NEW YORK
The Jewish Week
Wed, 01/14/2015
Rabbi Chaim Gruber
Special To The Jewish Week
On the third night of this past Chanukah, attorney Kevin Mulhearn sent a draft of a complaint against Yeshiva University High School for Boys to a group of plaintiffs who say they had been sexually abused as students.
The complaint will be filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. Mulhearn is attempting to find some legal remedy at the state level after legal action at the federal level did not succeed for these plaintiffs. (I am not one of the plaintiffs, although I left the school after one year due to alleged physical abuse.)
But, is it in the best interest of the Jewish world and all those personally involved in this case that more mass media reports come forward over the next number of years about this scandal? Wouldn’t the best remedy be an expedient out-of-court settlement so to finally lay this matter to rest? (That Yeshiva University should settle out of court was also the advice of Jewish Week editor Gary Rosenblatt, a graduate of YU, in his column “The YU Impasse,” Between The Lines, July 17, 2013.)
In the much publicized Twersky, et al., vs. Yeshiva University, et al. sexual abuse case that was in the federal courts for the past year and a half (also pleaded by Mulhearn), while YU has publicly admitted its guilt, the court ruled that the plaintiffs were past their maximum allowable time to file a legal suit according to the statute of limitations. However, it is important to recognize that according to the Jewish system of law that YU is meant to promote, the statute of limitations had not passed because there is no statute of limitations in Jewish law. One reason why there is no statute of limitations is because Jewish law is meant to reflect non-arbitrary divine law, which, as will be explained, has no statute of limitations.
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