Pearl Engelman, 64-year old great-grandmother told the NYTimes of her ordeal when her son Joel told rabbinical authorities of being repeatedly groped by a school official at the United Talmudical Academy in Williamsburg. The school denied the accusation, removed the official, and then brought him back to grope others, as soon as Joel turned 23 and barred from filing charges under the state’s statutes of limitations. Engelman said, “Our community protects molesters. Other than that, we are wonderful.”
“Try living for one day with all the pain I am living with,” says Mordechai Jungreis who was kicked out of his tenancy, threatened and cursed by neighbors for turning in a fellow Jew and pressurized by Rabbis to drop the cases he filed against a fellow Jew. The accused, a supposed favorite of the Rabbis, was found molesting Jungreis’s mentally disabled teenage son. When Jungreis protested the entire community turned against him. A mother who had her child in a wheelchair proudly confronted Jungreis’s mother-in-law and said her son too was molested by the same man, but she did not turn him in, because that was the right thing to do.
Got your head in the right place?
Abuse victims and their families are systematically expelled from their schools and synagogues and shunned by fellow ultra-Orthodox Jews. They are targeted, harassed, and their businesses destroyed.
In a case that happened in August 2009, Justice Guston L. Reichbach of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn was dumbfounded to find that the entire community including school principals and rabbis had turned out in support of Yona Weinberg, accused of molesting two boys under the age of 14. The boys had been thrown out of their schools because they had complained.
The judge mentioned that it was evident that there was a “communal attitude that seeks to blame, indeed punish victims.” Astoundingly, he noted, out of the 90 letters he received from community leaders of the ultra-Orthodox Jews, not one displayed “any concern or any sympathy or even any acknowledgement for these young victims, which, frankly, I find shameful.”
Child molesters are Rodef and should be reported directly to the police, not the local rabbi. This is loshon hara letoeles.
This has been the psak from some Hasidic and other orthodox rabbis.
Other rabbis, including the vice president of Agudath Israel have ruled exactly the opposite.
Unfortunately I have noticed a trend where this group that includes very learned rabbis rule in such a way sometimes,to me, seem like deciding to state the world is flat.(due perhaps to unstated
motivations and or concerns)
Other examples would be to rule that habitual cigarette smokers do not violate the Torah, and inviting a convicted swindler, and debarred lawyer with absolutely no medical or psychological liscence to prove that “reparative therapy” works.
These Ultra-Orthodox Jews have abandoned Torah for the protection of their own community. If this isn’t absolutely wrong under the Jewish canon, what kind of people are we? Torah says that the widow and the orphan must be protected, the poor given a way to get food without the humiliation of asking for help. Torah is humanistic because we have been made in the image of Hashem. The abused are victims. By shunning these victims who seek justice, these Ultra-Orthodox Jews violate Torah because they believe that the survival of their community is more important than justice. This is a warping of everything Judaism stands for.