Jeanette Friedman

Honorable Intentions from an Honorable Man

Sep 01

Jeanette Friedmandomestic violence 1 Comment

This was written in 2003. Since then, I have no clue if Silverstein ever succeeded in his mission. I found this while googling for something else, and dashed off a comment that applies for right now. We haven’t seen much action on the child abuse front in those three years until recently, when unorthodoxjew and Robert Kolka, among others, began to expose the rot in the system–again. Here’s what Silverstein was hoping to do, and underneath is my response.

I’ll be cross-posting this on unorthodoxjew, too, It’s addressed to anyone who cares about these issues so that they get what the root of the problem is and where it comes from.

In 2003, Silverstein wrote on his Tikkun Olam website,
Judaism and Child Abuse

I am in the process of writing a personal and theological meditation on the issue of child abuse. I will especially focus on the role that rabbi’s might play within their congregations in identifying and ameliorating the suffering of child members. Right now, I am in the process of identifying Jewish traditional sources which deal with this problem. I am also trying to determine what type, and how much training rabbis receive both in rabbinical school and through professional education. I hope to talk to a pulpit rabbi who has counseled families suffering from abuse to try to understand what constructive roles they can play (and also what roles they cannot play, if any).

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jeanette friedman said,
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August 23, 2006 @ 6:17 am

the ultra orthodox rabbis generally do nothing about child abuse, they aren’t taught to recognize the symptoms and until extremely recently, when the Yudi Kolka story, after decades of his spreading misery round, broke, they basically refused to deal with any of this in public. Now thanks to unorthodox jew, and people who are tired of seeing kids and wives suffer…after a number of hi-profile cases like Chayeh Seiger who really got the shaft, things might be changing, albeit very slowly.

Using Loshen Horah and the laws of hostages and all that ancient stuff that had nothing to do with criminal behavior in terms of dina Malchutei dina–because after all, the penalty for raping a 3-year old is that you get to marry her–-the ultra-orthodox rabbis were able to pull the wool over people’s eyes and force the victims to shut up–-or they would be victimized further by being tossed out of school and generally treated like dirt beneath their “perfect� community’s feet.

When I wote the Shma journal article “Our Dirty Little Secret is no More� more than ten years ago, neither Ohel or Ed Gluck wanted to raise these issues in public. Now they do, now they get it. When the three boys in Bobov, who are now probably upstanding members of the community, gang-raped a classmate because his father was a BT and his mother was a ger, and then the victim committed suicide, those boys never saw the inside of a jail cell–-because why should three more lives be ruined? (so spake one of the most important women in the Bobov community).

When the late Novominsker Rebitzen was asked why Mikvah ladies don’t check for bruises, she said that no one pays attention to anything her husband says about expensive weddings, they certainly aren’t going to pay attention to that.. she, btw, was a college graduate, and a social worker at the Jewish Family Services in Boro Park, and was my intake counselor when I got a divorce from the guy who battered me.

When men neglected their children and beat their wives, it was ignored. When the Ungvar Rebbe, Menashe HaKaton Klein (Elie Weisel’s rabbi) started a concubine hotline and declared a moratorium on gets, no one really cared, and from what some wives have told me, there is now an underground concubine society in some orthodox neighborhoods.

Now the rabbinate is being forced to bring this stuff out in public because of people who have had enough of the nasty dirty secret that was no secret and will now have to be dealt with in a realistic way to benefit and counsel our children.

How you are going to find stuff in the Talmud to support a positive pro-active role on the victims’ behalf is beyond me. From the stuff I see in the Talmud, I am far from hopeful. Look at the way they talk about Goliath’s mother–like she had anything to do with anything. Never mind what they said about Dina, who after all, according to Rashi, was “looking for it.�

You will need to look at the rules governing self-defense– without using pikuach nefesh as the basis for your reasoning on any of this, you will be wiped out before you start. Because the first thing they throw in your face is “Spare the rod and spoil the child.� My machiteynista’s 6-year-old brother was murdered by his rebbe in cheder for not knowing his place in the chumash. His rebbe kicked him in the stomach with a steel-toed boot. The boy died the next day. No one cared, and the rebbe, who was like many other cheder rebbes in that time, continued to teach little children, who grew up to survive the Holocaust, come to America and never broke the cycle.

Neither did some of their kids. So I wish you the best of luck, because you are on a holy mission, and you need to succeed for the sake of the women and children.

good luck
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That, with some minor corrections, is what I left on the honorable man’s website. We will see if it generates a response. The Talmud, meanwhile, is not very helpful, and I now see why women weren’t allowed to go near it. Talk about blowing stereotypes out of the water. People who learn daf yomi know precisely what I am talking about. The most dangerous creature in the Jewish community is an enlightened Jewish woman with a brain, reasonableness, rationality and a sense of ethics.
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In the meantime, what was the result of the Torah Temimah fiasco? Who knows? Everyone is so obsessed with who is saying what, that the criminals still function with impunity. Just look at the Jon Benet Ramsey fiasco, the whole world is focusing on that instead of the fact that Iran is saying to the world that he will wipe every Jew off the face of the planet with the help of nuclear bombs and that no one will stop him. There is a reason that the Ramsey story is so overwhelming. It’s because it can happen to any kid at any time, and some people go into the education business to be near kids

So do you still think there are no predators in the Jewish community, where educational methodology in the ultra-orthodox community, especially in the boys’ schools is psychologically primitive?

Remind yourself that a: you have a mother who is female. b. you may even have sisters. c. you were a child once and d. you have children and/or grandchildren/child relatives.

Don’t you want them to be protected from pedophiles and batterers? Ask yourself how you can do that, and then do it.

Just do the right thing ’cause it’s the right thing to do.