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Barbara Finkelstein
May 2, 2017
This article originally appeared in the Forverts.
When a notable anti-domestic violence activist asked her father, the founder of a Baltimore yeshiva, how rabbis had dealt with child sexual abuse in prewar Europe, he told her, “We closed the shutters.”
Up until a few years ago, this selective blindness was the de facto rabbinic therapy for addressing child sexual abuse in the Jewish community. If you couldn’t see the problem, you couldn’t name it, and if you couldn’t name it, it didn’t exist.
But the same forces that rent the veil of secrecy over child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, Penn State University’s football team and Great Britain’s youth soccer system exposed the alarming reality of abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community. “Social media brought major awareness to the existence of child sexual abuse,” says Meyer Seewald, co-founder of Jewish Community Watch, a victim advocacy organization that takes a guerrilla approach to supporting victims, shaming offenders and rebuking rabbis who minimize the trauma associated with sexual crimes against children.
Indeed, grassroots organizations such as JCW have thrown open the shutters on a communitywide tendency to downplay victim suffering and perpetrator guilt for two arguably valid reasons: Rattling skeletons in the family closet compromises the marriageability of the perpetrator’s children; and committing mesirah — turning over a fellow Jew to non-Jewish civil officials — is halachically taboo. Historically speaking, “squealing” on a fellow Jew to Diaspora authorities frequently did result in the punishment by death of the Jewish offender. Maimonides himself urged rabbinic authorities to kill Jewish informants.
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