Sexual abuse cases in Brooklyn's Haredi community


The response of the Haredi Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York City, to allegations of sexual abuse against its spiritual leaders has drawn scrutiny. When teachers, rabbis, and other leaders have been accused of sexual abuse, authorities in the Haredi community have often failed to report offenses to Brooklyn police, intimidated witnesses, and encouraged shunning against victims and those members of the community who speak out against cases of abuse.

Prevalence and under-reporting

The greater New York City area is home to the largest Haredi community outside Israel. Haredim, who are often called ultra-Orthodox, though they themselves do not like that label, make up about a quarter million of New York City's population, and most of them live in Brooklyn. According to scholars, the rate of sex abuse within Haredi communities is roughly the same as anywhere else. However, for generations, most victims have not come forward with accusations because of stigmatization from the community, and when they did come forward, the matter generally stayed within the community, rather than being reported to the police and forming part of crime statistics.
Sexual abuse within the community is often not reported to police. Many feel that to report a Jew to non-Jewish authorities constitutes the religious crime of mesirah: Samuel Heilman, a professor of Jewish studies at Queens College, writes that one reason why cases or patterns of sexual abuse are rarely reported to law enforcement is because "they think that anyone who turns over anyone to the outside authorities is committing a transgression to the community at large". Agudath Israel of America, a leading ultra-Orthodox organization, has stated that observant Jews should not report allegations to law enforcement without first consulting with a rabbi. Heilman adds that some wish to protect the community's reputation and the accused's family, and that the rabbis worry that outside scrutiny could weaken their authority: "They are more afraid of the outside world than the deviants within their own community", since "the deviants threaten individuals here or there, but the outside world threatens everyone and the entire structure of their world". However, other rabbis, including a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbinic court in Crown Heights and Yosef Blau, disagree, and encourage reporting abusers to police, stating that the ban on mesirah does not apply. Rather than reporting to police, Haredim may take a case of sexual abuse to the shomrim, a local Jewish street patrol. The shomrim keep the names of suspected child molesters on file, but do not share them with law enforcement or take other measures to end abuse, and sometimes try to discourage people from taking a case to the police.
Reports of abuse to religious authorities rarely result in punishment for the offender; as in the Catholic sex abuse cases—where child molesters were re-assigned to other dioceses—rabbis, teachers, and youth leaders found to be abusing children are usually re-assigned to another yeshiva, perhaps after seeing a board of rabbis.
Many of the people accused and/or convicted of sexual abuse and related charges in Brooklyn's Haredi community are rabbis. Among other accused are a school principal, a spiritual adviser, and a social worker.

Reprisal

sometimes occurs after someone is accused of sexual abuse. Victims, their families, and advocates have been threatened with violence, false police reports of child abuse, loss of kosher licenses or other harm to business, and/or eviction. They are pressured or offered bribes not to co-operate with prosecutors, and physical harassment, distribution of fliers attacking victims and advocates, and coercion occur.
Establishment reprisal against sexually abused children and their parents can be severe: Parents have been shunned by the community, with rabbis forbidding congregants to speak to them, and abused children have been barred from schools.
Even when cases are reported to police, they often cannot be prosecuted because victims decide not to go forward with a case, or agree to a plea deal with the accuser, out of fear of reprisal. District Attorney Charles Hynes has stated: "As soon as we would give the name of a defendant... would engage this community in a relentless search for the victims... And they're very, very good at identifying the victims. And then the victims would be intimidated and threatened, and the case would fall apart." Hynes has described the intimidation that occurs in these cases as worse than anything else he has ever seen in his career, including mob cases and police corruption cases.

Prosecution

Brooklyn's district attorney, Charles Hynes, has had a mixed record on prosecution of these sexual abuse cases. He was praised for starting a program in 2009 called Kol Tzedek, which is geared toward ultra-Orthodox Jews and encourages them to co-operate with law enforcement; according to Hynes, it reduced the amount of victim intimidation. Since 2009, roughly 100 out of 5389 cases of sexual abuse in the district have come from the ultra-Orthodox community. The first high-profile child sex abuse case that Hynes brought against the Hasidic community, since his election in 1989, was that of Nechemya Weberman, an unlicensed youth counselor and prominent member of the Satmar community, who was convicted on December 10, 2012, of repeatedly sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl he was supposed to be counseling, and sentenced to 103 years in prison.
Some victims' rights activists have still criticized Hynes, accusing him of pandering to rabbis and those in power for political reasons, and not prosecuting cases aggressively enough. Described as "a velvet glove wrapped around a velvet fist", his approach did not publicize the names of defendants, even those who were convicted of abuse, and took other steps to remain in the good graces of religious leaders who took the side of accused molesters. In one complex series of cases, for example, after a prominent cantor was convicted of sexually abusing a 16-year-old boy, the boy's father was indicted by prosecutor Hynes for extortion based in part on testimony from a supporter of the cantor. And, as of 2013, the cantor's conviction was overturned based on the parent's "indictment and other technicalities".
At trials for these cases, expert witnesses inform the jury that Hasidic victims often do not come forward because the community is so insular.
When Rabbi Yoel Malik, 33, a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect, was given a 60-day jail sentence for the abuse of students at Ohr HaMeir, a now closed Satmar yeshiva in Borough Park, the punishment was criticized by Ben Hirsch, a spokesman for Survivors for Justice, who stated that, "What DA Thompson has done is inexplicable", and claimed that, "Through unexplained plea deals such as this, he has effectively quashed any willingness on the part of victims to come forward". It was claimed that the victims were "extremely reluctant to testify publicly", according to a law enforcement source familiar with the case, as quoted in the NY Daily News.

Victim Advocacy

Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg, an ultra-Orthodox Rabbi from the Satmar Hasidic Community in Williamsburg, created a hotline featuring weekly, impassioned lectures in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English - imploring victims to report sexual abuse to the authorities, while accusing community leaders of silencing the reporting of child abuse. Rosenberg also uses his social media presence to share his opinions on the state of child sexual abuse in the Jewish community, chronicle his efforts and struggles as an activist, and occasionally engage in online hate speech against the LGBT Community, referring to homosexuals as "perverts" and "terrorists".
In March 2016, Rosenberg discouraged his followers from participating in a protest against the alleged cover-up of child abuse in Yeshiva Oholei Torah of Crown Heights because it was to be attended by members of the gay community. "We will not stand in rank together with the faggots", Rosenberg wrote on his blog, "no matter how just the cause".
Rosenberg is often shunned by communal authorities, and there have been instances in which he was physically attacked. In 2008, fliers were posted around Williamsburg depicting a coiled snake around Rosenberg's head with the words "Nuchem Snake Rosenberg: Leave Tainted One!". Rosenberg has also been banned from Satmar synagogues by its authorities, and he alleges that he has been formally ostracized by several Rabbinic entities. Despite his decades of activism, Rosenberg has yet to be involved in the investigation, arrest, or prosecution of any member of any Jewish community for child sexual abuse.
Anti-abuse community activist Rabbi Tzvi Gluck has said that in 2011, a 30-year-old man molested a 14-year-old boy in a ritual bath; this case never made it to the police due to community pressure on the victim. A rabbi made the boy apologize to the molester for seducing him.
Monsey rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Jacobson has lectured on this topic, which disturbed some people, but also has brought awareness to the problem.

Notable cases

At his trial, after which he was sentenced to 13 months in jail, the courtroom was packed with Weinberg's supporters who maintained, and continue to maintain, his innocence. Weinberg also received more than 190 letters of support from former clients and prominent members of the community who he had assisted. In response, presiding Justice Gustin Reichbach criticized the "communal attitude that seeks to blame, indeed punish, victims".