UNITED STATES
Hevria
BY ASHER LOVY • MARCH 15, 2016
Recently, Newsweek published an article detailing the ongoing abuse of children, both physically and sexually, at various Chabad schools, most notably, Oholei Torah, in Crown Heights. The article was devastating, both in subject and in scope, chronicling decades of abuse, cover-ups, and threats against victims. You’d think that anyone with a soul reading that would be horrified, that their thoughts would immediately be with the survivors and their wellbeing. You’d be wrong.
The outrage was immediate. Newsweek is an antisemitic source. They got some facts wrong about how Chassidus works. They made us sound uneducated. Or the worst ones were actually, we agree with your cause but not with your methods—in other words, we acknowledge the problem, but we’re not going to do anything about it because you published the story in Newsweek. A friend sent me a link to a COLLive.om article which basically summed up all of those points, which I found utterly devestating.
Here’s what makes me so mad about these responses.
For all the outrage mustered in response to all of these articles, you’ll never see outrage directed at the fact that the religious media refuses to cover abuse. You’ll never see this level of communal outrage at the fact that religious institutions knowingly cover up physical and sexual abuse. You’ll never see this level of condemnation leveled against the people who bully and threaten victims of abuse into shutting up, lest they lose their jobs, homes, families, shidduch prospects, or any future standing within the community.
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