UNITED STATES
Jewish Philanthropy
It’s time for the Jewish community to take a stand against child sexual abuse.
By Joshua Avedon, Dr. Shira Berkovits and Rochel Leah Bernstein-Deitcher
For a people that takes pride in creating community-wide systems to preserve tradition and ensure the future, we seem to have a major blind spot when it comes to one threat to our children: sexual abuse. Our children have always been a primary concern for the organized Jewish community. Millions of charitable dollars are invested in programs focused on raising the next generation of committed and engaged Jews. These places and programs, which are supposed to be safe and encouraging settings, have made transformational progress in ensuring the wellbeing of children with different backgrounds, orientations, identities, and abilities. Now they must do a better job of protecting all our children from sexual predators.
Movies such as Best Picture Oscar-winner Spotlight have told the story of how predators exploit relationships with families and children wherever adults work closely with kids. But the sexual abuse of minors isn’t a religious problem; it’s a human one. Experts agree that any organization that provides regular interaction between adults and children will attract sexual predators. Child molesters seek out these settings to gain access to their victims. In the Jewish world, those settings include Jewish schools, camps, youth groups, and synagogues.
Recent scandals in the Jewish media and in broader society have begun to focus attention on this issue. Yet despite the outrage that accompanies each new revelation, no systemic solution has been proposed or implemented to dramatically change the organizational landscape with regard to this issue. There are numerous advocates and organizations that have focused on child sexual abuse and done excellent work in areas such as training, education, victim-support, and advocacy. But they have largely been operating on their own, exerting herculean efforts with minimal resources, and helping one victim, one organization, at a time. Over many years, their hard work and persistence has shifted the conversation about what can and should be done in every organization that works with children, across the entire communal system.
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