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	Clergy Misconduct By Richard Greenberg Washington Jewish Week [United States] January 18, 2007 http://www.washingtonjewishweek.com/main.asp?SectionID=4&SubSectionID=4&ArticleID=6543&TM=95.172 This article is the result of a three-month-long investigation by JTA News and Features of policies that have been drawn up over the past several years to rein in rogue rabbis and others who sexually exploit congregants, students or others. The issue of clergy sexual abuse has gained increased attention in the 10 years since it was first investigated by JTA. That earlier investigation, which focused primarily on rabbis who sexually coerce adult congregants, indicated that the problem was more widespread than had been assumed ‹ and that the Jewish establishment was beginning to grapple with it, but not always effectively. For example, formal denominational policies governing rabbinic conduct were sometimes slow to develop. Although behavioral guidelines are now the norm, some other systemic problems uncovered in that earlier JTA series still persist. Since that original investigation was published, the Catholic Church has been rocked by a massive pedophilia scandal, while the Jewish community has been buffeted by high-profile cases of sexual impropriety involving rabbis and other authority figures. The list of offenders includes Orthodox youth leader Rabbi Baruch Lanner, a former regional director of the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, who is now serving a seven-year prison sentence for abusing teenage girls while he was principal of a New Jersey yeshiva. The scandal set off a storm in the Orthodox world stemming from allegations that rabbinic leaders and others had long been negligent in supervising Lanner. More recently, David Kaye, a prominent 56-year-old Conservative rabbi from Rockville, was ensnared in a nationally televised pedophile sting operation. Kaye, the former vice president for programs of Panim: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, was sentenced Dec. 1 to 6 1/2 years in prison for trying to solicit sex last year from someone posing on the Internet as a 13-year-old boy, a case that was featured on the network television show Dateline NBC. Virtually all denominations, except segments of fervent Orthodoxy, now have formal codes on the books that outline unacceptable clergy behavior and mandate precisely how complaints of sexual impropriety are to be investigated and adjudicated by in-house ethics panels. In its investigation, JTA examined those policies with the help of mental health providers, victims' advocates, rabbis and others whose assessments reflected a mix of encouragement and skepticism. Among the findings of this series: • The anti-abuse guidelines represent a well-intentioned, yet sporadically flawed, attempt to address a problem that had once been neglected entirely. One evaluator gave the policies a C-plus grade, another a C-minus. • The system, according to critics, suffers from an institutional fear of lawsuits and excessive secrecy ‹ both byproducts of an ethical quandary faced by decision-makers. They must balance an individual's right to privacy against the obligation to protect the public from a potential sexual predator. • A symbol of that ethical push-pull is the Awareness Center, a private, 5-year-old Baltimore-based Jewish organization that is devoted to protecting the public from abusers. The center has been both criticized and praised for its policy of identifying rabbis and other sexual predators on its Web site, whether or not they have been tried in court. • Perhaps the most serious impediment to controlling clergy abuse is what Chicago psychologist and psychoanalyst Vivian Skolnick calls "the plague of silence" ‹ the continuing reluctance of victims to report transgressions. "People are afraid of being ostracized if they come forward," said David Framowitz, 49, who has alleged in a recently filed federal lawsuit that he was abused decades ago by a Brooklyn rabbi.
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