Tel-Chai Nation

So here's another columnist writing about the fallout of the Walder sex abuse scandal, and it reveals, for example:

Lefkovitch adds that there is a distinction between average families and the atmosphere among the younger generation, those at different levels of openness to general society. In the WhatsApp groups of haredi young adults, Lefkovitch says one finds great criticism of rabbis who did not sufficiently distance themselves from Walder after the accusations were revealed. “There is a feeling that they knew and kept quiet and even after it became known they did not shake [it] off immediately, and that adds to the growing sense that perhaps the rabbis do not deserve the absolute trust they have – until recently – gained.”

“But,” adds Lefkovitch, “let’s not forget that for the large majority among the different factions of the haredi society, there is very little – if any – awareness of these events. These people live totally disconnected from the media – they don’t listen to non-haredi radio, they don’t watch TV, they don’t read newspapers – just a few glances at the haredi press – and hence they know very little of what is going on outside their closed world, and those are still the majority.

[...] Regarding any eventual changes in the way haredi parents address their children about such dangers, Lefkovitch says the major problem is that within this society, there are things and words that will never be mentioned in a talk between father and son, mother and daughter. “They will not talk about these issues openly. They will say for example, do not talk with a stranger, do not get in the car of someone you don’t know, but they will not even hint at sexual issues. So finally, protest and talk about what exactly happened is done only in secular media.”

As for the reactions in the streets, Lefkovitch confirms that here again, embarrassment and lack of clarity reign: “There were struggles over whether to throw away his [Walder’s] books. There was a group who burned the books on the street, while others claimed it is precisely in the books that his better expressions remain.”

No good expressions can come from tainted publications. But to think they'd burn books is incredibly stupid, after what occurred in Nazi Germany in the past century and others. What should be done with the books is transfer them to a criminology institute, where they can be studied to see if it provides insight into what a twisted mind Walder had. What the Haredi ignoramuses did just compounds how poor their insular judgement really is. In more related news, there was a rebbetzin who caused anguish after she defended Walder despite the mounting evidence availiable through the rabbinical investigation:

The recent revelation of acclaimed children’s author Chaim Walder’s decades of sexual abuse has prompted a reckoning in the Orthodox community, or at least calls for one.

It also prompted a prominent Haredi rebbetzin and scholar, Tziporah Heller, to write an impassioned Facebook post decrying those who shamed Walder and vilifying the reporter who first wrote about the women who have accused him of molestation and rape. Heller described the Haaretz journalist as a “supercilious” and dishonest lapsed Orthodox Jew — and appeared to blame him for Walder’s Dec. 27 death by suicide.

She also seemed to downplay the alleged victims’ trauma, writing that Walder — convicted in a Haredi religious court in Israel after the judges heard testimony about 22 victims — “lost his balance.”

Her Jan. 2 post, and its warnings to Orthodox Jews to keep ugly stories out of the public eye, then drew a backlash of its own, and provided a window into the way that the Haredi community is grappling with sexual abuse. Traditional ideas rooted in the Biblical prohibition of talebearing are butting up against more notions about accountability that are no less Biblical but much less talked about.

The post drew hundreds of angry comments from Heller’s followers, many of whom have non-Orthodox backgrounds themselves.

It's just as damaging when women serve as apologists for abominations, and she sure caused a lot of anguish that could've been prevented. Just because Haaretz is a leftist paper doesn't mean this subject in itself was done with poor intentions. Rachel Bayar addressed this troubling example of a woman stupidly acting as apologist without doing some fact checking:

Choices. Choices are what we make every day. We walk through each moment deciding what to do and how to do it. Choices are how we make it from point A to point B; they are why we are here. In the case of a DWI, the choices are your road map. The choice to drink. To leave the bar. To pick up those keys. To walk to your car. To open the door. To get in. To put the key in the ignition. To turn it. To shift into Drive. Those small choices are what led to this moment. To crash. To kill.

Every single person who has sexually abused a child has made a choice. So too have the adults, parents, teachers, coaches, role models, clergy, spiritual advisors or communal leaders who have chosen not to act — or not to act in the right way.

The recent scandal surrounding Israeli children’s book author Chaim Walder, accused of sexually abusing dozens of people, including minors, is rife with people making the right and wrong choices. The revelations inspired a surprising and welcome backlash within the Orthodox Jewish community in which Walder was a celebrity, with retailers and media companies severing ties with him.

On the other side, too many rabbis, communal leaders and educators kept silent, chose to say little or cautioned against “gossip,” especially after Walder’s apparent suicide in the wake of the allegations. Some publicly blamed his accusers for going public, appeared at Walder’s funeral and shiva house or, as the Jerusalem-based teacher and author Rebbetzin Tziporah Heller did on her Facebook page, spoke of Walder as having “lost his balance.”

He did not “lose his balance.” He preyed on children. And the choice to use such benign words only inflicts more pain, trauma and harm.

In all my years of prosecuting child abuse and sex crimes cases, the impact of choices was apparent in every case, every day. Choices made by others meant I could not indict a perpetrator or take them to trial because of the trauma inflicted on the victim, in many cases — a young child. Choices had an impact on every person who could not testify because the pain and trauma were too raw and real. Choices made by some meant a child could not disclose their suffering for years because there was no safe space to do so. Other survivors couldn’t come forward because they knew they would be ostracized in communities that choose to blame the victims.

Again, this is why building such an insular culture is dangerous. In the USA, a girls' yeshiva was panned for telling parents not to discuss the issue:

Members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community are at odds after an elementary school principal in Brooklyn encouraged parents not to engage with their kids about sex abuse allegations involving a widely popular children’s author who killed himself once the accusations became public. [...]

Walder was one of the ultra-Orthodox world’s most popular and beloved young-adult authors, with some 80 books to his name. He established summer camps for Jewish children, and was behind the Center for the Child and the Family in the mostly Hasidic city of Bnei Brak. As a result, the insular global community of Haredi Jews has been rocked by the assault claims against him—and leaders such as Rabbi Menachem Frank, the principal of all-girls private school Bais Yaakov in Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood, are under fire for a response some say will only further hurt children.

The Bais Yaakov dust-up began shortly after Walder’s recent death, when a student wrote about the situation in the school’s newsletter. After they were mailed out, the school changed its mind and immediately tried to claw back all copies of the newsletter by asking parents to return them upon receipt, a source close to the community told The Daily Beast. In response to confusion and uncertainty among parents as to what prompted the school’s freakout, Frank, who did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment, sent a letter to parents in an attempt to clear the air.

“In light of the recent horror that has occurred in Eretz Yisroel in regard to a well-known children’s author, I urge you all to exercise extreme restraint when discussing this,” he wrote, suggesting that conversations about Walder could lead to “mental health triggers, confusion, feelings of betrayal, and so on.”

“Sharing these discussions with our children can definitely create deep seated damage in their precious and delicate minds…,” Frank went on. “Please recognize the danger to ourselves and our children. In truth, this subject should never have reached the ears of our children in the first place. As a community, we need to be more vigilant about what we share with our children and what we allow them to view, read or hear. We are partially the cause of this unnecessary crisis of how to support our children who are now grappling with too-much-information. Let's be more careful.”

The solution, Frank wrote in his letter, was to “remain vague and simply state, ‘We all thought he was a good guy but it appears that he may not have been very good after all. It sounds like he hurt people. But he is gone now, it’s over, let’s move on.’”

You can't just simply move on unless you give some understanding of the incident to the students. And that's not what they're doing here either.

What's really irritating about the way the Daily Beast, from which this article comes, covered the case is that they sought comment from a leftist:

Dainy Bernstein, who attended Bais Yaakov as a child and later taught there as an adult, has focused their PhD studies on ultra-Orthodox Jewish children’s literature in America. Bernstein, who also teaches courses on young-adult literature at Lehman College in the Bronx, said that Frank’s second letter was “still not okay.”

“The idea of, ‘Don’t use the horror of the Chaim Walder story’—this is the same thing as saying, after gun violence, ‘Now is not the time to talk about gun control,’” Bernstein told The Daily Beast. “No, now is exactly the time to talk about it.”

Bernstein, who identifies as non-binary, was “raised on” Walder’s books, they said, calling them “an extremely important part of my childhood.”

Oh, God. Just what we need. Somebody who buys into that incredibly stupid idiocy of "genderlessness". Why, if this is a girl we're talking about here, she basically retains a certain mindset that most ultra-Orthodox embrace, that "modesty" is more important than looking beautiful. This is just so embarrassing, even as the interviewee was willing to note the following:

Many people in the Hasidic community are not raised with the same critical thinking skills about the secular world, according to Bernstein. Because of this, parents who now have “an odd feeling” about Walder’s books are confused about what to do and don’t know how to figure it out on their own.

“And they’re looking to leadership, and all leadership is saying is, ‘Stop all conversation,’” said Bernstein. “Parents are turning to [the school principal] for guidance. Give them real guidance.”

The unfiltered internet is, theoretically, forbidden in the Hasidic community. In many yeshivas, going to the public library is also prohibited. But Bernstein, who is no longer ultra-Orthodox, chafed against these restrictions and learned about sex from secret visits to the public libraries around New York.

“I actually remember asking my mother at one point, ‘Is this something that’s part of Jewish marriage also, or is this just a thing that goyim do?’ I had no idea how babies were made, and I was, I think, 17 at the time when I asked my mom. Which is ridiculous.”

But why doesn't she seem to have any critical, objective viewpoint of the whole LGBT propaganda machine she's all but adhering to? It goes without saying that to compare this to discussions of gun control is also ludicrous, unless we're talking about how Walder had a weapon he may or may not have bought on the black market without registration. Other than that, what's gun control got to do with this? She doesn't believe in the importance of self-defense? Totally inappropriate to bring that up, yet it's just like the Daily Beast to do so.

There's also discussions referencing Walder's actual credentials, and what the following columnist reveals is quite eyebrow raising:

Chaim Walder, it seems, had no formal training. It is therefore difficult to come to conclusions regarding psychologists or other licensed therapists based on this case. Besides the training and supervision, licensed psychologists obligate themselves to a high professional standard of ethics, including the possibility of being suspended if guilty of untoward conduct. Unlicensed “therapists” do not.

If Walder had no legal permit to practice psychology - which could easily be the case for a substantial number of would-be specialists in insular Haredi communities - then the writing was on the wall. Why didn't anybody take issue with this matter sooner? Why wasn't he penalized for not applying for the proper permits early in his career? It just shows how much corruption is in the Israeli governing system in the past, that also enabled him to do that.

In the end, let's hope this whole scandal will get people in Haredi societies to wake up and realize why it'd be better to abandon the lifestyle...but not take up the kind the Daily Beast's interviewee did. All that would be doing is adhering to ideologies hurtful to women - and men - that aren't so different from punk subculture, and are as hurtful to women as some of the customs in Haredi communities advocating "modesty".

Labels: haredi corruption, Israel, misogyny, Moonbattery, New York, sexual violence, United States