UNITED STATES
Times of Israel
Michael J. Salamon
Just last week a colleague told me that a patient that she had been seeing for years had told her that she was molested by a rabbi four years ago. The therapist said to me “Four years ago I made the mistake of asking the wrong rabbi if I should report it. At that time my rabbi told me not to report him. So I asked him again this week. He gave me the same answer.” So she did not report the abuser to the proper authorities.
I asked her if caring for her patient by seeing that some form of justice was performed or, possibly protecting others by having the authorities prosecute him or, her license, which made her a mandated reporter regardless of the outcome of the investigation, ever entered her mind when she asked the “wrong rabbi” both times after these four years. I wonder if I can call her a colleague or even a therapist anymore but, my colleague, the therapist was quiet. She would not respond. It’s a Talmudic suggestion “silence is as if an admission” in this case of a breach of appropriate protocol maybe even malpractice or malfeasance. Then, perhaps out of a sense of guilt, she told me the name of the rabbi who abused her patient – it was the same man that my new patient, someone who just recently started seeing me, told me about just two weeks earlier. She too had been abused by him. My patient and I discussed options about reporting and we decided that she, a mature adult, would like to do so herself. So she did report him. In that two week time I received a call from a detective who asked some questions about the molester and let it slip, deliberately I believe, that the abusing rabbi was a predator and had been one for likely 30 years. The detective said in just a few days of investigation he has been able to determine that it is likely that the rabbi abused as many as 40 or more young women.
Think for just a second about the implication of the detectives comment. Had someone reported the abuser earlier, even just four years ago, so many women might never have been abused. Now think about the issue of hypocrisy. Why are there still leaders and supporters who are insistent that abuse not be reported?
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