NEW YORK
Forward
Sam Kestenbaum
March 13, 2016
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s premier yeshiva is seeking to assure parents that no sexual or physical abuse is taking place within its walls following a detailed report on allegations of such abuse in the past.
“I categorically assure you that there is absolutely no abuse taking place in Oholei Torah that we know of,” Rabbi Sholom Rosenfeld, the school’s administrator, wrote parents in a March 8 letter on school letterhead, “neither sexual abuse, nor physical abuse, nor verbal abuse.”
The abuse allegations, which appeared in a March 3 Newsweek article, detailed past instances of alleged misconduct at Oholei Torah, a religious school of about 2,000 male students, kindergarten through high school, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. In one such case, a student was said to have thrown through a door or window. In other cases, reports of sexual abuse were allegedly ignored.
The school’s letter to the parents, dated March 8 and posted on community websites, neither addressed or denied any specific allegations or complaints, but described “many actions and precautions” that the school has instituted in recent years to prevent abuse. Among other things, the letter stated, Oholei Torah has, in recent years installed “windows on every classroom door” and has invited “numerous speakers” to address “child abuse and bullying.” The school has also held regular training programs for students on how to react to “improper behavior toward them,” according to the letter.
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