UNITED STATES
The Jewish Week
07/08/15
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Two months after the sentencing of mikvah-voyeur Rabbi Barry Freundel, the Orthodox community’s leading rabbinical council has released what it calls the new “gold standard” for preventing rabbinic abuses of power during the conversion process.
The 22-page report was prepared by a special committee chosen last fall, made up of 11 members, including five women – two of whom are converts to Judaism. It seeks to improve the Rabbinical Council of America’s Geirus Protocol and Standards (GPS) conversion process that, ironically, was implemented by Rabbi Freundel in 2007. Though the GPS process initially sought to standardize and centralize conversion procedures, it allowed breaches in the system to go unchecked, the report notes.
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking the crime was just about the cameras,” said Bethany Mandel, a convert and one of the members of the review committee. “Freundel was abusing his power long before that.”
Aside from his crimes of voyeurism, the rabbi employed seemingly arbitrary benchmarks for assessing a candidate’s readiness for conversion, and was vague about how long the conversion process would take. The report found that Freundel was not alone in causing potential converts to feel unsettled about a lack of precise requirements and timetables.
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