NEW YORK
The Jewish Daily Forward
By Frimet Goldberger
Published December 03, 2014
NEW SQUARE, NEW YORK — To his hasidim, Rabbi David Twersky is nearly akin to God.
But that does not mean he exempts himself from the obligations God imposes on all Jews, at least as traditionalists understand them.
Like his followers, Twersky prays to God three times a day. But unlike other Hasidic grand rabbis, Twersky does not pray in the main synagogue with his hasidim. He worships, alone, in an adjoining room. When he has completed his silent readings of the daily prayers known as the Shmoneh Esrei, he knocks on the wall to signal the waiting congregants outside. Only then can the communal service move forward.
Similarly, Twersky’s home in New Square, New York, the exclusively Hasidic upstate enclave where he presides over his sect, has its own mikveh, or ritual bath, built exclusively for him and his sons. His followers use the communal bath.
And when Twersky feels a need to get away from the community he leads — where more than half his followers live below the poverty line — he can summon his black Cadillac XTS and instruct his chauffeur to drive to his multimillion-dollar lakeside vacation home in Nyack, New York, which also sports a private mikveh.
For outsiders, such regal privilege may inspire disapproval. But for his followers, the separateness that Twersky cultivates only increases the holiness with which he is regarded. To them, he is a revered tzadik, a higher spiritual being endowed with saintly wisdom.
That aura of grandeur filled the parents of 14-year-old Laiby Stern with both high hopes and deep trepidation when they set off for an audience with Twersky in 2006. They were coming to tell their holy leader something horrifying that required his immediate intervention: Recently, after a long period of being clearly troubled, their son had related to them that their neighbor, Moshe Menachem Taubenfeld, a 55-year-old father of 20, and a highly respected teacher of Torah and Talmud to adult men in the community, had been sexually molesting him for five years.
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