UNITED STATES
The New York Jewish Week
BY HANNAH DREYFUS May 25, 2017
he seeds for Shira Berkovits’ organization were planted in rural Minnesota at the breakfast table of a devout Lutheran family.
The table belonged to Victor Vieth, founder of a national child protection training center and an expert in addressing child abuse in small communities. During the summer of 2013, Berkovits, who is Orthodox, lived with Vieth and his family in order to absorb everything she could about systematically preventing abuse.
“We’d sit at the breakfast table and start brainstorming,” recalled Berkovits, who was a law student at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at the time — the summer experience with Vieth was a legal internship.
“I remember saying, ‘Victor, what would it look like if we did all this in the Jewish community?’”
Sacred Spaces, a nonprofit that aids institutions across the broader Jewish communal landscape in developing policies to prevent institutional abuse and properly handle it when it occurs, is the realization of that dream. Launched last July, the initiative aims to train Jewish community professionals around the world about child protection policies, best practices and boundary violations. The end goal is to create an accreditation system for the Jewish community.
Unlike other initiatives that have sprung up to address this problem, Sacred Spaces is not focused on helping victims or exposing offenders — it is aimed at reshaping institutions.
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