NEW HAVEN (CT)
New Haven Register
Oct. 19, 2019
By Steven R. Wilf
Where is the community in the Rabbi Daniel Greer child-rape case? Greer was convicted on four charges pertaining to risk of injury to a minor. According to testimony, Greer repeatedly engaged in sex with Eliyahu Mirlis, a student in his New Haven school, and propositioned with offensive touching another student. The abuse began when Mirlis was 14 years old. Even more devastating was the 2017 civil trial where Greer was found liable with a $15 million judgment for these actions. In the civil case, evidence was presented that Greer abused another student over a period of years.
As in most criminal trials, the focus was largely on the perpetrator and the victim. Yet the Jewish community loomed unexpectedly large. Was it an enabler that provided the cultural fabric to allow the sexual abuse to proceed? Did the particular fraught power dynamic between rabbi and student impede reporting by the victim? And was the tightly knit character of Orthodox Jewish communities critical in allowing the years of sexual exploitation to occur without being detected?
Expert testimony by forensic psychologist Gavriel Fagan did as much to exoticize the Orthodox Jewish community as it did to make its world more transparent. The question that loomed over the trial was why Mirlis did not report the sexual abuse earlier and why he maintained contact with Greer after his marriage — and even honored him at his son’s circumcision. Much was made of the charismatic authority of rabbis, religious sexual repression and the Orthodox Jewish insistence upon remaining isolated from the outside world.
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