Another Haredi victim of sex abuse turned into an outcast
In the 2 1/2 years since Mordechai Jungreis’ boy revealed the awful truth — the mentally disabled teen was allegedly molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse — Jungreis (pictured) has turned from a respected member of the Hasidic community into a leper. A nobody.Just like the victim of Satmar's Nechemya Weberman, here too is someone who needs the backing of people with more common sense than the Bobov seem to have. And here too are some folks who need to consider either searching for a Haredi community with more of a head on their shoulders than Satmar or Bobov have, or they should leave the lifestyle and go for a simpler Jewish community where it's more open and better justice can be done.
Pond scum.
Jungreis, his wife and four children were kicked out of their apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and forced to move to the community’s outskirts. They found a new synagogue that would accept them.
His son, “badly damaged” by the alleged abuse, was targeted a second time, he said, expelled from two yeshivas. Summer camp, too.
People on the street crossed to the other side when Jungreis walked by. Words of abuse were hurled anonymously into the telephone. Or on the street.
As a Jew, I’m horrified that, in 2013, Jungreis, 38, could be punished, vilified and treated worse than a criminal. All for publicly accusing a fellow Jew of a heinous crime?
Finally, tomorrow, Meir Dascalowitz, 29, the man charged in 2010 with molesting the teen, is scheduled for a pretrial hearing in a crime that, Jungreis says, he discovered after finding blood on his boy’s underwear. Jungreis hopes this exercise in jurisprudence will put his nightmare to rest.
He expects nothing.
“I went through hell,” Jungreis, who once considered himself a member of the Bobov ultra-Orthodox community, told me.
“We used to pray in the park, because I wasn’t allowed in the synagogue. My son is not in school.’’
And now, Dascalowitz has the full support of Jungreis’ neighbors.
“Everyone is running away from my child,’’ said Jungreis, whose son is afflicted with learning disabilities and a low IQ. The boy, now 17, is tested regularly for HIV.
“What about my child? This is a disabled child. And they’re screaming at me in the street!”
Labels: haredi corruption, Judaism, misogyny, Moonbattery, sexual violence, United States