UNITED STATES
The Jerusalem Post
The haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community in the US has made major strides in coming to terms with the issue of child sexual abuse, a prominent community activist told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
According to Rabbi Yakov Horowitz, the New Yorkbased founder of Project YES, a program for at-risk youth loosely affiliated with Agudath Israel of America, the progress made among both the hassidic and Lithuanian Orthodox communities has been “extraordinary.”
“It’s not even comparable” to the situation that obtained when he first began advocating for stronger measures to be taken in combating pedophiles, Horowitz told The Jerusalem Post.
“Twelve years ago, when I started writing about this, the vast majority of people thought that I had lost my mind, including some of my closest friends,” he said.
While he agreed that there was certainly “a long way to go” on the issue, he said internal opposition to change was “dissipating very quickly.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.