Mikveh of Cards: How in the world did Rabbi Freundel get away with it?

By Allison Kaplan Sommer
Harretz
October 27, 2014

http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/routine-emergencies/.premium-1.622952

Barry Freundel was a rabbi with a big problem. If police reports cited in the press are to be believed, he was a compulsive voyeur who exploited his position as a senior rabbi and university professor. His utter control over his synagogue and adjacent mikveh allowed him to feed a need to surreptitiously and criminally watch women undress. Allegedly, of course.

Yes, it is true that his particular - alleged - fetish had the advantage of utter secrecy and total distance from his victims. That’s the difference between the Freundel affair and other sex abuse scandals: Freundel is charged with crimes, in which the victims were, until now, oblivious.

But as the scandal widened in the time since his arrest, with the revelation that Freundel had been under investigation in 2012 by the Rabbinical Council of America, the umbrella organization for Orthodox rabbis for whom he served as national chairman of the group’s conversion system for, as described in the RCA statement on Freundel, “allegations of impropriety” regarding his treatment of converts which include coercing them into doing secretarial work for him and soliciting donations from them both before and after their conversions.

How in the world did this man stay at the helm of the prestigious and savvy Orthodox congregation that included senators, congressmen and cabinet members, and, most famously, the first Jewish vice-presidential candidate, in the heart of nation’s capital for 25 years? When I began talking to current and former Kesher congregants looking for answers to that question, I expected to find people who were shocked and devastated that their longtime beloved senior rabbi was capable of treating anyone badly.

But I was surprised. The way Freundel treated converts, it seems, was not terribly different from the way he treated members of his own congregation and many rabbinical colleagues.