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	Women Tell of Abuse by Rabbi Long Silence Broken with Accounts of Mistreatment by Synogogue's Founder By Nick Madigan Baltimore Sun October 4, 2009 http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-county/bal-md.co.rabbi04oct04,0,6337775.story For more than half a century, Rabbi Jacob A. Max was a dominant figure in Baltimore's Jewish community, founder of one of its most important synagogues, an influential leader who officiated at countless cycle-of-life rituals of the faith. A man, it seemed from afar, above reproach. • But Max's reputation disintegrated earlier this year after he was convicted of sexually molesting a woman half his age in a Reisterstown funeral home. It marked the only time a woman had sought a legal remedy against the rabbi, even though murmurs had long rippled through Moses Montefiore Anshe Emunah Hebrew Congregation that his behavior toward some of the females in his flock was anything but appropriate. The hushed accusations of Max's penchant for groping and fondling - which some women say he accompanied with a smirk and an excuse about his being a "bad rabbi" - appear to have been tolerated without inquiry for decades because of his standing and authority in the tightly knit religious community. Girls who complained to their mothers about his conduct say they were ignored. On April 13, three days before his 85th birthday, Max was found guilty of second-degree assault and a fourth-degree sex offense after a brief bench trial in Baltimore County District Court. Max, who has been married for 25 years, was sentenced to a suspended one-year prison term and one year of unsupervised probation. He will not appeal, his lawyer said. News of the conviction prompted five other women to share with The Baltimore Sun their own allegations of improper advances by the rabbi. Three contacted a reporter and the remaining two were referred by others. The women said news of the conviction impelled them to come forward because they believe their charges about Max's behavior deserve to be disclosed, no matter how long ago the events occurred. The case also spurred Max's defenders to come forward, saying the rabbi remains a respectable figure who has been unfairly maligned. Informed of the women's allegations, Max's lawyer, David B. Irwin, said his client was innocent. "If anyone took a friendly gesture the wrong way, as far as he's concerned, he's sorry," Irwin said. "But he never intentionally molested or inappropriately touched anyone." Irwin declined several requests to make his client available to comment on each allegation in this article. None of the five women had spoken publicly before the criminal case, because, they say, it was understood that members of the modern Orthodox Jewish community - especially young ones - did not divulge errors by its leaders, let alone accuse them of impropriety. The women's accounts reflect a pattern consistent with the case that resulted in Max's conviction. They said the rabbi made suggestive comments or touched them in a sexual manner, and that sometimes he did both. The women said they were shocked and offended by the rabbi's actions, but none intends to pursue a civil case or criminal charges, options that remain a possibility for those who were minors at the time of the events they described. "He came up behind me, pressed himself against me, kissed me on my cheek, and put his hands down my sweater," said Judy Flax-Gerstein, 54, who was newly divorced a decade ago and working as a secretary in the office of Max's temple, where her family had long worshiped. "I was in shock. I pushed him away and screamed." Max was impervious to complaints about his behavior, Flax-Gerstein said. "He got away with it for years because no one spoke up," she said. "You just did what the authority figure said. I told my mother and she said, 'Everyone knows his reputation.' " Rabbi Elan Adler, who succeeded Max at the shul after its founder's retirement in 2001, acknowledged in a sermon in July that women in the congregation might have endured Max's advances for years, and addressed the culpability of the temple's leaders in brushing aside the women's grievances. "We as a congregation need to ask ourselves whether we listened carefully enough to complaints and allegations of inappropriate behavior," Adler said, according to a transcript of his remarks. At the same time, he went on, "Rabbi Max needs to be accountable for his actions, and justice must be done, and above all, victims deserve our sympathy and our prayers." Adler urged Max to come forward and apologize "to each person he has harmed" and to take responsibility for the "shame and embarrassment he has brought upon himself and upon the synagogue." Moses Montefiore has come to be viewed, Adler said, "as a congregation that protected and covered for its revered rabbi." After his sermon, Adler was approached by Elaine Witman, director of the Shofar Coalition, a group of Baltimore-area Jewish organizations, who said she wanted to help Max's victims. The conversation resulted in the Jewish Healing Service, a Sept. 13 gathering at the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Jewish Community Center that Witman said was attended by about 200 people. Among them were women who said they had been groped by Max as well as victims of physical and emotional abuse by others, she said. Several of the victims stood and recounted their experiences. "We are saying to those who suffer among us that you need not suffer in silence alone any longer," Witman said in her opening remarks. "We will replace apathy and denial with compassion and truth." Kathleen Cahill, a Towson lawyer retained by the 44-year-old woman whose complaint led to Max's conviction, said his behavior had likely stayed under the radar for so long because the rabbi was "a man in a position of substantial status and power, and you have a community where the ice has not been broken before." Cahill's client said Max fondled her chest on two occasions minutes apart on Dec. 4 after coming up behind her in a lunchroom and conceding that he was being a "bad rabbi." A police report said the woman was "crying uncontrollably" as she described what had happened. One of the victim's colleagues said Max sometimes gave massages to the woman, according to the police report. Cahill said her client is considering suing for damages. The rabbi's defenders say the accusations are falsehoods. Max "is and always has been a decent, respectable man," Violet Krichinsky of Pikesville wrote in a letter to The Jewish Times. Norman Goldberg, 81, who said he and his family were longtime members of Max's congregation, described him to The Sun as a gentleman and "one of the most beloved rabbis in the city." Shortly after Max's court appearance, Towson University alumnus Brandon Scherr, who worshipped at the rabbi's temple as a boy, created a Facebook page "to poke fun at the entire situation," he told The Sun. On the page, called "I Was NOT Molested By Rabbi Max," Scherr wrote that if the charges that led to the conviction "are in fact true, at least it was a 44-year-old woman, and not a little Catholic altar boy." Phil Jacobs, executive editor of The Jewish Times, made the point in a column that Cahill's client is not Jewish, a fact that enabled her to avoid retribution from the congregation. Nobody of the Jewish faith, Jacobs wrote, would have spoken up like that, despite Max's reputation. "Let it not be ignored that we allowed this to happen," Jacobs wrote, referring to the community's public silence. Jimmy Berg, board chairman of The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore, said Max had a "long and storied" career as a spiritual leader, and that the allegations against him were sad. "As much as you don't want to think that these kinds of things go on in your community, they do," Berg said. "I feel bad any time there's abuse, and we want to help anyone who's been abused." Berg said he saw no reason to dispute the women's accounts, even though, he added, "I would like to think that the situation with Rabbi Max is a one-time deal." Max, he said, has "got to be embarrassed, and he's got to be ashamed." The rabbi's behavior appears to have left indelible imprints on the memories of the women who agreed to be interviewed. "I can't even think about it without being disgusted," said Flax-Gerstein, who now works for a doctor in the Timonium area and has five children. She said she was dismissed from her job at the temple after presenting a detailed written report about the rabbi's conduct to the synagogue's board, which included Max. She said she no longer has a copy of the document. "I was told I was causing a ruckus," Flax-Gerstein said. "I was fired from the synagogue, my children were pulled from the Hebrew school and I had to make other arrangements for my son's bar mitzvah." Karen Pine, whose second wedding was officiated by Max and who was his secretary for more than three years before his retirement, watched Flax-Gerstein grapple with the news of her firing. "I remember her completely freaking out, screaming and crying," Pine said last month from her home in Las Vegas, recalling the moment when Flax-Gerstein, whom she considered one of her best friends, told her she had just been ordered to pack up and leave. "Then she ran out the door." Pine, 58, said she often heard rumblings about Max's behavior toward women in the congregation, but that its members never did anything about it because of the rabbi's position. "My mother - may she rest in peace - used to call him Jake the Snake," she said. Neither Bob Meyerson, the longtime president of Moses Montefiore, nor Adler, the current rabbi, responded to requests for comment. Adler's only public statement about the matter came in his July 11 sermon, during which he told worshippers that Max's title as rabbi emeritus had been revoked, along with the privileges that go with it, such as an office in the synagogue's building. Max's name was removed from the lobby and from the entrance to the parking lot - where it had been etched in marble - and no longer appears on mailings to the congregation. Born in Austria, Max came to the United States with his family when he was 3 years old. He grew up in a Jewish enclave in Southwest Baltimore, where his father was the rebbe, orleader, of a synagogue. Max graduated from the Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Pikesville and, in 1952, founded the Liberty Jewish Center in Howard Park, a Modern Orthodox synagogue that later moved to Rockland Hills Drive. He presided over at least 50,000 simchas - life-cycle events such as weddings and coming-of-age ceremonies - before retiring from the synagogue in November 2001. In his honor, the property was rededicated as the Rabbi Jacob A. Max Torah Campus. "I'm known for being a rabbi you can reach at all times, day or night," he told a Sun reporter when he retired. "If others can't help you, maybe I can help you." A 45-year-old woman in Frederick who agreed to share her experiences as long as she was identified only by her adopted Hebrew name, Eve, said Max groped her 20 years ago, when she was studying to become a Jew and was five months' pregnant with the first of her three children. "He rubbed my belly and said, 'This is getting big,' and his hands just went up from there," she recalled, naming the precise date of the incident, a month after Max had co-officiated at her wedding. "He had one hand on each breast. He said, 'These are getting big too.' I thought - that didn't just happen." Two months earlier, Eve said, Max had been watching her without her knowledge while she undressed and took a mikvah, a ritual bath to remove impurities from the body. Max made his presence known as she was leaving the room in a bathrobe, and said to her, "You don't look that pregnant," Eve recalled. She stopped going to his classes after the groping incident. "When I finally told my husband what happened I don't think he wanted to believe it," she said. "His parents' reactions were that Rabbi Max was known as a womanizer. It was never discussed after they made that comment. I just had to deal with it." Debbie Troutman, 55, would like an apology from the rabbi. "I pretty much stopped my religious life because of him," said Troutman, who works in a men's barbershop in Reisterstown. She was 16 and attending Hebrew school at Liberty Jewish Center when Max began making comments that were "definitely sexual and suggestive." Troutman recalled being grounded by her parents after telling them that he had made a particularly offensive remark to her. " 'Hey, baby,' " she recalled him saying. " 'You look great. Meet me in my office later and we'll get it on.' " Even at 16, she said, "No one is that stupid not to understand what he was saying," but her parents, devout Orthodox Jews, did not believe her. In light of that, Troutman's devotion to the faith vanished, she said. Later, when she was 29 and her mother died, Troutman stopped by Max's synagogue to make funeral arrangements. "He wanted me to go to his office to talk about the service, but I said to him, 'I'm not going into that room with you. You're out of your mind.' " Lynn Keyser, a photographer born and raised in Baltimore and now living in Sebastopol, Calif., was 15 when her father died in 1965. Max, the family's rabbi, was at their house sitting shiva, the period of mourning. "I was out of my brain because of my father dying, and Max got inappropriately close," she said. "I tried to pull away and he'd hold on." As he pressed his pelvis against her, Keyser said, it was plain that the rabbi was aroused. "Who was I going to tell?" she asked. "My 40-year-old mother, who had just lost her husband? Who should I tell - my rabbi?" Five years later, Keyser, engaged to be married, was dispatched by her mother to talk to the rabbi about the impending wedding. Max asked her fiance to wait outside his office. "He said he wanted to talk to me alone," Keyser recalled. "And then he did it again - a hug that was too long and too close, and he had an erection." Another woman, a 57-year-old Baltimore native who lives in a Washington suburb and agreed to be identified only by her middle name, Lynn, said she was studying for her bat mitzvah at age 13 when Max summoned her to his office, told her she had grown into "quite a lovely young woman" and then fondled her. "I almost felt I was in a doctor's office, being examined to see that I'd developed breasts," Lynn said. "How can I say anything to anyone about a person who's so revered? He was like God in our community, but to me he was an old man, even then." Lynn told no one about the incident until she mentioned it to her mother seven years later. "She brushed it off," Lynn recalled. "It didn't matter that I was underage and that he was much too old and should have known better. He had a reputation, but in the Jewish community in Baltimore, people don't say anything. They don't want the community to look bad to outsiders." Michael Meyerstein, executive director of the 55-member Baltimore Board of Rabbis, said Max, who had sat on the panel for at least 40 years, resigned this summer just before a vote that would "probably have suspended him." "It's a very sad ending to a very marvelous career," Meyerstein said. "What else is there to say?" Timeline of Rabbi Jacob A. Max April 16, 1924: Born in Austria. Three years later, moves to the United States with his family. Grows up in a Jewish enclave in Southwest Baltimore. 1952: Establishes the Liberty Jewish Center, a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Howard Park. It later moves to Rockland Hills Drive in Pikesville and is renamed the Moses Montefiore Anshe Emunah Hebrew Congregation. 1960s: Girls in the congregation begin to complain that Max makes improper advances, according to interviews with now-grown women. Others cite more recent instances of similar behavior. November 2001: Retires from Moses Montefiore, and the campus is named after him. Dec. 4, 2008: An employee at the Sol Levinson & Bros. funeral home in Reisterstown says Max fondles her breasts, then repeats the behavior minutes later. He is later charged with two counts in connection with the incident. April 13, 2009: Max is convicted in Baltimore County District Court of second-degree assault and a fourth-degree sex offense. He is sentenced to a suspended one-year prison term and one year of unsupervised probation. July 11, 2009: Rabbi Elan Adler, Max's successor at the shul, tells worshippers that Max's title as rabbi emeritus had been revoked and his name removed from the lobby and the entrance to the site. At about the same time, Max resigns from his 40-year seat on Baltimore Board of Rabbis. Sept. 13, 2009: At the Jewish Healing Service in Park Heights, an event prompted by revelations about Max, some 200 people gather to end what organizers call a "conspiracy of silence" around all forms of abuse. Several victims recount their experiences.
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