UNITED STATES
JTA
By Uriel Heilman
July 6, 2015
NEW YORK (JTA) – After facing criticism for its handling of inappropriate behavior by a convert-supervising rabbi who turned out to be a mikvah-peeping voyeur, the country’s main centrist Orthodox rabbinical group has released key guidelines aimed at preventing abuses during the conversion process.
The Rabbinical Council of America is recommending that would-be converts be given a clear sense from the outset of the timeline and requirements for conversion, and that the conversion curriculum be standardized.
The review of the RCA’s Geirus Protocol and Standards (GPS) conversion process, announced last October two weeks after Rabbi Barry Freundel’s arrest, was designed to establish safeguards against rabbinic misconduct and included both women and converts.
Aside from his crimes of voyeurism, including having female conversion candidates take “practice dunks” in the mikvah ritual bath so he could record them naked on a hidden camera, Freundel had conversion candidates do free clerical work, kept prospective converts in the dark about how long their conversions could take and employed seemingly arbitrary benchmarks for judging candidates’ readiness for conversion. Converts say Freundel is not alone among conversion-sponsoring rabbis in using seemingly capricious timelines and standards for conversion, despite the RCA’s centralizing of Orthodox conversion in 2007 under its GPS system.
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