NEW YORK
The American Conservative
By ROD DREHER • October 11, 2013
The Jewish Daily Forward has for the past 10 months or so been writing that the senior leadership of Yeshiva University, a major institution of Orthodox Judaism in America, covered up sexual abuse for decades. The paper now reports that Yeshiva is in serious financial trouble because of a huge lawsuit abuse victims are filing against it. And the editorial page blasted the university for its recent hire of Akiva Roth, a teacher who in 1997 pled guilty to four counts of lewdness with boys he was preparing for bar mitzvah. From the editorial:
When will Yeshiva University ever learn? When will modern American Orthodoxy’s flagship institution learn to own up to its mistakes, genuinely reform its procedures, live out its values and, above all, provide a safe and honest environment for its students?
The latest revelation, that Y.U. hired a new faculty member who had been convicted of inappropriate sexual behavior with boys, starkly illustrates the gross mismanagement and hypocrisy of the university’s current administration. Here we have an institution reeling from allegations that for decades — decades — its leadership ignored the sexual abuse of students at the hands of at least two of its most prominent staff members. Here we see an institution that covered up the abuse, allowed the offending rabbis to take jobs working with children elsewhere in the Jewish community and, even after the Forward uncovered this sorry and painful story, refused to acknowledge its own complicity and grasp the opportunity to help with the healing process.
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