and Richard Greenberg
New York (JTA) — The rabbi in a mid-sized Pennsylvania city was eager to share his congregation’s wrenching experience — but no names, please.
It has been nearly five years since the synagogue’s cantor pleaded guilty to sexually molesting two girls he was preparing for their bat mitzvah services. He was sentenced to 15 to 30 months in prison and is now on Pennsylvania’s sexual offender list.
Still, the rabbi wanted the name of his synagogue and of the abuser, whose crimes are a matter of public record, kept confidential.
“We are mindful of not causing additional trauma to those who suffered here,” he wrote in an e-mail.
But the rabbi wanted it known that measures have been instituted to guard against a repeat occurrence. For example, the synagogue now requires that another adult be present during private religious instruction.
In that respect, this synagogue typifies many Jewish institutions, which over the past several years have adopted new policies — or intensified existing ones — to crack down on rogue rabbis and others in positions of trust who sexually exploit congregants, students or others.
The issue of clergy sexual abuse has gained increased attention in the 10 years since it was first investigated by JTA.
That earlier investigation focused primarily on rabbis who sexually coerced adult congregants. It indicated that the problem was more widely spread than had been assumed — and that the Jewish establishment was beginning to grapple with it, but not always effectively.
For example, formal denominational policies governing rabbinic conduct were sometimes slow to develop. Although behavioral guidelines are now the norm, some systemic problems uncovered in that earlier series persist.
Good intentions
Since that investigation was published, high-profile cases of sexual impropriety involving rabbis and other authority figures have arisen.
The list of offenders includes Orthodox youth leader Rabbi Baruch Lanner, a former regional director of the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, who is now serving a seven-year prison sentence for abusing teenage girls while he was principal of a New Jersey yeshiva.
The scandal included allegations that rabbinic leaders and others had long been negligent in supervising Lanner.
More recently, David Kaye, 56, a prominent Conservative rabbi from Maryland, was ensnared in a nationally televised pedophile sting operation.
Kaye, the former vice president for programs of Panim: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, was sentenced Dec. 1 to six-and-a-half years in prison for trying to solicit sex last year from someone posing on the Internet as a 13-year-old boy. The case was featured on the network television show “Dateline NBC.”
Virtually all denominations, except segments of fervent Orthodoxy, now have formal codes that outline unacceptable clergy behavior and mandate precisely how complaints of sexual impropriety are to be investigated and adjudicated by in-house ethics panels.
In a three-month investigation, JTA examined those policies with the help of mental health providers, victims’ advocates, rabbis and others. Their assessments mixed encouragement and skepticism. The findings include:
• The anti-abuse guidelines represent a well-intentioned yet sporadically flawed attempt to address a problem that had once been neglected entirely.
• The system, according to critics, suffers from an institutional fear of lawsuits and excessive secrecy, both byproducts of an ethical quandary faced by decision-makers. They must balance an individual’s right to privacy against the obligation to protect the public from a potential sexual predator.
• A symbol of that ethical push-pull is the Awareness Center, a private, five-year-old Baltimore-based Jewish organization devoted to protecting the public from abusers.
The center has been criticized and praised for its policy of identifying rabbis and other sexual predators on its Web site, whether or not they have been tried in court.
• Perhaps the most serious impediment to controlling clergy abuse is what Chicago psychologist and psychoanalyst Vivian Skolnick calls “the plague of silence” — the continuing reluctance of victims to report transgressions.
“People are afraid of being ostracized if they come forward,” said David Framowitz, 49, who has alleged in a recently filed federal lawsuit that he was abused decades ago by a Brooklyn rabbi.
Like most of the observers contributing to the JTA analysis, anti-abuse activist and author Drorah Setel, a rabbi at a Reform congregation in Niagara Falls, N.Y., lauded the denominational rule-makers for working to undo decades of inaction and denial, but she faulted their specific policies.
“They are really well-intentioned, but they just don’t understand the process and the issues involved in sex abuse cases,” said Setel, who has written extensively on the topic of clergy sexual misconduct.
The notion of image-conscious, liability-minded and often male-dominated rabbinic ethics boards policing their own members, she added, is like “the fox guarding the henhouse.”
Although get-tough policies may have their flaws, conclusive proof of their effectiveness — or ineffectiveness — is elusive. One reason is that the pool of sex abuse complaints that have been processed by ethics panels over the past several years is minuscule.
It is an open question, however, whether the low volume of cases indicates that the problem is minimal, as some claim, or is underreported, as Skolnick and several others contend.
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