UNITED STATES
Frum Follies
Rabbi Shraga Feivel Zimmerman, the Gateshead Rav Hair, recently spoke about “The Halachic Obligation of Reporting Abuse to the Authorities” in a telecast aimed at an Australian rabbinical audience.
Rabbi Zimmerman is a Haredi who holds a prominent pulpit as the main posek for Gateshead, a Haredi community centered around the UK’s first kollel formed during WW II by R. Eliyahu Dessler and others.
R. Zimmerman showed courage in the case of Todros Grynhaus by publicly declaring the community erred in the past in trying to manage his abuse by counseling. This was in contrast to the former mashgiach of Gateshead, R. Matisyahu Salomon, who continued to run back channel interference to obstruct the legal process. In the end, Grynhaus was convicted of sexually abusing two minors. Rabbi Zimmerman’s testimony contributed to that conviction.
In this talk he demolishes most of the pseudo-halachic misrepresentations put forth to conceal abuse from the authorities. At one point he declares that those who invoke the shulchan aruch on mesirah to block reporting are either ignorant of choshen mishpat or deliberately misrepresenting it.
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