NEW YORK
The New York Times
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
Published: January 4, 2013
Just as we think we know what an abuser looks like, we think we know what an abusive religious community looks like. We may think it is highly insular — like the Satmar Hasidic community in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, a prominent member of which was convicted last month of sexually abusing a young girl sent to him for help. Or it is hierarchical and bureaucratic: if the Roman Catholic Church did not have so many bishops and archbishops who refused to dismiss or defrock molesters in their ranks, would so many pedophile priests have been able to carry on for so long?
But we don’t know a thing. Consider Yeshiva University.
As Paul Berger reported last month in the Jewish newspaper The Forward, two rabbis at the Modern Orthodox high school run by the university were accused of sexually abusing students in the 1970s and ’80s. Leaders, Mr. Berger wrote, responded by “quietly allowing them to leave and find jobs elsewhere.” The university president at the time, Norman Lamm — until last month a titan of contemporary Judaism — told Mr. Berger that he had let the staff members “go quietly.”
“It was not our intention or position to destroy a person without further inquiry,” Dr. Lamm said.
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