UNITED STATES
Los Messiah
from Eric Aiken
Dear Rabbi Dratch,
I write this letter to you out of great concern for what I perceive to be a lack of any meaningful action on the part of the RCA to protect Orthodox children from the plague of sexual abuse. The RCA is the largest Orthodox rabbinical organization in the world with over 1,000 members in 18 countries. It has close ties to Yeshiva University, the Orthodox Union, the Beis Din of America, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and the Conference of European Rabbis.
With the RCA’s enormous power and influence comes a concomitant responsibility to protect Orthodox children and support the survivors of sexual abuse in ways that have never been done before.
I tried to address this issue with you when I drafted an email that was sent to you in November of 2015. In it, I asked you to consider doing 3 specific things to protect Orthodox kids. Unfortunately, you would not commit to doing any of them.
1) Implement and enforce the 4 separate sets of child protection resolutions that the RCA has adopted over the last 23 years.
I am not aware of a single rabbi or Orthodox institution that has implemented these important child safety procedures.
The RCA doesn’t even have a list of its own child protection rules on its website. It took me half a day of reviewing every RCA resolution for the last 50 years just to find these 4 sets of child protection resolutions.
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