Deborah Feldman Claim Of Murder Cover Up In Kiryas Joel

Deborah Feldman X Satmar Hasid

Coroner’s report lists 20-year-old’s death in Kiryas Joel as suicide.

With allegations of communal cover-ups involving child sexual abuse dogging the haredi community over the past several years, it may not be much of a stretch for some readers to believe a gruesome story that appears in a new memoir about growing up in, and leaving, the Satmar community.

The story, recounted by Deborah Feldman in “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots” (Simon and Schuster), involves the alleged mutilation and murder of a boy by his own father — supposedly for masturbating — and the subsequent cover-up of the crime by Hatzolah, the community’s volunteer ambulance service.

The only problem, however, is that based on information obtained by The Jewish Week, the story seems not be true.

Feldman claims she first learned of the grisly crime from her husband who had, in turn, heard about it from his brother, allegedly a member of Hatzolah at the time, who had been called to the blood-soaked scene. Apparently, the boy’s “penis was cut off with a jig saw and his throat was slit too,” Feldman writes.

Feldman recounts that her husband told her his brother “said the neighbors told him they heard loud arguing coming from the house. When he called the [volunteer ambulance] dispatch, they told him to go home and keep quiet about it, that they would take care of it. He said they buried him in thirty minutes and they didn’t even issue a death certificate.”

In a pre-publication interview with Julie Wiener in The Jewish Week, Feldman was questioned about the veracity of the story. Feldman not only insisted that she was not lying, but asserted that the father was known to be mentally ill and implied that he had escaped justice for his crime.

“I worry about his other children,” Feldman told Wiener, “and I worry about people thinking if he could get away with that, then they can get away with anything.”

This is not the first time Feldman has made this allegation. Indeed, in December of 2008 it appeared on her then anonymous blog, Hasidic-Feminist, where it was described as a “Class A secret.” In the blog post, Feldman recounted the story of a “thirteen year-old boy [who] had been castrated with a jig saw and bled to death.”

The incident, according to Feldman, took place “two years ago on an Erev Shabbos in [Kiryas Joel].” She goes on to elaborate that when Hatzolah arrived at the crime scene (a basement) and tried to question the father, “he refused to cooperate, saying only that his son deserved it and that he was a chazar, a pig, because he touched himself.” Feldman then notes that no police report was ever filed and the boy was “under ground” in 30 minutes. “People of KJ,” she warned, “a murderer walks in your midst.”

While some of the 31 comments on the blog post were credulous of Hasidic-Feminist’s claims, several expressed serious skepticism. At least one claimed knowledge that the death was in fact a suicide and that the young man (who, one commenter noted, was not 13 but 19) was well known to have been mentally ill.

“Our community would not have ignored a murder,” wrote a commenter with the screen name Product, “but anyone familiar with Hasidic culture knows that any mention of a familial disgrace such as suicide would be stifled. This explains why the story is so shrouded in mystery.”

A few commenters even chastised Feldman, in the guise of Hasidic-Feminist, for not reporting her knowledge to the police. “[No] one has gone to the police,” she responded to one of these charges, “because no one wants to be publicly outed as a musser — a tattletale. That’s a sin that merits ‘honor killing.’”

However, The Jewish Week confirmed that the state police do in fact have a record of the incident and its office provided the paper with the names of two of its investigators called to the scene, John Van Der Molen and Michael Colern. Calls to the two officers were not returned Thursday.

Further, a death certificate obtained by The Jewish Week indicates that the death — which it noted occurred in a “storeroom” on a Friday afternoon in Kiryas Joel around the approximate date Feldman’s blog alleged — was ruled a suicide by coroner Thomas A. Murray, and lists the cause of death as “partial decapitation, severed carotid arteries due to circular saw.” The deceased’s age was listed as 20.

Several e-mails to Feldman and her publisher, Simon and Schuster, seeking comment did not receive a response.

Privacy laws prevent Hatzolah from commenting on any case, but Moses Witriol, the director of public safety and chief constable for Kiryas Joel, told The Jewish Week that the story was patently false.

“When the first Hatzolah member showed up on the scene, he cordoned off the area and contacted the public safety office, which in turn immediately contacted the state police. Except for them and the coroner, no other people were in the room [where the boy was found]. The state police conducted a full and thorough investigation and interviewed every member of the family.

“If Mrs. Feldman knows about a crime in the village [of Kiryas Joel],” Witriol continued, “I invite her to come forward to law enforcement.”

Reached by phone, a relative of the deceased told The Jewish Week, “I cannot understand how a person could possibly find it within themselves to fabricate such a gruesome story and slander a completely innocent, grieving and tragedy-stricken family in such a horrific way. The facts are that the boy had a long history of mental illness, and his family and the community did a lot to try and help this individual. It was a very tragic end to a life full of suffering.”

Has The ‘Tough Love’ Rebbe Gone Too Far?

Rav Aharon Bina has headed a popular Jerusalem yeshiva for diaspora students for many years. But charges of emotional abuse continue to dog him.

For those in the Modern Orthodox community who send their sons to yeshivas in Israel for a year or two of post-high school study, it’s long been an open secret that Rav Aharon Bina, rosh hayeshiva of Netiv Aryeh in the Old City of Jerusalem, has a unique — many say bizarre — pedagogical style.

Supporters call it “tough love”; critics call it abuse.

Credited with transforming many troubled American students who had been branded hopeless by other educators, and taking motivated young men to a higher level of learning, the 63-year-old rabbi is praised by several leading American rabbis as having been a wonderful educator for more than three decades. And his yeshiva, supported by prominent philanthropists, including businessman Ira Rennert, is a major — and approved — feeder school to Yeshiva University.

But a significant minority of former students, employees and colleagues maintain that Rav Bina is controlling, manipulative and emotionally coercive in ways that would never be accepted in other schools. In what has become known throughout Israeli yeshivot as “Bina Stories,” he is said to regularly yell at, humiliate and insult students in public; threaten to expel them for seemingly no reason (and make good on that promise with a few every fall, sometimes without first notifying the parents); press psychologists he hires to share private information about the students he has sent them; and tell those in disfavor that they are cursed.

The situation is so well known that a several years ago a disgruntled former student created a blog and invited others to share their experiences — and many did. It was called IHateRavBina, later changed to the Bina Abuse Blog, which has posts from more than two dozen former students and parents over a span of three decades sharing their personal stories of disturbing encounters with Rav Bina.

The blog re-emerged recently, and includes a long post from Joel (Yoel) Moskowitz, 47, of Long Island’s Five Towns, who recounted several disturbing episodes from more than 30 years ago, when he was a student of Rav Bina at HaKotel, a Jerusalem yeshiva Rav Bina headed before heading Netiv Aryeh.

Having lost his mother to cancer and seen his father remarry shortly thereafter, Moskowitz said he was shocked when Rav Bina, in class one day, suddenly declared that if a man remarries after his wife dies, it shows he never loved his first wife. Later, seeing that Moskowitz was distraught, Rav Bina said to him, “If you took it personal, then you’re a bigger idiot than I thought you were,” the former student recalls.

“I want to be quoted by name [on the website] and I chose to speak out,” Moscowitz says, “because I hear that this abusive and damaging behavior by Rav Bina is still going on and [I know] that victims tend to blame themselves.”

He adds that his experience helped turn him away from Jewish observance for a time. And he finds it “inconceivable” that the rabbi’s actions are known and tolerated by Jewish lay leaders and yeshiva high schools in the U.S., “reminiscent of all the other instances of the head-in-the-sand attitude in the Orthodox community toward abuse, albeit emotional and not physical.”

Even the rabbi’s most ardent supporters acknowledge that he sometimes speaks and acts as if out of control, and some have described him as “crazy,” “wacko” and “doing things no rebbe should ever do.” But in the next breath they defend him as a warm, remarkably caring man who has had a very positive impact on the overwhelming majority of the thousands of students he has taught.

Sandy Eisenstadt, a New York businessman who has been an avid supporter of Rav Bina for the last 25 years since his two sons studied with him, likens Rav Bina to a drill sergeant.

“If you’re thin-skinned, he’s not for you,” he said, comparing the Rav Bina experience to becoming a Navy Seal or U.S. Marine. “You know what you’re in for. Otherwise don’t go. You have to ask yourself why more students are coming to his yeshiva than any other. And most love and adore him, and have become wonderful Jews.”

But some are wondering why, indeed, Netiv Aryeh is so popular, with an estimated 110 first-year and 60 second-year American students. Is it because of, or in spite of, Rav Bina’s personality? And why do families, deeply concerned about the emotional, educational and spiritual well-being of their children, continue to send their sons to study with Rav Bina when his controversial reputation is so well known?

A Slap Or A Shove

The level of concern about the rabbi’s behavior escalated in 2009 after Andrew (not his real name), a student at Netiv Aryeh and graduate of the Frisch School in Paramus, N.J., says that Rav Bina slapped him in the face four or five times during a meeting in the rabbi’s office. Andrew’s parents lodged complaints and were told the rabbi would apologize for his behavior. But the rabbi claims, through intermediaries — he declined to be interviewed for this story — that it was a harmless shove or poke to the shoulder.

What led to the encounter was the fact that although Netiv students are not allowed to leave the premises at night, Andrew had gone out to a bar with friends on Ben Yehuda Street, the pedestrian mall and popular hangout for American students in Jerusalem, and was spotted by a madrich, or counselor, from his yeshiva.

The next morning he was told he was expelled.

Andrew later explained that at Netiv, expulsion meant a student could remain in the dorm and eat in the cafeteria, but could not attend classes. To be readmitted, one had to meet with Rav Bina and “you had to beg him to let you back,” he told The Jewish Week, which often happened, but the result was that “you were going to be watched more closely.”

Andrew decided he would meet with Rav Bina, apologize and hope to be taken back. “I had made great friends, was learning a lot and did not want to leave,” he explained.

When he arrived at the rabbi’s office, he recalled that about nine other students were there for the same reason, on “parole” and seeking readmission.

He said they waited for many hours until, at 2:30 a.m., Rav Chanan, one of Rav Bina’s sons and his top assistant, emerged from the main office to say that Rav Bina needed to sleep. The young men came back in the morning and waited for “five, six hours at a time” to be called in, according to Andrew, with brief breaks to eat.

This went on for “two or three days,” he said.

“Occasionally Rav Bina would walk out of his office and yell at us, telling us that we weren’t good people and that we were nothings.” Andrew said he tried to go back to his morning seder [class] once but the rabbi in charge told him to leave.

Eventually the boys on parole were called in to Rav Bina’s office, one at a time, and during his meeting, Andrew said he apologized for his behavior and said he had made a mistake, but the rabbi said he was being dishonest. “You’re a good actor and a liar,” he says Rav Bina told him.

He alleges that Rav Bina rose from his chair, walked behind him, grabbed his shirt and asked, “What are we going to do about this? What are we going to do?” Then, Andrew claims, the rabbi lifted his hand and slapped him “across the face four or five times.

“I was shocked, I couldn’t speak,” he says.

The Rav Bina version, culled from intermediaries, is that he was concerned about the young man’s drinking and was just trying to shake him up, out of concern.

Whatever transpired, whether Andrew was slapped in the face or, as Rav Bina claims, shoved in the shoulder, the young man notified his parents back home that he was on probation and would only be accepted back if he agreed to three conditions: no more Ben Yehuda visits; he would have to sit in the beit midrash [study hall] and learn all night on Thursday nights, as is a regular if not prevalent practice at many yeshivas; and he had to be willing to see a therapist at his own cost if Rav Bina thought it was appropriate.

Andrew’s mother was uncomfortable with the situation and called John Krug, The Frisch School guidance counselor who is also director of alumni affairs for Netiv Aryeh and unofficial spokesman for Rav Bina. He sought to reassure her that Rav Bina was “a very good person but just has a different way of doing things,” as she recalls.

Krug has said that Rav Bina is often misunderstood, noting that people who are “passionate about what they do are going to arouse emotions in other people. In today’s world, with its [emphasis on] political correctness, sensitivity has taken a place on the front burner.”

Andrew’s mom said Krug told her he would see to it that Rav Bina would apologize, which did not happen.

She also met with Ilana Scheiner, the executive director and American representative of Netiv, who began the conversation by praising Rav Bina and his positive impact on his students.

“Then I told her what happened” to her son, the mother said. “’He may have gone too far,’ she told me. ‘In general he’s very effective.’”

Andrew said that after word got back to the yeshiva that his mother was questioning Rav Bina’s behavior, he was treated with suspicion, and felt increasingly ill at ease.

He ended up transferring to another Israeli yeshiva, and looks back on the Netiv experience as contributing to the fact that he is no longer observant.

Now a sophomore in college, Andrew said he was disillusioned by what he encountered. “We learned in yeshiva that if you embarrass someone it is like killing him, and yet Rav Bina likes to publicly humiliate people.

“I’m off the derech [religious path] now,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is how you treat people as a rabbi in the Old City of Jerusalem?’ This is not for me.”

YU Connection

The complaints Andrew’s mother made became known at Yeshiva University, since Netiv Aryeh is one of 24 men’s yeshivot and 20 women’s seminaries in Israel that are part of YU’s S. Daniel Abraham Israel Program. Each year about 600 high school graduates begin their YU education with a year of study in Israel, for which they receive college credits, before continuing their undergraduate studies at YU, here in New York.

Scott Goldberg is director of YU’s Institute for University-School Partnership and part of a team of educators and psychologists that visits the Israeli yeshivot periodically “to review their educational programs to satisfy our need for confidence” in the academics and the quality of the yeshiva program, he said.

In 2010, Goldberg was part of a team that visited Netiv Aryeh and, “having been made aware of complaints” about Rav Bina’s behavior, met with the rabbi and other administrators, as well as educators and students who were there at the time.

“We asked pointed, tough questions,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Jewish Week after declining to be interviewed in person, “and received what we judged to be straight answers. We learned that changes had been made and that specific programs and procedures had been put in place to not only monitor the situation but to ensure the safety of all the students.”

Goldberg did not respond to The Jewish Week’s request for details about the nature of the review or the changes that were put in place.

Andrew and his mother say they were never questioned about his encounter or how the yeshiva dealt with the complaint.

Goldberg said that since the 2010 meeting with Rav Bina, neither he nor YU staff members in Israel have heard of any new grievances. He added that were they to learn of “a credible new complaint, we would certainly look into it immediately and respond appropriately.”

Similarly, Rav Bina’s supporters acknowledge that he has acted inappropriately on occasion over the years, primarily in terms of berating students publicly, but they insist he is a changed man and that they know of no recent accounts of the rabbi acting in a belligerent manner.

But the complaints persist and are not difficult to come across.

Peter (not his real name), a 19-year-old currently studying in Israel, attended Netiv Aryeh this past fall but transferred after finding the environment too authoritative.

He maintains that Rav Bina can be extremely controlling and manipulative of his students. Peter recalls a friend of his being chastised by the rabbi after the student decided to play football on the night of his father’s yahrtzeit.

“Why do you hate your father?” Rav Bina berated the student, according to Peter, and later told the young man he had to see one of the school therapists at his own cost.

Several psychologists called on by Rav Bina to meet with students have refused to do so because they say the rabbi insists on finding out what was discussed between client and therapist, a professional taboo.

Peter also notes that Rav Bina would make fun of and bully certain students in public. He regularly “disregards a person’s feelings and just does what he wants, whether its correct or not.”

Ben (who gave permission for only his first name to be used), left Netiv Aryeh halfway through his year there, in 2006, feeling “very depressed.” He says he was bullied and publicly humiliated by Rav Bina, who referred to him as shaygetz (a derogatory word for gentile) because he had been caught reading a book on evolution. Ben said his social isolation reached the point where his classmates would not count him in a minyan.

Aaron (not his real name), a recent alum of Netiv Aryeh and current student at YU, said he was uncomfortable with how Rav Bina spoke to students, making seemingly instant judgments about their character based on appearance. Picking on certain students, he often would refer to them as “gay,” or say they had a “goy face,” or were fat or would come down with AIDS or that God hates them.

“Rav Bina would regularly tell people they are addicted to drugs, mistreat their parents and are going to beat their wives,” Aaron said. One student caught drinking early in the year was from then on referred to by the rabbi as “Alan the Alcoholic.”

“Rav Bina would single out specific kids in class and say things like, ‘You look at porn and you will for the rest of your life. You told me that; I know what you do. Get out, pack your bags.”

Such students were told by the rabbi they were being sent to cherem (a form of censure or excommunication) and had to transfer to a yeshiva in the south of the country, in the isolated community of Mitzpeh Ramon, often without their parents being notified.

That control apparently applies to yeshiva staff as well. One former Netiv Aryeh rebbe described the environment of the yeshiva as one of “constant emotional abuse” during the four years he was there. He said he was one of a number of teachers forced by Rav Bina to go to one of the school therapists, and that the sessions were not kept confidential.

Deeply Admired

Supporters of Rav Bina, including rabbis, lay leaders and illustrious former students of his, offer up a very different portrait of the man they deeply admire, while acknowledging his excesses.

Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on the Upper East Side, says that “whoever Rav Bina is, and whatever his way of teaching and reacting may be, it is well known in the community that he is, on the whole, a person who deeply loves his students and cares very much about their development.

“He may be guilty at times of what I would consider ‘tough love’ and talks freely, perhaps going overboard and embarrassing people, but all of the situations I am aware of are where he cares deeply about the students and wants to keep them on the straight path.”

Rabbi Lookstein, whose son was a student of Rav Bina two decades ago, said he can think of no other Israeli rebbe who is flown in to the U.S. to officiate at as many weddings of former students as Rav Bina, an indication of the devotion and affection his students and their families have for him.

“I know from personal knowledge that he teaches students to be baalei chesed [kind people], to give of themselves to the community and to individuals,” Rabbi Lookstein said. “That’s the Rav Bina I know, and if sometimes his speech is too quick and too strong, he’s a human being who can make mistakes. And that is the essence of the man.”

Asked about the critical statements some former students of Rav Bina have made, Rabbi Lookstein said, “I’m not familiar with blogs,” adding, “When I talked to him recently, he said he was spoken to by a professional from another institution and that he has tried very hard to avoid this kind of speech.”

Rabbi Heshie Billet of the Young Israel of Woodmere has known and been close to Rav Bina for more than 40 years.

“I have attended several Netiv Aryeh alumni Shabbatonim,” he told The Jewish Week, “and am impressed by the huge turnout of alumni — single and married, recent alumni and alumni from decades ago — who come for an inspiring tefillah [prayer service] and for the opportunity to say Shabbat Shalom to Rav Bina.”

Sandy Eisenstadt, the local businessman who described Rav Bina as a kind of rebbe-drill sergeant, said he is “totally devoted to teaching his students” to be upstanding Jewish young men. “He is not politically correct, his style is not traditional, he acts in provocative ways. But it works with most students, who love and adore him and who become wonderful Jews.”

Would the rabbi’s behavior be tolerated at an American school or yeshiva?

“Probably not,” Eisenstadt said, adding, “Maybe not anywhere else.” But he said that students and parents know what they are signing up for, and that the overwhelming majority of them are very pleased by the results.

Eisenstadt solicited 11 lengthy testimonials from grateful parents and recent and older students of Rav Bina, including rabbis, each describing their teacher as deeply considerate, personally concerned with them as individuals, and not at all like the “scary” personage they had heard about before coming to his yeshiva.

Ari Berkowitz, who spent the last two years at Netiv Aryeh and is currently living in Israel, awaiting the start of his service in the Israeli army, wrote: “In my years at Netiv Aryeh, Rav Bina has time and again dispelled my initial fears and proven what an incredible human being he is and how much love and care he has not only for Judaism but for each and every one of his students as well.”

Unlike most people, Berkowitz noted, Rav Bina “often does not make a good first impression; however, the more one gets to know him, you realize how kind and caring he is.”

The other writers also noted that what they had heard about Rav Bina in advance of meeting him made them cautious, but that he proved to be warm, insightful, compassionate and devoted to each of his students.

‘Red Flags’

Could the same rabbi be so kind and attentive to some students and controlling of others?

One American rabbi, who asked to remain nameless here, said the negative stories he has heard over the years are “very troubling” to him and that he is certain at least some of them are true. But he said Rav Bina “has helped so many” students and “puts more care into each kid than anybody” that he himself continues to recommend the yeshiva, except for “emotionally fragile” young men.

Dr. Michelle Friedman, a Manhattan psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who directs the pastoral counseling program at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, says she has heard a number of disturbing stories about Rav Bina over the years.

She has written professionally about what she calls “the power and peril of rabbinic charisma,” and speaks of the need for a rabbi’s self-awareness about his or her control over congregants or students, as well as the importance of establishing boundaries.

She questions why parents who are “so concerned about the quality of the food and laundry service” at Israeli yeshivas where they send their children are not more involved in choosing the right psychological environment.

“You’re sending your child thousands of miles away for a year in late adolescence for an intense, isolated experience,” she said, and yet she finds “an unquestioning reverence for what goes on there. It just amazes me.”

In regards to reports about Rav Bina, she asked: “Why are we so accepting? Are we so fearful of critiquing authority? Do parents think, ‘he’s doing a great job, and if we criticize it we’ll be on the outside,’ so they just say nothing?”

Friedman says the hazing analogy, comparing Rav Bina’s technique to an army drill sergeant, doesn’t hold up.

“The assumption is that hazing is somehow necessary for the end product,” she said. “But what about the fallout and destruction wrought by the hazing? What about the impact on the other students who witness it and remain passive? Maybe they figure, ‘he’s a great rabbi, I better not say anything.’”

A number of the students interviewed here said they had heard about Rav Bina’s unusual behavior but were advised, as one said, “if you keep away from him you can have a positive experience” in the yeshiva.

Another said his parents were taken with the Old City setting, the assurance that the students would be safe, with strict curfews, and the reassurance that so many other American students were attending.

The mother of “Andrew,” the boy who alleges Rav Bina slapped him, said that on meeting Rav Bina in the U.S. when he was recruiting, “he came across as eccentric but very grandfatherly.

“We talked to many boys who went there, and they told us, ‘just follow the rules” and steer clear of Rav Bina.

“How we didn’t get it, I just don’t know,” she said ruefully. “We should have seen the red flags.”

How parents make choices is critical for Michelle Friedman. “Maybe the rabbi has a good heart. But if he were, for example, driving a car recklessly, wouldn’t we say something? In this case his words and actions can be dangerous and are antithetical to his Torah. Why don’t people challenge that?”

Ami Magazine Apologizes For Picture Of White House Draped In Nazi Flags

The editor of Ami Magazine acknowledged today that the front page of this week’s issue depicting the White House draped in Nazi flags with Nazi storm troopers marching in front “may have been a poor choice.”

“The swastika is the present day symbol of Nazism and we did it to make a journalistic statement about the spread of neo-Nazism,” explained Rabbi Yitzchak Frankfurter, the magazine’s publisher and editor-in-chief. “The White House was used as a symbol of the U.S. and not to suggest anything about the present administration or its occupants.”

The magazine, which is not affiliated with any organization, is published each Wednesday in New York and Israel. It is aimed at the cross spectrum of Orthodox Jews ranging from the modern Orthodox to the heredi or fervently Orthodox.

Although this week’s cover generated some complaints “I would not call it a storm,” Rabbi Frankfurter said.

“We’ve had storms in the past about editorial positions we took or articles we ran,” he said. “We had people ask us this week about our choice [of cover illustration], but I wouldn’t say there was an uproar. … Some people said they felt it was a poor choice, and in retrospect we think it may have been.”

Rabbi Avi Sharfran, director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America and a regular contributor to the magazine, said in an email that he was “appalled” by the cover.

“The intent, of course, was not in any way referring to [President Barack] Obama but to a nightmare future scenario of American neo-Nazis taking over,” he wrote. “Still and all, the image itself was offensive. I told the editors so, and they agree it was a bad judgment.”

Rabbi Frankfurter said this was a particularly “sensitive” time to have run the illustration so soon after the recent street demonstration in Jerusalem by 1,500 fervently Orthodox Jews, some of whom wore yellow Stars of David on their jackets with the word “Jude” in the center. And some children in the protest wore striped black-and-white uniforms associated with Nazi concentration camps. One child raised his hands in surrender, mimicking the iconic photo of a Jewish boy in the Warsaw ghetto. They were protesting what they said was a nationwide campaign against their belief in the strict separation of the sexes.

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, called the use of Nazi imagery during the protest “disgraceful.”

“Because of the uproar in Israel over the use of the Jewish star, we may have made a poor choice and we regret putting that in this week’s issue,” Rabbi Frankfurter said.

He pointed out that his magazine “condemned” the Nazi imagery used in the street protest in “very strong” terms.

“We unequivocally condemned the abuse of the Holocaust memories. Now people may make the equation that we are doing the same thing. But if you look at any neo-Nazi Website, you will see that the swastika is their symbol – it is still being used and people are associating it with neo-Nazism.”

Asked if the magazine is going to say anything in next week’s issue about the cover illustration, Rabbi Frankfurter replied: “We may apologize. We don’t want people to think this was an abuse of the Holocaust memory. If anyone would think that, we want to correct that mistake and apologize to people who were offended.”

Rabbi Shafran said he does not see “any comparison between using concentration camp garb to accuse parts of Israel society of anti-heredi animus (real as that animus, unfortunately, is) and seeking to illustrate an article about the growth of actual neo-Nazis in America with the photo at issue.”

In the article, author John Loftus wrote that anti-Semitism has been increasing in the U.S. for the last 30 years and “by leaps and bounds around the world.” He said he has detected an “all too-common tendency of government and social organizations to sweep anti-Semitic or terrorist incidents under the rug. The FBI has been frequently accused in the press of deliberately mislabeling attempted terrorist attacks to improve their statistics. My friends inside the Bureau blushingly admit that the accusation has merit.”

“There is a similar inclination in law enforcement to label attacks on Jews and their property as ordinary criminal mischief rather than anti-Semitic incidents,” Loftus wrote. “Spray painting a swastika on a synagogue is only vandalism. You have to carve a swastika onto a Jewish face before the police will concede that the knife attack may possibly have had an anti-Semitic component.”

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told The Jewish Week that that the problem of anti-Semitism is “serious enough not to have to exaggerate.” He said that although it has increased worldwide, it has declined in the U.S. over the last 30 to 40 years.

“That is not to say that America is immune from anti-Semitism, but certainly the White House or America is not overrun by Nazis and neo-Nazis,” Foxman added. “There may be an increase in anti-Semitism, but comparing America to Germany – it will never reach that situation. Both the drawing and article are an exaggeration.”

Brooklyn, NY - Williamsburg Chasid Says He Forgives Attacker

My name is Nochum Elek, I am a Torah Jew, and a psychotherapist. Last Friday night I was assaulted on the street I live on, for reasons unknown to me or anyone else to the best of my knowledge. Some people think that it was a hate crime, others a gang initiation and some are spinning tall tales that I’m at fault for being either a slum lord, the owner of a business who didn’t pay his workers on Friday, or even a Public School teacher hated by his students.

I don't have enough information to reach a conclusion about this incident apart from the fact that it was an act of violence from one human being toward another, and I believe that this is all that matters. Everything that happens to us has a deeper meaning. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov talks about the "hidden messages in all things", the way God communicates with us through the textures of everyday life.

What I need to figure out as a Torah Jew and as a healer is, what is God telling me, and what He wants me to do? All my life I have been a champion of the underdog, respectful of other ethnicities, religions and life styles, while at the same time not compromising my own. The first question I asked my attacker was "Why are you doing this?" But in his rage he could not hear me and kept hitting me until people came to my rescue.

What generates such blind hatred? How do we stop the violence and learn to live with people who think, speak and dress differently than ourselves? It is common knowledge that the root of racism, bias and intolerance is ignorance and fear.

Therefore an important step in the right direction is for us to learn about one another’s culture, values and humanness; what one contemporary Jewish leader has called the “dignity of difference.

When people try to explain that the attack was directed at me as an individual, they are avoiding hearing “the heavenly voice that comes forth from Mount Horeb and calls: return to me, wayward children…” They refuse to ask themselves “in what way do we share responsibility for this? And what can we do to prevent it in the future?” A reporter asked me if “I wanted to see more police surveillance in our community." But I think that the true answer is that we urgently need to build bridges of mutual understanding and respect.

Finally I had like to say to my attacker that “I have not one ounce of hatred against you in my heart”. My uncle was shot at eighteen by a Nazi firing squad.

After the war the police asked my Grandmother, “Madame Elek we’ve caught the people who shot your son, what should we do with them?” To which she replied “Enough mothers have lost their sons. Send them home." You see I come from a tradition of forgiveness.

You have the potential to turn your life around for the good. I deeply hope you can find it within yourself to embrace life and the world we live in together in spite of all the hardship you may have encountered.

Crown Heights: 20 Years Later: Telling It Like It Wasn't

Some of the players in the Crown Heights drama look back, in their own words:

Henna White: Mothers To Mothers

In September 1991, a month after the riots, I was walking with Brooklyn Deputy District Attorney Charles Posner through Crown Heights, when we reached the corner of President Street and Utica Avenue, the spot where cars had been burning, people had been shouting and chaos had reigned.

Across the street, beneath a defaced peace mural that black and Jewish youngsters had attempted to create, stood Jean Griffith, the mother of Michael Griffith, the young man chased to his death on the Belt Parkway by a mob in Howard Beach, Queens. What she was doing here on this isolated corner in the dark of the night? “I thought I could help,” she said.

At that point Charles [Posner], who had recently read of Protestant and Catholic mothers of Northern Ireland who received the Nobel Peace Prize Prize for their work in joining together to end the brother-killing-brother hatred in their country, gave birth to the idea of Mothers to Mothers. I, a white South African Lubavitch woman who grew up in a country that practiced some of the worst systematic racial hatred in modern history, and Jean Griffith, from the African-American community, became the founding “Mothers.”

Mothers to Mothers was made up of about two dozen women, half Orthodox Jews and half African-Americans, who met every third Monday of every month for 10 years, an occurrence that to the best of my knowledge had not happened before in Crown Heights.

Our meetings took place on neutral ground in District Attorney Charles Hynes’ personal conference room. Everyone was on their absolute best behavior; it appeared that the woman were intent on saying exactly what they thought the other group wanted to hear. I decided I had to find a way that would get the women to discuss those issues that were being consciously avoided by all parties.

At our next meeting, I invited a guest who had lived on the corner of Utica Avenue and President Street, where she experienced her windows being broken and crouching in fear as the riots happened around her. Her anger and frustration was apparent.

The women began to open up. The ice had been broken. Our women often left these meetings with much information and insight to share with their own communities.

One specific conversation: One African-American woman asked her Lubavitch counterpart, “Why do Orthodox men walk in front of the women?” The Jewish women turned to each other with a puzzled look, and someone answered that the men walked faster.

Through sharing our common ideals and beliefs, we shattered the ignorance that often created unnecessary and unwanted tensions.

Mothers to Mothers ended on the 10th anniversary of its founding. Throughout the years, many meaningful friendships developed that have continued until today. Many members of our close-knit group continue to share happy occasions; on sad events, we band together to console one another. We blazed a trial for many new groups that foster the same important message of reconciliation.

This is the legacy of Mothers to Mothers.

Una Clarke: The View From City Council

What stands out in my mind is the pain that can come when some senseless incident takes place in a community and affects everyone in the community in a a negative way. So whether it was the black community, it was negative experience, and for the Jewish community it was a horrendous kind of time, the senseless loss of human life. … Those of us who also understand the tragedy that it was to that other child’s family, we tried to play a constructive role on both sides in order to not really escalate what was already a tense time in the community.

I was proud to be able to play a role, being level-headed and [evenhanded] making sure both communities recognized and understood that peace is better than keeping up the struggle of a war. … I am glad that both communities have grown over the 20 years and the whole level of coexistence in the community [has grown]. It’s important that all sides understand the role and responsibility of members of the community, respect of each other’s religion and day of worship and to better understand the customs and traditions of all residents of the community. I’m sure that out of that time it became a better community and a more unified community, and the communication between the groups in Crown Heights has been a key to that.

Una Clarke, a former City Councilmember representing part of Crown Heights, is now a consultant on governmental relations.

David Lazerson: The Music Of Dialogue

The riots were a wake-up call for me. A Crown Heights rabbinical organization selected me as liaison between the Lubavitchers and the African-Americans. I had written a song about racism a year before, never expecting I would use it in my very own community.

Our music group, known as Dr. Laz & The CURE, is still alive and kicking. We did three concerts and dialogues for the Hillel Academy day school in South Florida this year on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

We do concerts and dialogues for schools, centers and communities throughout the country. In honor of the 20th anniversary of our coming together as a more united community, we’re releasing a CD that has 12 of our original songs, three of which were used for Showtime’s “Crown Heights” movie.

The memories from back then are very much alive. When it comes to overcoming racism and stereotyping, it’s a lifelong struggle. Project CURE has expanded to include special-needs children as we work to break through those negative stereotypes.

Rev. Paul Chandler and Richard Green from the Crown Heights Youth Collective, my partners in Project CURE — and all of the youth and other people who joined our efforts — show that people of different ethnic backgrounds can respect and enjoy each other’s company.

David Lazerson, a founder of the interracial Project CURE music-and-dialogue group in 1991, is a special education teacher in the Broward County school system in South Florida.

Michael Miller: Getting Beyond ‘The Tinderbox’

Today, Crown Heights is a very different place than it was 20 years ago. So is New York City.

In 1988 I attended a meeting of African-American and Jewish leaders, hosted by Mayor Ed Koch. When I diagnosed Crown Heights as a “tinderbox,” the mayor chided me for contributing to a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Then, Crown Heights was the scene of multiple turf battles over housing, services and political clout. The anti-Semitism was palpable. There was little communication and virtually no cooperation.

On that fateful day in August 1991, I was leading a mission of New York leaders in Israel, one that included Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. When we returned to our hotel I was greeted by a fax (this was before cell phones), informing me of the horrible accident and brazen murder. The tinderbox had exploded. The image of Yechiel Bitton kneeling over his father’s prone and bloody body is indelibly seared in our minds as a symbol of those awful days. That Caribbean-American reporter Peter Noel and others shielded the Bittons from further attacks, gave hope for a better future.

During the worst of the pogrom, JCRC staffer Phil Abramowitz ducked rocks and bottles thrown by a threatening crowd. JCRC’s President Ken Bialkin and others went to Crown Heights to meet with the heads of the Jewish community there. What they learned led to meetings with city officials and a broader group of Jewish communal leaders.

Since 1991 there have been important changes for the better. For example, when Raymond Kelly was named Police Commissioner in 1992 he sent a clear message: another “Crown Heights” would never occur under his watch.

Over the past 20 years the neighborhood dynamics evolved. The leaders of the African-American, Caribbean-American and chasidic communities meet often — with JCRC acting as a catalyst. They still head multiple communities co-located on shared turf, but that’s much less of a problem these days. Now, the shifting casts of leaders know one another and have each other’s cell phone numbers. Through ongoing contacts, they recognize the overarching commonality of hopes and aspirations of all of the neighborhood residents. When a problem arises, the conversations, the recognition of overlapping cultures and the sense of shared purpose guide all these communities to solutions beneficial to all Crown Heights residents.

This week, the people of Crown Heights celebrate 20 years of progress. It’s no utopia, but it’s no longer a tinderbox. Crown Heights is gentrifying, making affordable housing a rare commodity. The federal, state and city budget cuts are likely to affect everyone — young and old. Still, the future remains undimmed. If a brushfire breaks out, there are trained firefighters throughout the neighborhood, with the tools to keep Crown Heights intact.

Michael S. Miller is executive vice president and CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, a post he held during the Crown Heights riots.

Jacob Goldstein: Communities Growing Together

From that infamous night of the pogrom on Aug. 19, 1991, to where the community is today, there has been a sea change in attitudes for both communities. The African-American community has learned a lot about the chasidic community and its customs and schools. For instance, they understand why men don’t shake hands with women — that it’s a religious thing and has nothing to do with skin color or race — and why boys and girls attend separate schools.

Our community board has been a co-sponsor of a day at Wingate Field for everyone, usually around June 1, for fun, rides and kosher food for children and adults; it’s a day enjoyed equally be everyone. The Jewish community now has an understanding about some of the distress that is associated with the African-American community, with single parenting being a major reason for that. So we begin to learn from one another, and we are growing together — that is a marked event. It took years for us to develop this understanding, and today we are seeing the fruits of that understanding.

I don’t think [the riots] can happen again. I think the city leadership under Mayor Michael Bloomberg would never permit that to happen. At the time the city was under poor leadership.

GOOD SHABBOS: Orthodox NY Jewish Teens Texting on Sabbath

At a recent campgrounds Shabbaton sponsored by a local Modern Orthodox high school, the teenage participants broke into small groups after the meals, as is usual, to talk with their friends.

On their cell phones.

Of the 17 students who attended the weekend program, said 17-year-old Julia, a junior at the day school, most sent text messages on Shabbat – a violation of the halachic ban on using electricity in non-emergency situations.

“Only three [of the 17 students] didn’t text on Shabbos,” Julia says. Most did it “out in the open,” sitting at picnic tables. “They weren’t hiding it.”

The students at the Shabbaton were not the exception for their age group. According to interviews with several students and administrators at Modern Orthodox day schools, the practice of texting on Shabbat is becoming increasingly prevalent, especially, but not exclusively, among Modern Orthodox teens.

It’s a literally hot-button issue that teachers and principals at yeshiva day schools, whose academic year ends this week, acknowledge and deal with it in both tacit and oblique ways. For the most part, they extol the virtues of keeping Shabbat rather than chastising those who violate it.

The practice has become so widespread – some say half of Modern Orthodox teens text on Shabbat – that it has developed its own nomenclature – keeping “half Shabbos,” for those who observe all the Shabbat regulations except for texting; “gd Shbs,” is the shorthand text greeting that means good Shabbos.

Not surprisingly, because of texting’s high-tech nature, it is the frequent subject of bloggers and discussion groups on the Internet.

Schools are still looking for ways to deal with the issue, how to recognize the extent of the problem without issuing directives that are likely to be ignored.

Bottom line: The teens who text probably won’t stop.

“It’s a big problem,” says Rabbi Steven Burg, international director of the Orthodox Union’s NCSY youth group. Teens who text on Shabbat are an open secret in their schools and social circles, he says.

“Adults don’t know how common it is,” one student at a local yeshiva day school says. “Everyone is doing it.”

Someone who identified himself as PJS wrote last year on the kavvanah.wordpress.com Website of an encounter with Shabbat texters: “On the first night of Rosh Hashanah I was walking home after dinner at friends. Passing through a neighborhood park, I passed a group of clearly frum kids – boys and girls – whose faces were illuminated by the lights from their cell-phones, iPhones etc as they texted away.”

The Shabbat texters, according to anecdotal evidence, include kids who grew up in less-observant homes as well as students from chasidic or so-called black hat backgrounds.

“People have been whispering about it for around a year or so … and only recently have begun about to speak about it out loud,” Rabbi Jay Goldmintz, headmaster at the Ramaz Upper School on the Upper East Side, wrote in a recent column to Ramaz parents.

They Can’t Stop

Open rejection of an Orthodox lifestyle, addiction or susceptibility to peer group conformity?

Orthodox teens’ texting on Shabbat is a little of each, students and administrators tell The Jewish Week. Some teens say they see their parents making their own compromises with the letter or spirit of Jewish law, and don’t think a text message on Shabbat is any different.

Mostly, they can’t stop texting, they say.

“It’s almost a problem of addiction,” says Rabbi Burg. American teens, according to surveys and anecdotal evidence, communicate with their friends during the week primarily by sending text messages on their cell phones. It’s hard to stop for 25 hours, the rabbi says, if they feel everyone else is doing it. “In high school, the world revolves around their friends. Everything is about your friends and your social group.

“They don’t think [texting on Shabbat] is that bad,” Rabbi Burg says.

In an email message, Rabbi Boruch Perton, educational director of the Hebrew Academy of Montreal, added: “The thing about texting is that it can be done anywhere. The bathroom or the bedroom are private places.”

Rabbi Perton said his day school recently tried to enforce a ban on using cell phones during school hours, “When we did take away a phone,” he said, “the amount of pain the student was in was literally unbearable. The parents would beg and scream because they were getting it at home from their kid and just wanted to end their own misery.

“If the students and their parents lose their equilibrium when a phone is taken away for a week, can such a child stop on Shabbos?” the rabbi asks. “I hope so, but do not know.”

Miriam Shaviv, a columnist for the London Jewish Chronicle, wrote recently that Orthodox teens “openly discuss whether they keep ‘half-Shabbos’ or ‘full Shabbos.’ There is apparently no shame attached to this violation.”

Texting on Shabbat has become a frequent subject of on-line discussions: “They are the failures of Modern Orthodoxy or they are the failures of Orthodoxy-lite.” (kavvanah.wordpress.com); “Children will text each other in stealth. Their divine service is external; if no human being sees them, it is as if it hasn’t happened” (Rabbi Steven Pruzansky’s rabbipruzansky.com).

The frumsatire.net Website carried a fictional report that Modern Orthodox rabbis “have begun to consider texting during shul on Shabbos to curb talking,” in order to keep synagogues quiet during religious services.

Teens who text on Shabbat rarely discuss its halachic propriety, said Leah, who identifies herself as Conservadox and attended a Modern Orthodox day school for several years.

“I know it’s breaking Shabbos,” Leah said. “I don’t feel guilty.

“My mother knows – I text her,” to let her mother know her whereabouts.

“It’s definitely a stage” that many teens pass through without necessarily leaving the Orthodox world, said Rachel, a recent graduate of a local yeshiva high school. “It’s not a defiant thing.”

“They still believe in God” and consider themselves Orthodox,” Julia said of her friends who text on Shabbat.

The Orthodox teens who agreed to speak about this subject asked that their full names not be used, lest their parents or teachers or more-observant friends find out.

The Challenge Of Technology

Chani said she is typical. A student at a New York area yeshiva high school, she started texting on Shabbat when she discovered that many of her Orthodox friends were already doing it. “I was just so bored” on Shabbat, she said. “I had nothing to do.”

Though she was going through a crisis of faith, texting on Shabbat was her only lapse from religious observance. “I was not driving” on Shabbat. “I was not eating non-kosher.”

Why did she text, when she wouldn’t do other prohibited acts?

“I had people to text,” she said.

Most of the teens who text on Shabbat do not weigh the halachic and spiritual implications, Chani said – they know it’s wrong, but do it anyway.

Chani stopped texting on Shabbat after three years, when her religious faith deepened. She said she knows many other teens who gave up Shabbat-texting after returning from a post-high school year in Israeli yeshivas.

For many Orthodox teens, keeping “half Shabbos” has apparently achieved the status of Orthodox men who do not wear a kipah on the job or Orthodox women who wear pants or do not cover their hair once married, both considered violations of outright halacha or established Jewish practice.

“If in previous generations the biggest challenge to Sabbath observance was making a living, today it is technology,” Rabbi Goldmintz wrote in his column to Ramaz parents. “These are kids from otherwise shomer Shabbat homes who nevertheless sneak into their rooms or down the street and use their phones or computers to text or tweet with friends. These are not (yet) necessarily kids who are so called ‘off the derech (i.e., who have wandered off the religious path) for they otherwise may not turn on lights or televisions, but they just can’t break the social habit. They keep Shabbat, but not all of it.”

“You can’t say that the kids who text on Shabbat are ‘off the derech,’” said Dr. Michelle Friedman, a psychiatrist who works extensively in the Orthodox community. Texting on Shabbat does not necessarily lead to other violations, she said. “This is a separate category.”

Lower Voltage?

While some teens reportedly rationalize their practice by claiming that texting uses a low level of electricity, thereby reducing the severity of the prohibition, texting is as forbidden on Shabbat as any other use of electricity, Jewish experts in technology say. “Pressing electrical buttons on Shabbat is prohibited. The only justification to permit this is in various security needs or medical conditions,” a spokesman for the Israeli-based Zomet Institute, which deals in matters of halacha and technology, told The Jewish Week in an email message.

“It is universally accepted in the halacha-respecting community that electronics are off-limits on the Sabbath,” said Rabbi Avi Shafran, a spokesman for Agudath Israel of America.

Some observers describe teens as experimenting with the limits of sanctioned and non-sanctioned actions in a Jewish version of the Rumspringa practice in which Amish 16-year-olds are free to engage in banned behavior before formally affiliating with the church and abiding by their community’s norms of behavior.

Texting on Shabbat “is probably more prominent [in the Modern Orthodox community], but it is by no means exclusively there,” Rabbi Goldmintz wrote. “Someone once suggested that it all got started when observant kids signed on after Shabbat and realized how much their non-observant friends had been communicating over Shabbat and they didn’t want to be left out ever again.”

Students from local Orthodox high schools say teachers and administrators usually handle this topic in a subtle way, talking about the beauty of Shabbat rather than ordering an outright ban on Shabbat texting. (Besides Rabbi Goldmintz, none of the rabbis or principals from several local day schools contacted for comment by The Jewish Week returned the newspaper’s messages.)

Preaching to teens would be ineffective, said Julia, who attended the Shabbaton where most of the students texted. “It’s a waste of energy to argue with the kids.”

Ohel Says Jewish Week Accusations ‘Unfounded’

Newspaper rejects charges of bias; source says boy in story was removed from home.

Responding to a front-page Jewish Week investigation last week (“Abuse Case Tests Ohel’s Adherence To Reporting Laws”) detailing the case of a mother who was believed to be sexually abusing her 5-year-old son, but whose case was never reported to secular authorities by the Ohel Children’s Home and Family Services, the agency placed a full-page ad in this week’s paper, accusing The Jewish Week of bias.

The ad, which appears on page 17, calls The Jewish Week’s coverage of the woman’s case “inflammatory” and “driven by a misguided agenda.” It states that the group was “compelled” to take out the ad because “The Jewish Week would never otherwise allow Ohel the opportunity to articulate our response.”

In fact, though, the paper has given Ohel multiple opportunities to respond to detailed questions not just about specific cases (where confidentiality rules may have prevented the agency from responding), but also about its practices and policies in general.

These questions have covered a range of issues, including Ohel’s policies and practices regarding the treatment of known abusers referred to the agency by rabbis, to its internal protocols relating to the reporting of suspected cases of abuse — for example, whether it is standard internal protocol to consult with Ohel’s counsel and/or its halachic adviser before making a report.

With the exception of general statements that Ohel complies with the New York State mandated reporting law — which the ad restates — and provides information on private practitioners who may treat known offenders, Ohel has not given The Jewish Week direct answers to its questions.

Ohel’s ad also sought to discredit one of The Jewish Week’s sources on the story, clinical

psychologist Asher Lipner. While the paper stands behind the credibility of Dr. Lipner, who has long been a staunch public advocate for victims of sexual abuse, The Jewish Week relied on multiple sources for the story. Some were involved, in one way or another, in treating the woman in question; others were told about the events of the case either as they were unfolding or shortly after they happened.

The paper’s sources made it clear that everyone overseeing and involved in the woman’s treatment came to believe that she was abusing her child because of statements made by the mother herself.

The law requires a report to the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) even if there is only a “reasonable cause to suspect” that abuse is taking place.

Ohel argues in its ad that extenuating circumstances for non-reporting exist “in cases of alleged abuse that may have taken place years earlier, or one of the parties involved may have emotional problems.”

In this case the abuse was believed to be taking place currently and not in the past. The law does not allow for non-reporting based on the emotional state of the suspected perpetrator.

The Ohel ad says “The Jewish Week article itself … acknowledges that Ohel’s actions were ‘technically legal,’” yet continued to “insinuate Ohel still acted wrongly.”

In the case of the mother and son, however, the article never suggested that Ohel’s actions were “technically legal.”

The article’s reference to “technically legal” concerned Ohel’s treatment of self-confessed molesters referred to the agency by rabbis. The article called that practice into question from a practical/ethical standpoint and noted that it departs from protocol endorsed by professionals in the field, including the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers.

The ad also accuses The Jewish Week of taking “deliberate pains to portray Ohel as an ‘Ultra-Orthodox’ Brooklyn agency.”

The article describes Ohel as “a social service agency based in Brooklyn.” The phrase “Ultra-Orthodox” with regard to Ohel as an agency does not appear anywhere in the article.

The only mention of that phrase in the article is in stating that Ohel operates in the context of the ultra-Orthodox community.

Meanwhile, The Jewish Week has learned that the 5-year-old boy at the center of last week’s article was removed from his family’s home nearly two years ago shortly after his mother, who suffered a nervous breakdown, was admitted to a hospital in the tristate area. At the hospital, according to sources, the mother disclosed the abuse and the hospital staff reported the case to ACS.

Earlier the mother had sought counseling at Tikvah, a branch of Ohel, and disclosed that she thought she “may be” sexually abusing the boy. Ohel chose not to report to ACS.

Last week’s article reported that the youngster had not been removed from his home. But according to a source closely involved with the family, the boy was removed from the home by ACS and is now living with his paternal grandparents. The source said that the mother had her parental rights terminated and that she has been granted twice-weekly supervised visits with her son.

When asked to comment on the case, an ACS spokeswoman told The Jewish Week that the agency is “not permitted by New York State law to provide information on whether or not a child has been in foster care.”

Does Ohel Violate Mandatory Reporting Laws?

Counselors, higher-ups at Brooklyn social service agency grapple with reporting of abuse to secular authorities. An inside look at an agonizing treatment process involving a mother and her young son.

As the story of child sexual abuse in the Orthodox community has unfolded over the last several years, the issue of when, and even whether, to report such allegations to law enforcement has emerged as perhaps the most important and the most complicated.

One of the focal points of this debate — report to secular authorities or deal with the problem from inside the community — has become Ohel Children’s Home and Family Services, a social service agency based in Brooklyn. Ohel has earned high praise in the community for the services it provides for foster children. Its work dealing with sexual abusers, however, is much more controversial, with many advocates and observers accusing the agency of functioning in a way that does more to protect the reputation of the community than the safety of its children.

So when a distraught young haredi woman entered counseling at Ohel in 2008 and soon after revealed that she “may be” sexually abusing her own young son, her case would test Ohel — and its adherence to mandatory reporting laws — and expose the agency’s problematic role in this issue perhaps as never before.

The Jewish Week pieced together the timeline of the woman’s case over the course of several months through interviews with people who had intimate knowledge of the case. Some were involved, in one way or another, in treating the woman; others were told about the events either as they were unfolding or shortly after they happened. All but one asked for anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case or their ongoing relationships with Ohel.
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Ohel declined to comment on the case, citing the fact that “like all other social service agencies, hospitals, physicians, and therapists, [Ohel] is subject to various state and federal confidentiality requirements.”

The thirty-something mother initially sought counseling at Tikvah, a branch of Ohel on Kings Highway, because she was suffering in an abusive marriage and overwhelmed by the demands of parenting. But her problems didn’t end there. Once in therapy, the woman also revealed a terrible secret: she had been molested as a child by her grandfather.

In addition to working on these issues with her therapist at Tikvah, the woman was also referred to a support group there, facilitated by a psychologist and a social worker, for female survivors of sexual abuse. It was in that group that she disclosed that she thought she “may be” sexually abusing her own 5-year-old son.

Understandably, the other women in the group were both shocked and angered by this disclosure. While the mother claimed to be unsure about her own behavior, her comment was certainly cause for concern and, many in the group believed, a report to the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), the city agency charged with investigating such matters. Under New York State law (other states define mandated reporters differently), people designated as mandated reporters — a list that includes social workers, psychologists, mental health counselors and mental health professionals — are required to make a report when, in their professional capacity, they have “reasonable cause to suspect a child is being abused or maltreated.” To the women in the group and those running it, this seemed to qualify as such a case.

The support group leaders promptly consulted with their Ohel supervisor, Hillel Sternstein, who dismissed the woman’s statement, positing that, as a result of her own traumatic past, she was likely suffering from delusions. No report was made.

Sometime after she began treatment, the woman’s son also began individual treatment at Tikvah. Indeed, it seems that despite the woman’s disclosure to the group, her son was brought to treatment not because of her possible abuse of him, but because she discovered he was being molested by a young male relative — something some at Ohel also felt merited a report to ACS. The supervisor overseeing this case, however, deemed a report unnecessary, according to someone knowledgeable about the boy’s case.

Over the course of many weeks, based on additional disclosures by the mother that she was touching and becoming sexually aroused by her son, counselors and their supervisors at Tikvah came to realize that sexual abuse was in fact taking place. Once again, despite their obligation to report the case under the law, a decision was made not to do so. Instead, those involved in the woman’s case, supervised and led by Sternstein, developed a “family safety plan,” which involved making the father responsible for monitoring the mother’s behavior around their son.

Underlying this decision seemed, in part, to be the fear that reporting the woman to ACS could have resulted in the child’s removal from the home. This was of particular concern here, as the mother herself had been removed from her home as a child and had repeatedly expressed to at least one person involved in her case that she would “kill herself” if her child were taken away from her.

After some time, however, because of what they came to see as a dysfunctional family situation, the counselors and supervisors determined that the safety plan was not viable and made a decision to report the abuse. This was viewed as a welcome development by some members of the team, who had begun privately to question the feasibility of the safety plan and the prior decision not to report, but who were also frightened to take it upon themselves to call ACS — an act they felt would be viewed as a subversion of their supervisor.

Before making the report, however, Sternstein told the team he would run the decision by Ohel attorney and quality control officer, Adam Lancer — standard Ohel protocol, claim several people familiar with its practices.

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A few days later, according to Dr. Asher Lipner — a clinical psychologist who worked at Ohel for nine years — Sternstein notified the team that, based on feedback from Lancer, the team should not make a report. No further explanation was given. (Lipner, who now has a private practice and treats survivors of abuse in the Orthodox community, was the only person among several with direct knowledge of the case willing to speak about it for attribution.) Lancer did not respond to an e-mail about the case. Calls to Sternstein for comment were not returned.

Some members of the group agonized about this turn of events, feeling confused about the reasons for the decision but powerless to act against it; at this point, they feared that, given the lawyer’s directive, reporting could possibly cost them their jobs.

According to Dr. Michael Salamon, the director of the Adult Development Center in Hewlett, L.I., and a prominent psychologist in the Orthodox world, it is not uncommon for psychologists who work in large agencies to find themselves faced with such dilemmas.

“There has been a lot written on the subject of supervision which details the conflicts that arise between a supervisee, the supervisor and the agency they work for,” Salamon told The Jewish Week. “Goals at all three levels are not necessarily the same, supervisees often feel overburdened, even intimidated. As a result, expectations and deciding exactly how to handle things are not always clearly explained or understood.”

As it turned out, however, the issue quickly became moot as, about a week later, the woman suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to a hospital in the tristate area. Word of the woman’s hospital admission made it back to Ohel. Members of the team were told by Sternstein that the woman had disclosed the abuse of her son to hospital staff, and also that she had been in treatment at Tikvah. Sternstein also told team members not to talk to ACS — which was said to be conducting an investigation into the case — if they were contacted by the agency; they were told instead to refer any inquiries to a supervisor or Ohel’s attorney.

The child stopped coming in to Tikvah for treatment. The Jewish Week was unable to determine the fate of the boy but did confirm that he was not removed from the home or put into foster care by ACS.

It is unclear whether ACS did in fact contact Ohel about the case, or investigate it at all. Elysia Carnevale Murphy, a spokeswoman for ACS, told The Jewish Week that it is not “possible for someone at ACS to respond to [questions about] the specific case you are looking into,” adding that “[while] we are very committed to transparency, we are also committed to upholding the laws around confidentiality.”

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While this case may be the only one that has come to The Jewish Week’s attention to date of Ohel apparently acting in violation of mandatory reporting laws, the agency has long played a role in the handling of sex abuse that, while technically legal, many advocates and observers believe has put the community’s children at serious risk: treating known sexual abusers who have not been reported to law enforcement and whose proclivities are protected from being made public by confidentiality laws, should they drop out of treatment.

A 2000 Jewish Week article, entitled “Treating the Offenders,” described Ohel’s sex offender treatment program, which was started in 1997 in conjunction with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office. Through the program, Ohel treated Orthodox sex offenders who had been sent to them by the court as well as “those whom the community pressured to seek help without notifying authorities.”

That formal program no longer exists — Ohel pulled the plug on it in about 2003, due to concerns about insurance coverage and potential liability, according to Brian Leggiere, who at one point ran the program. But information obtained by The Jewish Week indicates that Ohel continued to offer treatment at Tikvah to self-confessed molesters who were not court mandated as recently as late 2009.

(It is unclear whether Ohel has since stopped this practice. In response to a direct question about whether the agency currently treats self-confessed abusers who have not been reported, Ohel spokesman Derek Saker said, “[W]hen Ohel receives an inquiry on services for offenders not in the criminal justice system, Ohel provides information on private practitioners who may provide such services.”)

In 2009, The Jewish Week reported on the case of Stefan Colmer, who had been “sent” by rabbis to treatment at Ohel after he was discovered to have been sexually abusing boys in his Brooklyn neighborhood. Because neither the victims nor anyone else with knowledge of the situation reported Colmer to law enforcement at that time, his treatment at Ohel was not court mandated and thus considered voluntary. Further, because of confidentiality rules, the therapist treating Colmer was prohibited by law from notifying anyone in the community about the danger he posed to children unless Colmer signed a release or disclosed to the therapist that he was currently abusing or had serious thoughts of abusing a specific child (such information allows for the breach of confidentiality rules).

This meant Colmer could drop out of treatment at any time without suffering legal or social repercussions. And he did just that, ultimately going on to molest what police believe may be as many as 12 other boys, two of whom ultimately filed charges.

Another such case involves Emanuel Yegutkin, who was arrested in January 2009 on charges of child molestation and endangering the welfare of a child and is currently awaiting trial. At the time of his arrest, Yegutkin, then 30, was a principal at Elite High School, a private Jewish school in Bensonhurst. According to several sources close to Ohel, Yegutkin — who also worked as a camp counselor and volunteer Hatzolah medic — had been seen at Ohel for this issue prior to his arrest, apparently referred there by a rabbi in the community.

The fact that Ohel made a practice of treating unreported sexual abusers — instead of guiding referring rabbis to report to law enforcement — is something many advocates and observers find troubling, particularly given the context in which Ohel operates. In the ultra-Orthodox community, where most people do not report for fear of being branded an “informer,” because rabbis have instructed them not to and/or to avoid the social stigma of being a “victim,” therapy, these observers say, is one of the only means employed to deal with molesters.

Add to this the fact that therapists are bound (with some important exceptions) by confidentiality and it becomes clear that treating self-confessed abusers who have not been reported means there is likely to be a potentially dangerous lack of oversight and accountability in the treatment process.

This view seems to find support from The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, an international, multi-disciplinary organization dedicated to preventing sexual abuse that has 3,000 members. A position paper put out by the Association notes that it “supports the position that treatment of sex offenders does not replace a criminal justice response, but rather is one of several tools society can use in designing effective sentences for offenders. Treatment can be combined with other criminal justice responses such as probation, jail, incarceration, as well as community monitoring and supervision.”

None of this, of course, directly applies to the case of the mother, who did not come into treatment as a known molester and whose disclosures while in therapy clearly created a situation that would mandate a report, according to Charles Carson, assistant deputy counsel at the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, the agency that supervises ACS.

“A mandated reporter situation [certainly] comes into play,” Carson told The Jewish Week, “when either the child comes before the mandated reporter, or the parent, guardian or other person who is responsible for the child comes before the mandated reporter, in the reporter’s professional or official capacity, and provides information that creates reasonable cause to suspect that a child was abused or maltreated.”

Despite meeting these criteria, Ohel did not make a report, something that seems to contradict Ohel’s public statements.

“We comply with NYS mandated reporting requirements and are regularly audited by various city, state, and federal licensing and contract agencies regarding our provision of services to clients,” Saker, the Ohel spokesman, told The Jewish Week in an e-mail message. In an earlier, joint interview with Dr. David Pelcovitz (who co-edited a book with Ohel CEO David Mandel on sexual abuse in the Orthodox community), Mandel echoed this statement.

Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for the Brooklyn DA’s office, told The Jewish Week that, while he could not comment on this particular case without knowing all of the facts, “[The DA’s office has] investigated cases of failure to report and we’ve brought charges [against others] in the past. We certainly take any allegation of any crime seriously. We never dismiss anything out of hand. [If we had allegations of a failure to report], we would pursue it; we would look into it.”

The Brooklyn DA was Ohel’s partner in its now-defunct sex offender treatment program and currently partners with Ohel, among other agencies, on Kol Tzedek, a hotline the DA set up in 2009 to encourage victims of sex abuse in the Orthodox community to report abuse to law enforcement.

According to Carson, of the Office of Family and Children’s Services, in addition to potential criminal liability, a mandated reporter who fails to report under the required circumstances could be held civilly liable for any “proximate damage” caused by the failure to report (in this case, proximate damage would be the continued abuse of the child). If the mandated reporter is employed by a licensed state agency, the failure to report could also be a violation of the agency’s statutory responsibility.

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Regardless of the law, the fact that Ohel did not report the case of the mother comes as little surprise to some, given its unique position standing in a sense between the community and law enforcement.

“[Ohel] is the group in the community that works with children, with survivors and with abusers,” Rabbi Yosef Blau, mashgiach ruchani (spiritual adviser) of Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and a longtime advocate for abuse survivors, told The Jewish Week referring to the mother’s case as well as others of which he has knowledge.

“They have been the point men for the community [on this issue] and they have accepted the approach of the community, which is never to go to the police. They endlessly [hide] behind technicalities,” Rabbi Blau continued.

“Because [Ohel is] an agency that does wonderful things for children,” Rabbi Blau added, referring to the homes and services Ohel provides for foster children, it is not an agency he would like to see disappear. However, with respect to the handling of child sexual abuse, Rabbi Blau believes that Ohel “is the problem, in a nutshell. They [have shown that they are] not able to deal with the situation that they are legally required and morally required [to deal with]. The workers are all sincere people,” the rabbi added. “Solutions [to the current problem] would involve changing [Ohel’s] leadership. [And] you will know there’s change when they start reporting.”

Despite the particular issues at play in the Orthodox world, some observers see Ohel’s behavior in general — and in the case of the mother and her little boy specifically — as reflective of society’s approach to this issue more generally.

“This is a paradigmatic story of how we deal with child sex abuse in the United States, and also another example of the inadequacy of New York’s reporting laws,” said Marci Hamilton, a professor at Cardozo School of Law and a prolific writer and speaker on the issue of clergy sex abuse.

“At every level, the adults protected adult interests. While the adults dithered in their own interest, this young child was left to fend for himself. It is tragic, and all too predictable.”