WASHINGTON (DC)
The Jerusalem Post
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN \ 05/17/2015
In October of last year a well-known and very well-connected rabbi was taken from his synagogue-owned house in handcuffs.
In a story whose salacious details emerged over time, he was found to have put hidden cameras in a mikveh, or traditional religious bath, and to have taped women nude, many of them undergoing conversions that he was overseeing. He had meticulously cataloged the tapes, according to reports. Investigators identified 152 separate female victims, of which 88 fell within the statue of limitations for voyeurism. In February of 2015 Rabbi Barry Freundel plead guilty to 52 counts of taping these women without their consent.
On May 15 he was sentenced to six years in prison.
Open and shut case, right? And perhaps not a surprising one; other religious communities, such as the Catholic Church, have had sex scandals.
But throughout the Freundel story there was always a sense that something fishy was going on beneath the surface. Dr. Elana Sztokman, an author and feminist activist, connected the abuses to the “multiple layers of power, authority and gender hierarchy involved…a system of intricate rules about [women’s] bodies that have been determined by men.” She correctly noted that the way in which the rabbi encouraged women to use the mikveh (often in the form of “practice dunks”) was “nothing more than a smokescreen to allow him to watch them undress.”
She wondered why there “always seem to be some rabbis who inexplicably rush to the side of the perpetrator.”
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