Mikveh Pervert Soul-Searching Should Start With Powerful
Now that Rabbi Barry Freundel has pleaded guilty to peeping at 52
women while they went to the mikveh — prosecutors say he spied on 100
more women, but outside the statute of limitations — we finally can take
off the qualifiers and accept that he is guilty. And that means we can
begin some much-needed, and largely absent, soul-searching.
One hopes that it is only the delay in legally establishing Freundel’s guilt that has caused some of his most
ardent supporters (prior to the scandal) to remain so
uncharacteristically silent.
There are, I think, two categories of such people:
those with institutional positions, and those who considered Freundel
their teacher and friend.
Among those in the former category are the Orthodox
rabbinic umbrella organization the Rabbinical Council of America, and
those in leadership positions at Kesher Israel. Here, the discourse is
like that of other scandals: who knew what, when; what could have been
done differently; what policies are being changed.
Because these are familiar dynamics, and because
others have written about them already, they are of secondary interest
to me. Soon after the allegations surfaced, the RCA provided a
(hopefully exhaustive) account of complaints it had received about Freundel.
If that account is complete, it doesn’t amount to much.
To be sure, there are still unanswered questions. It
is rumored that Freundel had several external hard drives filled with
videos of women from the mikveh who are visible in his office at Towson
University.
Is it really plausible that no one ever noticed or asked
about them? Has the RCA really done enough
[[http://www.rabbis.org/index_with_RCA_response%20.cfm]] to protect
women in the conversion process? Really — did no one suspect,
investigate or ask? But at this moment, I’m more interested in the
high-wattage men who regarded Freundel as a friend, teacher and leader.
When I lived in Washington, I attended Kesher Israel
regularly. It was a thrill to sit behind Senator Joseph Lieberman, Leon
Wieseltier and other luminaries of the American Jewish scene. They and
many others took pride in articulating a literate, intelligent Modern
Orthodox Jewish sensibility – and Freundel was an exemplar of it.
And whether or not Freundel really coined the phrase “family values,”,his was also a powerful voice among neoconservatives and moderates.
All this time, he was a sex offender, a fraud and a pervert.
How can some of our community’s leading (if
self-appointed) cultural sages lionize and valorize someone who, in
fact, they didn’t really know that well?
Spiritual leaders are not like
political or business leaders, with private lives sequestered from their
public personae (if that is even true for politicians anymore). They
are meant to walk the walk and talk the talk. Think of those Hasidic
tales where the Hasid wants to learn how the rebbe ties his shoes. Or of
the racier talmudic version,where Rabbi Nachman Kahana hides under Rav’s bed, saying “This, too, is Torah I need to learn.”
That story of rabbinic voyeurism leaves an
uncomfortable taste today, but part of its meaning, I think, is that a
rabbi’s character counts, that the rabbi’s teachings are not confined to
the pulpit, that his entire life is his Torah.
I suppose Freundel was a very good liar. It’s easy to
look at a bad photo of him today (especially one that makes light of
his partial facial paralysis — a cheap shot that editors should be
ashamed of) and see a pervert. But many good people were duped by him,
and, rightly, feel betrayed.
Yet I also wonder what criteria we use to evaluate our spiritual leaders when a serial sex offender can sneak past them.
To me, the Freundel scandal looks a lot like the
Madoff scandal. There are questions that should have been asked,
suspicions that should have been raised. But the self-reinforcing loops
of elite power — X likes him, X is powerful, therefore I should like him
— blinded those entrusted to keep watch.
And then there are the nonsexual allegations. One of Freundel’s victims, Bethany Mandel, told The Daily Beast
that we’ve gotten Freundel wrong. “People keep calling him a pervert
and yes, he’s a pervert, but he’s also a power hungry sociopath,” Mandel
said. “It wasn’t about porn. It was about power, and this was
additional power no one knew he had.”
This, too, should have been visible in plain view to anyone who worked closely with Freundel.
One wonders if the highly self-congratulatory nature
of the D.C. Jewish intelligentsia — which prides itself on saying
important things, generally to other old straight white men — enabled
the
selective blindness that, in turn, enabled Freundel. This small circle
of elites is an echo chamber — one with access to power, but an echo
chamber nonetheless, in which elites anointed other elites. There is
some original thinking in this community, but there’s also a lot of old,
rich, straight, white male bloviating, as the rest of us watched in the
New Republic debacle. There’s more privilege than quality.
Giving erudite speeches about conservative moral
values does not a spiritual hero make. Nor do the layers of posturing
and rhetoric that squat, like painted facades, atop an unknown interior.
Nor does the intoxicating aroma of power that wafts through Kesher
Israel and places like it. It can seem, downing a shot of whiskey with
someone of influence, that you are in the presence of greatness. Really,
you are only in the presence of power.
Yes, Freundel had secrets, but if his followers
really had no inkling of them, they must not have been looking in the
right place.
Jay Michaelson is a contributing editor to the Forward. Contact him on Twitter @jaymichaelson
Rabbis' absolute power: how sex abuse tore apart Australia's Orthodox Jewish community
Yeshivah leaders in Sydney and Melbourne chose to preserve the
prestige of their faith over the safety of children. A national inquiry
that reverberated around the world painted a devastating picture of how
individuals were abandoned and ostracised as they fought to end the code
of silence
Orthodox Judaism
has never been exposed to such scrutiny. From a Melbourne courtroom,
the torment of the Chabad rabbis was streamed live to the world as the
royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse
probed the city’s secretive and powerful Yeshivah community.
Sharp divisions in the Jewish world have been exposed. Two rabbis,
including one of the nation’s most prominent, have been forced from
their posts. Whistleblowers, humiliated and ostracised for years by
Yeshivah, have been dramatically vindicated. More victims have come
forward. More criminal charges may follow. Yeshivah schools face a
nightmare of civil litigation.
The cast is Jewish, yet the bones of this story are familiar to
anyone who has followed the scandal of child abuse in Christian schools
and parishes. Rabbis and bishops have shown over the years much the same
failings when faced with a choice between guarding the prestige of
their faiths and the safety of children. This story is about the dangers
in any cult of blind obedience to holy men.
Rabbi Yitzchok Groner died just in time. He was a dominating figure
in Melbourne’s Jewish world, a mountain of a man with inexhaustible
energy, deep religious learning and a stare that stopped grown men in
their tracks.
Rabbi Yitzchok Groner
As the Melbourne emissary of the Chabad-Lubavitch leader Rabbi
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Groner’s authority was absolute. He spent 50
years building the Yeshivah sect into a wealthy, powerful and very
private community of several hundred families living around a busy
synagogue and thriving schools at a campus on Hotham Street, East St
Kilda.
Yeshivah
is ultra Orthodox: fundamentalist, intellectual and charismatic. God
created the world in six days. Families are big. Sex is never discussed.
Modesty is everything. Men and women mark their days with prayer and
ritual. Instead of dying in the face of the modern world, old-fashioned,
rule-bound Chabad-Lubavitch Judaism flourished.
Groner died in the winter of 2008, but his power didn’t die with him.
To question his authority – indeed his saintliness – after his death,
was considered a particularly grave sin among the Chabad. Protecting his
memory were the rabbis he had trained and sent out into the wider
Jewish world, and the interlocking mesh of Chabad families that seemed
to make everyone at Yeshivah the son-in-law, nephew or sister of
everyone else.
A couple of months after Groner’s death, news broke that David Kramer
had been sentenced to seven years in prison in St Louis, Missouri, for
molesting children at a youth camp where he was supposed to be teaching
“Hot topics for Jewish teens”. The story died in Australia for the time
being, but from this point, a number of Chabad leaders, teachers and
parents knew an appalling scandal threatened Yeshivah.
Kramer had taught at the Yeshivah primary school in late 1989. The
young American rabbi was immediately popular and immediately began
molesting children. The number of his victims is not known, perhaps
dozens, including two of the sons of Zephaniah Waks.
Waks was a most unwise man to cross. The Waks name is all through
this story. Tenacity runs in the family. Half measures aren’t in their
DNA. Their sense of right and wrong is strong and personal. As the
father of 17 children, Zephaniah Waks had more than proved his
dedication to Chabad. But in the end those children would mean more to
him than any obligations to the sect.
Waks discovered the abuse in 1992. He says he complained to the
principal of the Yeshivah school, Rabbi Abraham Glick. Within hours,
Waks learned that Kramer had admitted the abuse. When he wasn’t fired,
Waks says, he confronted Glick again, only to be told: “There is a
danger of self-harm. So we can’t fire him.”
Glick doesn’t deny learning about Kramer at this point, but can’t
recall discussing the teacher’s fate with Waks. He told the royal
commission: “I think he had that conversation or a similar conversation
most probably with someone else.”
Manny Waks and his father Zephaniah leave the county court in Melbourne.Photograph: Mal Fairclough/AAP
Waks was outraged by the failure to act. He didn’t call the police
because at this time he had no doubt that doing so “would be in breach
of the Jewish principle of mesirah”. This ancient rule, still
alive among the followers of many faiths including Judaism, threatens
believers with expulsion if they take crimes within the faith to the
civil authorities.
Waks called a meeting of parents hoping to pressure the school to
sack Kramer. Hours before it was due to begin, he was told Kramer had
been dismissed. What he did not discover until years later was that
Groner had given Kramer an air ticket to Israel, on condition he leave
Australia immediately.
Another threat was looming at Yeshivah in those weeks. Police had
discovered another paedophile active on the campus, a man whose abuse of
Chabad children Groner appears to have known about for nearly a decade.
David Cyprys had been to school at St Kilda and never left. He hung
around Yeshivah in various guises: as a helper at youth camps, security
guard, locksmith and martial arts instructor. He had keys to the ritual
bath, the mikveh, where he abused boys. He abused them in one-on-one kung fu lessons. He abused them at youth camps. He raped them in his van.
The earliest known complaint about Cyprys was in 1984. One victim and
the father of another complained to the head of Chabad Youth. The
father also confronted Groner, who promised to look after the matter and
assured him his son was so young he wouldn’t need counselling. Years
later the father would give evidence that from that time he didn’t hear
another word from Groner.
Complaints about Cyprys kept coming. In 1986 Groner told a
30-year-old mother whose son was being abused: “Oh, no, I thought we
cured him [Cyprys].” She trusted the rabbi’s assurances that all would
now be well. A long time later she discovered the abuse of her son
continued for another two years.
At the start of the summer holidays in late 1990, a scholarship boy
with ambitions to be a rabbi arrived at St Kilda from interstate. He was
15 and very vulnerable. His mother was dying of leukaemia. There was no
father in his life. This lonely kid, known at the royal commission as
AVR, welcomed attention from Cyprys. “I thought he was a really cool
guy,” he said. “He seemed genuinely interested in me.”
Cyprys repeatedly abused the boy for nine months. Found crying one
day in the playground, AVR was taken home by a kindly family. His mother
flew immediately to Melbourne. The boy told her something of the abuse
but couldn’t mention the rapes. “She was quite sick and I thought that
would push her over the edge.”
She rang Groner. AVR remembers them seeing the headmaster, Glick,
next day and also telling him about Cyprys. But Glick would assure the
royal commission he had no memory of the boy at the school at all; no
memory of this exchange with him and his mother; and no knowledge of the
allegations against Cyprys for something like a decade.
AVR was expelled from the school that day. “They did not want me
there any more,” he told the commission. “They did not offer to help me
or provide me with any counselling. From the time of the disclosure, no
one associated with Yeshivah would speak to us or help us. Even our
family members would not help us and we had a lot of trouble getting
back to the airport and getting home.”
AVR and his mother went to the police. The case was looming over the
St Kilda community as Kramer was given his air ticket to Israel. Cyprys
was charged only with indecent assault, for the boy was still unable to
talk about the rapes. Cyprys pleaded guilty in September 1992 and was
fined $1,500. No conviction was recorded. Newspapers carried no reports
of the case. Cyprys returned to his old stamping ground and his old
ways.
‘I was lost in the only world I knew’
The wall of secrecy around the St Kilda community would not be
breached for nearly 20 years. But witnesses told the royal commission
that within the walls Cyprys’s brush with the law was common knowledge
at the time.
Even so, no surviving Chabad leader has admitted knowing in the 1990s
that the man they still trusted to help out at youth camps and give
private kung fu lessons to 12-year-olds, had confessed to sexual
assaults in a Melbourne court. This was despite Yeshivah being, in the
words of Rabbi Glick, “so small that you can’t sneeze without everyone
knowing it”.
The royal commission discovered another peculiarity: not a scrap of
paper survived at the Yeshivah centre recording the allegations against
Kramer, or his flight to Israel, or the multiple complaints against
Cyprys which continued to land on Groner’s desk.
In 1996, Zephaniah Waks was appalled to discover another of his sons
had been abused. Back from Israel for his sister’s wedding, Manny Waks
had heard about Operation Paradox, the hotline for abuse victims run
each year by Victoria police. In the history of combating abuse in many
institutions and many faiths, Operation Paradox was to play an honoured
role.
Manny told his father he had been abused for many years at Yeshivah,
first by the son of a senior Chabad rabbi and then by Cyprys. He
believes the abuse ruined his childhood. It was known in the playground,
and he was mocked for being gay. He became wild and alienated from his
schooling and his family. By the time of his Bar Mitzvah he had come to
loathe the Chabad way of life. “I was lost,” he told the commission, “in
the only world I knew.”
The police were called. Cyprys denied everything.
With the pluck so typical of his family, Manny confronted Groner in
the street and told him of his abuse. “The conversation was a brief
one,” he told the royal commission. “It seemed clear to me that Rabbi
Groner was aware of the circumstances so there was very little I had to
say. He said that Yeshivah was dealing with Cyprys and that I should not
do anything of my own accord.”
Having finished his military service in Israel, Manny brought his
wife home with him to Melbourne in 2000. They lived apart from the
Chabad community but visits to his parents’ house for Sabbath took him
past the Yeshivah centre, where it infuriated him to see Cyprys still on
duty as a security officer
.
“I recall many occasions when our eyes met while I was walking past,”
he told the commission. “He seemed to deliberately smirk at me. Often
he fixed his eyes on me and continued to smirk until I was forced to
look away. To me his facial expression said: ‘We both know what I did,
and I got away with it.’ ”
Once again, the young man confronted Groner. “How can you have this
person here providing him access to children when you know what you
know?” he asked the rabbi. In his evidence to the commission, Waks
recalled Groner pleading with him not to pursue the matter.
“He said that he was taking care of it; Cyprys was getting
professional help and, according to these professionals, was making
improvements. My final question to Rabbi Groner was: ‘Can you assure me
that Cyprys is not currently reoffending or that he will not reoffend in
the future?’ To which Rabbi Groner responded: ‘No’. At this point I
said I had to go, and I left.”
How many complaints Groner received about Cyprys will never be known.
The last the commission examined was particularly heartbreaking. It
came from the mother who first complained to the rabbi in 1986. Her son,
now 30, had just told her his abuse continued for years after her
meeting with Groner.
“You promised me you would take care of the matter and you didn’t and
my son is suicidal,” she told the rabbi on the phone in 2002. According
to the evidence she gave at the royal commission, Groner asked if her
son was planning to go police. “I said: ‘Probably.’ And Rabbi Groner
then said: ‘Well, what do you need me for?’ And I think we both hung up.
I don’t recall who hung up first.”
Her son did go to the police, but his allegations were vague. He was
coming down from years of heavy marijuana use and was, by his own
account, all over the shop. The police case against Cyprys wasn’t closed
but by 2003 it seemed to be getting nowhere.
That was the year Yeshivah says it cut its formal links with Cyprys.
His security licence would say he was still employed there for many
years, but Yeshivah says his services were terminated in 2003, not
because of allegations of abuse, but late bills, illegible invoices and
high prices. He was not shunned in the Orthodox community. On the
contrary: he remained on the board of the Elwood synagogue and in 2006
became a director of the Council of Orthodox Synagogues of Victoria.
Groner was, by this time, very old but his immense authority in the
Chabad community was unchallenged. He had determined that his successor
would be his son-in-law, Zvi Telsner. When Groner died in 2008, honoured
in the secular and religious press, Telsner inherited the post of chief
rabbi.
He could not be sacked or directed or disciplined. He was in charge
because Groner had put him there. His authority depended on the
continued and unquestioned dedication of the sect to the memory of a man
whose achievement would be questioned over the following years in the
most mortifying way.
Not that Telsner, even today, has any doubts about the fundamental
goodness of Rabbi Yitzchok Groner. “His sensitivity to every child was
something which cannot be described,” he told the royal commission. “His
whole life was taking care of children. Anyone who could think that he
would want to harm any child in my estimation would be not only
erroneous but just not acceptable, totally.”
A loathing for the exposure a police investigation might bring
With David Kramer due to be released from his St Louis prison in
2012, someone in Melbourne kept reminding the police about Yeshivah’s
role in spiriting this paedophile out of the country years before.
For the first time, Victorian police began investigating Kramer and
turned to Yeshivah for help. The school provided police with names and
addresses of students at the school in Kramer’s time, and in the middle
of June 2011, Telsner put a brief notice up on the wall of the synagogue
urging parents to co-operate with the investigation.
The Chabad community was in an uncomfortable position. Only months
before, the Orthodox rabbis of Victoria had made it clear that the old
prohibition of mesirah did not apply to child abuse. Jews were
not only free to take allegations of abuse to the police but the
Rabbinical Council of Victoria declared that as a matter of Jewish law
it was “obligatory to make such reports”.
Events would prove the Chabad community deeply divided over this
fresh development. Some simply could not accept the right of the secular
world to interfere in the affairs of the community. Others saw it was
impossible to keep the police out but had little appetite for helping
them. Widely felt in this private world was a loathing for the public
exposure that investigation might bring.
For a time it was not known in the community that one of their own
was helping the police. AVB finished his schooling in St Kilda, but had
grown up in the sister Yeshivah community in Bondi. There as a boy in
the 1980s he was abused by Daniel “Gug” Hayman, a major donor to that
community. But AVB had also been abused by a youth leader who brought a
party of Yeshivah students up from Melbourne, David Cyprys.
Daniel Hayman leaves court in Sydney in June 2014 after pleading guilty to indecent assault.Photograph: AAP
AVB was puzzled by the list of students Yeshivah had given the
police. “My name and address, my brothers’ names and addresses, and the
names and addresses of many of my friends and classmates was not on it.”
So he emailed his contacts within the Melbourne Chabad community,
urging them to encourage and support victims who might be willing to
speak to the police.
“Many in the community have been aware of these allegations for an
extended period of time,” he wrote. “As parents and community members,
we have a duty to confront sexual abuse in our community. Only this way,
can we ensure that it never happens again.” He ended: “Ongoing silence
is NOT an option.”
Retribution was swift. The day after the email went out, Telsner
delivered a fiery sermon reminding his congregation of the false spies
who condemned the people of Israel to wander 40 years in the wilderness.
AVB was not there. He soon heard about it. He assumed, and many in the
community assumed, that Telsner was attacking him.
A few days later, Manny Waks was shocked to read in the Age a story
that began: “Police are trying to breach a wall of secrecy at a private
boys school in St Kilda East over allegations of sex crimes by a former
teacher who is now in jail in the United States.”
The paper’s education editor, Jewel Topsfield, wrote of a community
afraid to speak. One former student told her: “If you are labelled an
informer it gives the family a bad name and makes it hard for children
to get married … the issue is not just about the sexual abuse
investigation, it is about the culture that enables it.”
Waks had his life back under control. At the age of 35 he was
married, working in Canberra and a vice-president of the Executive
Council of Australian Jewry. He rang Topsfield. He knew this could be
very difficult for his family. But he felt he had no choice but to take a
leadership role in bringing this impasse to an end. He detailed
Groner’s failures to act. He identified himself as a victim.
This blew the lid off the story and Chabad’s response was everything
Waks feared. Zephaniah was attacked in the street. He and his father
were denounced around the world in blogs and on Facebook. The terrible
accusation moser – betrayer – was levelled against them.
Documents that emerged at the royal commission suggest the accusation
was also being made in email exchanges between rabbis and at meetings of
the Yeshivah centre’s committee of management.
Zephaniah begged the Chabad leadership for help. He supported his
son. He wanted a statement from them that neither Manny nor his family
was to be blamed for him going public. “I am sick of being smeared,
along with my family,” he wrote. “I attribute a lot of the problem to
Yeshivah’s inaction, or worse, in this matter.”
No protection was offered.
Zephaniah sat in the synagogue as Telsner delivered another slashing
sermon. “Who gave you permission to talk to anyone, which rabbi gave you
permission?” Telsner asked. It was a week after Manny’s revelations in
the Age. Victims must go to the police, said the rabbi, but the
congregation must cease spreading loshen horah – false rumours – that
Yeshivah and his father-in-law had failed to act. Accusations, he said,
should first be brought to him, the rabbi.
Telsner named no names, but Zephaniah Waks had no doubt the rabbi was
attacking his son. He and his wife, supported by a few friends, walked
out of the synagogue. He then made notes of what he had just heard
Telsner preaching: “The rabbis have the power to excommunicate people
when they disobey the rabbis … the worst sin is besmirching the name of
Rabbi Groner.” And: “In the last few weeks, people have argued about who
I meant in my sermons. Now I am saying clearly: if you think it refers
to you, it does. Don’t think it means someone else ... “
Telsner would admit in the witness box of the royal commission that
he delivered this sermon at a time when many members of the Chabad
community were reluctant to talk to the police. He would deny mentioning
his father-in-law. He denied using the word excommunication. Above all,
he denied his sermon was a personal attack on Manny Waks.
Honours previously shown to Zephaniah in the synagogue were
withdrawn. He and the rabbi would sit there side by side for years, but
Telsner never said anything that might reassure Waks that he and his
family were not the target of that attack. “We had a very, shall we say,
cool relationship,” the rabbi told the royal commission. “Therefore I
didn’t think that actually speaking to him would clear up matters.”
As the shunning intensified, AVB and the Waks father and son made
futile appeals to a number of Jewish organisations for support. Years
later, senior Orthodox rabbis would say what AVB and Manny Waks had done
was correct, even admirable. But at the time, none spoke out on their
behalf. There was no one to condemn loshen horah when the targets were
victims of abuse who had defied Chabad’s old code of silence.
The grip of that code still seemed strong in Sydney, where the Bondi
Yeshivah was grappling with its parallel scandal: the failure to act on
old allegations about the activities of Gug Hayman and a rabbinical
student known at the commission as AVL.
One of Hayman’s many friends was the Sydney rabbi Yosef Feldman, son
of Pinchus, the chief rabbi at Bondi, and Pnina, sister of both the
legendary diamond explorer Joe Gutnick and one of the heroes of this
story, Rabbi Moshe Gutnick.
Rabbi Yosef Feldman: ‘This was very wrong of me.’
Yosef emailed colleagues: “I really don’t understand why as soon as something of serious loshen horah is heard about someone of even child molestation should we immediately go to the secular authorities.”
When those emails were leaked to the Australian Jewish News, Feldman
issued a statement that he did, indeed, support the official ruling that
abuse must be reported to the police, and then stepped down as
president of the Rabbinical Council of New South Wales.
He was furious with the paper. After meeting executives of the Jewish
News, Feldman emailed a number of fellow rabbis to explain why the
public attention being given to the troubles in Chabad caused him such
disquiet: “I felt that the hype has been causing phoney attention
seekers to come forward like Manny Waks and this should be stopped.”
Drowning in the witness box as he tried to explain that email,
Feldman assured the commissioners he didn’t doubt Waks had been abused.
“Phoney didn’t mean he’s not a genuine article.” The thing was, he
hadn’t been raped. Before he left the box, the rabbi said: “This was very wrong of me.”
‘There is a tradition ... that you do not assist against Abraham’
Cyprys was charged a mere seven weeks after Waks went to the Age. He
faced 16 counts of indecent assault and 13 counts of gross indecency
involving 12 victims. At his bail hearing, Detective Senior Constable
Lisa Metcher spoke of lies and cover-ups. She accused “high-standing
members of the Jewish community” of protecting the accused paedophile.
Police feared Cyprys’s supporters would help him flee the country.
AVB was there in court. He was seen talking to the police. The
attacks on him in Chabad blogs redoubled. He was accused of lying, of
inventing his abuse, of welcoming his abuse, of setting out to destroy
the Yeshivah community. There were calls for his wife to be burnt as a
witch.
“I was gut wrenched,” he told the royal commission. His boss was
told. He feared losing his job. He heard that Cyprys’s lawyer at the
bail hearing, Alex Lewenberg, was complaining about the help he was
giving police. AVB rang the man and an authorised recording was made of a
conversation in which Lewenberg accused AVB of being a moser.
“I am not exactly delighted,” said the lawyer, “that another Yid
would assist police against an accused no matter whatever he is accused
of. That is the reason why I was very disappointed, because there is a
tradition, if not a religious requirement, that you do not assist
against Abraham.”
The charge list against Cyprys kept growing. He was eventually
committed for trial on 41 charges – including rape – committed between
1982 and 1991. The magistrate took the opportunity to say the claim by
the school’s headmaster, Rabbi Glick, that he had not known sexual abuse
was occurring in his school in the 1980s was “unfathomable”.
Cyprys compelled his victims to give evidence of their rapes before a
jury. He was found guilty of rape and subsequently pleaded guilty to 12
further charges and was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. Manny
Waks was granted permission by the court to identify himself as a
victim.
The Australian Jewish News carried a full page ad demanding Glick be
stood down by Yeshivah. It didn’t happen. On advice from senior counsel,
Yeshivah issued a very carefully worded apology: “We understand and
appreciate that there are victims who feel aggrieved and we sincerely
and unreservedly apologise for any historical wrongs that may have
occurred.”
That’s as far as they were willing to go at that point: “May have occurred …”
Kramer was extradited from the US and pleaded guilty in July 2013 to
molesting four boys at Yeshivah back in the early 1990s. He was
sentenced to 18 months in prison. His own lawyer accused the school of
covering up these crimes and helping his client flee the country.
Yeshivah issued an unreserved apology “for not informing the police at
the time the allegations arose”.
The parents of one of Kramer’s American victims alerted to Kramer’s
fate by the Melbourne Herald Sun, were not impressed. They told the
paper: “We arrive at the inescapable conclusion that the blood of our
child . . . rests upon the head of those complicit in Kramer’s escape
from justice.
“We call upon the Yeshivah centre to do the right thing: not by
offering hollow, meaningless platitudes of ‘we’re sorry’, but to take
concrete action by releasing from its employ all who were responsible
for Kramer’s escape from justice.”
Telsner remains the spiritual leader
The witness stand of a royal commission is a cruel place for men of
any faith. Cardinals and preachers are not used to being held to
account. In their world, facts don’t necessarily matter. Belief is
everything. Up against the law, compelled to answer, they find
themselves trapped in daylight.
Over 10 long days of hearings in Melbourne, rabbi after rabbi
apologised for the failings of the Chabad-Lubavitcher communities of St
Kilda and Bondi. Some did so bluntly. Some only when they were cornered
by tough questioning. Only Rabbi Moshe Gutnick seized the opportunity
with gusto.
“I and many of my so-called ultra-Orthodox friends and colleagues
share the outrage as to what has gone on here,” he told the
commissioners. “I believe that the true tenets of Chabad, Judaism and
Orthodoxy require that I and all Jews stand proudly shoulder to shoulder
with, and in absolute full support of, the victims.”
He called those who went to the police heroes. Demands that dealing
with child abuse should be left to rabbis he rejected as “a gross misuse
of rabbinical power”. He condemned mesirah as a mechanism for maintaining control. “You threaten people with mesirah and they become intimidated and they stay underfoot.”
When he left the box, he embraced Manny Waks.
Rabbi Meir Shlomo Kluwgant made smooth headway in the witness stand
until almost the end. The most senior rabbi in Australia said all the
right things. His downfall came when he was read a message he had sent
while watching online as Zephaniah Waks gave evidence a few days
earlier.
“Zephaniah is killing us,” he messaged the editor of the Australian
Jewish News. “Zephaniah is attacking Chabad. He is a lunatic on the
fringe, guilty of neglect of his own children. Where was he when all
this was happening?”
Pnina FeldmanPhotograph: AAP
Kluwgant resigned three days later as president of the Organisation
of Rabbis of Australasia. He is also no longer chaplain to the Victorian
police.
Gutnick’s nephew, Yosef Feldman, made such a hash of his appearance
in the witness box that he lost yet another post. At one point he said
he didn’t “have a clue” if an adult touching a child’s genitals might be
a crime. His attempts to square the old prerogatives of the rabbis with
modern demands for reporting to police were condemned by the Executive
Council of Australian Jewry as repugnant. He resigned next day as a
director of Yeshivah Sydney.
Feldman’s mother, Pnina, emailed Manny Waks last October: “Why do you
keep highlighting Yeshiva?! … You need counselling! I haven’t met a
person yet with one nice word to say about you. Most people consider you
a lowlife – not because of any molestation, which wasn’t your fault,
but because of your malicious blame game, which is unjust, unwarranted,
undeserved and wicked.” She was not called to the commission to give
evidence.
This week, Rabbi Glick resigned from his positions at Yeshivah
College. He told the Age he felt the victims would want him to break all
his links with his old school. “That’s where the abuse took place and
it was under my leadership. I haven’t taken this lightly.”
But Zvi Telsner is still the spiritual leader of Melbourne’s Chabad
community in St Kilda despite calls from many quarters in the Jewish
community that he resign. To the end, he manfully claimed those famous
sermons were not attacks on AVB and Manny Waks. It was all a
misapprehension. Yes, he could have corrected that any time in the past
three years in a heartbeat. No, he didn’t. For that failure and for any
pain it caused, he wished to apologise.
Counsel for the Waks family, Melinda Richards, finished her withering
examination of Telsner with a long question: “Rabbi, if the evidence of
Zephaniah Waks and AVB is accepted in relation to the shunning, even if
you didn’t do the shunning but you stood by whilst it was occurring, do
you accept that you were complicit in the process of shunning that was
undertaken by other members of your community?” Telsner replied: “I do.”
AVB remains, despite everything, a member of Telsner’s St Kilda community. He holds to his faith. He will not be budged.
Alex Lewenberg is practising law in Melbourne. The legal services
commissioner, Michael McGarvie, will not comment on any disciplinary
proceedings a lawyer may or may not be facing. He told Guardian
Australia: “It is impermissible for lawyers to intimidate witnesses.
That goes to the heart of the justice system and the role a lawyer plays
as an officer of the court.”
Zephaniah Waks has broken with Chabad, trimmed his beard and put the
St Kilda family home on the market. But how many Melbourne families need
a house with 13 bedrooms and six kitchens? The target market is
Yeshivah, directly over the road. They aren’t buying. Zephaniah and his
wife are dividing their time between Israel and Australia, living
outside the sect that was their shelter, their world for most of their
lives.
Once the hearings were done, Manny Waks flew to his new home in
France. “If it was up to my wife,” he told the commissioners as he
fought his tears, “we would have left a long time ago.” Before he flew
out he met, at their invitation, five of Rabbi Groner’s children who
wished to apologise to him for the abuse and the cover-ups in their
father’s time at Yeshivah.
That last meeting capped a fortnight of remarkable victories that
have left Waks feeling profoundly vindicated. But he does not believe
the saga is over. He is calling for the complete renewal of the
leadership of Yeshivah in St Kilda and Bondi – starting with Telsner:
“For the pain and suffering he has caused to so many people over the
years he must resign. He has brought the entire Jewish community into
disrepute.”
And Waks is still waiting for an apology from the peak Jewish bodies
which did not stand up for him and the other victims. “They must
apologise not just for the abuse, not just for the cover-ups. They left
us out to dry.”
I call it my story, but it is not really my story to tell. But it has become a part of me, it is part of my life; in fact it is taking over my life.
My husband was raped.
I can say it over and over again. Yet each time it almost doesn’t even sink in.
Thirteen years ago, when my husband was 14 years old, he was raped. He was a young Chassidish boy, who came from a family that never quite fit in however hard they tried. His parents divorced when he was 2, and he suffered for years as a result of that. At the age of 9, a judge made him decide. Mommy or daddy? Yes I repeat, mommy or daddy, “who do you want to live with?” the judge sweetly asked him.
My husband chose daddy, because mommy was no longer frum, stable, nor lived in the community, and daddy said he could still see mommy and he would let her come and visit. Mommy promised she would. But she never did.
After those events, it is safe to say that my husband was emotionally scarred for life. His behaviour or lack of, and education suffered tremendously. His lack of cooperation and willingness to be a part of his new family, with daddy, Ima and his half brothers and sisters tore the family apart. And at the grand age of 12 years old, it was decided that my husband would leave school and officially, he would be home-schooled, but primarily he would get a job to keep busy.
A young and innocent Chasidish boy, with his bekesher and long payos, and who davened in the local Chasidish shtieble each week, was about to embark on a journey that would not let him return.
I recently watched his Bar Mitzvah video and I had to hold back the tears. He gave a beautiful Dvar Torah and thanked all those that needed the relevant Hakoras Hatov. Only watching it in hindsight, it was just so apparent to see the innocence that was about to be ripped away from him in the coming years.
And so it came to be.
He was 14, he had a job in a local shop and got rather close with the owner. Until one day he got a little too friendly and raped him.
I would say I have spared you the details, but in all honesty, I have been spared the details so I am unable to relay them to you. I am not sure whether I am lucky, or whether that means I will never truly understand what my husband went through.
My husband knew something was wrong. Something bad had happened. Being the technological savvy teenager he was, he managed to actually obtain the cd of the CCTV camera that had recorded them.
He decided he would go to speak to their Rabbi about what had happened. Surely his saintly chassidish Rabbi, who everyone in the community flocked to for advice, would be able to help him.
And so there he found himself, seated in his Rabbi’s house, telling him his story. From beginning to end.
Once he had said his piece, he looked up at his Rabbi, with his tear stained face and asked him “what shall I do? What shall you do?” and brace yourself for this response: “You won’t do anything, you must not tell anyone about this or about this conversation, don’t tell your father, don’t tell your friends, or everyone will know what a bad person and boy you are, you will be shamed, you will be nothing. Now go and never speak of this again to anyone.”
And so he went.
Years past. And there were lots of changes.
Yiddishkeit, Torah, Mitzvos, they soon became memories of the past. And his father, well he surely must have been evil, if he knew about such things happening to boys and then not being allowed to speak about it.
After the numerous meetings daddy had with the Rabbi, surely the Rabbi must have told him why he suspected that daddy’s son had tried to commit suicide a few times, and why he did not want to be Frum anymore.
Relationships broke apart, a father and son, Hashem and his child.
Being involved in the youth program for the ‘off the derech’ teens is where things all started to change. They did not force Frumkeit, they just helped to educate and facilitate. It was there that new strong bonds were created, and my husband got to learn about evil things that people normally get sent to jail for. He spoke about what happened, got therapy, and was offered someone to accompany him in all his meetings with police and lawyers. But for my husband, it was not something that he wanted to do.
He did not blame the man that raped him. He blamed the Rabbi for covering it up.
When I met my husband at some point in our relationship prior to marriage, I was told about all of this. He confided in me, and I promised to keep his secret and support him no matter what.
The glass was smashed, Siman Tov uMazel Tov was sung, and Sheva Brochos were over. Now it was time for real life to begin.
We found our happy medium in Judaism. We kept some Chasidish traditions, but on the outside, we look like your standard Orthodox Jews.
As every young couple starts their new marriage, one of the most exciting aspects is the physical side, the intimacy. In our relationship, we had it before we were married, although we had firmly kept to our self-made rule of anything but sex before marriage.
I first realised something was wrong when I would cry myself to sleep at night, feeling so rejected when my husband once again told me “I’m not in the mood tonight, I just want to cuddle.”
We had sex, but it was not as often as I would have liked or wanted. But after countless arguments, we just came to the conclusion that we were different from each other and we had different sex drives. And the good outweighed the bad, so we tried not to make it a big deal out of it.
After all who wouldn’t want a husband that loved to cuddle? To him, sex did not equal love.
We had our first child almost two years after marriage. We were so happy.
But that was when the flashbacks started for my husband. Every time he looked at our daughter, all he could feel was fear, and images of what had happened played in his mind over and over again. All he saw were images of himself being raped. He feared for our daughter’s safety, and he fell into a deep depression.
I begged him to go to therapy. “Please go”, I would say over and over again. But it was and still is too painful and it had never helped him in the past.
He did not want to talk. He wanted to forget.
Up until six months ago, we were at breaking point. We spoke to our Rav, who really helped and guided us, and I got myself into therapy, which taught me how to understand the abuse my husband had endured and how to be there for him and cope with the repercussions it had had on him.
And then it happened.
Our community exploded.
Headlines read as follows: “Hariedi Rabbi Exposed in Rape Sex Scandal”, “Prominent Marriage Counsellor Inappropriate with Married Women.” The list can go on and on. And then the big one: “Rabbi Resigns from All Positions”
During the course of these past few months, we have watched the biggest cover-up in our community unfurl. Finally, this Rabbi is being exposed for the heinous crimes he has committed. Not only did he cover up for rapists and pedophiles, but he was a molester himself.
But as always, there will always be the poor misguided souls that will follow their leader to whichever depths of the lowest places they will go. There were those that fought back, and the fights are still taking place. It is far from over.
But finally, my husband is beginning to heal.
Justice has started to take place.
More victims are speaking out.
More abusers are being named and shamed.
The only hard part to deal with is the somewhat like ‘Stockholm syndrome’ that my husband continues to suffer from. For those that are not familiar with the term, it is when a bond is made between captor and captive, or in this case, abuser and victim.
I would not say my husband empathises with or understands the man that raped him. But to this day, he is not willing to press charges against him or speak to the police. Therefore, there is a pedophile roaming the streets of our community and has gotten away scot free.
And that is the hardest part for me. I need this man to be punished. I feel like he has ruined my husband’s life and my own.
I do not think that my husband realises what our sex life could be like if he had not been raped, or maybe he does realize but he does not want to dwell on it, because the harsh reality is that the lack of sex, has led to the lack of a pregnancy. We have been desperate for a second child for over a year; but until now, we have not been able to make that happen because of the lack of intercourse.
I stand by my husband and I am patient for him because I love him. I love him unconditionally, partly because I know he is my soul mate and partly, I make the extra effort because I know he has no one else in the world that can love him unconditionally.
He will never be able to forgive his father for exposing him to the Rabbi that covered this up. And he will never forgive him for not realising that there was something severely wrong with his son all these years.
I urge all victims of abuse to speak out.
This story started thirteen years ago, and the end has only just begun for us now.
I have given you a glimpse into my world, the world of a wife of a victim of abuse.
I have learnt not to cry myself to sleep at night because my husband does not desire me; but instead, I hold him tight and I keep him close and try to protect him from the world that has caused him so much pain.
All I can do is try to understand and encourage people to speak out. Staying silent is easy, but bottling it up is the hardest thing to do. Whatever a victim does will be painful, and we need to show them support no matter what.
I wish I could end my story with a happy ending, but unfortunately I cannot. Right now, there is no happy ending. My happy ending will be when we live in a community where we do not allow any Rabbis to cover up crimes of abuse of any kind, and when all victims of abuse feel safe enough to speak up.
Please, I urge you, if you know someone who has suffered at the hands of any abuser, be it emotional, physical, mental or sexual abuse, help them to speak up and act now.
Prosecutors may move forward with dozens more counts of voyeurism
By Suzanne Pollak
Senior Writer
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Embattled Georgetown Rabbi Barry Freundel appears at his most recent court hearing; the criminal complaint. Photo by David Stuck
Prosecutors may move forward with dozens more counts of voyeurism against Rabbi Barry Freundel, now that they have identified 152 victims, according to sources who attended a closed-door meeting between the prosecution and victims.
Only 88 of those victims can be included in the criminal case against Freundel, as 64 of the women were videotaped as far back as 2009, placing them outside the statute of limitations, prosecutors from U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia told the women,according to several sources.
Currently, Freundel is charged with six counts of misdemeanor voyeurism. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to one year of incarceration on each count.
According to four women who attended the Feb. 11 meeting, prosecutors said they would prefer to reach a plea deal in the case rather than go to trial, as any trial would inevitably mean the women would be subjected to cross examination by Freundel’s lawyers and would have to identify themselves on footage taken in The National Capital Mikvah.
The charges stem from allegations that the rabbi used cameras to record women at the ritual bath. However, prosecutors stressed that any plea offer conveyed to Freundel would include jail time, the women said.
Most of the 35 women attending the meeting “were really just curious,” said Kate Bailey, who has been informed that she was videotaped by Freundel. (Her case was outside the statute of limitations.) A few of the attendees were angry, others depressed, but most were just there to get answers, she said.
During the meetings, the women were given paper to list any questions they had, their feelings and what their thoughts were on a plea bargain.
If a plea deal cannot be reached in this case, the matter will proceed to trial. Freundel, an Orthodox rabbi, is next due in court for a hearing on Feb. 19. He has pleaded not guilty.
