NEW YORK
The Jewish Daily Forward
By Judy Brown (Eishes Chayil)
Edited By Naomi Zeveloff
Published December 20, 2012, issue of December 28, 2012.
Guilty on all 59 counts: guilty, guilty, guilty.
On Monday, December 10, a jury of 12 found Nechemya Weberman enormously guilty. The jurors convicted him of sexually abusing an underage girl entrusted to his care. They declared the respected member of the ultra-Orthodox community to be a criminal and a fraud, and thousands of survivors, advocates and victims, many of whom still live in silence, breathed a sigh of relief as one.
Once, an ultra-Orthodox man could not be found guilty of sexual abuse. He could not be charged with a word that did not exist.
I was 9 years old when I first encountered the word “abuse.” I was at my friend’s house. I found a book on a desk near her room, and ran to the staircase to read it. I don’t remember the title, or what the book was about, only that across its white cover was a picture of a gun, and on the first page, in the subtitle, was an adjective I’d never seen.
I read it, slowly: “Ub-u-sive…”
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