The complaint alleges Rabbi Ephraim Shapiro, who is a former dormitory counselor at the school, groomed, raped and sexually abused the victim over years.

 

Rabbi - Congregation Agudas Achim, Baltimore, MD

Rabbi - New Rochelle, NY

Rabbi - Tifereth Israel Anshe Sphard Congregation, Baltimore, MD

Former Principal - Talmudical Academy (TA) - Baltimore, MD

 

Accused of molesting several boys for over a fifty year period.  Rabbi Shapiro was born in New York on July 22, 1916, and died April 7, 1989, in Baltimore, MD. There is at least  one alleged victim of Rabbi Ephraim Shapiro who committed suicide. It is unknown at this time how many more there are.

 

Rabbi Ephraim Shapiro was a graduate of the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School and Yeshiva University, New York, NY. He moved to Baltimore in 1941 to serve as the spiritual leader of Congregation Agudas Achim. In 1955 moved to New Rochelle, NY and then returned to Baltimore in 1957 to serve as rabbi at Tifereth Israel Anshe Sphard Congregation and also the principal of the Talmudical Academy until retiring in 1982.  While working at the Talmudical Academy, Rabbi Shapiro worked as a guidance counselor and dorm counselor.  Rabbi Ephraim Shapiro died in 1989 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. 

Rabbi Ephraim Shapiro

Maryland Jewish boarding school sued over sexual abuse claims by former student from 1970s

 

*All The Local Baltimore Rabbis Knew * Rabbi Jacob Ruderman, Rabbi Herman Neuberger, Rabbi Emmanuel Polliakoff, Rabbi Jacob Weinberg, and Rabbi Ephraim Shapiro entering the Bet Hamidrash, 1980.

 

Rabbi Ephraim Shapiro officiating at the wedding of Rabbi Simcha Shafran is marrying Pauline Kahn on March 13, 1949 at Agudas Achim at 4239 Park Heights Avenue, Baltimore, MD.

A former student and resident at The Talmudical Academy, a Jewish boarding school in Baltimore County, filed a lawsuit against the school over claims of sexual abuse in the 1970s.

 

 

The complaint alleges Rabbi Ephraim Shapiro, who is a former dormitory counselor at the school, groomed, raped and sexually abused the victim over years.

"Rabbi Shapiro had unfettered access to our client and other children due to his role as a dormitory counselor at the Academy," the alleged victim's attorneys said. "Over several decades, there has been extensive news coverage of Rabbi Shapiro's sexual abuse of minors while employed at the Academy.  As a result, our client has endured years of suffering and trauma."

The lawsuit comes under the Maryland Child Victims Act, which was established in 2023 and eliminates the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse cases.

According to the attorneys, this is the first known civil lawsuit against The Talmudical Academy.

"By the time our client was ready to come forward as an adult, he was well beyond the statute of limitations," his attorneys said. "The Child Victims Act enabled our client to seek recourse."  

Lawsuit against The Talmudical Academy

The alleged victim was a student and lived at The Talmudical Academy, a Jewish Orthodox boarding school in Pikesville, from 1971 until 1974. He claims the abuse happened when he was 14 to 17 years old.

According to the lawsuit, Rabbi Shapiro was rehired by the Academy in 1972 despite allegations that he was sexually abusive to minor students during his first stint at the school in the 1960s.

The lawsuit claims Shapiro, who had direct oversight of minor students and unfettered access to them, groomed and manipulated the students until he gained their trust, which ultimately led to years of sexual abuse.

All of the sexual abuse -- which included molesting and forced kissing -- happened at The Talmudical Academy, the lawsuit claims.

The unnamed survivor, who now lives in Florida, also accused the school of negligence, citing that leaders allowed students to go off campus and hitchhike to get to stores in the area. 

The lawsuit alleges the survivor left campus, which staff members knew about, to go to a kosher grocery store nearby. While attempting to hitchhike, which was the recommended mode of transportation, a driver offered to drive him. Before taking the survivor to the store, the driver allegedly raped and abused the survivor. 

The lawsuit alleges that the school was negligent and did not adequately protect the students while they were in the care of the school. 

According to the lawsuit, other sexual abuse victims were chronicled in a 2007 article in the Baltimore Jewish Times.

The Talmudical Academy told WJZ in a statement that it is aware of the complaint.  

"The employee named in the suit is no longer living and has not been affiliated with the school for many decades," said Executive Vice President Rabbi Yaacov Cohen. "While we cannot comment on the details of the case due to ongoing legal proceedings, we want to emphasize that this allegation does not involve any current faculty, staff, or students. The safety and well-being of our students is always, and continues to be, our highest priority. As always, we will continue to focus on providing a safe learning environment, at all times, for each and every one of our students."

What is the Child Victims Act?

In 2023, the Child Victims Act, which removed the statute of limitations and allowed victims to receive up to $890,000 per occurrence of abuse, was made a law.

Since then, 4,500 victims have filed claims, potentially putting the state on the hook for billions of dollars.

Democratic Delegate CT Wilson, a victim of childhood sexual abuse, introduced amendments to House Bill 1378, which would lower the payout cap for each claimant to $400,000. 

It would also require an alternative dispute resolution process to promise transparency in these payouts.

"I wanted to make sure that whatever we do today, we don't so irreparably damage our state, that we must go to bankruptcy," Wilson said. "Because while the victims do need an opportunity to speak and they do need to come up in financial support, billions and billions of dollars is not what we can afford to do."  

Lawsuits filed against McDonogh School

Last month, more than a dozen former students at The McDonogh School, a private school in Baltimore County, alleged sexual abuse against former school leaders dating back to the 1960s.

The alleged victims claim to have suffered sexual abuse by former dean Alvin Levy, former Spanish teacher Robert Creed, and two more faculty members while attending the school between the 1960s and 1980s.

Four lawsuits have been filed against the school, claiming school leaders knew about the abuse but failed to protect the students.

A 10-page lawsuit details a former student's account of being sexually assaulted several times by former dean Levy, while alone on weekends. The lawsuit says the alleged victim was 10 years old at the time of the abuse.

In 1992, Levy was indicted on sexual abuse charges brought by another former student. However, Levy died before his scheduled trial. 

Attorney Ari Casper said an investigation into the McDonogh School decades later revealed that five former faculty members, including Levy and former Spanish teacher Robert Creed, allegedly sexually assaulted two dozen students between 1940 and 1980, with the Board of Trustees and former school administrators failing to take proper action.

Former student sues Baltimore Talmudical Academy, alleging rabbi sexually abused him

A man who attended the Talmudical Academy of Baltimore is suing the Baltimore County school for more than $3 million, alleging that he was sexually molested in the 1970s by a rabbi who was hired to work as a dorm counselor despite having a history of sexual abuse.

Rabbi Ephraim Shapiro convinced the victim, then 14, that he hoped to be his “mentor and friend,” and then used his “direct and unfettered access” to groom and ultimately sexually abuse the boy, according to the suit, which was filed Friday in Baltimore County Circuit Court.

The victim is not named in the suit, which was filed by attorneys Michael Belsky, Catherine Dickinson and Kellyn Wilcox of SBWD Law in Baltimore. In a news release, the attorneys wrote that they are conducting an investigation into the abuse and encourage anyone with knowledge of it to contact them.

“Plaintiff Doe has suffered and endured mental anguish and embarrassment,” has “incurred expensive psychological treatment” and “will continue to suffer mental anguish and require treatment for the rest of his life,” the suit states.

 https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/baltimore-talmudica-academy-sexual-abuse-E7VI56PMEZDYXAC7M4C7YDYSHQ/

 

CBS NEWS MAY HAVE BEEN PRESSURED TO REMOVE THE LINK:

https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/maryland-jewish-abuse-talmudical-child-viictims-baltimore-county-rabbi-shapiro/

A $4 Billion Sex Abuse Settlement in L.A., After Childhoods of ‘Pure Hell’

Thousands of plaintiffs, once children in Los Angeles County’s juvenile detention and foster care systems, are part of a record-breaking payout.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/los-angeles-county-abuse-settlement.html

 

From the Pirkei Avot, a compilation of rabbinical ethical teachings: “Be cautious with governments, for they bring a person close to them only for their own needs. They appear as friends when it benefits them, but they do not stand by a person in his time of difficulty.” Some Jewish people feel gratified to hear the president say he’ll defend us, but today’s ruling authorities will not be good for the Jews.

 The enemy of our enemy was not our friend. There’s a lesson there, if we can heed it.

Trump Is Selling Jews a Dangerous Lie

Listen to this article · 12:15 min Learn more

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By Michael S. Roth

Mr. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University.

Taking a break from her work dismantling her own department, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon last week threatened roughly $9 billion of grants and contracts with Harvard because of “the school’s failure to protect students on campus from antisemitic discrimination.” As shocking as that threat was, it wasn’t entirely a surprise: Since the Justice Department convened its Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, 60 universities have received notice that they are being monitored or investigated.

With an administration seemingly determined to do everything, everywhere, all at once, discerning its true priorities can sometimes be challenging. But on this one point, Donald Trump wants no ambiguity: “My promise to Jewish Americans is this,” he said on the campaign trail. “With your vote, I will be your defender, your protector, and I will be the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House.”

As the first Jewish president of a formerly Methodist university, I find no comfort in the Trump administration’s embrace of my people, on college campuses or elsewhere. Jew hatred is real, but today’s anti-antisemitism isn’t a legitimate effort to fight it. It’s a cover for a wide range of agendas that have nothing to do with the welfare of Jewish people.

All of these agendas — from dismantling basic government functions to crushing the independence of cultural and educational organizations to criminalizing political speech to legitimating petty presidential vendettas — endanger the principles and institutions that have actually made this country great. For Jews, a number of these agendas do something more: They pose a direct threat to the very people they purport to help. Jews who applaud the administration’s crackdown will soon find that they do so at their peril.

Among the first high-profile targets of the anti-antisemitic push have been a recent Columbia graduate and a current Tufts University graduate student, one a lawful permanent resident of this country and the other one here on a student visa, who spoke out in favor of Palestinian rights. Both have been handcuffed, driven off and indefinitely detained. Neither has been charged with a crime.

Abductions by government agents; unexplained, indefinite detentions; the targeting of allegedly dangerous ideas; lists of those under government scrutiny; official proclamations full of bluster and bile — Jews have been here before, many times, and it does not end well for us. The rule of law and the right to freedom of thought and expression are essential safeguards for everyone, but especially so for members of groups whose ideas or practices don’t always align with the mainstream. As M. Gessen recently wrote in these pages, “A country that has pushed one group out of its political community will eventually push out others.” What our government is doing now is wrong in itself, but beyond that, it poses a bigger threat to Jewish people’s safety than all the campus protests ever could.

I’ve received a trove of emails asking whether Jews are welcome at Wesleyan. In my (lucky) 18th year as Wesleyan’s president, I am pleased to tell them that Shabbat dinners are well attended, the Israeli Film Festival is offering excellent cultural fare and Jewish studies courses — one on the archetype of the Jewish mother, taught by an Israeli — are oversubscribed. Of course we’ve had protests, with Jews on both sides of them. Some of the students having grown up in communities of like-mindedness are surprised there is more than one side of an issue. In some cases, that is enough to awaken their anxieties.

The situation was different at Columbia. Protests became violent (both in the actions of the participants and those of the police who were called in to quell them). Tensions between supporters of Palestinians and Israelis were at times extreme. In the pages of The Atlantic, Franklin Foer recently documented some serious antisemitic activity. All of which is presumably why Columbia was the first to be singled out by the forces of anti-antisemitism.

But in other ways, Columbia is an odd choice. It has the second highest percentage of Jewish students in the Ivy League. Secretary McMahon has said the government is cancelling $400 million of federal support for the school because of its failure to protect Jewish students. Federal cuts to Columbia, however, will disproportionately affect Jewish students.

And when the White House announced the cuts, it did so with a tweet that said “SHALOM COLUMBIA.” You don’t have to be Jewish to hear a large measure of sarcasm in those words.

That kind of tension — between championing Jews and ridiculing, reviling, or in some cases even threatening them — has been visible on the right for some time. Consider first the president: On the one hand, his daughter, son-in-law is Jewish. On the other hand, when neo-Nazis, Klansmen and others marched through Charlottesville, Va., carrying torches and shouting “Jews will not replace us,” Mr. Trump condemned the most extreme elements of the rally but observed that there were “some very fine people on both sides.”

A “Severance”-level disconnect between an image of Jews as both vulnerable people who must be protected and powerful people who must be defeated, is now widespread. Last year when Congress drew up a bill to oppose antisemitic speech on college campuses, many legislators raced to voice their support. But not some of MAGA’s most prominent representatives, including Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had no objection to fighting antisemitism but observed that the language of the bill would interfere with Christians’ ability to accuse Jews of killing Christ. At other times, agreeing with Vladimir Putin, she has said that the Jewish president of Ukraine was running “a Nazi army.”

The prominent Trump supporter Candace Owens has said that Jeffrey Epstein was working for Israel, a nation that has gotten blackmail “down to a science.” The MAGA hero (and subject of sex trafficking charges) Andrew Tate has encouraged people to “question” their criticism of Hitler — and to bring back the Nazi salute, while they’re at it — and said that “the people who wrote the official story” of the Holocaust “have used it to subvert the consciousness of Western populations into mass genetic suicide.”

Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking House Republican, has ferociously defended Jews against antisemitism in higher education, leading intense questioning of three university presidents, two of whom soon after lost their positions. In other settings, however, she has used language similar to the “great replacement theory,” the same xenophobic conspiracy theory that the Unite the Right participants in Charlottesville were chanting about.

Nick Fuentes, who had dinner with Mr. Trump in 2022, lists “the influence of Jews” as one of the two biggest problems in the world, and announced that “Talmudic Jews” have to leave the country or be converted. As for Mr. Trump himself, he declared that Senator Chuck Schumer is “not Jewish anymore,” which reminded me of Karl Lueger, a raging antisemite and fin-de-siècle mayor of Vienna, who declared, “I decide who is a Jew.” Leo Terrell, the head of Mr. Trump’s antisemitism task force, shared a tweet by a prominent white supremacist that lauded the president’s “ability to revoke someone’s Jew card.”

As Oscar Hammerstein II put it in “The King and I”: “If allies are strong with power to protect me/Might they not protect me out of all I own?” These are our defenders? SHALOM, indeed.

In the Long Island town where I grew up, Jews were a minority. My father taught me how to punch antisemites before getting hit — when I was in elementary school! And he emphasized to me that I should expect to encounter such people wherever I went, especially as I moved into unfamiliar professional or social settings.

Today I encounter many young Jews who are shocked by anti-Israel attitudes (even from fellow Jews, part of the long history of Jewish antizionism). They are shocked by how many progressives decry ethnostates but somehow mention only Israel, or how readily people, when given half a chance, will express what the historian Deborah Lipstadt has called “clueless” antisemitism. Political events seem to expand their license to do so. If you feel righteous about being an anti-colonialist, why worry about a little antisemitism? Like the white supremacists liberated by mainstream anti-D.E.I. language, these antisemites hear perfectly legitimate criticism of, say, the Israeli government, and regard it as an opportunity to unfurl the true extent of their prejudice.

The novelist and scholar Dara Horn has speculated that as the memory of Nazis and the Holocaust dimmed, “the public shame associated with expressing antisemitism was dying too — in other words, hating Jews was normal.” Which means we should expect things to get even worse.

Given all this, there is a great temptation for Jews to embrace anyone who denounces antisemitism, regardless of the moral contradictions (or the dubious connection between protecting religious minorities and, say, cutting grants for cancer research). “We appreciate the Trump Administration’s broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism,” the Anti-Defamation League said in response to the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, the legal permanent resident, “and this action further illustrates that resolve by holding alleged perpetrators responsible for their actions.”

As Sam Adler-Bell has recently noted, some American Jewish organizations have encouraged the erosion of rights and norms in exchange for support for Israel. The president hadn’t been in office a full day before the ADL spoke up to defend Elon Musk for throwing what sure looked to me like a Sieg Heil. After weathering intense criticism over its support for Mr. Khalil’s abduction, the organization’s chief executive last week restated the need for due process. How did we get to the point where that’s even in doubt?

The ADL was founded in 1913, in the wake of the case of Leo Frank, a Jewish man accused of murdering a 13-year-old Christian girl. Most historians today agree that Frank, who was lynched in 1915, was wrongly convicted after a sham trial, but the MAGA folks on X can’t help but celebrate the lynching of a Jew. “He got exactly what he deserved,” exclaimed Lauren Witzke, a 2020 Republican Senate nominee “and everyone in that crowd should have received medals for protecting their community.”

Kingsley Wilson, the 20-something deputy press secretary at the Pentagon, praised the far-right party Alternative for Germany by invoking the Nazi slogan “Ausländer raus!” (“Foreigners out!”). As the traditional conservatives at Bulwark put it, “The ‘vibe shift’ is not necessarily that more people on the right are antisemites compared to eight years ago, but that much of the right now appears to reject the basic notion that there should be any stigma against even the vilest bigotry.”

That’s why the “instrumentalization of Jewish fear” is so pernicious. Those who attack people like Mahmoud Khalil today will be breaking bread with the “Ausländer raus!” folks tomorrow. They will seek new targets. Who’s next?

In the second and first century B.C., the Jewish kingdom of Judea aligned itself with Rome to protect itself from the domination of Greek culture. Rome obliged, and conquered Judea for itself. The enemy of our enemy was not our friend. There’s a lesson there, if we can heed it.

Here’s another, from the Pirkei Avot, a compilation of rabbinical ethical teachings: “Be cautious with governments, for they bring a person close to them only for their own needs. They appear as friends when it benefits them, but they do not stand by a person in his time of difficulty.” Some Jewish people feel gratified to hear the president say he’ll defend us, but today’s ruling authorities will not be good for the Jews.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/opinion/trump-jewish-antisemitism-wesleyan.html

 

H.L. Menken (H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) writing for the Baltimore Sun is appropriate: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."