[Vision2020] Not Only Catholics

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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July 22, 2013
The Faithful’s Failings By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html>

The men were spiritual leaders, held up before the children around them as
wise and righteous and right. So they had special access to those kids.
Special sway.

And when they exploited it by sexually abusing the children, according to
civil and criminal cases from different places and periods, they were
protected by their lofty stations and by the caretakers of their faith. The
children’s accusations were met with skepticism. The community of the
faithful either couldn’t believe what had happened or didn’t want it
exposed to public view: why give outsiders a fresh cause to be critical? So
the unpleasantness was hushed up.

This is not a column about the Catholic Church.

This is a column about Orthodox Jews, who have recently had similar
misdeeds exposed, similar cover-ups revealed.

And I’m writing it, yes, because the Catholic Church over the last two
decades has absorbed the bulk of journalistic attention, my own included,
in terms of child sexual abuse. There are compelling reasons that’s been
so: Catholicism has more than one billion nominal adherents worldwide;
endows its clerics with a degree of mysticism that many other denominations
don’t; and is just centralized enough for scattered cover-ups to coalesce
into something more like a conspiracy. The pattern of criminality and
evasion has been staggering.

But some of the same dynamics that fed the crisis in Catholicism — an aloof
patriarchy, an insularity verging on superiority, a disinclination to get
secular officials involved — exist elsewhere. And the way they’ve played
out in Orthodox Judaism illustrates anew that religion isn’t always the
higher ground and safer harbor it purports to be. It can also be a
self-preserving haven for wrongdoing.

Early this month, 19 former students of the Yeshiva University High School
for Boys in Manhattan filed a lawsuit alleging sexual
abuse<http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/yeshiva-university-high-school-students-file-380-million-sex-abuse-lawsuit-article-1.1393327>by
two rabbis in the 1970s and 1980s who continued to work there even
after
molestation complaints. The rabbis were also allowed to move on to new
employment without ever being held accountable. School administrators, the
lawsuit alleges, elected not to report anything to the police.

Rabbi Norman Lamm, the president of Yeshiva at the time, admitted as much
in an interview with The Jewish Daily Forward. He said that when accusations
against a faculty
member<http://forward.com/articles/167588/student-claims-of-abuse-not-reported-by-yeshiva-u/?p=all>were
“an open-and-shut case,” he’d let the accused person “go quietly.”

Back then there was less alarm about, and understanding of, child
molestation, he said. Back then he was also steering Yeshiva through grave
financial hardship. A sex-abuse scandal wouldn’t have been a great
fund-raising tool.

“The school made the conscious and craven decision to protect its
reputation,” Kevin Mulhearn, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, told
me Monday.

Is such a defensive mind-set really a relic of a less enlightened past?
Earlier this year a prominent scholar at Yeshiva University, Rabbi Hershel
Schachter, was caught on audiotape at a conference in London telling
Orthodox leaders that Jewish communities should set up their own review
boards to evaluate any complaints of child sexual abuse and determine
whether to bother with the police. This contradicts state laws on mandatory
reporting for teachers, counselors, physicians and such.

Schachter further discouraged police involvement by warning that accused
abusers could wind
up<http://forward.com/articles/172957/yeshiva-rabbi-bluntly-warns-sex-abuse-reports-put/?p=all>“in
a cell together with a
*shvartze*, in a cell with a Muslim, a black Muslim who wants to kill all
the Jews.” *Shvartze* is a harshly derogatory racial term. Yeshiva
University condemned the remarks but seemingly didn’t discipline Schachter,
who didn’t respond to my request Monday for comment. Neither did Rabbi
Lamm.

Rabbi Schachter’s aversion to law enforcement isn’t isolated. The
ultra-Orthodox group Agudath Israel of America has taken the position that
observant Jews should get a green light from a rabbi before notifying
police about suspected molestation. It’s precisely this sort of internal
policing that the Catholic Church did so disastrously, leaving abusers
unpunished and children in harm’s way.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews in particular have prioritized their image and
independence over justice. They have shunned
Jews<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/nyregion/ultra-orthodox-jews-shun-their-own-for-reporting-child-sexual-abuse.html?pagewanted=all>who
took accusations outside their communities; in fact, Charles Hynes,
the
Brooklyn district attorney, has cited that as a reason for minimizing
publicity around child sexual abuse cases among Orthodox Jews. But over the
weekend he changed
tacks<http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/da_outs_orthodox_sex_pervs_SwrevAJ2VuBlvP8Qm6aa7I>and
gave The New York Post the names of some 40 convicted people.

Community intimidation is why 17 of the 19 plaintiffs in the Yeshiva case
are identified only as John Doe, said Mulhearn, their lawyer, who mentioned
another insidious wrinkle reminiscent of Catholic cases.

One of the abusers, he said, used religion itself to muffle a few abused
boys. The rabbi allegedly invoked the Holocaust, which their parents had
survived, telling the boys not to cause mom or dad any more suffering with
a public stink.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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