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Sunday, December 16, 2012

By George! - I Told You It Was Just A Matter Of Time!


George Finkelstein



Alleged Yeshiva Abuser Quits as Accusations Mount!

Finkelstein Steps Down at Shul; 5 More Students Claim Abuse!

“Macy Gordon was malevolence personified,” said Barry Singer, who graduated from Y.U.’s Manhattan High School for Boys in 1975, “whereas George Finkelstein was a more complicated, disturbed individual.” “I fought these guys tooth and nail the entire time I was in school,” Singer added. “I had no idea that what was being done to me was sexual abuse or any abuse, I merely knew I didn’t want these guys touching me and I did my best to keep them away from me.”

A former staff member at Yeshiva University High School for Boys has resigned from his post at a synagogue in Jerusalem. Five more ex-students have told the Forward they were abused by rabbis George Finkelstein or Macy Gordon.

 Rabbi George Finkelstein has resigned his position at the Great Jerusalem Synagogue after the Forward reported that he had sexually abused students at Yeshiva University High School for Boys in Manhattan during the 1970s and ‘80s.

“He sent us an email saying he’s resigning because he does not want to expose the Great Synagogue to embarrassment,” Zalli Jaffe, the synagogue’s vice president, said in an interview. Finkelstein had served as the institution’s executive director since 2001; last month, he began serving as its ritual director.

Jaffe said that the resignation was received on Thursday, “immediately following the publication” of the Forward’s investigation. The correspondence came from France, where Finkelstein is currently vacationing.

Around the same time as Finkelstein resigned, senior staff of the Orthodox Union in America and Jerusalem held a teleconference regarding the position of the other Y.U. high school staff member investigated by the Forward, Rabbi Macy Gordon. They decided to impose a “leave of absence” on Gordon’s teaching duties at the OU Israel Center in Jerusalem, where he gives a weekly class on the laws of the Sabbath, Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, OU executive vice president emeritus, told the Forward on December 16.

He said that the unilaterally-imposed leave of absence will last until the OU can “clarify exactly what happened.” This is in spite of the fact that the OU has “to presume that he’s innocent until we find out more about it.”

Weinreb said: “When we became aware of the news article we felt we had to investigate ourselves to see what kind of credence to give [the claims].” He stressed that the allegations were dated to a time before Gordon started teaching at the OU.

He said of Gordon: “I know that he has no memory of the alleged incident whatsoever."

The dramatic news came as five more men have stepped forward to say they were inappropriately touched and suffered emotional and sexual abuse at the high school.....

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/167767/alleged-yeshiva-abuser-quits-as-accusations-mount/?p=all#ixzz2FEPA8wtn

‘Who Would Do This to Our Poor Little Babies?’ Let's ask "Wise Man" Avi Shafran & His "Brilliant" Bosses!


‘Who Would Do This to Our Poor Little Babies’

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Gradually, the group of frantic parents shrank and was gently ushered to wait in a back room in the old brick firehouse around the corner from Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The sounds of cartoons playing for restless children wafted incongruously through the air, but the adults were hushed. A police officer entered and put the parents’ worst fears into words: their children were gone. The wails that followed could be heard from outside, sounding the end of a horrifying shooting that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in the school.

It was about 9:30 a.m., when the school locks its doors to the outside world, demanding identification from visitors. What happened next sounded different depending on where you were in the school when a normal school day exploded.

Pops. Bangs. Thundering, pounding booms that echoed, and kept coming and coming. Screams and the cries of children ebbed, until there was only the gunfire.

Countless safety drills learned over generations kicked in. Teachers sprang to their doors and turned the locks tight. Children and adults huddled in closets, crawled under desks and crouched in classroom corners.

Laura Feinstein, a reading support teacher, reached for her telephone. “I called the office and said, ‘Barb, is everything O.K.?’ and she said, ‘There is a shooter in the building.’ ”

“I heard gunshots going on and on and on,” Ms. Feinstein said.

Even in the gym, the loudest room in any school on a given day, something sounded very wrong. “Really loud bangs,” said Brendan Murray, 9, who was there with his fourth-grade class. “We thought that someone was knocking something over. And we heard yelling and we heard gunshots. We heard lots of gunshots.”

“We heard someone say, “ ‘Put your hands up!’ ” Brendan said. “I heard, ‘Don’t shoot!’ We had to go into the closet in the gym.”

In the library, Yvonne Cech, a librarian, locked herself, an assistant and 18 fourth graders in a closet behind file cabinets while the sound of gunfire thundered outside.

Witnesses said later that they heard as many as 100 gunshots, but saw next to nothing in their hiding places. What was happening?

“Some people,” a little girl said later, searching for words, “they got a stomachache.”

The shooting finally stopped. Most teachers kept the children frozen in hiding. Some 15 minutes later, there was another sound, coming from the school intercom. It had been on the whole time. A voice said, “It’s O.K. It’s safe now.”

Brendan, in the gym, said, “Then someone came and told us to run down the hallway. There were police at every door. There were lots of people crying and screaming.”

The officers led children past the carnage. “They said ‘Close your eyes, hold hands.’” said Vanessa Bajraliu, 9. Outside, a nightmare version of the school was taking shape. Police officers swarmed with dogs and roared overhead in helicopters. There were armored cars and ambulances.

Inside, the librarians and children had been hiding in the closet for 45 minutes when a SWAT team arrived and escorted them out.

Word spread quickly through the small town. At nearby Danbury Hospital, doctors and nurses girded for an onslaught of wounded victims. “We immediately convened four trauma teams to be ready for casualties,” a spokeswoman, Andrea Rynn, said. Nurses, surgeons, internal medicine and imaging specialists, as well as staff members from pathology and the hospital lab, rushed to assemble in the emergency room to receive an influx of patients from the shooting. An influx that never arrived. Only three victims came to the hospital, two of whom did not survive. The rest were already dead.

“I’ve been here for 11 years,” Ms. Feinstein, the teacher, said. “I can’t imagine who would do this to our poor little babies.” .........

NAMES OF THE VICTIMS:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/nyregion/victims-of-the-newtown-shootings.html?hp&_r=0

READ MORE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/nyregion/witnesses-recall-deadly-shooting-sandy-hook-newtown-connecticut.html?src=mv&ref=general