UNITED STATES
Forward
No matter what happens at the Oscars, the very best film of 2015 was “Spotlight,” the improbable drama of how a team of newspaper reporters painstakingly revealed an institutional cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The film’s excellence lay not only in its superb acting and storytelling, but in the way it humanized without sensationalizing the lasting pain of child abuse.
Who can forget the scene of a tough Bostonian recounting how a priest molested him when he was a vulnerable youngster? His confusion, embarrassment and shame were laid bare on the screen before us, allowing us to viscerally understand how it can take years for a young victim to comprehend what happened and to muster the courage to challenge a figure of religious authority.
That image needs to remain in our sights, alongside the images of the young men the Forward wrote about in 2012 and 2013 who bravely stepped up to reveal the abuse they suffered at the hands of esteemed rabbis at Yeshiva University High School for Boys.
And it should remain alongside the stunning essay by Sara Kabakov published in this week’s Forward, where she for the first time detailed how she was repeatedly molested in her home by the former rabbi and spiritual guru Marc Gafni when she was only a teenager and he was a rabbinical student.
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