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	On Sex Abuse, Haredim Are Fed up By Rod Dreher Beliefnet October 13, 2009 http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/10/on-sex-abuse-haredim-are-fed-u.html Categories: Judaism Now this is news. Finally, the wall of silence within New York's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community over child sexual abuse has begun to crack, as ordinary Jews get fed up with a religious establishment allowing children to suffer to protect the image of the community. "What we have witnessed in the past year is completely unprecedented," said Rhonnie Jaus, chief of the Brooklyn district attorney's sex crimes bureau. "This would be inconceivable just a few years ago." Children in haredi families are no more or less likely to suffer sexual abuse than others, according to several recent studies. But Ben Hirsch, founder of Survivors for Justice, a New York group whose members include ultra-Orthodox Jews molested as children in communities nationwide, said the clandestine handling of molestation cases had kept leaders from dealing with the problem and made it easier for predators to operate. Mr. Hirsch credits the Jewish press, therapists and rabbis in the Orthodox population itself, and organizations like his, with bringing the issue to light. Jewish blogs like FailedMessiah.com and theunorthodoxjew.blogspot.com, he said, have also been "a major catalyst," giving abuse victims their first opportunity to vent and connect without fear of being identified. "People are rising up," he said. Thank G-d! And why are they rising up?: The father of a Brooklyn 10-year-old said in an interview that the mishandling, as he viewed it, of sex abuse cases by rabbinical courts had persuaded him to contact the police immediately when his son told him last year that a neighbor had abused him. "I'm not one who believes rabbis are capable to handle this," he said. Of course not. By now, everybody should have learned from the bitter experience of the Catholic laity in these matters. Go straight to the police. Don't give it a second thought. It doesn't make you a bad Jew, a bad Catholic, or a bad anything. Religious authorities are not to be trusted to handle these things justly. If, God forbid, something like this were to happen to one of my children in the Orthodox Church, I would let my priest and bishop know after I had already spoken to the police. Nothing personal there; I have no reason to suspect that my particular priest and my particular bishop would be anything but responsible in such a case. But I would take no chances. I am reminded of a Latino immigrant father in one diocese about a decade ago -- I wrote about the case -- who arrived in the US to find that a nest of abuser priests at the local parish had set upon his young son, who had come earlier to this country with his mother. He went to the vicar for Hispanic affairs to report the situation, and was confronted by a bishop who pulled out a checkbook, and offered to write him a check for thousands of dollars, in exchange for the father's signature on a piece of paper giving the diocese's law firm the right to "represent" the boy in this matter. The father may have been an immigrant laborer, but he knew he was being had. He marched out, got a Jewish lawyer, and sued their sorry butts. Haredim parents might want to take a lesson from this, though I don't know about the hiring a Jewish lawyer thing in this context. What this signals is a breakdown of trust within a community. It is wrong that any parent should feel compelled to seek recourse in the civil courts, or with the police, for crimes like this. But when religious authorities have failed in their duty to the victims, to their families, and indeed to God, what choice does the laity have?
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