BALTIMORE (MD)
Washington Post
‘Standing Silent’ follows uncovering of sexual abuse in Baltimore’s Orthodox Jewish community
By Emily Wax, Published: March 19
One by one the victims stood and described their alleged molesters: the Torah teacher, the rabbi, the ice cream truck driver, the man at the mikvah.
That meeting, held nearly six years ago in a small room in a synagogue in Pikesville, just outside Baltimore, went on for four hours. Seated in a circle with the other victims was Phil Jacobs, a Baltimore Jewish Times journalist. He was not there as a reporter. He was there because he, too, had experienced sexual abuse.
But after the meeting, a young man who knew Jacobs was a journalist approached and asked to be interviewed, to have his story told. That was the beginning of Jacobs’s effort to document sexual abuse in Baltimore’s Orthodox Jewish community, bringing the harrowing experiences shared by the 18 victims in that room out into the open.
The first of his stories, “Today, Steve is 25” was published in February 2007, 10 months after the Pikesville meeting.
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