UNITED STATES
Washington Post
By Emily Wax
A controversy erupted this week over “Standing Silent”, a documentary film about sexual abuse in Baltimore’s Orthodox Jewish community, reported the JTA, a news service that covers the Jewish world.
It all started in September, when L.A.Jewish Film Festival chief Hilary Helstein wrote an email to other Jewish film festival directors warning about the danger of showing “Standing Silent,” and saying that while it was well made, “Our committee felt with a community that reveres it’s [sic] rabbis this was not something they wanted to show.”
That email was not made public until last week during a March 20 screening of the film in Hartford. Steve Shaw, a member of the Hartford Jewish Film Festival, showed the film’s producer, Scott Rosenfelt, a copy of the Helstein email. Shaw wanted to use it during a Q and A session after the film to demonstrate that,“our rabbis in West Hartford not only endorsed showing the film, but they actually sponsored the entire evening,” Shaw said in a telephone interview with The Washington Post.
“I read a quote from the email at the Q and A to show that the response in other communities had not been as welcoming,” Shaw said.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.