UNITED STATES
The Jewish Daily Forward
By Jay Michaelson
Published February 20, 2015
Now that Rabbi Barry Freundel has pleaded guilty to peeping at 52 women while they went to the mikveh — prosecutors say he spied on 100 more women, but outside the statute of limitations — we finally can take off the qualifiers and accept that he is guilty. And that means we can begin some much-needed, and largely absent, soul-searching.
One hopes that it is only the delay in legally establishing
Freundel’s guilt that has caused some of his most ardent supporters (prior to the scandal) to remain so uncharacteristically silent.
There are, I think, two categories of such people: those with institutional positions, and those who considered Freundel their teacher and friend.
Among those in the former category are the Orthodox rabbinic umbrella organization the Rabbinical Council of America, and those in leadership positions at Kesher Israel. Here, the discourse is like that of other scandals: who knew what, when; what could have been done differently; what policies are being changed.
Because these are familiar dynamics, and because others have written about them already, they are of secondary interest to me. Soon after the allegations surfaced, the RCA provided a (hopefully exhaustive) account of complaints it had received about Freundel. If that account is complete, it doesn’t amount to much.
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