What we owe the accusers

New York magazine ran an article earlier this month with this sensational headline: “Do the Orthodox Jews have a Catholic-priest problem?”

The “problem,” you probably guessed, is the molestation of minors by members of the clergy. The article was a report on a $20 million federal lawsuit filed against Rabbi Yehuda Kolko, a teacher at a yeshiva in Brooklyn, by former student David Framowitz. Framowitz alleges that the rabbi regularly fondled him for a two-year period beginning in 1969, when Framowitz was 12.

The article offers Framowitz’s shocking accounts of Kolko’s gropings in the teacher’s Plymouth, at the yeshiva, and at a summer camp where Kolko worked as a counselor. And it offers a lawyer’s assertion that “as many as 20 victims” say they were abused by Kolko.

But does it answer the question raised in the headline? That depends. The article asserts that “rabbi-on-child molestation is a widespread problem in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.” Yet the evidence it offers — references to unnamed and unquoted “rabbis, former students, parents, social-service workers, sociologists, psychologists, victims’ rights advocates, and survivors of abuse” — is weak. One of the few such sources named — the author of a book on hasidic “rebels” — says this: “People I’ve interviewed have told me every hasidic kid has heard about this happening to someone.” When an article’s money quote is a second-hand report of a second-hand report, you know the reporter is stretching.

But even if child molestation is no more widespread among the Orthodox than any other religious community, the article does suggest another problem: the inability, and even unwillingness, of Jewish communal institutions to investigate reports of child abuse among their own. Framowitz’s tale takes a by-now-familiar, and depressing, route. Rabbis discounted his accusations as “loshon hara,” or passively or actively discouraged accusers from coming forward. His lawsuit accuses the yeshiva of orchestrating “a campaign of intimidation, concealment, and misrepresentations designed to prevent victims from filing lawsuits.”

This is not just an Orthodox problem. No sooner had Kolko’s story hit the newsstands than reports came out that Bayit Chadash, a spiritual outreach group in Israel, had dismissed its American-born cofounder, Rabbi Mordechai Gafni. Gafni issued a statement saying he was entering into treatment for his “sickness,” while authorities pursued complaints by at least three women who accused him of sexual misconduct.

Although Gafni was educated in Modern Orthodox yeshivas, he seems to have embraced a post-denominational spirituality in recent years. And when rumors about similar conduct arose two years ago, his defenders included rabbis from nearly all the denominations. The New York Jewish Week ran an article at the time confronting Gafni with the accounts of women he allegedly assaulted. Several rabbis issued a statement saying they had “collectively looked at this issue” and found the accusations “totally unconvincing.” Last week the same rabbis told the Forward that they are “deeply regretful of our prior support of Rabbi Gafni."

Gafni is a gifted and charismatic public presence, spinning Torah and Kabala into an intriguing self-help mix that has landed him several book contracts and a PBS special. He had his detractors, among them Rabbi Shlomo Riskin of Efrat, who revoked the ordination of his former student after he felt his theology had gone beyond the Orthodox pale. But many others were awed by his talent — and, it appears, blinded.

And that is where the Jewish community’s problem begins to look like the Catholics’. Not in sheer numbers — there is nothing to suggest that rabbis are abusing kids in the nearly epidemic proportions of the Catholic clergy. But like the church, which conducted its own flimsy and self-serving investigations of abuse over the years, rabbis themselves seem in no position to seriously evaluate and investigate such charges. In the best known cases — including that of Rabbi Baruch Lanner, convicted of sexually abusing two teenage girls at Hillel Yeshiva high school in Ocean Township — accusers have had to run the gauntlet of community leaders who didn’t want to hear about it or exonerated the accused when they did.

The leadership vacuum has been filled, honorably, by journalists like Gary Rosenblatt of the Jewish Week, and dishonorably by a number of Internet crackpots who come off more like attack dogs than watchdogs. The inability of the latter to distinguish between “alleged” and “convicted” and between cases of rape and sexual harassment leaves a trail of slime across cyberspace.

A few brave souls are encouraging all Jewish communities to face up not just to the abusers in their midst, but to the need for a mechanism for investigating accusations.

These advocates include Rabbi Mark Dratch, a former vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America, who now heads JSafe: The Jewish Institute Supporting an Abuse-Free Environment. According to JSafe, “The Jewish community has no single hierarchy or unifying infrastructure that enables it to set standards for training or to hold professionals responsible in these areas. Thus, the response of rabbis, teachers, and counselors to survivors of abuse is only as good as their training and experience in identifying and dealing with these issues. Too often, it’s inadequate.”

JSafe has proposed a nondenominational certification program to train professionals at all Jewish institutions in policies that “prevent abuse, that ensure that survivors are treated supportively and appropriately, and that will make perpetrators accountable for their improprieties.”

The destruction of the Second Temple has become symbolic of all the ways Jewish communities can fail. And one of the classic reasons given for its destruction was the failure of Jewish leaders to speak up when they witnessed an injustice. Jews don’t have a “Catholic-priest problem,” but that doesn’t mean we’re off the hook.

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