TEL AVIV-YAFO (ISRAEL)
Haaretz [Tel Aviv, Israel]
March 22, 2022
By Allison Kaplan Sommer
Protest letter signed by hundreds of Reform Jews urges immediate action for greater accountability and transparency, following a report about alleged sexual misconduct in the movement in past decades
Nearly 500 past and present staff members of the Union for Reform Judaism are demanding “a concrete plan and public timeline for institutional review and reform” following a damning investigation released last month uncovering numerous instances of sexual misconduct, sexual assault and tolerance of a “sexualized culture” in the movement’s summer camps, Israel trips and youth movement activities over the past 50 years.
A protest letter carrying the signatures of both employees and volunteers at institutions run by the Union for Reform Judaism, including senior rabbis in the movement over the years, was delivered late last week to the URJ’s leaders.
The letter urged immediate action for greater accountability and a clearer path to address the flaws in the system that had allowed the transgressions to happen, and prevent them from occurring in the future.
When first released earlier this month, the letter had 100 signatures. The rest have been added since, and several veteran and respected Reform rabbis have signed on.
The letter stated that its signatories awaited “swift and decisive” action and a “serious project of reform” with “high expectations and limited patience.”
Sexual harassment, abuse and misconduct, the letter said, were “heinous and vile reflections of unequal systems of power in institutions and organizational life,” and that those inequalities needed to be addressed immediately and directly.
“Many of us know good people working within the URJ who labor every day to effect change in these areas,” the letter stated. “We are often left wondering why they have to work so hard. What has been standing in the way? The movement taught us to speak truth to power, and we find ourselves in the uncomfortable situation where the Movement is the power.”
Rabbi Stephanie Crawley, associate rabbi at Temple Micah in Washington, was one of the first to sign the letter. She told Haaretz that the dissatisfaction and unhappiness expressed in the letter reflected disappointment with the pace and degree of the movement’s follow-up action on the report thus far, and also a lack of transparency in the process.
It also reflected a level of frustration with the report itself, which only named a handful of figures – all of whom were retired or deceased – and failed to name those higher in the movement’s ranks who were made aware of the incidents and situations detailed in the report, but allowed it to persist.
“I’ve been really disappointed at how we’ve essentially rehabilitated people without requiring them to go through the proper steps of rehabilitating themselves and doing real teshuvah [repentance], and doing the actual legal and spiritual work that it would take to rectify some of these things,” Crawley said.
“When you read the URJ report, and hearing how deep the knowledge of some of this was, and how far many went to protect [perpetrators] and keep things under wraps … just sort of sent me over the edge,” she continued. “It’s one thing to not know, and it’s another thing to very well know and keep people around and protect them. The reason why I wanted to sign on to this letter, and why I felt this strongly, is because I think there’s a lot of work to be done and a lot of cleaning up that has to happen. And the only way that that can happen is if it’s full transparency, and if there’s a real process that involves lay leaders along with professional leadership.”
A senior rabbi at a large congregation who signed the letter but asked not to be quoted by name said the report left out the names of “rabbis in responsible positions in the movement who moved rabbis who were abusers around from position to position after it was clear to them that those rabbis had been engaged in misconduct – much as bishops and archbishops in the church moved priests from one parish to another without informing the new parish,” he said, referring to the child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
One of the omissions, he noted, was someone he had personally confronted after witnessing him verbally abuse a woman, and whose institution was aware of complaints against him but did not take disciplinary action. He “continued to teach and apparently continued to abuse women,” the rabbi said.
The senior rabbi also said the report reflected “an extremely sad chapter in the Reform movement’s history – it turns my stomach. But the truth must be told both to hold those responsible who are guilty of victimizing others, and to serve as a powerful deterrent against anyone who crosses the line and abuses people going forward.”
The letter was directed to URJ President Rabbi Rick Jacobs, Jennifer Kaufman, chair of its board of trustees, and senior professional and lay leaders.
Jacobs said in response: “We know that the signers speak from a position of love and concern, and we are grateful for this outreach. They are among our partners in this critical work, and we look forward to following up with them very soon.”
Senior figures
The behavior detailed in the URJ report included inappropriate contact between adults and minors, involving senior figures such as camp directors and youth movement leaders, for a period spanning decades.
The report also revealed that in some cases, congregational rabbis who had been fired for sexual misconduct were subsequently hired by the national movement. Meanwhile, some staff accused of inappropriate behavior had been permitted to remain in their posts.
It was conducted by Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, which was hired by the URJ to carry out a comprehensive investigation into charges spanning a wide range of the movement.
At the time of the report’s release on February 17, the movement issued a statement acknowledging that the report included “serious and credible reports of sexual harassment, abuse, and misconduct, including sexual assault, taking place over decades at URJ workplaces, camps, and youth programs. We are heartbroken and distressed by these accounts and we profoundly apologize for the enduring pain caused to so many.”
The report regarding youth activities was the final installment of a trio of third-party investigations by Debevoise, initiated by the Reform movement’s seminary, rabbinical association and synagogue network. The first investigation, released in November, focused on Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and identified patterns of abuse in the seminary’s history.
The second, examining the Central Conference of American Rabbis, or CCAR, was made public in late December.
The third and final report, which triggered the protest letter, was especially disturbing because of the involvement of minors.
The protest letter criticized the report for lacking “clarity” regarding “the scale of negligence and abuse which has been allowed to unfold in the URJ’s professional workplaces, summer camps, and youth programs.” It added that “suffering within a community is woefully incomplete unless it fully explores and makes public the structural forces that allowed the suffering to continue.”
Failing to apply the same scrutiny and “thorough accounting of justice” taught in Reform movement programs “would forsake our community’s credibility as a moral voice in the public square and as a spiritual space for survivors,” the letter argued.
The report recommended improvement and simplification of the movement’s practices for reporting, tracking and responding to abuse allegations. It also recommended that the branches of the URJ collaborate more closely to prevent those with instances of misconduct on their record from moving within them.
It was also critical of the movement’s existing teshuvah process – one in which employees engaged in misconduct can return themselves to good standing. It said that scrutiny was needed to determine whether that process “has been effective in preventing future misconduct and whether it addresses adequately the needs of individuals and congregations that have been harmed by the misconduct.”
When the report was released last month, URJ stated that it was “committed to reviewing and implementing these recommendations as thoroughly and swiftly as possible.”
Subsequently, on March 11, an email was sent to URJ affiliates titled: “Path to Accountability: Next Steps in Implementing the Ethics Report Recommendations.”
In the email, the movement outlined steps it had taken thus far, including the creation of two separate “Ethics Implementation Task Forces” designed to “oversee the implementation of the recommendations, including compliance with deadlines, as well as other initiatives that may be pursued by the URJ to combat sexual misconduct and retaliation throughout the URJ and its programs.”
The email also announced the addition of two full-time staff positions “focused on culture change and employee engagement,” and “training enhancements” including “new and upgraded sexual misconduct training modules for staff and volunteers working with youth.”
Organizers of the protest letter said they felt let down by the March 11 email and its “slow-moving” bureaucratic approach and lack of “substantive information” regarding steps that the report had recommended.
The letter suggested more far-reaching steps, citing an article by Karla Goldman, a former faculty member at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, who proposed that the URJ create and release a concrete plan for institutional reform and accountability tied to public quarterly benchmarks and a commitment to transparency.
The letter also called for the organization to “state unequivocally their belief in survivors’ and reporters’ testimonies,” as well as “formally release all former employees from non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and end the practice of requiring employees to sign them in order to receive severance.”
Crawley has been part of the Reform Movement and Reform institutions all her life, growing up in a Reform congregation, attending and working at URJ camps, and attending Hebrew Union College. She said that while much of the information in the report did not come as a surprise to her, “it was painful to see the stories in print” and “the extent to which the movement allowed for this to happen.”
Together with her criticism, however, she noted: “I am proud of the Reform movement and all of its branches” for initiating and cooperating with the investigation that led to the report. “I think it’s a very good thing that the Reform Movement is doing.”
Still, she said she was extremely “dissatisfied” with “how quiet the atmosphere was after the report. It didn’t seem to make a lot of noise and there wasn’t much energy about responding to it” – perhaps, she speculated, because it was the third report that was released.
“As important as the other two reports about Hebrew Union College and the Central Conference of American Rabbis were, the URJ is different. It is a large, representative movement – and the third report involves children, which I think certainly should have intensified things.”