are “having conversations” about how men can prevent rape. But unless real, measurable change comes out of it, it’s nothing more than some good PR.
Often it’s the nice Jewish guy you encounter who claims progressive politics and yet defend rapists in the name of “fairness” and “hearing both sides.” (You might have witnessed such folks in action on Facebook when Woody Allen was accused of sexual assault earlier this year.) No one ever suggests that we look at both sides in a kidnapping, a stabbing, or a theft. Yet rape, which is the most private and personal of attacks, is often judged in a Talmudic “let’s examine every possible variable” sort of way. What we’re really doing when we press for this kind of analysis is defending men’s right to have unfettered access to women’s bodies, consent be damned.
At the heart of this willful ignorance is the fact that protecting men, and male power, is regarded as more important than acknowledging the reality of sexual violence. This fact gets reaffirmed every time we dismiss women as hysterical liars, accuse them of making up stories of rape and sexual assault for purposes of attention or revenge, or offer up campaigns that perpetuate ideas of toxic masculinity. Until we take communal responsibility for erasing the voices of victims of sexual violence, maintaining patriarchy is going to seem an awful lot like a Jewish value.
