WASHINGTON (DC)
Harretz

By Allison Kaplan Sommer | Oct. 27, 2014

Barry Freundel was a rabbi with a big problem. If police reports cited in the press are to be believed, he was a compulsive voyeur who exploited his position as a senior rabbi and university professor. His utter control over his synagogue and adjacent mikveh allowed him to feed a need to surreptitiously and criminally watch women undress. Allegedly, of course.

Yes, it is true that his particular – alleged – fetish had the advantage of utter secrecy and total distance from his victims. That’s the difference between the Freundel affair and other sex abuse scandals: Freundel is charged with crimes, in which the victims were, until now, oblivious.

But as the scandal widened in the time since his arrest, with the revelation that Freundel had been under investigation in 2012 by the Rabbinical Council of America, the…