Spelling Out Abuse After Nechemya Weberman's Conviction

By Judy Brown (Eishes Chayil)

Edited By Naomi Zeveloff

Published December 20, 2012, issue of December 28, 2012.

Guilty on all 59 counts: guilty, guilty, guilty.

On Monday, December 10, a jury of 12 found Nechemya Weberman enormously guilty. The jurors convicted him of sexually abusing an underage girl entrusted to his care. They declared the respected member of the ultra-Orthodox community to be a criminal and a fraud, and thousands of survivors, advocates and victims, many of whom still live in silence, breathed a sigh of relief as one.

Once, an ultra-Orthodox man could not be found guilty of sexual abuse. He could not be charged with a word that did not exist.

I was 9 years old when I first encountered the word “abuse.” I was at my friend’s house. I found a book on a desk near her room, and ran to the staircase to read it. I don’t remember the title, or what the book was about, only that across its white cover was a picture of a gun, and on the first page, in the subtitle, was an adjective I’d never seen.

I read it, slowly: “Ub-u-sive…”

My friend’s mother came up the stairs just then, and when she saw me holding the book, she gasped. I wanted to ask her what ub-u-sive meant, but she grabbed the book right out of my hands and scolded me. She warned me never to take books without permission. Clasping the book firmly in her hand, she closed the door of her room behind her, and the book disappeared, hidden away, I suppose, in that mysterious, forbidden place where all books go that are not meant to be read.

It remains a vivid memory in my mind, the first of many similar episodes with books, magazines or pictures. Every incident reinforced the dominant ideology of the ultra-Orthodox world: More important than what you are allowed to know is what you are not allowed to know.

In the ultra-Orthodox world, words are important. Words are powerful; they give life to an image, reality to an idea. If you use only pure words, your mind cannot be tainted; bad words will leave a stain, marking you as less-than-good.

Abuse was not a word. If there was no such word, than there were no such children. And truly, for decades, there were none. They did not dare to exist.

When I was 9 years old, I heard a story. It was about a crazy lady who called the police. She told them crazy things about an uncle in the family. She had fabricated lies about him; she hated him, she wanted attention.

When I was 11 years old, a Bobov boy hung himself. He wasn’t crazy, but something was a bit wrong with him. Mainly, he didn’t have any friends in school. That’s why he hung himself, everyone at school said.

Then in high school, 14-year-old Chavi was expelled from school. She had testified to the police that her father molested her after he demanded custody. My principal explained to me that she knew that Chavi wasn’t lying, what she said was true. But her grandparents went against the will off the rabbanim and told her to talk to the police.

They had no choice, but to expel her, she said. Classmates were warned not to speak with her. We never saw her again.

Then, my friend told me her cousin touched her; he touched her a lot, she said. I didn’t know what she meant, but one day she took me to a faraway place, far beneath the world I knew. She pulled me along with her, down long, dark corridors to a space I’d never seen before.

Few in the Orthodox community know of this place, where children live who do not really exist. Few in the community know of this world, where children go to die of forbidden wounds.

I did not want to be there. I could not bear to stay. I wanted to run away from my friend. I wanted to be part of the happy world, where people smile, and sing, and pray, where they do not bleed impurity. But my friend pulled me back. She said she was scared, so scared, and that I must stay with her, and I did, watching her curl up in agony, begging to die.

I did not dare tell anyone what I had seen. That would be the worst of all. You cannot wipe off the blood of a leper.

I never prayed for my friend, or the ones who dragged me there later on. I kept them a secret, even from God. Surely He would have nothing to do with such boys or girls. God is for pure intentions and thoughts; God is for the tragically ill. Abused children are an aberration, a mistake, and I was scared He’d view me as tainted, along with them.

In the insulated confines of my ultra-Orthodox community there are two worlds: the outer world and the underworld, and in between them a horrifying disconnect. We, of the underworld, are untouchable. If it is revealed that we are in any way tainted by abuse, even if only by association, it will defile our entire family; it will ruin their lives, their prospects at marriage. We are contaminated. And it is our job to protect the community from our contamination.

For many years we hid. We hid from our friends and from our family; we hid from our spouses, who did not want to know. We grew in silence, through adolescence, through the teenage years, through young adulthood and, for many, through arranged marriages. Then, slowly, as adults, we emerged, one victim, then another, some by accident, some by therapy, some by way of an outsider who taught them the words forbidden in their childhoods, words that described hell.

We began to speak. We used words like “abuse,” “rape,” “molestation” and “pain.” We began to tell our stories to investigators, to journalists and on blogs. Some of us, for the first time, told our friends and our spouses.

The reaction was immediate. We were branded as tainted, damaged and dangerous, often by close friends and others. We were declared by leaders and respected rabbis to be “mosrim,” traitors; deceptive liars. They called us self-hating Jews. They described us as young and shallow, rebellious men and women bent on vengeance and destruction; adults whose empty, worthless lives were filled with bitterness and rage.

We had violated the rules of what we were not allowed to know. We were using words that had been banned, forbidden. And we, who were stained with someone else’s crimes, were ordered to disappear, to stop whining. For how could we claim trauma and pain when we did not really exist? How could we have witnessed crimes that our leaders, wiser and holier than we are, said were not there? Because there was only one truth in this world, that of the rabbis and the holy men — and it was only they who could decide what had happened and what had not.

In 2003 I began writing my novel, “Hush,” a story of two ultra-Orthodox girls who endure the horrors of sexual abuse. People often asked me how I did it, how I wrote and published such a book while still living within the community.

I never answer their question. I have never been able to explain. It would take another book to do so. Because from the day I wrote until the day I finally ran away, I lived through the darkest parts of my world.

“The truth shall set you free,” David Foster Wallace wrote in “Infinite Jest.” “But not until it is finished with you.”

Victims of sexual abuse, forced free by a horrific truth, live with gashlike scars across their souls. One scar from the crime, the other from the denial that followed. They live with a constant question:

How?

How did this happen?

How did a community of values, of family, of God, become stripped of its own humanity? How did a group of people, warm and giving in so many ways, so viciously deny the suffering right in front of their eyes?

I don’t know if we will ever find an answer. Yet if we look deep within our own mindset, perhaps we can better understand the complicated factors that have brought the community to where it is today: cover-up, abuse and scandal exploding in the daily news, like buried landmines in old battlefields.

The religious Jewish community is a closed world, one that has built high walls around itself, walls that ensure that the gentiles and their evil influences cannot infiltrate. Yet the religious Jewish community is also a giving world, one with countless chesed organizations, there to help ease the suffering within. It is a generous world so long as the suffering is of a certain kind, so long as it does not violate the rules of what can and cannot happen.

Chai Lifeline, Tomchei Shabbos, Bonei Olam, among others — these are all organizations that help the ill, the poor, the widows and the orphans to deal with misfortunes sent by heaven.

Heavenly tragedies are not in the community’s control. They are there by a decree of the Almighty, a small part of a larger, divine story, just one piece of God’s grand plan, one that we cannot hope to understand. We must accept it with simple faith.

Sexual abuse is not from heaven. Sexual abuse is an act of man. Sexual abuse is suffering brought upon a person by the twisted demons of another. It is part of a darkness we declared to be safely beyond our high walls.

It means that there are victims, and where there are victims there are villains. It means that there are scars, and where there are scars there are criminals.

The ultra-Orthodox community does not want to know its criminals. It does not want to see its villains. It chooses to hide the darkness, to fight like hell against those who try to show it. It chooses to ban the words that define the evil, to intimidate those who try to speak or understand it. This way the community continues to feel safe, to hold an image of itself as whole, unbroken, secure from the harm of suffering children.

It is deeply disturbing, seeing those scars, the part of the community that doesn’t fit the traditional Jewish narrative. It is terrifying to look in the mirror and see a gentile’s reflection; that was only supposed to belong to the goyim. The instinctive reaction is denial: This cannot be us. The instinctive reaction became community policy, and it is visceral, terrifying and cruel. Such children were called mentally unstable. It was better to be crazy than to be abused. Crazy was the child’s fault, abused was the community’s own.

And this is how the Orthodox Jewish community turned into a world that went to war with its own children.

The Orthodox Jews are not alone in this. Over the past decade, they have partnered with their historical enemies, the Catholics, to battle the grave threat posed by men and women scarred by the sins of their leaders. Among the Catholics, the lies and the scandals tore the forefront 10 years ago, opening the doors to thousands of other victims to come forward. A decade and billions of dollars in settlements later, the cases are ongoing.

For us Jews, the process toward justice has been much slower, with victims emerging from the shadows only recently. But a little more than three weeks ago, on November 26, a trial began on the 20th floor of a building in Downtown Brooklyn.

Tens of thousands watched — Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox, secular — following the story on blogs, Twitter and newspapers. Tens of thousands watched as, for the first time, an 18-year-old girl from a Hasidic enclave took the stand as a witness to her own hell. They watched the slight, just-married, slip of a girl say — and say again — that she’d been abused and molested repeatedly, and that what happened to her had a name, a label, a word. She existed. They watched the girl, not quite an adult, stand up to a community that refused to acknowledge an act of evil because doing so meant there was evil among that community, they who were inherently pure. ‘

On the December 10 the jury came out, and something changed in our world. Something happened to the long and paralyzing silence, frozen for decades with fear. It cracked open. It shattered with finality.

Guilty, guilty, guilty; 59 times guilty. The jury of 12 declared Nechemya Weberman to be a criminal, one who was enormously guilty. And survivors, advocates and victims breathed in relief as one. Because we had long known that bricks and stones, traditions and ancient rules do not ensure morality, only a dangerous pretense of it. We have long known that the greatest enemies lie not behind the walls, but here, inside, deep within ourselves.

There are those in the ultra-Orthodox community who say that much has changed, that there is more awareness than before. They say that many schools have taken on the issue, bringing in experts and educating teachers about the symptoms and dangers of abuse; so why don’t the survivors just shut up already? Why do they still demand attention and embarrass the community in the media? What more do they want?

For decades, victims of sexual abuse have had to pay dearly for the community’s denial. Those victims are now grown. They speak out in different ways, and it is the community that now, too has to pay a price for its denial.

The community members don’t get to choose the price. They don’t get to decide what victims should to do with the trauma they’ve created. After years of brutalized silence, victims will speak as loudly as they need to.

This is a community that wants to leave sin, so long as it can do so without expressing regret. It is willing to change the future, so long as we allow it to forget the past, so long as we don’t ask it to account for its actions. It wants change, it really does, but the change is conditional: change on its own terms, change it can take credit for without ever looking back, change that is another form of denial.

One cannot ask forgiveness from the dead. It is too late to reach out to those who jumped off balconies, who hung themselves off bathroom rods. It is too late to turn to those who swallowed bottles of painkillers, who overdosed on drugs. Yet there are hundreds of survivors who still live, men and women who’ve stood up and walked on — once terrified children, now haunted adults, still gripped by a past that has ripped into their souls.

They are no longer seeking the truth; now they seek only honesty. They are no longer seeking holy men; now they seek only good men. What they want from those who have legislated spirituality, from those who’ve led the community down its darkest path, is the first step of repentance; a confession, an acknowledgement, a reckoning that in the hollowed halls and back rooms of homes and institutions built for God, a terrible thing has happened.

Perhaps there will be a day when a victim in Williamsburg or Lakewood can ask for justice without being forced out. Perhaps there will be a time when advocates and survivors will not be threatened, harassed and terrorized for demanding that the most basic of morals be upheld. Perhaps there will be a day when the community and its leaders will acknowledge the hell they’ve created for so many of their own. Maybe they will ask for forgiveness. And then we will know that change has truly come.

Until then, let us teach our children the words stolen from our generation, words that describe hell. Because for those of us who have survived, who have lived in the underworld and came out alive, we hold a sacred knowledge: Words are important. Words are powerful. A mind cannot be tainted by a word, only by its refusal to acknowledge it.

Judy Brown wrote the novel “Hush” under the pseudonym Eishes Chayil. “Inside Out” is her essay series about life in the ultra-Orthodox world. It is based on true events, but her characters’ names and identities have been changed; some are composites, comprising several real-life people. Find her atFacebook.com/JudyBrownHush.

Don't fall in! Amazingly realistic 3D images on pavements across America and Europe: Video

From Piccadilly Circus to an incident at Waterloo this eye-opening 3D street art is probably the best on the planet.

Not only do these incredible pastel drawings on pavements across the world look realistic by themselves - but when passers-by jump into the scene they take on a life of their own.

As well as his London creations, U.S. street artist Kurt Wenner, 53, created a playboy's bachelor pad in a Singapore Airport, a magic carpet for children to ride over an Arabian fantasy city and a grand prix car for local female drivers to try out during the Bahrain Grand Prix.

Scroll down for video

Under the carpet: Mr Wenner's The Flying Carpet photographed in Bettona, Italy

Piccadilly Circus? A three-dimensional street painting called The Belgian Underground photographed in Brussels, Belgium

U.S. street artist Kurt Wenner, 53, created this work, called Incident at Waterloo, in London

Bradley Wiggins gets involved in the artwork by riding along a jungle scene called St Paul's and London Craning Skyward

Mr Wenner invented a new geometry that creates compositions that appear to rise from or fall into the ground.

Using his homemade pastels, he can take up to seven days to complete his intricately detailed large-scale drawings, sometimes longer depending on the weather.

More...

• It's Christmas cake...but not as you know it: Food artist creates turkey and trimmings out of sponge, chocolate and buttercream icing
• London, by Instagram: Unusual exhibition of images taken and edited in 2012 using smartphones

Mr Wenner's innovative style draws on religion and classical mythology.

Mr Wenner began his career in Rome, inspired by the city's centuries-old tradition of street art.

Mr Wenner explains: 'The pieces look real because they are calculated to be perfectly and mathematically accurate.'

Incredible: A three-dimensional street painting called Women Driver photographed at Bahrain Grand Prix in Bahrain

Adventurous: The Northwest Fantasy photographed in San Francisco, California

Mr Wenner's Titania Encantado photographed in Burgos, Spain

Grand Canyon Trail photographed at National Geographic Grand Canyon Visitor Centre in the U.S.

Sustainable: A 3-D painting by Mr Wenner called Greenpeace / Million Signatures

Hellish: Dies Irae, based on a 13th century Latin hymn thought to be written by Thomas of Celano

Awe-inspiring: Mr Wenner's incredible 3-D sea dragon photographed in Kaosiung, Taiwan

Arizona republican says Israel operates murder squads in the U.S. and did the Shootings in Sandy Hook

The lunatic Mike Harris on Press TV 

 An Arizona republican, Mike Harris, blamed the Connecticut school shooting and several other shootings that happened recently in the United States on Israeli death squads, according to video uploaded to the internet.

It did not take long for the anti-Semites in the world to somehow blame the Jews for the recent unimaginable tragedy that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, when a gunman killed twenty young children and six adult staff members, after killing his mother, before finally turning the gun on himself.

This week, an American journalist told Iran's Press TV that the shooting was a "revenge killing in the
United States sponsored by Israel" in response to international support at the United Nations
last month.
The journalist, Michael Harris, is an editor at Veterans Today, a website best known for its anti-Semitic and anti-Israel conspiracy theories.
During his interview with Iranian media, Harris, once a Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, said that "Israel has been operating death squads for a long time now in the United States."
Harris insisted that the Israeli "revenge squads" have been killing innocent U.S. citizens from Tucson, Arizona, shooting in which Jewish Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head, but survived, while six others were killed.

Jacob Ostreicher jailed in Bolivia freed on bail!

Jacob Ostreicher, an Orthodox Jew from the Unites States, who was jailed in Bolivia, was released on bail, according to official reports.

After 18 months of wrongful imprisonment in Bolivia, Jacob Ostreicher, was released today on bail.

Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn), a confidant and defender of the Ostreicher family after the imprisonment of Jacob Ostreicher, called the occasion "the beginning of the end of the nightmare for Jacob Ostreicher.” The court issued its order today, according to reports. Ostreicher has been cooperating with authorities who took down several prominent figures since his arrest, according to reports.

"This is the first good news we have received in relation to Ostreicher, and we are all very optimistic," Hikind said. "We hope that Jacob will be reunited with his family in Brooklyn, New York, soon. I could not be prouder of our community to be involved with the Ostreichers for everything they do and constantly keep in mind his situation. We are all still praying. Almighty hears us," Hikind added.

Ostreicher family members are currently in Bolivia, where he has reportedly been sentenced to house arrest with bail set at 100,000 bolivianos or $14,265.30.

Two letters: Two points of view on Chassidic life styles in response to the Weberman verdict

FmrHassidicGirlReply

December 13, 2012 at 5:42 am

First, thank you for writing such an in-depth article on this topic.

I was born and raised in the Hassidic community and have totally left that world. I am, what you would consider, “Off the Derech”, or to some a “goyita”.

When I decided to leave about 6 years ago, it wasn’t that common (at least for a girl), to leave the community. Today, the amount of women who run away from the Hassidic cult is reaching numbers no-one ever dreamed of, and although those within the cult call us a “nebech”, the fact is the only nebech’s are those that are mentally and physically enslaved by this rotten, mind and life destroying cult.

Many of my friends today where raised in modern homes, the kinda jews my former community would make fun of, in Yiddish they would be described as “zei zennin mamesh goyim” (they are literally gentiles) or “zee geit ungetien vee ah shicksa” (she dresses like a non jewish female), mind you we where commenting on women, that by all standards where dressed more modest than 99.9% of the planet.

But what I found is that girls from modern homes are not all that rebellious, they keep shabbos, they keep kosher (no, they do not panic over how long the rabbis beard was, who gave the hechsher), they date jewish men only. But, I and the others who came from the extreme background, we keep nothing.

The Hassidic cult becomes more and more extreme as time goes by, more rules, more madness and more hypocritical.

It’s a sign how far jews have fallen when you think that you can live in the United States and have something like a vaad, NO vaad is good, NONE, only someone who has been hypnotized by living to long is this Boro Park/Williamsburg world can even suggest, taht a vaad is something that is a good thing.

The problem is you are slow learners, the nasty truth will start showing up more and more, people will associate a hassidc jew with pedophilia, patronizing prostitutes, and grand larceny. You will realize that the more you dictate to others what to do, the more it will backfire.

It is already backfiring, you are losing many many kids, when we leave we go all the way, and guess what, when I walk in a mall and I see a group of chassidishe girls, and I start talking Yiddish their eyes light up, they feel like the “mashiach” arrived, if their mom or some older hassidic dominatrix isn’t around them, they start talking to me, and never do they ask me “why I left” all they say is “I wish I can do the same thing”, many take my number, many end up calling and many end of leaving.

And for those of you who think we are a nebech, and “oh my god, she must have such an emty life” get a grip on reality please. In short it’s called freedom, I celebrate and do things as I wish, I went to school, a normal school, and started my own business.

While, the rest of America made sure to give women equal rights, the hassidic community turns a woman into a slave, a dirty thing, something that is used to make kids and chulent.

The boys who left and went off the derech, almost all that I know of do very well, they are smart, motivated and most importantly happy, only someone in the hassidic cult thinks, that the rest of the world is sad.

A while ago Saturday night (motzai shabbos), myself and several friends where shopping at a mall, two girls walk by, obviously Hassidic girls, and I proceed to tell them “A gitta voch”, they smile and proceed to come over and talk to me.

They were both 21 years old (alte meidlach/old girls by hassidic standards), and I could relate to their pain, the real pain, they do not want to get married yet but the family is pressuring, their parents had no clue they were in the mall, they needed to lie, they wanted to go out to the city, so they asked me if I can go with them, I said yes, the problem is they must be home at a certain time or their mom will call the shomrim, the hatzallah, a rabbi and a kabbalist in Israel.

They said that in a week or so they have a wedding to go to of a classmate; it’s a real chasidishe wedding, so it ends like 3am or later, that night is a great night for them to go to the city.

They call me using a prepaid cell phone (something commonly used by criminals), and I pick them up from the wedding hall about 11o’clock.

They get into the car and they ask if I can make a stop at some office building, I say, hey what’s going on? Well, one of the girls has access to the office and she keeps some pants and shorter skirts there, clothing not allowed in her house. They go in, change, and they emerge as normal looking girls, and not girls from the 1950’s. We had a great time at this beautiful lounge in NYC, they spoke to men while shaking in their boots, worrying if lighting will strike them, but nothing struck them, just reality!

I ended up taking them back to this office, they changed back into the cultish clothing, and I dropped them off to their homes. One already left her family B’H (yes, I just said that), she’s a great girl, she will remain Jewish as she respects and loves, shabbos, and will without a doubt marry a Jew, but she wants nothing to do with this radical Hassidic movement, a movement that started 300 or so years ago, but really radicalized itself the past 100 years. Wait, so Jews until then where not really Jews as god intended them to be?

So what is the point of this whole megilah I just wrote?

Well, it’s designed to serve a few proposes.

a) To educate those who do not understand the mindset, of those who leave the cult, and to reassure you that we are far from nebachs and if anyone is a nebach it’s those within the cult.

b) To tell those considering leaving, that there is real hope out there, there is a life to be had after the pain and differing you endured, some mental pain only, while some physical pain, as some parents still think this is the 1800’s and forgot you will get thrown in jail for hitting a person, you child or someone else’s, (will anyone ever expose the physical abuse still going on in yeshiva’s or is that ok because it’s a rabbi that’s administering the spanking?).

c) To give the yentas something to do, you can now get on your phones, make a three way call so you can have 2 other yentas on the line, then try to review all weddings of the past few months, and narrow down what girls left early, maybe it’s Ruchie, no maybe it’s Sheindy nah it can’t be, no It must be Malkie no but she always reads the Tzena Rena and wears extra thick shtrimp etc.

d) To give the vaad more work, now that they read this story, they can, ban women from going to malls, ban women from having keys to a office, and force people to end weddings early or force girls to bring their mom to all weddings, all the while wondering “I wish she would of posted the name of this lounge she went too, I’d love to hook up with some nice girls”.

Have a Happy Chanukah everyone, the main thing is, be happy, living in misery so someone else is happy, is borderline psychotic.

loving yiddishkeitReply

December 16, 2012 at 10:53 am

So sorry to read your comment..however, having grown up in a place you despised…I am sorry to say that you only speak for a small percentage of girls or boys who come from homes where parents are robots and follow blindly. Most of us, including myself had wonderful parents who guided us and taught us right from wrong. We had a radio, read…etc. I am not saying that every parent allowed for that, but that still would not give you or anyone “permission”, yes I said it permission to leave the faith and become mechalel shabbos.
There are many options for those who feel they need a broader yiddishkeit and it is available to them. We have hundreds, yes hundreds of kids with degrees in various fields, making a nice living.We are not a closed minded community, like you wish to state and make a Chillul Hashem by besmirching us to the world out there.
Yes, we have all kinds of crazies out there…but what society doesn’t? I don’t know what type of home you came from, and I know they exist…of course they do…but they are not the MAJORITY, THEY ARE THE MINORITY…
YES….I’M sure there are girls and boys who are not happy living within “this” community…I don’t doubt it….
It’s a pity they don’t actually discuss it with their parents in a nice way and allow for some “changes …you be surprised today how many understand that not everyone can adhere to the very strict rules and would give leeway instead of losing their child to the outside world and as seen by you ….to Yiddishkeit.
We love all our children. I am a grandmother with grandchildren…my friends are all of the same understanding as I am..
I wish you could have made a decision to go for all those things you wanted, like education….whatever it is that you wanted within the framework of yiddishkeit….because we all know, you can. You chose to go away out of rebellion to the Ribbono shel Oilem and for that you will have to pack cheshbon one day. It is between the One Above and you…nobody else. We still love you all the same. I have close family members in your shoes…We all have bechira when we are handed things that don’t seem to conform with our “feelings”. Life is tough and there are many challenges to handle. That is what Hashem wants of us and a time to test our faith. It is not random that he chose to put you into your family. Knowing your nature, it was something Hashem chose for you to see where you want to take all this….and you made your choice…however, it does not have to be permanent..Hashem is waiting for you…for me…for all of us …to do what he wants and what the Torah asks of us.
I love you, you are one of us…a loving yiddishe daughter of our NATION…and that will never change. You are welcome to come back whenever your seichel will dictate that your “kind of happiness and freedom” in the end…is no freedom at all.
Every freedom needs rules…otherwise it is not freedom, it is chaos!!!
Love you.

Weberman made our daughters into "zoines"

The horrifying saga of the Nechemya Weberman trial and the guilty verdict on 59 or 60 of the consolidated counts has caught the attention of the world.

If the allegations are true, as guilty verdicts tend to indicate, and as the existence of 11 other victims too fearful to step forward indicates, then what we have here is truly sickening.

We have a 12-year-old girl that did not quite meet the standards of the community around her. The school officials refused to admit her back into the school unless her parents pre-paid for therapy—to the tune of $12,900.

And then she suffers three years of horrifying abuse at the hands of the very “therapist” that the school had required her to meet with regularly. Imagine the pain of such a girl who must endure the sickest of acts—with the knowledge that no one would believe her if she told of what was being done to her.

The Navi cries out, “Bagda Yehuda v’soaivah ne’esasa b’Yisrael!” Our schools are named after our heilege imahos and avos. And the matriarch, Mama Rachel, is crying now. Of that there is no doubt.

Our schools have handed over these precious souls to monsters for abuse. And then, when they ultimately come forward, we vilify them and their families. We exclude them from our camps and our schools.

Hakezona ya’aseh es achoseini?

And this was aided and abetted by the kehilah leadership, rachmana litzlan! The kehilah leadership! Not even a brush full of the blackest of paint could put such horrors on a canvas!

Has there ever been such a parallel in our entire history?

During the reign of Nicholas the First, y’s, in Tsarist Russia, we had something close, when he initiated the heartless conscription of precious Jewish children for 25 years in the Russian army. The kehillah leadership selected the recruits. They were from the weakest of the weak, the young boys of defenseless widows. The kehillah had hired vicious people called, “khappers” who would do the vile deeds.

It was the Bubby of Yehuda Leib Katzenelson, who best related the dark history of this time, a history that finds parallel in our very own times now too:

“First I thought that the khappers could only be Plishtim or mizera Amalek. But no, my child, to my horror, to our great shame and horror, the khappers, all of the khappers were, in fact, Yidden. Yidden mit beard un payos! And that is our greatest problem. We Jews are accustomed to attacks, lies, libels, and evil decrees from anti-Semites, yes. This has happened from the dawn of time, and such is our lot in the galus. In the past, our enemies held a cross in one hand and a knife in the other and said, “Jew! Kiss the cross or feel the blade of the knife!” and Jews preferred death rather than conversion. But now there comes Yidden, fruma Yidden, who capture children and send them off to oblivion. Such a punishment was not even listed in the most horrible curses of the toychacha. Yidden spilling the blood of their brothers! And, rachmana litzlan, the rabbanim are silent!”

Her words, so poignant and so painful, describe the fate of this dear daughter of Williamsburg as well, who suffered not once but twice! Once at the hand of her tormentor and again at the hands of our community who so abandoned her.

The horrifying reality is that all this was brought about by the existence of a so-called “Vaad HaTzniyus!” Clearly, we need to do teshuvah. We need a teshuvah so profound and deep that it should shake the very mountains that surround us.

This op-ed does not mean to question the notion of an institution that watches over tzniyus within Torah communities. The need for an oversight committee to ensure that matters between the genders do not get out of hand is established both in the Talmud, the Shulchan Aruch, as well as in the codes and laws of numerous societies and nations throughout history.

What we are questioning, however, is how this particular Vaad HaTzniyus is staffed and operated. The revelations made in this trial and by various people who have been in touch with rabbanim as to their experiences are appalling.

It seems, unfortunately, that we have allowed this institution to run amok, staffed by corrupt individuals, who have lost all sense of propriety in what types of behaviors the Torah demands of us. The Weberman case reveals the tip of the iceberg in how low we have sunk in terms of corruption, extortion, and yes, violations of arayos.

If we look into the halachic sources, the officers of these organizations must be an extension of a beis din. It is sad to say that in this Vaad HaTzniyus, there is no affiliation whatsoever with the community beis din—they are gangs of self-appointed ruffians with little or no Torah training whatsoever, who use threats and intimidations to line their own pockets or to fulfill some psychological need to exert power over others. In short, the Williamsburg community must face up to what we have allowed to develop within our midst.

We have our own home-brewed mafia.

This mafia is not represented by poskim, rabbanim, or by batei dinim. Indeed, our Torah leaders are frightened to take a stand against their excesses. We need to take steps to remedy this situation, and we need to do so now.

Firstly, we must abolish the current organizations now and disenfranchise them from any power base that we can. The Vaad HaTzniyus organizations and everyone involved in them must be directly run by batei dinim and poskim. The beis din must have oversight over every individual involved in these activities and anything said and done must have the approval of qualified poskim.

Secondly, like in other areas of halacha, the beis din should have the ability to consult with trained experts in the medical, psychological, social work, and legal fields to assist and advise in their decision as to what is proper and appropriate. Violations of hilchos yichud with a 12-year-old girl is never appropriate, notwithstanding Mr. Weberman’s horrible and incorrect misrepresentation that hilchos yichud is not a Torah violation.

Thirdly, we cannot have the chillul Hashem of forcing clients, students, or others who may have stumbled to attend “therapy sessions” with non-professionals who happen to be our own family members. Therapists should only be of the same gender as the client, and must be unrelated to the one pushing the recommendation. As Torah Jews we must make every effort to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Here we have what appears to be gross and wholesale “scams.” The chilul Hashem that we have all witnessed here in the past two years is of a dimension never seen in our history.

And finally, we must end the culture of punishing those who come forward. The menahelim of the schools that refused admittance to family of those who came forward must be either removed from their positions or severely warned. They must be identified and told not to do so again. We must learn the lesson of this toeivah that happened in Klal Yisrael and make sure that it never happen again.

In the early 1850’s when the great gaon and tzaddik Rav Eliyahu Shik of Grodno found out about the kehillah’s involvement in the horrible reality of khapping yiddisher kinder, he called upon everyone to “revolt and rebel against the heads of the kehilah, to tear the kahal building to shreds.” He himself ran with an axe in his hand in front of the crowd that had gathered, each man armed with an axe. Before they were stopped they had broken the iron bolts on the door of the kahal building and freed the three young men that were held there.

Our reaction must be to immediately dissolve this Vaad HaTzniyus which forced Yiddishe girls into the hands of a monster. Their names should be recorded and never again must such people be put in charge of such grave matters of responsibility. A vaad of tzniyus must only be direct representatives of choshuvah and leading poskim well respected throughout the Torah world. And no matter who it may be, which meyuchasdika person, we must never forget the holy words of Chazal, “Ein apitropus l’arayos—no one, absolutely no one can be trusted alone in matters of arayos.”