In June 2011, shortly after Moshe Keller, a rabbi who ran an
organization for wayward Chabad youth, was charged with molesting a local
teenaged boy, an anonymous blog began to circulate in Crown Heights, the heart
of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. In the blog’s initial post, its
author, who first called the site Crown Heights Watch, later changing the name
to Jewish Community Watch (JCW), claimed that Keller had been “sexually abusing
children since his days in Israel, two decades ago.”
“He believes he can hide behind being a rabbi, since the
Rabbonim (rabbis) of the Jewish communities have a track record of hiding such
matters,” the post continued.
At first, only Keller’s photo was posted, along with a
testimonial from an alleged victim and a call for additional victims to report
abuse to the police.
A month later, two more men, Yaacov Weiss, who pleaded
guilty to child-endangerment charges in 2010, and a never-charged cantor were
added to the blog’s “Wall of Shame.” People began to whisper, speculating about
who could be behind the blog.
The blogger, fearful of retribution, remained
anonymous until the summer of 2012, when he revealed himself to be 23-year-old
Meyer Seewald, a long-haired local with pale blue eyes, a stubborn jaw, and a
dark tan.
Now 24, Seewald claims to have a database containing over
225 suspected sex offenders and a confidential eight-member advisory “board”
made up of mental-health professionals, legal experts, and rabbis who,
according to Seewald, refuse to acknowledge their roles publicly for fear of
backlash. JCW’s Wall of Shame features 36 accused abusers, 21 of them arrested,
according to the site, each added when the “board” has determined there is
sufficient evidence of wrongdoing. Like other Jewish blogs dedicated to
sex-abuse awareness, such as Mark Appell’s Voice of Justice or Vicky Pollin’s
The Awareness Center, JCW aggregates related news and offers referrals for
legal advice or counseling services, but Seewald takes the job a step further.
When a victim who confides in Seewald is unwilling—or unable due to the statute
of limitations—to press charges, Seewald conducts his own investigation,
selectively exposing alleged abusers on his Wall of Shame.
According to Chaim Levin, 24, a Crown Heights blogger and
activist who won $3.5 million judgment against his cousin on June 12, claiming
years of childhood sex abuse, gaining Seewald as an ally was a relief. “The day
I got a call from Seewald asking me about my story was the first time I
believed that our community was actually making some progress in combating
abuse,” said Levin. “I had been talking about what happened to me to anyone who
would listen since I was 14, but everyone told me to keep it to myself and move
on.”
Seewald’s confrontational style is evident in his latest
project, Project E.M.E.S., an acronym for Educating Mosdos (institutions) on
Eradicating Sexual abuse, launched this month, which aims to prevent sex abuse
in religious summer camps.
The project’s accompanying video, titled “A Friendly
Message to Camp Counselors,” warns them: “I don’t care who you are, what family
you come from. If you touch a child, we will find out about it.”
But is Seewald—whose apparent irreverence for the
hierarchies of Jewish institutions sets him apart from other crusaders in the
field—helping or doing more harm than good? Seewald said he hopes the blog’s
Wall of Shame will warn parents and instill fear in local predators, preventing
the victimization of more children. “The only thing molesters are afraid of is
being exposed and caught.
They are more afraid of the Wall of Shame, than going
to jail,” he told me. But the Wall of Shame has also proved to be deeply
problematic; used irresponsibly, it can easily undermine the organization’s
objectives and destroy an innocent person’s life. According to Ben Hirsch,
co-founder of Survivors for Justice, an organization that advocates and
educates on issues of child safety, Seewald is on a dangerous track. “Setting
up a separate registry [from the law enforcement agencies] can be perceived as
condoning a separate justice system,” he told me, “Which, in a way, perpetuates
the message of the rabbis that we can deal with this issue in-house. The
message must instead be that the only way to deal with child sex abuse is to
report it directly to the police, without any prior consultation with a rabbi
or other communal figure.”
***
Seewald was 17 when his friend Benny Keller died in his arms
in the summer of 2006. According to Keller’s close friends, a fistfight several
days prior to their camping trip in the Catskill mountains had caused him to
hemorrhage in his sleep.
At the funeral, Benny’s father spoke. Moved by the
crowd of Chabad youngsters in attendance, Moshe Keller wept and vowed to start
an organization in his son’s name (called Gesher Ben Tzion) to support
“at-risk” teens. When Seewald heard about Rabbi Keller’s arrest five years later, he began question anyone
who had spent time at Keller’s home, and two of his friends told him they had
been violated by Keller.
“I came home in shock, like, this person abused people,”
said Seewald. “I remember telling my siblings, my mom, my brothers, and no one
understood. They just saw the pain in my face.”
On his own, Seewald launched an investigation, tracking
every move Keller made and every person who had come in contact with him in 20
years. One clue led to another, and Seewald said he learned that Keller had
been accused of child sex abuse in Israel and that Crown Heights rabbis had
helped him put the charges behind him.
One of Keller’s alleged victims, who called me from London,
said he emailed Rabbi Shea Hecht, who represents the National Committee for the
Furtherance of Jewish Education, in 2007, following a series of sex-abuse
seminars moderated by the rabbi, but Hecht, concerned for Keller’s family, did
not suggest going to the police.
“[Hecht] was the go-to guy [for sex abuse]; if you couldn’t
trust him to take care of things properly, there was no one else.” said the
victim, now 25, who asked not to be named.
In fact, no charges were brought against Keller until 2011,
when a third victim, Mordechai Feinstein, filed a complaint against him, and in
May 2012, Keller would be sentenced to three years of probation for endangering
the welfare of a child. When Seewald posted Keller’s picture on his blog along
with a call for victims to come forward, he thought he had done his part to end
decades of cover-up.
Three months passed and Seewald noticed an email account
associated with the blog. When he figured out how to access it, he told me he
found hundreds of emails from people who had been affected by sex abuse and he
realized that he had no choice but to keep helping victims find justice.
“It really, really got to me. None of these people had
spoken to anyone about it. No one was doing anything,” Seewald said.
The Keller case was not Seewald’s first encounter with
unchecked sex abuse. As Seewald spoke to victims, he says he came to terms with
his own experience of being molested by a counselor at sleep-away camp. When he
mustered the courage to post his story on his still-anonymous blog, omitting
his alleged perpetrator’s name, he received an email from someone who said he
had an identical experience at the same sleep-away camp.
When Seewald figured
out that they had been molested by the same person, the counselor’s name
appeared on the Wall of Shame. It was then that Seewald no longer wanted to
conceal his identity. “I was Meyer Seewald and I was sharing my personal story
and feelings with other victims. It was an open relationship. They knew who
they were talking to and sharing their deepest pain and secrets with,” he said.
Then Seewald made a major error. In August 2012, a
special-education teacher named Daniel Granovetter wrote a since-deleted
personal account on a Crown Heights news site, titled “I Was Falsely Accused,”
describing how he was arrested after an autistic boy he tutored accused him of
abuse, though the investigation was eventually dropped when the child retracted
his claim. “In people’s eyes I was no longer a Jew, let alone a human being,”
Granovetter wrote in a harrowing account. “I was regarded as a monster, an out-of-control
filthy, dangerous beast capable of snatching little children and sexually
abusing them.”
Granovetter told me Seewald confronted him outside his home
“rather aggressively,” demanding Granovetter confess to molesting the child.
When Granovetter refused, he was featured on the JCW Wall of Shame, which he
said has destroyed his career and social standing.
Shortly after the incident, Seewald removed Granovetter’s
name and picture from the blog, releasing a statement that there was
insufficient evidence against the teacher. Granovetter, who told me over the
phone that forgiveness is his nature, removed his story criticizing JCW from
the news site and replaced it with one praising Seewald’s work, placing blame
on the student who falsely accused him rather than JCW. Seewald admitted to me
that it was a mistake to confront Granovetter when there was a police
investigation under way, but like Granovetter’s reputation, JCW’s credibility
never fully recovered from the debacle.
***
Now Seewald has found himself pitted against an aging group
of sex-abuse-awareness activists in Crown Heights, led by Hecht, who told me he
disagrees with Seewald’s insensitivity toward the families and religious
institutions of the accused. Hecht is prone to talking in parables. “When we
come in with a shotgun and shoot up whole building and only get one guy, we
call that collateral damage,” Hecht told me when I asked him about JCW.
“Seewald doesn’t care about collateral damage.”
Hecht and Seewald have both encountered the limitations of
the legal justice system. Of the victims who press charges, many are beyond the
statute of limitations. Furthermore, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office
has a record of granting Orthodox abusers generous plea deals, resulting in
many confessed abusers still living, unregistered, among their victims.
Ironically, Hecht’s endorsement might be just what Seewald
needs to win over the religious establishment. Of the 14 Chabad-Lubavitch camps
in the United States, only two have agreed to meet the project’s guidelines.
Rabbi Moshe Shemtov, who runs Camp Gan Israel in Detroit, said that he takes
sex abuse seriously, but he said he declined to share his staff list with
Seewald, because JCW lacked the official backing of any Chabad institutions,
such as Hecht’s, behind the E.M.E.S. campaign.
“Supposedly, he has a list of offenders that no one knows
about,” Shemtov said. “He doesn’t have any official credibility with anyone I
know.” Sex abuse, he said, “is too sensitive to ignore, but it’s also too
sensitive for someone to grab and twist any way they want.”
As Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox communities grapple with sex
abuse, Hecht, who made a name for himself in the 1980s as a “Jewish cult
buster,” says leaders in Crown Heights have been taking proactive measures to
combat sexual abuse for 30 years, involving the police when they deem it
appropriate. Hecht maintains, as opposed to secular civil officials such as the
NYPD, that rabbis should be granted the discretion to determine whether victims
are lying. “The last time I remembered, I was ordained as a rabbi,” said Hecht.
“If the person [victim] came to me, I have at least the responsibility to
decide if it’s true or not true, because they want guidance.”
Not all Crown Heights leaders agree with Hecht. Prompted by
the Keller case, in July 2011, two out of three members of the Crown Heights
Rabbinical Court signed a letter asserting a ruling that the laws of mesira,
the halachic prohibition against reporting Jews to secular authorities, do not
apply to cases of sex abuse. The abuser, they wrote, is like a rodef, a
murderer, in which case, a religious leader “is forbidden to remain silent.”
The third and senior member of the Beit Din, Rabbi Avrohom Osdoba, abstained
from signing the letter, highlighting a schism in Chabad.
In some ways, Seewald’s efforts to spread awareness have
trickled down to Chabad institutions. For example, in the winter of 2012-2013,
all yeshivas and elementary schools in Crown Heights implemented an educational
initiative informing children about appropriate touch.
By Rachel Silberstein
Read more at:Tabletmag
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