February 3, 2009

NPR aired a brutal story today about two former Hasidic boys who were sexually abused as youngsters—one at the mikvah and the other at his school. Joel Engelman’s tale is particularly troubling and evokes memories of the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal. Shame. A code of silence. Fear of God and man.

NPR reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty explains:

Engelman parks his car across from the United Talmudical Academy, a hulking building on a desolate street. This was the yeshiva, or Jewish boys’ school, that Engelman attended. Engelman says he was 8 years old, sitting in Hebrew class one day, when he was called to the principal’s office. When he arrived, he says, Rabbi Avrohom Reichman told him to close the door.

“He motioned for me to get on his lap, and as soon as I got on the chair, he would swivel the chair from right to left, continuously,” Engelman says. “Then he would start touching me while talking to me. He would start at my shoulders and work his way down to my genitals.”

Engelman says this occurred twice a week for two months. He told no one for more than a decade. Reichman was, after all, a revered rabbi. Four years ago, he told his parents. And a year ago, when he heard that Reichman had allegedly abused several other boys, they confronted Reichman. When the school heard about it, they gave the rabbi a polygraph.

“He failed miserably,” Engelman says. “So they told me, ‘This guy is gone. This guy has to go.’ “

But a few weeks later, a religious leader from the school approached Engelman’s mother, Pearl. He posed an astonishing question: On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad was the molestation?

She was speechless. Then she says, the man continued, ” ‘We found out there was no skin-to-skin contact, that it was through clothing.’ So he’s telling me, ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, this was maybe a 2 or a 3, so what’s the big fuss?’ “

The school hired Reichman back. That was in July 2008 — one week after Joel Engelmen turned 23 and could no longer bring a criminal or civil case against the rabbi.

Reichman and school officials declined to be interviewed for this story. But Rabbi David Niederman, who heads the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, says the school did its due diligence. He says the allegation was thoroughly investigated by an independent committee of lay people and rabbis.

“I’m convinced that they made a serious investigation,” he says. “They felt that it’s not credible.”

Now Engelman has filed a long-shot civil suit against Reichman and the school, claiming they broke an oral contract.

Reichman’s attorney, Jacob Laufer, says the lawsuit is baseless and that the community is fully behind the rabbi.

“Even after these accusations were publicly made,” he says, “the parents continue to compete among themselves for the opportunity to have their children be educated by Rabbi Reichman.”

The Reichman case is not isolated. Four ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn have been sued or arrested for abusing boys in the past three years. That’s a tiny fraction of the actual abuse, says Hella Winston, author of Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels. She says that in researching her book, she encountered dozens of alleged victims who told her sexual abuse is an open secret in the Hasidic community. But the community is so insulated and the rabbis are so powerful that few dare to come forward.

“If I become known as an informer, then people also won’t want to have anything to do with my family,” she explains. “They won’t want to marry my children, won’t want to give me a job. This is the fear.”

But more and more accusations against rabbis have begun to circulate. Last August, politician and radio talk show host Dov Hikind devoted an hourlong program to sexual abuse. He interviewed Pearl Engelman, who spoke under an alias, about her son’s case.

The calls flooded in. Hikind, who is an Orthodox Jew himself, represents this area in the New York Assembly. He says after the show, people started showing up at his office with their stories.

“Fifty, 60, 70 people,” he says, “but you got to remember for each person who comes forward, God only knows how many people are not coming forward.”

The Jewish Journal published a cover story two years ago about sexual abuse, under the headline “Don’t Kid Yourself: There’s abusive clergy in the Jewish community, too.” It’s worth a read.

See Dawkins dance. See Dawkins rap. See Dawkins bag on believers like me and you.

It’s Dick Dawkins and The New Atheists, featuring Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. Hilarious. Thanks, Faith Central.

In his first article as executive editor of Commentary, Jonathan Tobin writes that that Jewish community has much bigger problems than the hundreds of millions of dollars lost by nonprofits in the Bernard Madoff investment mess. The most pressing issue, Tobin writes, is the resurgence of the “continuity crisis,” which the Jewish community has struggled with for two decades. An excerpt:

The results of the past two decades suggest that the outreach model is a failure; individual Jewish federations and most communal organizations have seen declines in fundraising, and what data there are indicate that these efforts have done little to renew the commitment of Jews on the margins to the community or its future. Indeed, one of the reasons that generous Jews have been so determined to bypass the larger Jewish communal organizations may well be that those organizations have been so ineffectual in addressing the concerns of committed members of the community who have wanted to use their wealth to ensure a specifically Jewish future in the United States and in Israel. The consensus-driven culture of Jewish philanthropy has, predictably, failed to make a decisive choice with respect to the future of American Jewry.

The combined crises of 2008—the financial collapse and the Madoff scandal—will certainly exacerbate this dilemma and perhaps even sharpen the debate over the allocation of dollars. But the devastating losses created by Madoff pale when set beside the more pressing concern of demographic decline and the possibility that the decline in the number of people who are interested in Jewish causes will only accelerate over time unless something is done to arrest it.

The inability of the apparatus of Jewish philanthropy to find the will to focus its existing resources on the threat posed by rising levels of assimilation dwarfs the worries generated by financial scandals, even those as serious as that of Madoff.

I wrote a story that will be published this week about related changes at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. The umbrella organization is trying to engage new members in the process of communal building, but by extending its funding to non-traditional organizations and reducing its support to blue-bloods, some have voice strong displeasure with the changes.

“There is no sense of the value of keeping a community together,” said the president of a nonprofit traditionally supported by the Federation. “We’re just going to have to make it on our own.”

More on that later.

(Hat tip: The Fundermentalist)

I’ve been meaning to congratulate Peter Manseau. His first novel, “Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter,” received the National Jewish Book Award for fiction. He told me this was the first time in more than 50 years that the award has gone to non-Jewish writer. Manseau can now be mentioned in the same sentence as Malamud, Ozick and Roth and gives hope to the rest of us. I think the appropriate expression here is: Mazal tov!

The official description from Simon & Schuster:

Summer, sweltering, 1996. A book warehouse in western Massachusetts. A man at the beginning of his adult life—and the end of his career rope—becomes involved with a woman, a language, and a great lie that will define his future. Most auspiciously of all, he runs across Itsik Malpesh, a ninetysomething Russian immigrant who claims to be the last Yiddish poet in America. When a set of accounting ledgers in which Malpesh has written his memoirs surfaces—twenty-two volumes brimming with adventure, drama, deception, passion, and wit—the young man is compelled to translate them, telling Malpesh’s story as his own life unfolds, and bringing together two paths that coincide in shocking and unexpected ways.

Moving from revolutionary Russia to New York’s Depression-era Lower East Side to millennium’s-end Baltimore with drama, adventure, and boisterous, feisty charm to spare, the unpeeling of this friendship is a story of the entire twentieth century.

Jeff Sharlet, Manseau’s co-author on “Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible,” reviewed his friends book when it came out in September. (I had intended to but couldn’t foster enough of an L.A. connection.) Here’s what Sharlet had to say:

Peter, the outsider as insider, the son of a Catholic priest and a nun—an abomination in his own tradition!—a Gentile who has written of passing as a Jew, of lying to little old Jewish ladies to make them better when he came to take their Yiddish books away (he was the book collector for the Yiddish Book Center), a novelist who writes in English, speaks Yiddish, and, he once explained, dreams in Catholic whether he wants to or not, has produced the real thing. Or, rather, produced is not the word: he has manufactured it. Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter flows so fast you may read it in a sitting or two, but it’s not an organic creation. It’s assembled. The narrator of the novel is a writer much like Peter, who intersperses his translation of a Yiddish memoir with “Translator’s Notes” that tell us more about his own love affair with a young, secular Jew who is busy reinventing herself as an Orthodox woman. The bulk of the novel is the memoir, and that Peter has drawn from the dust of the Yiddish Book Center’s warehouse, borrowing parts and pieces from the Sweatshop Poets and Di Khaliastre, the Gang, Yiddish experimentalists in Warsaw between the wars, and the Big Three—Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz—and the author of the first play banned on Broadway, Sholem Asch, and the darker, even more forgotten writers, Lamed Shapiro and Yankev Glatshteyn and the writer who went by “Der Nister,” the hidden one. Peter, once a Yiddish book collector, has become a Yiddish book thief, snatching stories from limbo and resurrecting them as Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter.

Nextbook previously published a revealing excerpt from the book. And you can hear Manseau talk about his book on NPR or in the video after the jump: