Yesterday the New York Times continued its great investigation of child abuse in the ultra-Orthodox community of New York by demonstrating that Brooklyn district attorney Charles J. Hynes has one set of rules for the Orthodox in these cases, and another set of rules for the general public. The piece focused on the an ultra-Orthodox advocacy group called Agudath Israel:
An influential rabbi came last summer to the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, with a message: his ultra-Orthodox advocacy group was instructing adherent Jews that they could report allegations of child sexual abuse to district attorneys or the police only if a rabbi first determined that the suspicions were credible.
The pronouncement was a blunt challenge to Mr. Hynes’s authority. But the district attorney “expressed no opposition or objection,” the rabbi, Chaim Dovid Zweibel, recalled.
In fact, when Mr. Hynes held a Hanukkah party at his office in December, he invited many ultra-Orthodox rabbis affiliated with the advocacy group, Agudath Israel of America. He even chose Rabbi Zweibel, the group’s executive vice president, as keynote speaker at the party….
Rabbi Yosef Blau of Yeshiva University was one of the few victims’ advocates who attended the Hanukkah party in December.
“Basically, I looked around the room and the message that I got is: You are in bed with all the fixers in Brooklyn,” Rabbi Blau said. “Nothing is going to change, because these people, the message they got is: These are the ones that count.”
Well hold on now. Last December? The same group, Agudath Israel, was favored with an ambassador of the Obama administration at the same time. Check out the youtube video below. It’s Jarrod Bernstein, the Jewish outreach director for the Obama administration, addressing Agudath Israel last November, days after he took his new job. He says he first started working with Agudath when he was in the Bloomberg administration in New York.
And he recruits Agudath in the war against terror. “If you see something, say something,” Jarrod Bernstein says of stopping terrorism– not Agudath’s policy when it’s child abuse.
You will see that a lot of Bernstein’s talk is about how the Obama administration supports Israel. Big applause lines. And he praises Agudath: “I value my long standing relationships in this community and this room and I look forward to working with you in the future… I will be there for you. Shalom aleichem.”
Evidently this has been going on forever and the way it is in that community.
The abused children and their families can’t get justice because they are caught between a DA caving to the local powers to keep his elected position, and the religious sect’s insular cultism.
What a fine mess, their so called community leaders won’t do anything concrete about this and then the outside secular law won’t help them either.
It’s enough to say some vigilante justice might be in order.
The DA is protecting the victims… [so we don’t know who the other 90 perverted guys/rabbis are]. Good to have justice on your side?
@Philip: “the Jewish outreach director for the Obama administration”
‘cuse me?? Americans’ tax money is supporting an Obama “Jewish outreach director”?? Are there Christian, Muslim, and atheist outreach directors, too? Buddhist? What is this Jewish outreach that needs directing? Why does there need to be outreach to any religion in a country that prides itself on very strict separation of church and state?
A tax-payer funded religious outreach director of any sort seems to be flying perilously close to violating the 1st Amendment separation of church and state doctrine.
To be honest, I have never understood how successive administrations could send billions of tax-payer money to support a Jewish state without violating the separation doctrine.
Any country that proclaims itself an Islamic state, or a Jewish state, or a Christian state, etc., should be cut off from any US financial or military assistance. (That includes North Carolina.) You can’t aid a country that is based on a religion without aiding the religion.
The statement–linked to in the NYT article–from Agudah (which is how one refers to them in one word) does not favor “coddling” abusers. It says, in fact. that it is obligatory to report abusers when the report is not simply based on conjecture. It does treat the situation the same way Orthodoxy treats other situations–as subject to halacha. Never mind Orthodoxy–reporting people to the authorities is a sensitive and serious matter–do you disagree with that?
1) Note on terminology: it’s “Agudat Yisrael (or Israel)” or “The Aguda”.
“Aguda” in Hebrew means “union”. So: The Aguda = The Union.
2) Interesting that the less insular modern-Orthodox Yeshiva University rep, Rabbi Blau is at odds with the very insular ultra-Orthodox Aguda.
3) Look how Zionism has become the universal Jewish dogma. Back in the day, the Aguda was founded in Europe as an anti-Zionist group. Today, see how much of the speech of the President’s envoy to the Aguda group was about the President’s support for the State of Israel.