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.
Hey, they’re not Catholic, no priests involved, so what’s the complaint? Should Jewish kids have rights?
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?
As far as I know you can release the names of those arrested without naming their victims. I am sure the arrested aren’t going to give interviews naming their victims. Most newpapers ,except the lowest rags, don’t publish names of victims in cases like this even if they could get the names….one of the few things they don’t stoop to these days. It’s an excuse.
I would agree that names of those arrested should not be given out unless their victims have definitely identified them.
@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?
Yitzgood, I find your comment a little confusing. What is one supposed to do when they discover that their rabbi is raping children? Are you saying that such cases must first be subject to halacha? I have no idea what that means but I guess you are saying there is some Jewish law that has precedence over American civil law. Please let us know what this law might be. Us Americans are curious.
toivo, i haven’t read the article yet but it’s my understanding under jewish law there has to be a witness to any alleged sexual abuse. perhaps this is what yitzgood means by ‘conjecture’. it is the rabbi who decides if it is conjecture or not.
Isn’t that “witness requirement” also present in Sharia law, as to rape? I guess all these religions have figured they can reduce litigation — and we all favor that, don’t we — by requiring a witness to a crime that (above most crimes) is unlikely to have a witness.
Next thing we’ll hear is that there must not only be a witness, but a witness who will be allowed to testify: remember when certain classes of people (black people, Chinese people) were not allowed to testify in American courts? Seriously, are women and children even allowed to testify against grown men?
OTOH, assertions of rape, etc., are very serious and harmful to the accused and the evidence is really not very often persuasive, so maybe the requirement of a witness is appropriate — don’t let your kid or your women-folk be unescorted and make sure whoever escorts them is trustworthy (or send two escorts).
No that is accusations of Zina (adultery)
“During the time of the Prophet (saw) punishment was inflicted on the rapist on the solitary evidence of the woman who was raped by him. Wa’il ibn Hujr reports of an incident when a woman was raped. Later, when some people came by, she identified and accused the man of raping her. They seized him and brought him to Allah’s messenger, who said to the woman, “Go away, for Allâh has forgiven you,” but of the man who had raped her, he said, “Stone him to death.” (Tirmidhi and Abu Dawud)
During the time when Umar (raa) was the Khalifah, a woman accused his son Abu Shahmah of raping her; she brought the infant borne of this incident with her to the mosque and publicly spoke about what had happened. Umar (raa) asked his son who acknowledged committing the crime and was duly punished right there and then. There was no punishment given to the woman. (Rauf)
Islamic legal scholars interpret rape as a crime in the category of Hiraba. In ‘Fiqh-us-Sunnah’, hiraba is described as: ‘a single person or group of people causing public disruption, killing, forcibly taking property or money, attacking or raping women (hatk al ‘arad), killing cattle, or disrupting agriculture.’
The famous jurist, Ibn Hazm, had the widest definition of hiraba, defining a hiraba offender as: ‘One who puts people in fear on the road, whether or not with a weapon, at night or day, in urban areas or in open spaces, in the palace of a caliph or a mosque, with or without accomplices, in the desert or in the village, in a large or small city, with one or more people… making people fear that they’ll be killed, or have money taken, or be raped (hatk al ‘arad)… whether the attackers are one or many.”
Al-Dasuqi held that if a person forced a woman to have sex, his actions would be deemed as committing hiraba. In addition, the Maliki judge Ibn ‘Arabi, relates a story in which a group was attacked and a woman in their party was raped. Responding to the argument that the crime did not constitute hiraba because no money was taken and no weapons used, Ibn ‘Arabi replied indignantly that “hiraba with the private parts” is much worse than hiraba involving the taking of money, and that anyone would rather be subjected to the latter than the former.
The crime of rape is classified not as a subcategory of ‘zina’ (consensual adultery), but rather as a separate crime of violence under hiraba. This classification is logical, as the “taking” is of the victim’s property (the rape victim’s sexual autonomy) by force. In Islam, sexual autonomy and pleasure is a fundamental right for both women and men (Ghazâlî); taking by force someone’s right to control the sexual activity of one’s body is thus a form of hiraba.
Rape as hiraba is a violent crime that uses sexual intercourse as a weapon. The focus in a hiraba prosecution is the accused rapist and his intent and physical actions, and not second-guessing the consent of the rape victim. Hiraba does not require four witnesses to prove the offense, circumstantial evidence, medical data and expert testimony form the evidence used to prosecute such crimes.
Islamic legal responses to rape are not limited to a criminal prosecution for hiraba. Islamic jurisprudence also provides an avenue for civil redress for a rape survivor in its law of “jirah” (wounds). Islamic law designates ownership rights to each part of one’s body, and a right to corresponding compensation for any harm done unlawfully to any of those parts. Islamic law calls this the ‘law of jirah’ (wounds). Harm to a sexual organ, therefore, entitles the person harmed to appropriate financial compensation under classical Islamic jirah jurisprudence. Each school of Islamic law has held that where a woman is harmed through sexual intercourse (some include marital intercourse), she is entitled to financial compensation for the harm. Further, where this intercourse was without the consent of the woman, the perpetrator must pay the woman both the basic compensation for the harm, as well as an additional amount based on the ‘diyya’ (financial compensation for murder, akin to a wrongful death payment).”
link to muslimaccess.com
yitzgood, i visited link to failedmessiah.typepad.com
so, i opened his ‘broke the story’ link and it is very revealing:
……..
From the NYT article:
>> … 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.
>> Many of the rabbis consider sexual abuse accusations to be community matters best handled by rabbinical authorities, who often do not report their conclusions to the police.
>> Yitzgood: Never mind Orthodoxy–reporting people to the authorities is a sensitive and serious matter–do you disagree with that?
Without a doubt, reporting people to the authorities is a sensitive and serious matter. This does not justify filtering accusations of wrong-doing through any person or group who has a clear conflict of interest in the matter (whether personal / communal / tribal / cultural / etc.) and giving him/them the power to potentially suppress evidence of wrongdoing.
“Never mind Orthodoxy–reporting people to the authorities is a sensitive and serious matter–do you disagree with that?”
Yea, I object to the whole idea of some cult operating on it’s own law and customs instead of the law and customs of this country where it concerns someone being seriously harmed.
some years ago when a Jewish teenager killed someone in Maryland, a rabbi functioned between the state/law and the accused. iirc the accused went to Israel where he was tried.
Jews functioned under such systems pre-emancipation; today, they have to choose: do you wish to be your own state, or do you wish to be part of the state in which you dwell? You can’t have both.
in “Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848-1933,” Peter Pulzer starts out arguing against the “common charge against the Jews” that they “constituted a state within a state,”
“”A condition for the ending of second-class citzenship, therefore, was that Jews should cease to be Jews, either by conversion or by unconditional assimilation, a demand summarized by Heinrich von Treitschke in 1879: ‘Let them become Germans, let them feel simply and properly as Germans.’ “”
Did he mean by “converting” from Judaism? Or in the sense of higher ‘fidelity’ to the nation than the Tribe? I know religious differences, demand for privileges by the religious, or forcing their will on others still exist, as we see today in the fanatic Christians in the US. But even in the 1800′s I would have hard time believing there could be any forced renouncing or conversions of a persons/groups faith. Maybe then they thought the Jewish tribalism stemmed from religion and maybe it did moreso back then. But I think the zionist have now proven it doesn’t necessarily come from Judaism although they have managed to blend or fold Judaism into zionism for many Jews.
For the zionist cult within the tribe I don’t think there is any hope of change, they have been given or attained every advantage and privilage –beyond their wildest deams —here in America–and for all that, they are still not American, they are Israeli.
It’s the same with some in this group in Brooklyn….as citizens they have every service and benefit of the US legal and police system…but they reject it in favor of their own cultist religious customs. ..they pick and choose what benefits they want from the country and reject it’s laws and norms that don’t serve or might damage the cult.
I don’t approve of government actions like the Waco disaster but the gov has busted up more than one cult on just rumors of sexual abuse of children so in cases like this I say the cult be damned, you clean them out with every legal and law enforcement means at your disposal with the harshest pentalities you can impose on anyone trying to cover it up or protect the guilty from the same legal prosecutions anyone else would face.
If you don’t do that you’re saying basically they are their own law and they can treat their children and their criminals any way they want.
I can imagine what it does to a child when they see their abuser isn’t completley rejected and vilified or fully punished by even their own community. Probably warps them for life.
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.
This does not justify filtering accusations of wrong-doing through any person or group who has a clear conflict of interest in the matter (whether personal / communal / tribal / cultural / etc.) and giving him/them the power to potentially suppress evidence of wrongdoing
Not every Rabbi has a conflict of interest. Check your assumptions. I would think that it is the same as getting advice in any other serious matter–get the advice from someone worthy to give it. Halachah includes the concept of someone who is “nogeia bedavar”– he has some interest in the outcome of the inquiry and is therefore inherently disqualified from issuing a ruling. Obviously Aguda does not advocate getting one’s halachic guidance from such a person and they are entitled to have their public positions reported accurately. They are an umbrella organization which includes a large number of groups. A few of these groups may have the problems the NYT is talking about, but it doesn’t seem to occur to participants in this thread that a molesting teacher is a normal parent’s worst nightmare.
>> Not every Rabbi has a conflict of interest. Check your assumptions.
I didn’t say every rabbi has a conflict of interest. Check your own assumptions.
This child abuse story reminds me of some of the hierarchy patterns discussed in Israel Shahak’s book, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. In it, he cites some of the history of Jewish Ghettos in aparthied Europe. He notes that the circumscribed Jewish Ghettos were strictly enforced by the Gentiles from the outside and by Rabbinical authorities from within. Rabbis had unquestionable authority within the Ghettos and Jews who were caught in comprimising relations with Gentiles or among themselves were punished (including public beatings) on orders from the Rabbis. Gentile law had no reach in the Ghettos.