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Letter 08   15-Apr-2002   Good Priests, Bad Rabbis
"There is the disgraceful case of the former headmaster Kopolevitch of Netiv Meir yeshiva high school who lived in a pedophile�s heaven for the last fifteen years, abusing dozens, even hundreds of boys under his tutelage." � Naomi Ragen
The Economist excerpts below were added to the present page on 26-Apr-2002 to lend support to the contention that targetting mainly Catholic clerics, or mainly Christian clerics, for their sex abuse is arbitrary, or rather has motivations other than the disinterested prosecution of sex crimes:

Sex offenders
Passing the trash

CHICAGO
The Catholic church is not the only institution that needs to confront, and deal with, sexual crimes against children

Some time around midnight on August 19th 1991, Mark Fry, a high-school history teacher in a wealthy Chicago suburb, was arrested on a student's roof.  He was dressed in black, wearing a ski mask and carrying a can of Mace.  School officials, fearful of bad publicity, did what many otherwise decent people do in such cases: they wrote glowing letters of recommendation for Mr Fry and sent him somewhere else.  He became a high-school principal in Wisconsin, where he was arrested and convicted seven years later for molesting a student.

As the Roman Catholic church squirms in the spotlight over charges of sexual abuse of young people, that spotlight needs to be shone in some other corners.  Sex offenders who prey on children go where children are, says Ernie Allen, president of the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.  They teach in schools, coach sports teams, run scout troops and day-care centres.  Charol Shakeshaft, a professor at Hofstra University and the author of a forthcoming book on sexual violence in schools, has found that 15% of pupils are sexually abused by a teacher of staff member between kindergarten and high-school graduation, and that up to 5% of teachers sexually abuse or harass students.  A recent FBI child-pornography sting, Operation Candyman, nabbed a teacher, a teacher's assistant, a school bus driver and an athletics coach.

On April 15th, Baruch Lanner, an Orthodox rabbi, will go on trial in New Jersey for sexually abusing two teenage girls while he was the principal of a Jewish day school.  Orthodox authorities stand accused of ignoring evidence that Rabbi Lanner sexually abused more than 20 teenage girls while he was in a position of authority in the Orthodox Union's National Conference of Synagogue Youth.  In 1999, Sports Illustrated described American youth sports, in which millions of children are coached or supervised by unscreened male volunteers, as "a ready-made resource-pool for paedophiles".  [...]

Studies of sex offenders in jail have found that the average child molester has gained legitimate access to children, begun molesting by the age of 15, and abused nearly 120 victims, most of whom never report the crime.  [...]

"The first instinct is to get them out of your organisation," says Mr Allen.  As in the case of Mr Fry, the perpetrator is sent away with nothing but praise in the personnel file.  Such cases are so common that educators have coined the term "passing the trash".  A 1995 study of 225 cases in which pupils were sexually abused by teachers or other staff members found that in only 1% of the cases did the school-district superintendent attempt to revoke the culprit's teaching licence.
The Economist, 06-Apr-2002, pp. 27-28.

  15 April 2002

Ezra Levant
159, 2515-90th Ave SW
Calgary, AB T2V 0L8


Ezra Levant:

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Clerical Sex Sins

The Sins of Cardinal Roger M. MAHONY

I caught a broadcast on CNN television on Saturday 06-Apr-2002 which I could not believe I was hearing, and when I looked it up on the CNN web site the following day, there it was, pretty much as I remembered it:

L.A. cardinal denies sex abuse accusations

April 7, 2002 Posted: 4:20 PM EDT (2020 GMT)


Mahony has denied the woman's accusations and says he is cooperation with an investigation.
FRESNO, California (AP) � Police are investigating a woman's sex-abuse accusations against Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, leader of the nation's largest Roman Catholic archdiocese.

Police Lt. Michael Guthrie confirmed Saturday that an investigation involving Mahony was under way.  Mahony said he was cooperating fully.

A 51-year-old Fresno woman claims she was molested by the 66-year-old Mahony while a student at San Joaquin Memorial Catholic High School in 1969.

She told The Associated Press on Saturday that she was knocked unconscious while fighting with students and woke to find the "bottom" portion of her clothing removed and Mahony, then a monsignor in Fresno, "over her."

She said she has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and is taking medication for depression.  She told the Fresno Bee for Sunday editions: "All I said was that when I opened my eyes, some of my clothes were gone and he was the only one around.  I was unconscious.  I don't know if he molested me, but he could have."

She said she could not remember many details.

She told the Los Angeles Times one reason she was coming forward with the allegations against Mahony is that the state is cutting her disability payments and she needs a cash settlement from the church.

The woman also told the Times in Sunday editions that her parents, other family members, high school classmates and former co-workers have molested, abused or emotionally mistreated her.
CNN www.cnn.com/2002/US/04/07/church.abuse.ap/index.html

What astonished me about the CNN coverage was the discrepancy between the volume of coverage and the flimsiness of the evidence.

The space allocated to the Internet version was considerable, the above being only the beginning of the CNN online article.  The time allocated to the television version was even more disproportionate, with the announcer discussing the case in leisurely detail, as if CNN time was not money, or as if this was the slowest news day of the year.

The contrasting flimsiness of the case consists in there being only a single complainant and only a single alleged impropriety which took place 33 years ago, and with no record of a complaint being lodged at around the time of the event, or in fact at any time over the next 33 years.  The complainant admits to being a paranoid schizophrenic and to being on medication.  She admits to being impecunious and having a mercenary interest in bringing her accusation.  She describes an event that should have been witnessed by many � being knocked out in a fight with other students � and yet does not bring corroborative witnesses.

And even if one were to credit her story, its meaning is ambiguous at best � fellow students who are delinquent enough to knock her out in a fight might also be delinquent enough to yank off her pants once she was unconscious.  Also, a half-naked student lying unconscious would attract a great deal of attention, and would quickly attract school officials to her assistance and protection.  Thus, it is to be expected that her first sight upon regaining consciousness would be a school official leaning over her.  Again, if she were discovered lying unconscious in the school yard or in a hall, then it is likely that an ambulance would be called, and improbable that anyone would carry her to a private office, and even more improbable that he should do so without attracting a retinue of helpers, thus affording insufficient privacy for sexual molestation.

This accusation against Cardinal Mahony is so lacking in substance that it is a wonder that it received any media coverage at all, let alone the extensive coverage given it by CNN.

In the days following that first coverage of Cardinal Mahony that I happened across, not only CNN but also the CBC and the BBC kept up its drum-beat of sexual wrongdoing among the Catholic clergy, to the point that I decided to write you about it.  The main thing that I cannot help noticing at the outset is that what the media seem intent on doing is accumulating instances of sexual wrongdoing on the part of Christian clergy, at the moment the Catholic clergy.  What they are not doing is placing that data alongside other data that was sorely needed � to begin, there is no indication of the number of Christian clerics who are innocent of sexual wrongdoing.

What is wrong with neglecting to present information about the number of innocent Christian clerics is that the public forms impressions of its own as to what this number might be, and these impressions will vary from person to person over a large range, and inevitably most people's impressions will be very wrong.  Thus, some people might estimate as little as one sexually-sinning Christian cleric out of every hundred thousand, and other people might estimate nine out of every ten.

The proportion, or the percentage, of Christian clerics who sin would be both interesting and practical to know, and yet we aren't being told.  To be fair to CNN, one participant in a Crossfire discussion that I caught Tuesday night did suggest the figure of 0.03%, which would be 3 sinning Christian clerics out of every 10,000.  Credit must go to CNN not for its research staff originating this statistic, but only for not expurgating it from the broadcast.  CNN's allowing this statistic to be broadcast was a step in the right direction, and all that is missing is to verify the figure, and to broadcast it almost always in discussions of sexual misconduct, instead of almost never.  It is indicative of the low level of discussion that only one participant in the Crossfire debate proposed this figure, but did not give its source, and did not give either the numerator (just how many sinning Christian clerics have been discovered so far?) or the denominator (just what is the total number of Christian clerics?), and indicative of the low level of the discussion also that no other participant came to this debate prepared with his own estimate, all apparently thinking it adequate to shake their heads at the freshest instance of a sinning priest, and seeing no advantage to cluttering up the discussion with more numbers than the one that had squeezed through.

But in addition, there is still more data that could be added, and that would be both interesting and practical to know.  And that data would be the comparable numbers for other religions.  That is, once we know what proportion of Christian clerics are sinners, it would be interesting to know the proportion of Jewish clerics that are sinners, and the proportion of Muslim clerics that were sinners, and so on.  Also of great interest would be the proportion of sinners among secular groups doing similar work in a secular setting.  Of course, no hint of these additional statistics was evident either on CNN or anywhere else, and no consciousness that such additional comparisons might be enlightening.

Again, in the absence of such additional data, the public generates its own estimates, and these will vary widely, and most will be very wrong.  Probably from the recent media focus on Catholics, most people will be drawn to the conclusion that sexual indiscretion is something that is peculiar to the Catholic church, or from media focus over recent years on Christians, that it is peculiar to Christians, with the accompanying assumption that other religions are largely free of it.

The question that we have begun to ask, then, is what the correlation is between the religion of a cleric and his predisposition to sexual sin, and that question can be answered by filling in the four question marks in the table below with four numbers.  That is, we need to know how many Christian clerics are sinners, and how many aren't, and we need also to know how many Jewish clerics are sinners, and how many aren't.  Adopting some objective definition of what a cleric is and what a sinner is, and examining some representative sample of clerics, a researcher would be able to fill in the four cells of the table, and any correlation would then become evident.  Expressed most simply, the data in such a fourfold table would permit us simply to compute the proportion of Christian and Jewish clerics that go astray.

RELIGION
Christian Jewish
S
I
N		 Yes ? ?
No ? ?

I pause for a moment to point out that a fourfold table such as the above contains the minimum data required to compute a correlation.  The table certainly can be expanded to ask more complex questions � for example, one could add a third column for Muslim clerics, or one could split up the Christian column into Catholic and Protestant, or go farther than that and split Catholic and Protestant up into still more columns, and so on.  I do not follow such a path of expansion here because our discussion is at a preliminary and elementary level, and I am trying to keep things simple.  But what does bear keeping in mind is that the table cannot be made any smaller than four cells, not if our goal is to discover a correlation.  If data from even one of the four cells is unavailable or undisclosed, then the correlation remains unknowable.  If data from more than one cell is missing, then we are being fed some very primitive and inconclusive evidence.

And so what bothers me about the current media coverage is that it dedicates the bulk of its efforts to accumulating instances in the yellow cell � that is to say, instances of sinning Christian clerics, particularly over the last few days Catholic ones.

So, as a preliminary first step toward broadening our horizons and answering the question of what the relationship may be between the religion of a cleric and his predisposition to sin, I asked myself merely whether there might be entries falling in cells other than that yellow cell upon which the information media appear to have fixed their spotlights, or whether these other cells were pretty much empty.  For starters, I asked whether there might be any entries in the blue cell � sinning Jewish clerics � and if so whether I could without a great deal of labor get a gut feeling as to whether the blue cell tended to accumulate entries easily or with difficulty.  I will take a moment to describe what I found.

The Sins of Rabbi Baruch LANNER

Rabbi Baruch Lanner
1 1
0 0
If we begin to fill in our fourfold table with cases considered so far in the present letter, then Cardinal Mahony constitutes a single case of a sinning Christian cleric, and so the yellow cell gets an entry of 1.  The criterion of sinning would have to be the rather low one of having been featured as possibly sinning by the media, no matter how flimsy the evidence.

The two zeros in the two lower gray cells are not meant to imply that there are no sin-free clerics � but only that in the course of sorting clerics that come to our attention in the present letter, we have not yet come across any that are sin-free.  Obviously, if we continued on in our research, we would encounter large numbers in these two gray cells.

What we are about to establish in the present section is that Rabbi Baruch Lanner gives us our first instance of a sinning Jewish cleric, so that the blue cell receives an entry of 1.

Lanner found opportunity to sin in several of the positions that he held � principal of Hillel Yeshiva High School, director of regions for the Orthodox Union's (OU) National Conference of Synagogue Youth (NCSY), and a leader of an Israel summer program.  Despite his long and illustrious career, complaints of his misbehavior were being made as far back as 1972, but were ignored right up to June 2000 when the New York Jewish Week published allegations against him, and against Orthodox Union officials, under the headline "Stolen Innocence."

So, what exactly had Lanner been doing over the previous three decades?  Well, he was good enough to leave Ari Greenspan with an unforgettable memento:

"It bothered me a lot," said Greenspan who recalled that when he was an eighth-grade NCSY activist in New Jersey, he was kicked in the groin by Lanner and left on a playing field doubled over in pain.
Leora Eren Frucht, Sweeping abuse under the carpet, Jerusalem Post, 30-Jul-2000.

Ari Greenspan was not the sole recipient of Lanner's camaraderie:

The Report describes how at least thirty witnesses testified to having suffered or witnessed Lanner kneeing boys in the groin.  Indeed, according to the 1989 psak, Lanner admitted engaging in this conduct.
Public Summary of the Report of the NCSY Special Commission, www.ou.org/oupr/2000/comm/SC000001.pdf, p. 15.

Groin-kicking was hardly the worst of it.  Lanner also stabbed a 22-year-old man, and throttled a 16-year-old girl:

In one account, the rabbi stabbed a 22-year-old man in the neck and the arm during a fight that began when the man asked Lanner not to interfere in his relationship with his fiancee.  One woman [Judy Klitsner] told the newspaper that when she was 16 and rebuffed Lanner's advances, "he began to strangle me with all his strength, and it was only when he saw that I was losing consciousness that he threw me down and walked away."
Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, 25-Jun-2000, www.jpost.com/Editions/2000/06/25/News/News.8649.html

Lanner did not always strangle girls who rebuffed his advances � those whose insubordination was less provocative, he merely punched in the stomach:

"There was a code of loyalty here at the same time, and also he was very scary," said Naomi Freistat, a 41-year-old doctor who said Lanner kissed and fondled her a dozen times and punched her in the stomach when she was 15.  "This was a man where you didn't know what was coming next."  [...]

Freistat, a podiatrist in New York, said she met Lanner when she traveled from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., to retreats in New Jersey.  Freistat said Lanner persuaded her mother to let her go on his six-week trip to Israel in 1974.

Lanner asked Freistat to kiss him on the cheek the first week of the trip, and on the second week summoned her outside � "it was always outside," she said � and kissed and fondled her.  She endured the contact a dozen times, she said, fearing she would be sent home.

She said she tried to pull away the last time he approached her in a Jerusalem courtyard near her hostel.

"He said 'Don't walk away from me,'" Freistat said.  "He punched me in the stomach.  All I remember is just looking up at him and saying 'You just punched the wrong girl.'"

Freistat said she and another girl on the youth group spoke to two rabbis about Lanner's conduct, but that he went unpunished.
Amy Westfeldt, Students accuse New Jersey rabbi of abuse over 20 years, Detroit News, 14-Jul-2000 detnews.com/2000/religion/0007/15/07150004.htm

When he was not kicking groins or stabbing necks or throttling throats or punching stomachs, he was pinching, jabbing, and hitting hard enough to bruise:

Rosie Shyker used to come home from her youth-group meetings bruised.  [...]

Shyker never bothered to tell her mother how the rabbi would push and pinch her roughly.

"I would come home from some activity, and my mother would say 'what's that?' pointing to a bruise, and I'd say 'oh nothing.'"
Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, 25-Jun-2000, www.jpost.com/Editions/2000/06/25/News/News.8649.html

Lanner's favorite pastime, however, was sexually molesting the teen-age girls in his care, scores of them coming forward to tell their stories, and with who knows how many more choosing not to come forward:

"I know of people in the States whose teenage kids have been abused by him recently.  They won't come forward because they are afraid it will affect their children's shidduch [matchmaking] chances or because they're afraid of Baruch."
"Debbie" in Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, 25-Jun-2000, www.jpost.com/Editions/2000/06/25/News/News.8649.html

During his 15-year tenure as principal of Hillel Yeshiva High School in Deal, NJ, Lanner found himself falling in love with even his 14-year-old charges, though to overhear him talking to them, allowing himself to fall in love only when such could be defended on the grounds of honorable intentions:

The first woman, now 19, alleged that Lanner sexually abused her almost daily in his office at the yeshiva when she was a 14-year-old ninth-grader there in 1995 and 1996.  She testified about this treatment before the grand jury, as did her mother, who asserted that she overheard Lanner on the phone with her daughter, telling her he loved her and wanted to marry her.
Gary Rosenblatt, Lanner charged with sex abuse, Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, 30-Mar-2001 www.jewishaz.com/jewishnews/010330/lanner.html

Dedicated to the support of his synagogue, Lanner was inventive in suggesting how a 14-year-old could improve her fund-raising:

"The commission may be independent, but what will the OU [Orthodox Union] do with the findings?" asked Debbie, who now lives in Israel, and requested that her real name be withheld.  Debbie said she was regularly subjected to lewd comments and was touched inappropriately by Lanner when she was a teenager in New Jersey.

"He would repeatedly tell me that I could improve my synagogue fund-raising if I would sell my body.  I was 14!  With other people, it was even worse.  He would tap girls on the chest with a fork."
Leora Eren Frucht, Sweeping abuse under the carpet, Jerusalem Post, 30-Jul-2000.

Lanner's misdeeds were being reported to his superiors from way back � though it might be underestimating Lanner's precocity to say "right from the beginning" � but always to no avail, as for example in 1972 and 1977:

A senior member of the professional staff admitted that in 1972 he was informed that Lanner engaged in a physical sexual relationship with two NCSY teenagers.  (p. 18)
In 1977, a female teenage student reported to a senior member of the NCSY professional staff her physical sexual relationship with Lanner on a summer NCSY tour when she was 14 years old.  (p. 19)
Public Summary of the Report of the NCSY Special Commission www.ou.org/oupr/2000/comm/SC000001.pdf

Exactly what Lanner did to whom, the public has not been allowed to learn, as a 331-page report on Lanner (by a commission appointed by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America) has been kept secret.

To Lanner's credit, though, it must be acknowledged that he was not so sex-crazed toward his 14-year-old charges as to neglect his obligations as the family breadwinner:

The Commission also found and included in its Report detailed evidence, including letters, bank records and cancelled checks, indicating that in recent years Lanner successfully solicited donations for NCSY programs, but instructed donors to send their checks to his home.  In several instances, the Commission has been unable to locate any record of these donations on the OU's books and the evidence indicates that they were deposited into Lanner's personal bank accounts.
Public Summary of the Report of the NCSY Special Commission www.ou.org/oupr/2000/comm/SC000001.pdf, p. 17.

Rabbi Lanner was one of the first sinning rabbis that I came across in my search of the Internet, and as information on him proved to be comparatively plentiful, I presented him first.  Other sinning rabbis that I came across I present alphabetically by surname below.


The Sins of Rabbi Shlomo CARLEBACH

Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach
1 2
0 0
From Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach's behavior we may safely lift the entry in the blue cell to 2.

It might be kept in mind while reading the account below that a girl or woman who has been merely groped or "dry-humped" (to use one of the victim's expressions) by Carlebach may feel less inhibited in coming forward with her story than one who has been subjected to more extreme sex acts.  The latter may tend to maintain silence because she will feel more humiliated, degraded, and ashamed.  Thus, we might expect that the sampling of cases below is a sampling of the milder cases, and we might expect at the same time that the number of mild cases that are visible will be proportional to the number of extreme cases that are hidden.  Of course this principle will break down in the case of very extreme sex acts for which the probability of public notice may be highest.

Among the many people Lilith [Magazine] spoke with, nearly all had heard stories of Rabbi Carlebach's sexual indiscretions during his more than four-decade rabbinic career.  Spiritual leaders, psychotherapists, and others report numerous incidents, from playful propositions to actual sexual contact.  Most of the allegations include middle-of-the-night, sexually charged phone calls and unwanted attention or propositions.  Others, which have been slower to emerge, relate to sexual molestation.  [...]

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, a pioneer Jewish feminist who was at that ALEPH Kallah, says that she "first became aware of his glorification at the gathering, when it was announced that this [memorial] was going to happen."  Right after the announcement, three or four people "jumped me", she says, and told their stories: "'Shlomo molested me, Shlomo was abusive to me,'" is how she summarizes their words.  [...]

She wrote of Rabbi Carlebach's molestation of one of her congregants, Rachel, as a young woman.  As Rachel (name changed on her request to prevent further trauma) told Lilith in a subsequent telephone interview, she was in high school in the late '60's when she attended a Jewish camp where, for the first time in her life she felt "safe and uncriticized.  Every talent I had was encouraged."  Music was everywhere, and it was to this "safe" environment that Rabbi Carlebach, who spent much of his life traveling to bring his music and prayer to communities, worldwide, was invited as a guest singer.  "We had heard that someone fabulous was coming, a star," she recalls of the visit.  "The rabbis [at the camp] really seemed to honor him, like a god."  Rabbi Carlebach, with his warmth and charisma, was like the Pied Piper, she remembers, and his singing was wonderful; Rachel recalls it as "the first time in a Jewish context that I could feel that I was having a spiritual experience."

When he asked her to show him around the camp, Rachel says she felt, "what an honor [it was] to be alone with this great man."  They walked and talked of philosophy and Israel, of stars and poems, and she remembers being "just enchanted."  He asked her for a hug, and when she agreed, "he wouldn't let go.  I thought the hug was over and I tried to squirm out of it.  He started to rub and rock against me."  So unsuspecting was she, she says, "that at first I thought, 'was this some sort of davening?'"  She says she tried to push him away while he was "dry humping me until he came."  And although she doesn't remember the words he spoke, she remembers him communicating to her that it was something special in her that had caused this to happen.  "It felt cheap, but he had said thank you."  The next day he didn't even acknowledge her presence.  [...]

Rachel, today an artist and a martial arts teacher in New Mexico, told almost no one what had happened.  Those she did tell said he was "just a dirty old man."  [...]

Other stories have begun to emerge, suggesting that Rachel's experience was not unique.  Robin Goldberg, today a teacher of women's studies and a research psychoanalyst on women's issues in California, was 12 years old when Shlomo visited her Orthodox Harrisburg, Pennsylvania community to lead a singing and dancing concert.  He invited all the young people for a pre-concert preparation.  And it was during the dancing that he started touching her.  He kept coming back to her, she reports, whispering in her ear, saying "holy maidele," and fondling her breast.  Twelve years old and Orthodox, she says she didn't know what to think.  Her mother, that afternoon, told her she must have been mistaken, and that she must not have understood what was going on.  But when she was taken to a dance event led by Rabbi Carlebach years later, while she was in college, she reports that the same thing, dancing, whispering, fondling, happened to her again.

Another story comes from Rabbi Goldie Milgram, 43, today a teacher and an associate dean at the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York City.  Rabbi Milgrom was 14 when Rabbi Carlebach was a guest at her United Synagogue Youth convention in New Jersey, and was invited by her parents to stay at their home.  Late that night they passed in the hallway.  "He pulled me up against him, rubbed his hands up my body and under my clothes and pulled me up against him.  He rubbed up against me; I presume he had an orgasm.  He called me mammele."

Rabbi [Goldie] Milgram says she didn't tell her parents at the time and wasn't able to work through the incident until three years later, when she was 17 and on her first trip to Israel.  Approaching the Kotel, she saw Rabbi Carlebach leading singing there and she fled.  Her companion saw her distress and suggested that she "'pretend I'm him,'" recalls Rabbi Milgram.  "All I remember is screaming 'Who are you?  Why did you do that?  I was so excited that you came to my house and then...'"  [...]

For the past 15 years, Marcia Cohn Spiegel of Los Angeles, has studied addiction and sexual abuse in the Jewish community and has spoken to some 60 groups through Brandeis University, the University of Judaism, the Havurah Institute, along with many Jewish women's organizations, synagogues and Jewish community centers.  She doesn't mention Rabbi Carlebach at all in her talks, she told Lilith.  Following such talks, women come up to her, even in the women's bathroom, to pour out their own stories, she says, "not seeking publicity or revenge, but coming from a place of shame and isolation."  Consistently through the years women have come forward to share their stories explicitly about Rabbi Carlebach, Speigel says.

In a letter, which Spiegel made available to Lilith, she states that in the last few years, a number of women in their 40s have approached her "in private and often with deep-seated pain" about experiences they had when they were in their teens.  "Shlomo came to their camp, their center, their synagogue," she wrote, "He singled them out with some excuse...  [G]etting them alone, he fondled their breasts and vagina, sometimes thrusting himself against them muttering something, which they now believe was Yiddish."

The other typical story, she says, is recounted by women who had gone to Rabbi Carlebach, "for help with problems, or who met him when they studied with him.  They were in their 20s or 30s when it happened.  He would call them late at night (two or three o'clock in the morning) and tell them that he couldn't sleep.  He had been thinking of them.  He asked, Where were they?  What were they wearing?"

A woman who attended services conducted by Rabbi Carlebach in California in the 1970's, and who asked not to be identified in this article, recalls precisely this second scenario.  After meeting her once or twice, she says, Rabbi Carlebach called her in the middle of the night several times.  "It was very creepy.  I seem to remember him breathing heavily on the phone and panting."  Though at first she was confused, once she realized that "something surreptitious" was going on, she told him not to call her in the middle of the night anymore.  He did not.

Rabbi Carlebach's sexual advances to adult women were apparently well known.  Rabbi [Lynn] Gottlieb herself recounts Rabbi Carlebach's request that she pick him up at his hotel when he was visiting her Albuquerque community.  When she got there, "he refused to come down," asking instead that she come up to his room.  Rabbi Gottlieb "went up and stood outside the threshold and said, "I am not coming into your room and you are not going to touch me."  Another woman recalls, "His manner was 'God loves you, I love you,' and then he'd come on to you out of 'love.'"

If these allegations were so widely known, why were so many people, in so many communities in the United States, Canada, Israel and elsewhere, able to ignore or squelch such serious concerns to preserve the myth of a wholly holy man?
Sarah Blustain, A Paradoxical Legacy: Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach's Shadow Side, Lilith Magazine Volume 23, No. 1/Spring 1998 www.rickross.com/reference/lubavitch/lubavitch12.html

We may as well allow into our thinking right at the outset the hypothesis that Jews may be more successful than others in suppressing evidence concerning sexual abuse:

The Jewish world has not really dealt with rabbinic [sexual] abuse," says [Nan] Fink [co-director of Chochmat HaLev and co-founder of Tikkun magazine].  "The Christian world has, the Buddhist world has.  The Jewish community needs to say, 'We don't sanction this.'  The main thing is to have it really be known that every infraction of this kind will not be tolerated."
Sarah Blustain, A Paradoxical Legacy: Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach's Shadow Side, Lilith Magazine Volume 23, No. 1/Spring 1998 www.rickross.com/reference/lubavitch/lubavitch12.html

Perhaps it is evidence of such suppression that searching for "Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach" on the Internet turns up almost nothing but tributes to his singing and promotion of his recorded work.  The original Lilith magazine article quoted from above exposing Carlebach has been removed from the Lilith web site.  Were it not for that Lilith article being reproduced in one other location on the Internet (by someone interested in it for reasons quite different from my own), then dry-humping-twelve-year-olds Shlomo Carlebach would have been left with his reputation quite sanitized as far as the general public was concerned.


The Sins of Rabbis John DOE and John DOE and John DOE

1 5
0 0
Some reports of rabbinical sexual misconduct come without any name attached, as for example the following three.

Rabbi indicted for alleged sex abuse of his students

The rabbi is alleged to have beaten one boy in a parking lot, tying his hands and sodomizing him, and abusing boys in basements and ritual baths.

(Ha'aretz)
usajewish.com, 30-Apr-1999 www.usajewish.com/scripts/usaj/paper/Article.asp?ArticleID=461

In her RCA [Rabbinical Council of America] speech, [Dr. Susan] Shulman [a pediatrician who served on the O.U.'s commission investigating the Lanner scandal and lectures frequently about sexual abuse] told of an anonymous rabbi who impregnated a student while he was principal of a school for Jewish girls with learning disabilities.  When he was fired, he moved to another community where he is "still a prominent rabbi."
Julie Wiener, No Longer Taboo: For years, the Orthodox community has hidden it. Now, a confluence of factors is making their sexual abuse problem come out of the closet. Jewsweek, 03-Apr-2002, www.jewsweek.com/society/080.htm

I assume that the following means that the rabbi was dressed in nothing more than hat and boots; however, if what is meant is that the hat and boots were just additions to normal dress, then certainly this example might not be serious enough to deserve to be included in my list.  Also, the example serves to illustrate that the rule that I am following is to count all sexual transgressions, not merely the molestation of youngsters:

In 1998, another Israeli rabbi was photographed in a nude bar.  Claiming that he went to the bar "to see if any of his students frequented it," he could not explain why he was dressed in a Stetson hat and cowboy boots.
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)


The Sins of Assistant Rabbi Yehuda FRIEDLANDER

    See under Rabbi Israel Grunwald.


The Sins of Rabbi Sidney GOLDENBERG

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A classic case � almost three decades of continuous sex abuse culminating in the molestation of a twelve-year-old.

The Petaluma rabbi accused of sexually molesting a bat mitzvah student has pleaded no contest to the charge and faces up to eight years in prison.

Rabbi Sidney Goldenberg, formerly of Petaluma's Congregation B'nai Israel, entered his plea at Santa Rosa Municipal Court Tuesday to a felony charge of lewd and lascivious conduct with a minor under the age of 14.

The sexual misconduct allegedly took place over several months late last year while Goldenberg was tutoring the victim, a 12-year-old girl, for her bat mitzvah.

Police said Goldenberg, 58, took the girl into his office, made lewd remarks, touched her breasts and asked that she put her hands into his pockets.  [...]

Several women from New York have contacted the Santa Rosa district attorney's office claiming to have been molested by Goldenberg while they were teenagers, Medvigy said.  Their calls came amid national media attention to the case.

Goldenberg taught high school in Levittown, Long Island, and was a lay educator and cantor at several synagogues on Long Island.

Medvigy said his office has reports about 10 women, six of whom either made statements to his office or spoke to him.  The other reports came from family members who refused to disclose the whereabouts of the alleged victims.

"The first victim we know of is from 27 years ago when [Goldenberg] was a high school teacher," Medvigy said.
Ronnie Caplane, Petaluma rabbi pleads no contest to charges of sexual misconduct, Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, 21-Feb-1997 www.jewishsf.com/bk970221/bnpleads.htm

SANTA ROSA. (04/1997).  Rabbi sentenced to three-year term.  Sidney Goldenberg, age 58, was sentenced by Superior Court Judge Mark Tansil for sexually fondling a 12-year-old girl in his religion class.  Reports had surfaced of similar offenses from 27 years before.
USA News Snapshots www.angelfire.com/ri/survivorconnections/usa1briefs.html


The Sins of Cantor Joel GORDON

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Joel Gordon was not just a man with a voice good enough to sing at synagogues; rather, he is twice described below as the "spiritual leader of Congregation Shirat Emet."

Cantor Joel Gordon
Friday evening, November 21

Cantor Joel Gordon, the spiritual leader of Congregation Shirat Emet in Chicago, will present a program of Contemporary Jewish Music and will also sing our Sabbath liturgy.  He is recognized throughout the country for his musical compositions and his outstanding voice.  He is the son of Temple members, Dorothy and Harvard Gordon and was confirmed at Temple B'nai Jeshurun in 1964.
Temple B'nai Jeshurun www.tbj.org/150.html

Members of Chicago's Jewish community are expressing shock and dismay about the arrest of a former synagogue cantor and his wife of a few weeks.

The two were charged in connection with a prostitution ring.  Joel Gordon, 51, who has served at several Chicago-area synagogues, was charged November 21 with keeping a house of prostitution following a police raid on three massage parlors, operated out of private apartments in the northern suburbs.

His wife, Alison Ginsberg, 23, was charged with prostitution and keeping a house of prostitution.

Gordon was most recently the cantor and spiritual leader of Congregation Shirat Emet, a now-defunct synagogue in the Chicago suburb of Buffalo Grove, Illinois.
Ruth Silverman, Cantor charged in prostitution ring, Jerusalem post Internet Edition 31-Jan-2001


The Sins of Rabbi Israel GRUNWALD and Assistant Rabbi Yehuda FRIEDLANDER

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Rabbi Israel Grunwald of Brooklyn and Assistant Rabbi Yehudah Friedlander, both 44 years old, found themselves on an overnight flight from Australia to Los Angeles, with not much to do to relieve the tedium of the long flight, but with an unaccompanied 15-year-old girl sitting nearby.

A nine-page affidavit submitted to the court by an FBI agent, which cites statements by the young girl, a witness on the plane and Friedlander, alleges a number of occurrences during the long United Air Lines overnight flight.

The girl, an American traveling alone, accused Grunwald of leaning across an empty seat and, following some conversation, touching her necklace and fondling her breasts.

At some point, Friedlander allegedly exchanged seats with Grunwald, and while the cabin lights were dimmed, Friedlander allegedly groped and fondled the girl's private parts and breast for some five to eight minutes, the complaint charged.

The teenager told authorities that she tried to fend off the advances but was too embarrassed to call for help.  However, a woman passenger observed the alleged incident, talked to the girl and then notified the flight crew, which radioed a report to authorities.

When the plane landed in Los Angeles, FBI agents, who assumed jurisdiction under the laws governing American aircraft in flight, arrested the two men.
Tom Tugend, Grand jury to hear sexual misconduct case involving rabbis, Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, 09-Jun-1995 www.jewishsf.com/bk950609/uscase.htm

Tom Tugend's report above has Grunwald facing a maximum of two years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and Friedlander facing a maximum of 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Just a bit of detail as to what Rabbi Grunwald (I infer from the reference being to "the rabbi") did on the flight, and what Assistant Rabbi Friedlander had been caught doing four years earlier without it dislodging him from his position of responsibility within his community:

The court was told the rabbi had admitted to federal agents that he had committed some of the acts, which the girl said included forcing his hand under her clothing and repeatedly touching her breast and her vagina despite her pleas not to, according to news reports.

Friedlander reportedly pleaded guilty in 1991 to the charge of third-degree sexual abuse in a Monticello, N.Y., case.

A federal magistrate, in initially denying bail, called Friedlander "a danger to the entire community."
Debra Nussbaum Cohen, Focus on crimes involving religious Jews sparks debate, Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, 16-Jun-1995 www.jewishsf.com/bk950616/uscrimes.htm


The Sins of Rabbi Steven JACOBS

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Rabbi Steven Jacobs' sexual misconduct would constitute one of the milder cases in the line-up presented here, were it not that it provoked murder.  But given that it did provoke murder, the question is raised below of whether Jacobs and his whole congregation should have foreseen that it might provoke murder, and whether they do not bear some responsibility for that murder.

Beyond outlining the Green-Jacobs case, the material below discusses denial and cover-up of sexual misconduct among rabbis.

In one highly publicized case, Michele Samit � who does not claim to be a victim of rabbinic sexual misconduct � says her community vilified her after she wrote a book about the relationship between Anita Green and Green's rabbi, Steven Jacobs.

Green was the president of Shir Chadash/The New Reform Congregation in Los Angeles when she was murdered in 1990.

Her husband, Mel Green, was convicted of ordering the killing, and is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Although the Greens were separated at the time of the murder, Anita's affair with Jacobs began while she was still living with her husband, according to Samit's book, "No Sanctuary: The True Story of a Rabbi's Deadly Affair."

Mel Green was an angry, jealous and violent man who had long threatened Anita, even in public, Samit wrote.

Several people who were Jacobs' congregants at the time said in telephone interviews that at Green's funeral, Jacobs � who had first denied but later reluctantly admitted the relationship � eulogized the dead woman not as a rabbi talking about his temple president but as a lover.

Samit wrote of the eulogy: "The rabbi recalled 'admiring or just staring at her beautiful nails and her gentle hands; those hands, her skin so very soft, so reassuring, those beautiful hands.'"

"No one [in the congregation] said anything" about it, Samit said in a recent interview, referring to what she believed was Jacobs' inappropriate language.

"The reaction of the congregation was nothing.  Not even discussion."

That's what convinced Samit she had to leave the congregation and the rabbi who had been her lifelong spiritual guide, she said.  She said she was the target of a smear campaign.

"People called me from the congregation and harangued me.  They said, 'You egomaniacal whore, you think you're better than us.  How could you destroy such a wonderful man?'"

"This was the most painful thing.  Rabbi Jacobs was my hero.  I had him on such a pedestal.  He bat mitzvahed me" and presided at her wedding.  "I baby-sat his kids.  We were so close."

Jacobs denied that his relationship with Green was an illicit affair.

"She was a dear friend, my temple president, and after the fact that she was going through a divorce and I had already been divorced, there was a romantic relationship," he said in a recent telephone interview.

He described Samit's book as "full of lies," and said some have accused him of adultery because "people are angry when you achieve a lot in rabbinic life.

"I would not be in the position and stay in the position if people didn't know who I am."

Samit said she believes she and every other member of Jacobs' congregation bear some responsibility for Anita Green's murder.

"There were signs to all of us that Anita was in danger, and we ignored them because we wouldn't dare cross our beloved rabbi," she said.

Another congregant, Michael Hirsh, outraged by his rabbi's behavior and his community's response, wrote to the head of the Reform rabbinical association's ethics committee in April 1993, charging Jacobs with violating the group's ethics code and demanding that it assess Jacobs' behavior.

Rabbi Jeffrey Stiffman, then the head of the committee, wrote back to Hirsh that Jacobs had agreed "to uphold all provisions of our Code of Ethics," which requires rabbis "to adhere to an exemplary moral code" and "to avoid even the appearance of sexual misconduct."

Hirsh responded to Stiffman with a letter saying that the action amounted to nothing more than "a rabbinic consent decree" for Jacobs to do it all over again.

"If there is a shanda [shame] here, it is not only in Jacobs' immoral conduct but in your organization's complicity in covering it up," wrote Hirsh, a former investigative journalist and current television producer.

Jacobs remains the rabbi of Temple Kol Tikvah, the name adopted after Shir Chadash merged with another synagogue.

Experts in clergy sexual abuse say congregants' denial is dangerous because a rabbi can harass and exploit numerous victims for decades on end without any of the individuals knowing the others exist, forcing each to suffer alone.

If a rabbi has sexually exploited one congregant, he almost always has exploited several, Fortune said, without referring specifically to any of the above-mentioned cases.

In the end, while rabbinic perpetrators often take a new job within their movements or even stay in their pulpits after a slap on the wrist from their rabbinical organizations, it seems the victims often go away.

They often break all ties to the Jewish community and, in some cases, convert to another religion.

According to Fortune, denial of the problem is so pervasive because "none of us wants this to be happening."

There is "long-term damage being done here that we're going to be living with for years," she said.

"It doesn't have to be that bad if we respond better."
Debra Nussbaum Cohen, "Conspiracy of silence" fuels rabbis' sexual misdeeds, Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, 01-Nov-1996 www.jewishsf.com/bk961101/1blast.htm


The Sins of Rabbi Robert KIRSCHNER

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The first paragraph below recommends treatment of sex offenders that might strike some as lenient.

The first sentence of the paragraph recommends that resignation should lead to a termination of investigation, which however may be objected to for two reasons: (1) resignation is insufficient punishment for many offences, and (2) resignation is no punishment at all when it is immediately followed by the occupation of some other comparable position, as most typically happens.

The second sentence of the paragraph suggests that it is wrong to accuse someone of sexual misconduct if the only evidence is the statements of several victims.  Here the question arises of whether this defense is reserved for Jewish clerics, or whether it is extended to Christian clerics as well?  If extended to all without discrimination based on religion, the public would rarely hear of sex abuse accusations against clerics of any religious persuasion, as evidence other than the word of the complainants is rare.

Because Kirschner resigned, Pearce said, synagogue leaders saw no reason to investigate the women's charges of sexual misconduct.  "Since there was no definitive judgment of guilt other than the statement of the women who came forward, there were those who felt he had been wronged."  [...]

Kirschner was once a rising star in the Reform movement.  While still in his 30s, he became the religious leader of one of the two largest synagogues in Northern California and the youngest rabbi ever to head such a sizable Reform congregation.

He was destined for a major leadership role in the Reform movement.  Some say he would have been on the short list of candidates to succeed Rabbi Alexander Schindler as president of the movement's Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

But after serving Emanu-El for 11 years, Kirschner suddenly resigned from his pulpit on New Year's Day 1992 amid accusations from three congregants and a temple employee that he had sexually exploited or harassed them.

Eight other women later came forward to the temple board to complain about the rabbi's conduct, including members of his congregation and two students from the Graduate Theological Seminary in Berkeley.  According to parties involved, at least three of the accusers later reached financial settlements with the temple's insurance company.  [...]

It took nearly four years after charges against Kirschner first surfaced until the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Reform movement's rabbinical association, suspended him from its ranks.  [...]

In the statement to JTA, Kirschner said that as part of his "process of rehabilitation" he has indicated his "willingness to apologize personally to anyone to whom my conduct as a congregational rabbi was hurtful or offensive."

He has never apologized to Gemma Elftman.

Elftman, who weighs less than 100 pounds and has been battling anorexia nervosa for years, now lives in Hawaii.  She moved there after dropping out of U.C. Berkeley, which she attended during her relationship with Kirschner.

Their 18-month sexual relationship began in early 1990 after the rabbi approached her at a reception for new members and offered to drive her home, according to a 48-page document she submitted in connection with her complaint against the rabbi and the temple.

Now in her early 30s, Elftman no longer has a connection to the Jewish community.

Lisa Sherman also has left the community.

Sherman was a newlywed and new to Emanu-El, she said, when Kirschner approached her in the late 1980s.

After pursuing her "ardently" for nearly four years, Sherman said, Kirschner kissed her against her will in February 1991, shortly after her father's death.  She rejected him, she said, but Kirschner continued to pursue her for months.

Today, the 41-year-old woman has no connection to Judaism and has divorced her husband of that time.  She has returned to Greek Orthodoxy, the religion she was raised in, and had her son baptized into that faith.

The extent of Kirschner's actions began to surface in November 1991 at a party.  Sherman said she was talking with three other women from Emanu-El when one expressed doubt about Kirschner, describing him as "shady."

"Though she didn't know it, she was talking to three other victims," Sherman said.

According to Sherman, the four of them jointly hired an attorney and wrote statements that were presented to Emanu-El's board in December 1991.  The women threatened legal action if Kirschner was not immediately removed from his job.

Kirschner resigned from his pulpit on Jan. 1, 1992.

A letter from the temple president informed congregants of Kirschner's resignation "with regret" in language that spoke warmly of his contribution to the synagogue and made no reference to the circumstances of his departure.

In Kirschner's own letter of resignation, sent to the temple's members, he cited personal reasons for stepping down and did not acknowledge any misconduct.

But in the next few months, another eight women came forward and told temple leaders that they had been sexually harassed or abused by Kirschner, said a member of the Emanu-El's executive board.
Debra Nussbaum Cohen and Natalie Weinstein, Rabbi Robert Kirschner apologizes, Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, 18-Oct-1996 www.jewishsf.com/bk961018/1brabbi.htm

When women charge sexual exploitation by a rabbi, a conspiracy of silence often ensues.  [...]

At the congregational meetings that follow allegations of rabbinic sexual misconduct, synagogue members often ostracize accusers.  Some accusers have been called "liars," "whores" and worse, she said.

"Even in situations where the perpetrator admits all the things the women allege, congregations sometimes will line up behind the rabbi," said Marie Fortune, another expert on clergy sexual abuse.  "It blows my mind."  [...]

Women who have experienced rabbinic exploitation usually feel a deep and degrading sense of shame and guilt, experts say.

They often feel they have a lot to lose: their place in their synagogue communities, respect and success in their careers and even, in some cases, their marriages.

At Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, some congregants allegedly tried to discredit the women who came forward to charge their rabbi, Robert Kirschner, with sexual exploitation.

At a congregational meeting soon after Kirschner resigned, the women were accused of wanting to ruin the well-liked rabbi's career.  They were called "harlots" and "jezebels," some of the women reported.

Two of the women overheard a congregant saying "'Boys will be boys. I don't see what the big deal is,'" said Warwick-Sabino, one of the women who claimed Kirschner sexually harassed her.  Then a student at Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, she has since become a professional in the field of clergy sexual abuse.
Debra Nussbaum Cohen, "Conspiracy of silence" fuels rabbis' sexual misdeeds, Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, 01-Nov-1996 www.jewishsf.com/bk961101/1blast.htm


The Sins of Rabbi Ze'ev KOPOLEVITCH (and another)

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One would imagine that a story having the following characteristics would receive intense media scrutiny � sex crimes committed by someone very highly placed, committed against a large number of victims, committed over a long interval of time, committed under a grant of impunity, and ultimately receiving mild punishment.  Had it been a Christian cleric who committed such crimes and received such indulgent treatment, CNN would have given the case considerable notice, at least if the current reporting that I have been watching is any guide.  When it is Rabbi Ze'ev Kopolovitch, however, the story is buried in the Jewish press, out of sight of the general public.

Former yeshiva head indicted on sex charges

JERUSALEM (JPS) � Rabbi Ze'ev Kopolevitch, the former head of Jerusalem's Netiv Meir Yeshiva, was indicted on Thursday of last week on charges of forcing 19 of his pupils, many of them under 16, to engage in homosexual relations with him.

In all of the cases, Kopolevitch, 51, was accused of conducting "indecent acts without the consent of the student.  The accused exploited the relationship of dependency inherent in the teacher-student relationship to put pressure on the student."

According to a Justice Ministry, police are still investigating allegations that some of the students complained to other rabbis about Kopolevitch's behavior and that the rabbis did nothing about it.  Among the rabbis who were reportedly informed were former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Avraham Shapira and National Religious Party Knesset candidate Haim Druckman.  [...]

According to the indictment, Kopolevitch systematically selected a group of students each year and gave them preferential treatment in and out of class at the residential high school.  He gave some of them private lessons in the early morning, brought them to his home or met them in the school health clinic when it was empty.

"For seven years, during the period between 1991 and 1997, the accused committed sexual crimes against students studying at the yeshiva," the indictment reads.  "These crimes involved various types of sexual conduct, beginning with kisses (including on the mouth), fondling (including the chest area, the crotch and the sexual organ), and ending with masturbation through hand or body contact."

One of the students whom Kopolevitch allegedly forced to have sex was 14 years old.
Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, 30-Apr-1999 www.jewishsf.com/bk990430/iyeshivaassault.html

I incremented the blue cell by two in the Kopolevitch section because while throwing additional light on Kopolevitch, Naomi Ragen also describes an unnamed Kabbalistic raping rabbi:

May I Have a Word, Mr. Rubinstein?

by Naomi Ragen

I am having difficulty understanding something about the Ministry you head, Mr. Rubinstein, and would really appreciate your help.  It seems that in the last few weeks in at least two instances your Ministry seems to be working overtime to get sex offenders, pedophiles and rapists, as well as those who harbor and protect them, special light treatment under the law because they all happen to be rabbis.

First, there is the disgraceful case of the former headmaster Kopolevitch of Netiv Meir yeshiva high school who lived in a pedophile�s heaven for the last fifteen years, abusing dozens, even hundreds of boys under his tutelage, boys whose complaints were apparently ignored by the Bnai Akiva yeshiva network's most respected spiritual leaders, Rabbi Druckman and Rabbi Shapira.

And then there is the rapist in Kabbalistic rabbi�s clothing who is still wandering around the south teaching Torah to innocent children, when he should have long joined his comrades in the religious wing of Masiyahu Prison.

Mr. Rubinstein, what can your Ministry be thinking when it agrees to a plea bargain of four and half years for Rabbi Kopolevitch?  When it dismisses charges against Rabbis Druckman and Shapira for allowing Kopolevitch to continue committing the most disgustingly immoral acts against young boys in their educational network, long after they apparently knew the facts?  When it suspends proceedings against a Rabbi who raped a young woman under the guise of giving her kabbalistic help?

I am only a woman (and everyone knows with what great respect and interest the opinions of such people are held in the religious world) yet, I think that it behooves you to listen carefully to my opinion and my amazement at your Ministry�s behavior.  [...]

And now we have the rapist who presented himself as a Rabbi versed in the mysteries of the kabbalah, a spiritual magic-worker, and wound up instructing a young woman who had come to him for help to undress and submit to his "magic" sexual demands.  Exploiting a religious young woman's innocence, he used his tremendous spiritual power to desecrate not only her body, but her soul as well.  Why does such a person deserve leniency?  Why does he deserve to have the case against him suspended because "he isn�t feeling well?"  I would think such a person deserves to have the case against him pursued relentlessly; deserves to serve a prison sentence twice as harsh as anyone else's.

Because when a Rabbi abuses someone who looks up to him, he does it not only with his body, but with the full weight of everything the victim holds sacred, destroying the victim�s innocence, faith, religious beliefs, connection to G-d, in a way that no ordinary hormone-crazed offender could ever do.  The damage is much greater, because the victim's faith � that which drew them to be students in Netiv Meir, or to the doorstep of a Kabbalistic mystic � has been raped as well.
Naomi Ragen, May I Have a Word, Mr. Rubinstein?, 04-Nov-1999 www.naomiragen.com/Columns/MrRubinstein.htm


The Sins of Rabbi Baruch LANNER

    See the top of the present section.


The Sins of Rabbi Jerrold LEVY

Rabbi Jerrold Levy
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For his sex crimes involving teenage boys, Rabbi Jerrold Levy was sentenced to 6½ years in federal prison:

Levy, who was an associate rabbi of Temple Beth El in Boca Raton, pleaded guilty in August to four federal charges that include having sex with a 14-year-old Wellington boy he met online and sending child pornography over the Internet.

He was initially arrested on state charges after the father of a 16-year-old boy discovered an e-mail soliciting his son for sex.  The father exchanged e-mails with "CoachBoca" and then went to sheriff's investigators, who set up a sting operation.  [...]

In addition to the Wellington boy, Levy solicited up to six boys on the Internet for sex, according to court documents.  He would approach the teens in an Internet chat room for gay teens.

Dr. Fred Berlin, a psychiatric expert in sexual disorders, testified Levy's attraction to teenagers was a preoccupation he couldn't control.  An obsessed Levy knew what he was doing was wrong, but it was as if he had a gun to his head, said Berlin, founder of Johns Hopkins University's sexual disorder clinic, in Baltimore.
Jon Burnstein, Boca rabbi gets 78 months in prison in child-sex case, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 28-Dec-2001

In a new indictment, a grand jury accused Levy of transmitting videos of young minor males engaged in sex over the Internet.  Levy could face a maximum sentence of 115 years in prison.
Palm Beach Post, Boca Raton Ex-Rabbi Faces More Sex Charges, 07-Jul-2001 www.vachss.com/help_text/archive/rabbi_7.html

Prosecutors said Levy is a flight risk because of his financial problems and ties to Israel.

"He is living in disgrace in the Boca Raton community, where he must ultimately stand trial in federal court or publicly admit his crimes," Assistant U.S. Attorney Lothrop Morris wrote.

"It is reasonable to conclude that under his present very painful circumstances, faced with a possible prison term of 15 years, Levy would flee to a country where the United States could not extradite him and where he could obtain citizenship."
Nancy L. Othon, Federal Prosecutors Try to Keep Boca Rabbi Jailed, Calling Him a Menace, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 19-Jul-2001 www.vachss.com/help_text/archive/rabbi_8.html


The Sins of Rabbi Pinchas "Pinny" LEW

Rabbi Pinchas Lew
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In September 1991, rabbinical student Pinchas Lew was driving the getaway car in an armed robbery of a convenience store in Postville, Iowa.  In the course of the robbery, trigger-man Phillip Stillman put a bullet into the spine of store clerk Marion Bakken, 49, for which he was sentenced to 55 years in prison.  For his role as driver, Lew served 81 days in prison and was sentenced to five years probation.  In 1994 Lew was ordered to pay the victim $1.6 million in damages, which he failed to do.

The year 2001 finds Lew a Hasidic rabbi teaching at the Chabad near the University of North Carolina Campus and directing the UNC Jewish outreach center, when suddenly people get wind of the 1991 Postville heist, and the Durham-Chapel Hill Jewish Federation invites Lew to defend himself at a meeting at Duke University.  Over 100 members of the local Jewish community attend.

The very day of the meeting, 16-May-2001 � I have not been able to ascertain whether before or after the meeting � Lew treats the housekeeper in his Chapel Hill home to a surprise:

A North Carolina community, already reeling from the news that a local Chassidic rabbi took part in an armed robbery a decade ago, is now dealing with the rabbi's recent arrest for indecent exposure.

Rabbi Pinchas Lew, 31, of Chapel Hill, was arrested on misdemeanor assault charges on May 16 after a woman accused him of repeatedly touching his genitals in front of her.

The woman, a housekeeper in Lew's home, reportedly said Lew had bolted all the doors and that she feared he planned to assault her.  She managed to escape through a back door.

The woman filed a complaint with police two days later and Lew was arrested four weeks after the incident.
Rabbi involved in robbery now accused of exposure, Jewish Bulletin of Northern California News, 13-Jul-2001 www.jewishsf.com/bk010713/usp12b.html

The Sins of Rabbi Richard MARCOVITZ

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As it is unlikely that any man will for the first time in his life initiate lewd acts against children and sexual battery against women when he is 64 years old, one must wonder whether Rabbi Richard Marcovitz may not have a history of similar acts which has not as yet been uncovered to public view.

NEW RABBI JOINS CLERGY CHILD SEX SHOW
Is it too late to suggest God fire His Personnel Director?  What is it about clergy guys makes them lust for the little ones?

Formal Charges Filed Against OKC Rabbi

Marcovitz Faces 11 Felony Counts OKLAHOMA CITY � Prosecutors filed 11 criminal charges against a rabbi Tuesday, alleging lewd acts with two girls who attended a religious school and sexual battery involving two women who worked there.  Richard Marcovitz, 64, was arrested last week and was freed on $80,000 bond.  He has been placed on administrative leave from Emanuel Synagogue, where he has worked for the past six years.  The incidents are alleged to have occurred between August 2000 and May 2001 at the Solomon Schechter Academy, now called the Oklahoma City Jewish Day School.  The school is based at the synagogue.

The girls involved in the complaint were 9 and 12.  The allegations against the rabbi involve inappropriate sexual touching.  Marcovitz said he is innocent of the charges and plans an active defense in court, said his attorney, Billy Bock.
usajewish.com, 27-Feb-2002 www.usajewish.com/scripts/usaj/paper/Article.asp?ArticleID=1461


The Sins of Rabbi Fred NEULANDER

Rabbi Fred Neulander
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Rabbi Fred Neulander seems to have been guilty of a string of adulteries which culminated in the contract killing of his wife, Carol Neulander, who was found bludgeoned to death in the couple's Cherry Hill home Nov. 1, 1994:

The state's case involved charges of a conspiracy among three men with little in common: a respected but adulterous rabbi; Mr. Jenoff, a financially troubled, habitual liar who worked for the rabbi as a private detective for six years after Mrs. Neulander was bludgeoned in her living room and then suddenly implicated him in a murder plot; and a drug-addicted paranoid schizophrenic, Paul M. Daniels, who lived with Mr. Jenoff and confessed to helping in the killing.

Trial testimony revealed that Rabbi Neulander had led two lives.

He founded the synagogue, M'kor Shalom in Cherry Hill, N.J., with his wife in the mid-1970's. Over the years he turned it into one of the biggest in South Jersey, while developing a reputation as a respected and charismatic spiritual leader.

But in the early 1990's, he started simultaneous sexual affairs with two congregants he had helped convert to Judaism. One was Elaine Soncini, the former hostess of a radio talk show in Philadelphia. She apparently grew weary of the affair and testified that she told the rabbi she wanted to end it by the start of 1995. She said that he, in turn, told her "something would happen" and they would be together by her birthday in December 1994.

The state contended that the "something" was the November murder of Ms. Neulander.
Robert Hanley, With Jury Split, Trial of Rabbi Ends in Mistrial, New York Times, 14-Nov-2001, college4.nytimes.com/guests/articles/2001/11/14/884542.xml

The Sins of Cantor Howard NEVISON

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Prior to his arrest for sex crimes, Cantor Howard Nevison's chief claim to fame may have been that he was the first cantor ever to sing at the Vatican.

The longtime cantor at one of the nation's largest and most prominent Reform synagogues was arrested in New York yesterday on charges that he sexually abused a nephew, a prosecutor said.[...]

Police in Lower Merion charged Nevison with sexually assaulting the boy on three occasions between 1993 and 1997 while the boy was 3 to 7 years old.

"Like anyone else, we in law enforcement tend to believe that religious figures are beyond reproach.  You want to make very sure before you go accusing one," Castor said.  [...]

Lawrence Nevison, 55, who is Howard Nevison's brother and an uncle of the victim, and Lawrence Nevison's son, Stewart, 30, who lived with the victim's family for a time, have previously been convicted of molesting the boy in unrelated incidents.  [...]

He [Howard Nevison] allegedly molested the boy, who is now 12, during visits to the family's home.  The boy's parents had sought medical treatment for several years for symptoms including abdominal and genital pain, but the boy did not disclose the alleged abuse until he started therapy, prosecutors said.

Nevison has been the cantor at the temple since 1978.  A cantor leads a congregation in song, while the rabbi is the spiritual leader.  In April 1994, he became the first cantor to sing at the Vatican.  [...]

Congregation Emanu-El was founded in 1845 as New York City's first Reform congregation.  Its present synagogue, on 65th Street facing Central Park, was completed in 1929 and is the world's largest Jewish house of worship, according to the congregation's Web site.

It lists a membership of some 3,000 families.  U.S. District Judge Milton Pollack of New York is a vice president, while its trustees include Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau.

Nevison faces two counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and single counts of indecent assault, simple assault and terroristic threats.  If convicted on all counts, he could face 27½ to 55 years in prison.

Lawrence Nevison is serving a five-to-15-year sentence for his June 2000 conviction on sex charges.

His son, Stewart, pleaded guilty in November 2000 to charges on assaults involving both the boy and the boy's younger sister.  Lawrence Nevison and the victim's father allege that Howard Nevison molested them when they were boys and he was in his late teens and early 20s, prosecutors said.

"This sort of fits in with patterns that we see with families in other cases.  Incestuous behavior tends to occur not in individual cases, but in groups," Castor said.
Bucks County Courier Times, 21-Feb-2002, http://www.phillyburbs.com/couriertimes/news/news/1122991.htm

These accusations are very different from the suddenly ubiquitous stories of priests molesting parishioners.  This is strictly a family affair.  [...]  When Larry confessed to detectives that he had abused Joel, he also claimed that Howard had sexually abused him when he was young.  Stewart says his father molested him when he was a boy.  Most remarkably, Henry told detectives he believed his son's charges because, as a boy, he too had been abused by both Howard and Larry, and in much the same ways: Larry gently, and Howard violently, with penetration, pain, and threats.  [...]

Some parents were outraged to learn that the temple leadership had known since 1998 about an investigation of the Nevison family yet continued allowing the cantor to meet with boys and girls preparing for their bar mitzvahs.  ("Hideous" is how one Upper East Side attorney, whose child is in nursery school, describes Emanu-El's handling of the affair.)
Susan Dominus, Song of Sorrow, New York Metro, 10-Apr-2002 www.nymag.com/page.cfm?page_id=5886


The Sins of Rabbi Ze'ev SULTANOVICH

1 19
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The case of Ze'ev Sultanovich displays a characteristic that may more often typify Jewish sexual misconduct than Christian � the characteristic of aggressive and concerted action to suppress complaints of wrongdoing.  Undoubtedly, some suppression is bound to occur in every society, but the suppression described below seems out of the ordinary, and additional reasons for believing that such suppression may be stronger in Jewish society will be presented further below.

Jerusalem police yesterday recommended that Rabbi Ze'ev Sultanovich, a lecturer at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva who allegedly sexually abused a number of students between 1994 and 1996, be indicted.

An investigation into the matter was launched in early January, several weeks after police received complaints from three men, now in their 20s, who studied at the yeshiva in their teens and said they had been sexually molested by Sultanovich.  Sultanovich has denied the charges.

Police also recommended that Rabbi Menahem Burstein, a teacher at the yeshiva, and eight students, be indicted for trying to prevent the three men who filed the complaint from providing evidence in the investigation.

Burstein had allegedly written a letter to the parents of the three requesting that they drop the matter.  Police also said that the eight students, friends of Sultanovich, came to the house of one of the complainants on Monday night and threatened him to stop the complaints to police or else they would spread stories about him and the two others.

Police now believe that Sultanovich, who is about 40, also sexually molested several other students.  But those students have not yet come forward, and police are trying to determine whether they are being prevented from doing so by other students or by Burstein.

Police have turned the case over to the Jerusalem District Attorney's Office.

The head of the yeshiva, former Ashkenazi chief rabbi Avraham Shapira, was alerted to the complaints about six months ago in an anonymous letter and soon after in an anonymous phone call.  He asked Burstein to look into the accusations, and Burstein found them to be false following a three-month investigation.

Shapira sent several verbal messages via other students and teachers for the accusers to speak to him personally, but no one came forward.

Rabbi Yehoshua Magnes, a teacher at Mercaz Harav, said that Sultanovich, who was once a student there, often lectures on an informal basis, is friendly with some of the students, and comes to pray.  Magnes confirmed Burstein's letter to parents and said that he also "may have spoken directly to the boys to try to prevent them from talking."

Magnes responded to the police recommendation by saying, "There doesn't seem to be such a strong case.  It seems a bit shaky.  But we'll wait and see."

Shapira was also previously suspected of trying to prevent a police inquiry into the improprieties of a yeshiva teacher.  Last year, he received a warning letter from Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein after he was said to have tried to cover up the illegal sexual behavior of Ze'ev Kopolevitch, formerly head of Jerusalem's Netiv Meir yeshiva, who was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison.
Tamar Hausman, Rabbi faces indictment for sexually abusing students, Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, www.jpost.com/Editions/2000/03/08/News/News.3739.html

The Sins of Rabbi Mordechai YOMTOV

Rabbi Mordechai Yomtov
1 20
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How long should it take for teachers and staff at a school to notice that a teacher is secluding himself at recess with one of his 8-10 year olds?  My expectation is that it might take days, but that it shouldn't take weeks.  If it takes months, then the entire administration of the school is at fault.

LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT
PRESS RELEASE
Wednesday, December 5, 2001

"Child Molester Arrested"

Hollywood: On Monday, December 3, 2001, the Los Angeles Police Department's Sexually Exploited Child Unit, arrested 36 year-old Rabbi Mordechai Yomtov for Lewd Acts With Children Under 14 Years of Age.

In November 2001, three students of the Chedar Menachem School in Hollywood, an all boys Jewish school, reported to the LAPD that their Hebrew teacher kept each of them in the classroom and individually molested them.  The acts occurred throughout the school year when the other students were at recess.  The victims range in age from eight to ten.  Officials from the school have been cooperative with the investigators.

On December 5, 2001, Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Christina Flemming filed ten felony counts that included Continuous Lewd Acts with a Child Under 14 Years of Age.  The Office of the District Attorney suggested that bail be set at 3.5 million dollars.  Yomtov was arraigned today in Division 30.  Further court dates are pending.

Detectives are requesting assistance from the public in identifying other possible victims.  Rabbi Yomtov taught Hebrew at the Chedar Menachem School for the last seven years.  His students were boys in the 8-10 year age group.
Los Angeles Police Department www.lapdonline.org/press_releases/2001/12/pr01804.htm


The Sins of Rabbi Sheldon "Shelly" ZIMMERMAN

1 21
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Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman was very highly placed, and perhaps because of this, his sexual transgressions have not been disclosed.  However, both the severity of his in-house punishment and the concealment of exactly what those transgressions might have amounted to suggest that they were not trivial.



NEW YORK � Reform rabbis across the country are reeling from the news that one of Reform Judaism's most respected professionals has resigned amid accusations of sexual misconduct.

Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, 58, quit his post as president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion on Monday, shortly after being suspended from the Reform movement's rabbinic association.

Zimmerman is the highest-ranking rabbi ever to be suspended from the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

The suspension, resulting from an inquiry by a seven-member CCAR ethics committee, prohibits Zimmerman from serving as a rabbi in any Reform temple or institution for at least two years.  [...]

Reform officials said Zimmerman violated guidelines concerning "sexual ethics and sexual boundaries," but the ethics committee � citing a policy of not commenting on individual cases � will not disclose the precise nature of his misconduct.
Julie Wiener, Facing sex accusations, Reform rabbi quits, Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, 08-Dec-2000, www.jewishsf.com/bk001208/usreformrabbiquits.html

The Sins of Rabbi Max ZUCKER

1 22
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Rabbi Max Zucker stands out as being the only one of the 22 Jewish clerics enumerated here for their sex sins who fully admits his guilt.

Dallas, Texas, 5/20/98

A former rabbi accused by three women of improperly touching them decades ago apologized for "a very dark chapter in my life".  Rabbi Max Zucker, the longtime head of a synagogue begged for forgiveness when confronted recently by one of the women he is accused of touching.  The woman, her husband and parents said Zucker, 73, did not dispute her account that he touched her genitals.
WW II 43rd Bomb Group, www.kensmen.com/catholic/clergysexabuse.html



Which Clerics Have the Higher Incidence of Sexual Misconduct � Christian or Jewish?

With the data gathered so far, of course it is impossible to come up with a definitive answer.  The mainstream press is dedicated to documenting instances only in the yellow cell, whereas in the present letter I have dedicated myself to documenting instances only in the blue cell.  Either of these efforts by itself is no way to get at the truth.  Inspecting the two efforts together is a little better than looking at one to the exclusion of the other, but still falls short of valid scientific method.  Nevertheless, even the flawed and incomplete data available so far yield certain valuable conclusions.

The Jewish Sins Tend to be Extreme

Of course an adequate comparison would take into account not only the number of sinners in the respective camps, but also the gravity of their sins, and here the hypothesis that cries out for evaluation is whether the Christian sins can compare with the Jewish ones.

For example, has any priest done what Rabbi Fred Neulander did above � which is to be involved with two women, and to contract the murder of the less favored one?  I mean, of course, not any priest anywhere in the world and at any time in history, but rather any priest within the same geographical boundaries and within the same time frame as the Jewish cases considered above.  And I don't really mean is there any single such priest, but rather do priests contract murders at the same rate as rabbis do, which qualification should be understood also in the further questions below.

Or, has any priest beaten a boy in a parking lot, tied his hands, and sodomized him?  Has any pair of priests taken turns groping an unaccompanied girl on an airplane?  Has any priest participated in an armed robbery in his youth, and after he became a priest, followed his housekeeper around while exposing and touching himself?  Has any priest operated a prostitution ring?  Has any priest distributed "videos of young minor males engaged in sex" over the Internet, and used the Internet to lure boys to homosexual trysts?

Perhaps not.  If priests had done such things, then the press would have featured them, and I would tend to remember them, which I do not.  Undoubtedly, every group will exhibit some instances of the most extreme deviance, which however is insufficient to equate the groups, as large differences may still exist between the average deviance in each group.  A minimal research plan would be to assign an egregiousness score to every sinner, say from 1 to 10, and then compare the mean scores for the groups of interest.  If the Jewish cases were more extreme than the Christian ones, the Jewish mean would be significantly higher.  A press educated in scientific method would be aware of the desirability of such research, would ask for it, and would report any that it found.  An uneducated press follows the instructions of its owners, and contentedly accumulates cases in the yellow cell only.

Don't forget the Denominator

Statistics based on the National Survey of Religious Identification (NSRI) and the American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS) indicate that in 2001 the United States had 159,030,000 Christians (an increase of 5% since 1990) and 2,831,000 Jews (a decrease of 10% since 1990).  The ratio of Christians to Jews, therefore, is approximately 56:1 (and climbing).  If the ratio of Christian clerics to Jewish clerics is approximately the same as that, then for the two groups to have an equal sinning rate, the number of Christian sinners would have to be 56 times the number of Jewish sinners.  Assuming the same ratio of 56:1 holds approximately over larger geographical areas, then alongside the 22 Jewish sexual sinners listed above, there should be discovered 22 times 56 equals 1,232 Christian sexual sinners who are guilty of approximately the same misdeeds.

For the rate of sexual sinning to be equal, then, beside the one Jewish cleric who contracted a killing there should be discovered 56 Christian clerics who contracted killings.  The one Jewish cleric who was in the habit of kicking boys in the groin would have to be matched by 56 Christian clerics who were in the habit of kicking boys in the groin.  The one Jewish cleric who distributed pornography over the Internet, and used the Internet to lure boys to homosexual trysts, would have to be matched by 56 Christian clerics who did the same.  The one Jewish cleric who operated a prostitution ring would have to be matched by 56 Christian clerics who operated prostitution rings.  The two Jewish clerics who molested a fifteen-year-old girl on a commercial airliner would have to be matched by 112 Christian clerics who did the same.

If the Christian:Jewish ratio of clerical sinners should be discovered to be lower than 56:1, that would indicate that Jewish clerics were more likely to sin than Christian clerics.  If the number of Christian clerical sinners equalled the number of Jewish clerical sinners, that would indicate that a Jewish cleric was 56 times as likely to sin as a Christian cleric.  If the number of Christian clerical sinners was less than the number of Jewish clerical sinners, that would mean that a Jewish cleric was more than 56 times as likely to sin as a Christian cleric.

It should be understood that the Christian:Jewish ratio of 56:1 for the United States population not holding exactly as the geographical region under consideration expands beyond the United States does not undermine this line of thinking.  Whatever the exact ratio happens to become as the geographical region expands, we can depend on that ratio always remaining large, and any large ratio leads to exactly the same hypothesis crying out for evaluation � that the rate of sexual sinning among Jewish clerics is much higher than among Christian clerics, simply because we doubt that we are going to be able to find 56 Christian clerics who contracted a killing, and so on.

The same line of reasoning applies to economic sins discussed further below where a much higher number of Jewish sinners points to a vastly and staggeringly higher rate of Jewish sinning.

The Media are Biased in Favor of Jews

From what we have seen above, we are able to conclude that the press is biased.  It relentlessly pursues stories of Christian (most recently, Catholic) sexual wrongdoing, while ignoring stories of Jewish sexual wrongdoing.  We see this most clearly in the contrast between the Catholic Cardinal Mahony with the Jewish 22 rabbis and cantors above � Cardinal Mahony appears to be the victim of an extortion attempt on the part of a poor and mentally-ill woman, and yet receives generous media attention as an accused sex offender; whereas the bulk of the 22 Jewish malefactors present graphic and sensational evidence of sex criminality, and yet are hidden from public view.

When I say "hidden from public view" I of course cannot mean "absolutely hidden from public view" as after all, I did find all the examples cited above on the Internet.  All that I can possibly mean is that the sexual wrongdoing of Jewish clerics is largely, or comparatively, hidden from public view.  Its representation in the mainstream press is not entirely absent, but it might have to be magnified by a factor of a hundred or a thousand before it could be said that Jewish and Christian wrongdoing were receiving equitable coverage.  The sex sins of Rabbi Sidney Goldenberg being described above as receiving "national media attention" may be among the rare exceptions to this rule, but nevertheless cannot be regarded as offering an unambiguous exception because national media attention comes in degrees, and where the national media attention afforded Cardinal Roger Mahony might be one hundred times that afforded Rabbi Sidney Goldenberg, and then on top of that the national media attention afforded Cardinal Bernard Law (described below) might be one hundred times that afforded Cardinal Mahony.

It follows that with equitable media coverage, the number of Jewish sex crimes that could be discovered in a scan of the Internet would be much higher than I have found it, and our list of 22 Jewish sinners would at least be longer than it is, and could potentially be ten times longer, or a hundred times longer.

Evidence that Jews Slip Through the Cracks in the Justice System

But the number of cases of Jewish sex crimes that come to public attention may be reduced not only by the press being reluctant to report arrests and prosecutions, but even at an earlier stage through the avoidance of arrests and prosecutions:

It is also not bad to be a Jewish, particularly a "pious" one, if one is a criminal seeking to avoid getting caught.  In January 2000, the Village Voice noted the difficulties local police faced in penetrating an ultra-Orthodox community to bring a murderer to justice.  Jacob Blum, son of a local rabbi, was being sought for bludgeoning to death his grandmother's 61-year old part-time (non-Jewish immigrant Polish) cleaning lady.  As a doctor noted, "The victim was missing a large part of her brain."  "[Police] precinct sources," reported the Voice, "say it is rare for cases [against ultra-Orthodox hasids] to end in arrests.  One cop bitterly recalled an incident in which a young hasidic driver who had accidentally run over an elderly black woman was not even cited for leaving the scene of an accident.  'He did not summon an ambulance or police and left the scene because he wanted to get home in time for Sabbath,' the source alleged."
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

Evidence of Jewish Witness Tampering

And there is reason to believe that Jewish wrongdoing may be underreported as a result of actions taken earlier still � that is, actions to silence witnesses.

We have already seen in several instances above Jews responding to accusations of sexual misconduct not merely with passivity and indifference, but also with an active hostility, and sometimes even with concerted and aggressive efforts to suppress the complaint, as for example

The case of Rabbi Bernard Freilich below serves to illustrate even more unmistakably how the Jewish suppression of complaints can develop into a conspiracy involving several participants who do not shirk from aggressive harrassment and even death threats.  Thus, if it is the case that the Christian suppression of testimony is neither so concerted nor so vehement as the Jewish, then it might be expected that Jewish sexual wrongdoing will less often come to the attention of the police and of the courts and of the public.

The Sins of Rabbi Bernard FREILICH

Rabbi Bernard Freilich
1 23
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Although Rabbi Bernard Freilich was not himself accused of sex crimes, but only of threatening a witness to keep her from testifying concerning sex crimes, I allow him to raise the blue-cell entry to 23 (from 22 where Zucker had put it) because Freilich is also a Jewish sinner, though of a different kind, and it will prove to be the case below that it is all the sins of the Jewish clergy that are relevant to our discussion, and not just their sex sins.

1 26
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Actually, once witness-tampering is included as a sin worth recording in our fourfold table, then since Rabbi Pinchas Shor is implicated below in witness tampering, and since we have seen just above Rabbi Menahem Burstein and Rabbi Avraham Shapira engaging in witness tampering as well, our blue-cell count jumps to 26.  I do not include witness-tampering lawyers George Meissner and Richard Finkel (appearing below) in the blue-cell count simply because they are not rabbis or cantors, and I am counting only Jewish clerics.

Rabbi Attempts to Cover-up Incest Rape

NEW YORK CITY � A prominent Hasidic rabbi has been charged with making death threats against a 22-year-old woman to keep her from testifying that her father raped her as a child.

Rabbi Bernard Freilich, 47, allegedly went to the woman's home earlier this year and told her he "would teach her a lesson and send her to the cemetery" if she took the stand, court papers said.  A grand jury indicted Freilich on felony charges of witness-tampering, witness intimidation, and harassment.  If convicted, he would face up to 4 years in prison.

Freilich had pleaded not guilty in May to misdemeanor charges in the same case.  His lawyer said he will enter the same plea when he's arraigned on the more serious charges next month.  The attorney described his client as a community leader who prides himself on his connections to law enforcement.  Before he was first charged, Freilich had been a special assistant to a superintendent in the New York State Police.

The lawyer said Freilich does not know his accuser, whose name was not released.  But prosecutors have said the rabbi and the woman's father are close friends.  The father was charged in Feb. with first-degree rape, incest, sex abuse, and harassment in the pending criminal case.  He was arrested again on April 22 after allegedly violating an order of protection by pounding on his daughter's door and warning her it would be her last day unless she withdrew her accusations.

Prosecutors say that three days later � with the daughter about to testify before a grand jury � Freilich went to her home and threatened her; allegedly repeating the threats the next day.  Another Borough Park man also has been charged with trying to get the woman to drop the charges.
religiousfrauds.50megs.com/judaism/rabbirape.html

DID FREILICH, SHOR, MEISSNER AND FINKEL LEAN ON INCEST RAPE VICTIM?

Rabbi's Lawyers Charged, Too, in Intimidation Case

Two politically connected Brooklyn lawyers have been charged with conspiring with a prominent Hasidic rabbi to intimidate an incest-rape victim from testifying against her father, sources said yesterday.  George Meissner and Richard Finkel are expected to surrender today and will be arraigned in Brooklyn on charges they conspired with Rabbi Bernard Freilich, who was arrested on witness-tampering charges May 13, sources said.

Freilich and Pinchas Shor, another rabbi charged with the same crimes, pleaded not guilty yesterday before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Betsy Barros.
usajewish.com 14-Jul-1999

What may initially strike us as excessive zeal in suppressing complaints of sex abuse may upon deeper probing be recognized as arising naturally from Jewish religion, particularly from the "law of the informer" (din moser):

[This] law commands every Jew to kill or wound severely any Jew who, without a decision of a competent rabbinical authority, has informed non-Jews, especially non-Jewish authorities, about Jewish affairs or who has given them information about Jewish property or who has delivered Jewish persons or property to their rule or authority.  (p. 137)
The systematic killing of informers, enjoined by eminent rabbis as a religious duty, has no parallel in other societies.  (p. 161)
Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Pluto Press, London and Sterling Virginia, 1999.

Our thinking so far has brought us to entertain the hypotheses that
  1. the press suppresses evidence of sex sins committed by the Jewish clergy even when that evidence is strong, and features evidence of sex sins committed by the Christian clergy even when that evidence is weak; and

  2. Jews are better at avoiding arrest and prosecution; and

  3. Jewish culture suppresses testimony of sexual wrongdoing among Jews more energetically than Christian culture suppresses testimony of sexual wrongdoing among Christians.

Thus, it is entirely possible that the three above factors combine to create the gratuitous impression that Christian clerics (Catholic ones at the very moment) are disproportionately guilty of sexual transgressions.  It might be reasonable to expect that research that corrected for the three above sources of bias would demonstrate that it is Jewish clerics who are burdened with the higher rate of sexual transgression.

Although evidence for any difference between Christians and Jews in the rate of sexual transgression makes no appearance in the media, the impression is created that Catholic clerics may be more prone to it on account of their celibacy � the celibacy of the priesthood being supposed either to attract deviants to the priesthood, or else to create deviants out of those who join the priesthood, and the solution is discussed of allowing priests to marry.  Such speculation as this implants the idea that it is almost indubitable that Catholics must suffer from the higher rate of sexual deviation.

However, the press does not discuss alternative hypotheses to the effect that Orthodox Judaism might have its own forces conducing toward sexual deviance which equal the force of Catholic celibacy in strength, or which surpass it.  One such alternative hypothesis that can be imagined is that Orthodox Judaism encourages its male adherents to play the role of tyrants toward all those who are weaker than them (females and children), and that playing the role of tyrant encourages sexual exploitation of the tyrannized.  In other words, it may be the case that the celibacy of Catholic Christians as a force leading to lechery or debauchery (assuming for the sake of argument that it is that) may be equalled or surpassed in its effect by the arrogance of Orthodox Jewish men.  Something like this hypothesis seems to be contemplated in the following description:

Howard Jacobson noted in 1993 the first conversation he had with British lawyer Martin Braum (both men are Jewish), who was active in fighting London's Jewish Orthodox community:

"The molesting of a child and the community's ring of secrecy around the molester are merely the surface of the problem.  Things are deeply wrong within Orthodox Judaism, and have been going wrong for a century.  Chief among the problems are the [Jewish] Germans.  Although a minority in Stamford Hill, the German Orthodox are assertive and assured, and are easily able to sway the less sophisticated.  They have brought over from Germany methods they acquired from the Nazis � crowd control, propaganda, hatred."

"They � the ultra-Orthodox ones," said Braum, "contaminate our religion.  They have no honour, no generosity, no prettiness.  They come to the court � yeah, yeah, to the trial � in those plant-pot wigs, to put off people with open minds.  They're there first thing, so they can take all the seats, staring with hostility at whoever isn't one of them....  Child-molesting doesn't bother these people, it isn't seen to be an enormous sin, it can't be grasped by them as such, because they cannot conceive of any innocence to be molested, and because the very idea of molesting a young person is so close to what they do anyway in their educational methods."
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

On the question of clerical sex sins, then, the press is currently duping the public, as it has already been demonstrated on the pages of the Ukrainian Archive at www.ukar.org to have a fondness for doing on one issue after another.  There certainly is cause for concern among the Christian clergy, and certainly room for improvement.  However, when I see the apparently guiltless Cardinal Mahony being featured on CNN while guilty Jewish malefactors are given exemption from CNN coverage, I have to ask myself whether what I am seeing is a war of one religion upon another more than an attempt to expose sex crimes.

This parallels my attitude toward war criminals.  Surely all war criminals do need to be punished � but when I see prosecutorial efforts being dedicated to the punishment of immigration infractions conjectured � not proven � to have been made by non-Jewish East Europeans more than half a century ago, I have to think that this must be a ruse to distract attention from serious war crimes that are being committed by Jews this very day, and that have been committed by Jews over the past century, and that are on the consciences of Jews who have committed them and have immigrated to Canada and are living among us today.  From this perspective, the net effect of current war crimes prosecutions is negative; it would be better to have none at all than to have the present ones.  It would be better if the minds of the public were not distracted from the genuine war criminality of Jews today to the imagined war criminality of Ukrainians half a century ago.


Top   Sex Sins   Doctrinal Sins   Economic Sins   Conclusions   Bottom

Clerical Doctrinal Sins

What do I mean by a "doctrinal sin"?  I mean a religious teaching that is so incongruous with contemporary Western values that Western eyes view it with distaste or even repugnance, and adherents to the religion understand that they must hide the teaching to avoid embarrassment and criticism.  Judaism has such doctrinal sins by the hundred, and Christianity can't compare.

I have already brought several of these Jewish doctrinal sins to your attention, as in my letter to you of

I dispense at this point with incrementing the blue cell of the fourfold table whenever a fresh sinning rabbi is encountered, largely to avoid the labor of having to link each doctrinal sin with some particular rabbinical sinner, and because doctrinal sins are not as clearly linkable to a single sinner in the same way that sexual sins are.

In connection with Jewish doctrinal sins, two characteristics must be kept in mind: that they are concealed from non-Jewish eyes, and that they influence contemporary practice.  The normal course of events in the evolution of a religion might be that elements that clash with the times are dropped, perhaps first the practice, and later the corresponding text.  In the case of Judaism, something different happened � under external pressure, offensive passages were deleted, but not the corresponding practice, and once the external pressure was removed, the offensive passages were restored:

Under external pressure, the rabbis deceptively eliminated or modified certain passages � but not the actual practices which are prescribed in them.  It is a fact which must be remembered, not least by Jews themselves, that for centuries our totalitarian society has employed barbaric and inhumane customs to poison the minds of its members, and it is still doing so.  (These inhumane customs cannot be explained away as mere reaction to antisemitism or persecution of Jews; they are gratuitous barbarities directed against each and every human being.  A pious Jew arriving for the first time in Australia, say, and chancing to pass near an Aboriginal graveyard, must � as an act of worship of "God" � curse the mothers of the dead buried there.)  (p. 24)
[F]ollowing the establishment of the State of Israel, once the rabbis felt secure, all the offensive passages and expressions were restored without hesitation in all new editions.  [...]  So now one can read quite freely � and Jewish children are actually taught � passages such as that which commands every Jew, whenever passing near a cemetery, to utter a blessing if the cemetery is Jewish, but to curse the mothers of the dead if it is non-Jewish.  In the old editions the curse was omitted, or one of the euphemisms was substituted for "Gentiles."  But in the new Israeli edition of Rabbi Adin Steinsalz (complete with Hebrew explanations and glosses of the Aramaic parts of the text, so that schoolchildren should be in no doubt as to what they are supposed to say) the unambiguous words "Gentiles" and "strangers" have been restored.  ( pp. 23-24)
Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, London and Boulder Colorado, 1994.

Below, then, are four instances of such Jewish doctrinal sins which can be added to the ones that we have just touched on above.  Hundreds more can be found in the works of Israel Shahak, which works I have already brought to your attention, along with purchasing instructions, at the bottom of my letter to you of 31-Mar-2002 (Can an Orthodox Jew be elected to Canada's parliament?).

(1) What standing does a Gentile have in a rabbinical court?

In my letter to you of 03-Apr-2002 (Are you a misogynist?) I quoted Andrea Dworkin to the effect that a woman has low status in a rabbinical court.  Israel Shahak below qualifies Dworkin's statement, and goes on to contrast what status a Gentile has before a rabbinical court.  It is important to notice that what is being described below is not only what ancient religious texts enjoin, but more importantly what contemporary Israeli rabbinical courts practice:

Gentiles are presumed to be congenital liars, and are disqualified from testifying in a rabbinical court.  In this respect their position is, in theory, the same as that of Jewish women, slaves and minors; but in practice it is actually worse.  A Jewish woman is nowadays admitted as a witness to certain matters of fact, when the rabbinical court "believes" her; a Gentile � never.

A problem therefore arises when a rabbinical court needs to establish a fact for which there are only Gentile witnesses.  An important example of this is in cases concerning widows: by Jewish religious law, a woman can be declared a widow � and hence free to re-marry � only if the death of her husband is proven with certainty by means of a witness who saw him die or identified his corpse.  However, the rabbinical court will accept the hearsay evidence of a Jew who testifies to having heard the fact in question mentioned by a Gentile eyewitness, provided the court is satisfied that the latter was speaking casually ("goy mesiah lefi tummo") rather than in reply to a direct question; for a Gentile's direct answer to a Jew's direct question is presumed to be a lie.  If necessary, a Jew (preferably a rabbi) will actually undertake to chat up the Gentile eyewitness and, without asking a direct question, extract from him a casual statement of the fact at issue.
Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, London and Boulder Colorado, 1994, p. 88.

Scandalous? � Think what reaction there might be from Jews if Canadian divorce courts operated according to the principle that Jews were congenital liars, and that a Jew asked a question by a Christian could be depended upon to answer with a lie.

(2) What respect does Judaism pay to other religions and to their sacred writings?

In addition to a series of scurrilous sexual allegations against Jesus, the Talmud states that his punishment in hell is to be immersed in boiling excrement � a statement not exactly calculated to endear the Talmud to devout Christians.  Or one can quote the precept according to which Jews are instructed to burn, publicly if possible, any copy of the New Testament that comes into their hands.  (That is not only still in force but actually practised today; thus on 23 March 1980 hundreds of copies of the New Testament were publicly and ceremonially burnt in Jerusalem under the auspices of Yad Le'akhim, a Jewish religious organisation subsidised by the Israeli Ministry of Religions.)
Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, London and Boulder Colorado, 1994, pp. 20-21.

Disgraceful? � Imagine what Jews might say if hundreds of copies of the Torah were "publicly and ceremonially" burned by some government-supported Christian organisation in Ottawa.

(3) What attitude might the Talmud encourage toward the Israeli holding of Christian girls as sex slaves?

The Talmudic injunctions below are not presented as ones that are applied literally today, but rather as ones that reveal how deep-seated is the hatred that is taught toward non-Jews, and that reveal the subordinate status to which the Talmud relegates non-Jews, and that provide Jews with ideological support for their sexual enslavement of Christian girls in Israel:

Sexual intercourse between a married Jewish woman and any man other than her husband is a capital offence for both parties [...].  The status of Gentile women is very different.  [...]  According to the Talmudic Encyclopedia: "[...] although a married Gentile woman is forbidden to the Gentiles, in any case a Jew is exempted."

This does not imply that sexual intercourse between a Jewish man and a Gentile woman is permitted � quite the contrary.  But the main punishment is inflicted on the Gentile woman; she must be executed, even if she was raped by the Jew: "If a Jew has coitus with a Gentile woman, whether she be a child of three or an adult, whether married or unmarried, and even if he is a minor aged only nine years and one day � because he had wilful coitus with her, she must be killed, as is the case with a beast, because through her a Jew got into trouble."  The Jew, however, must be flogged [...].
Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, London and Boulder Colorado, 1994, p. 87.

Repugnant? � Think what Jews might say if Jewish girls were held in sex slavery in Canada, and Christian doctrine dictated that when a Jewish girl of three was raped by a Christian, then the Jewish three-year-old must be put to death because through her a Christian "got into trouble."

(4) What implications might Judaism hold for labor practices?

In recent years the inhuman precepts according to which servitude is the "natural" lot of Gentiles have been publicly quoted in Israel, even on TV, by Jewish farmers exploiting Arab labour, particularly child labour.
Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, London and Boulder Colorado, 1994, p. 96.

Inhuman? � Imagine how Jews might react if the exploitation of Jewish children on Canadian farms were defended on television by citing a Christian doctrine that servitude was the natural lot of Jews.

A concise summary might be limited to the four above adjectives � that is, Jewish fundamentalism, whose doctrines dominate Israeli society today, is scandalous, disgraceful, repugnant, and inhuman.  That the world should be thrown into turmoil over the question of whether people adhering to such doctrines have a right to steal Arab land is ironic.  I will defer further comment on doctrinal sins until the end of the present letter.


Top   Sex Sins   Doctrinal Sins   Economic Sins   Conclusions   Bottom

Clerical Economic Sins

In the interests of limiting the present letter, I itemized above something in the order of one out of every hundred Jewish doctrinal sins that I found at hand.  In the area of the economic sins of Jewish clerics, I am forced to be similarly selective, as the volume of available documentation is staggering.

To begin, we have already seen above groin-kicking Rabbi Baruch Lanner stealing from the National Conference of Synagogue Youth.  Immediately below, we find a rabbi who happens to represent the tip of a very large rabbinical iceberg:

Rabbi Yosef CROZER

Rabbi Yosef Crozer fell because of his big mouth.  "I launder money, a lot of money", he once told an acquaintance.  "Every day I take $300,000 from 47 Street in Manhattan, bring it to the synagogue, give a receipt and then take a commission."
Ben Kaspit, The Jewish Laundry of Drug Money, Ma'ariv, 02-Sep-1994 www.abbc.com/crime/drugs/collect.htm#money

The money that Rabbi Yosef Crozer above is laundering is drug money.  It is not just occasional erring rabbis who are lured into laundering drug money, but rather entire Jewish institutions that have dedicated themselves to it:

Rabbis Israel EIDELMAN and Mendel GOLDENBERGER happen to be mentioned in the following overview

[U]ndoubtedly one of the most popular and successful ways to launder money is through Jewish religious institutions, such as yeshivas and synagogues.  Since the majority of the 47 Street gold and diamond merchants are religious Jews the process is made easier.  The Jewish religious institutions badly need funds.  The Colombians drug traders can be generous.  They transfer their drug money as donations, which go to the Jewish religious institutions one way and come out by the other way back to the donors.  On the way the synagogue or yeshiva obtain a respectable percentage for its pious uses.  Everyone is happy: the drug barons who launder their money quickly and efficiently and the synagogue or yeshiva which makes easy money.

The first laundering operation in which a Jewish institute in New York was involved was exposed already in 1984.  A ring which laundered about $23 million while making a profit of $2 million operated at the oldest yeshiva in the city, "Tifereth Yerushalayim", located in Manhattan.  The laundering was performed for the Kali cartel.  The contact man was David Va'anunu, mentioned in the context of the Prism affair, who worked with the cartel's major launderer, Jose Sairo.  The yeshiva's representative was a very pious Hassid, Mendel Goldenberger who daily received cash from Va'anunu and deposited the money in the yeshiva's accounts.  Goldenberger, who claimed not to have known the source of the money, was convicted of forging bank documents and given five years suspended imprisonment.  Vanunu was convicted, sentenced to eight years imprisonment but released much earlier after he became an informer for the DEA.  Later, as was stated, he ran into trouble again and fled the U.S..  Nine persons were convicted in that affair, including Rabbi Israel Eidelman, Vice President of the yeshiva, and some of its dignitaries.  Tiferet Yerushalayim faced financial difficulties at that time.  Its leaders attempted to maintain the number of students by paying them from the laundering drug profits.

That phenomenon, incidently, is very common among the New York Jews.  Many Jewish congregations are dying out because their members are leaving the city or their former neighborhoods.  Thus, they are losing their sources of income and facing large debts.  In that situation the road is short for the synagogue or yeshiva to launder drug money as a pious duty, since it means easy money, and lots of it.  "Laundering money is extremely beneficial to the yeshivas and other Jewish religious institutions", said a source close to the investigation.  "They are in a difficult situation and therefore they turn a blind eye to the drug problem.  They don't ask what is the source of the money as long as it keeps coming in."  The attitude of the pious Jewish community, according to the same source, is "drugs are sold anyway.  As long as it does not harm our own community and only does good for it, it doesn't matter if we benefit from drug trade."  The role of Israel is, in many cases, to make the connection between the religious Jewish communities of New York and the Colombians.

The Colombians are more satisfied with this method of laundering than with any other because, for political reasons, it is a relatively secure way which could be assumed initially not to be forcibly investigated by the U.S. authorities.
Ben Kaspit, The Jewish Laundry of Drug Money, Ma'ariv, 02-Sep-1994 www.abbc.com/crime/drugs/collect.htm#money

Below is a sampling of miscellaneous rabbinical economic crimes, only a few of them drug-money laundering, arranged alphabetically by surname (though where more than one rabbi participates in some crime, all appear together at the position of the surname of the alphabetically first of the rabbis).

Rabbi Elliot AMSEL

Yet another rabbi, Elliot Amsel, a "key fund raiser for Assemblyman Hikind," and president of Syrit College, was also charged by federal agents with putting $419,000 intended for the college into his personal bank account.  [...]

[I]n 1998 a Brooklyn rabbi, Elliot Amsel, who heads the Syrit College in Brooklyn, was charged with stealing over $700,000 from government funds intended for education.  He was also accused of money laundering, filing false income tax returns, and lying to investigators.  The money he stole, noted the New York Daily News, "was diverted to private bank accounts in New York and Israel."
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

Rabbi Bernard BERGMAN

"Reputed to be worth $100 million," notes Alan Dershowitz, "he had held the presidency of numerous Jewish philanthropic, religious, and educational institutions."  He was "one of the richest and most powerful orthodox Jews in the world," notes Robert Friedman, "with close ties to Israel's National Religious Party.  He made a fortune from a national conglomerate of Medicaid nursing homes, where infirm patients were left unattended to soak in their own urine....  No doubt Bergman learned his business ethics from his parents who were not only bootleggers, but also were convicted in 1941 of smuggling eight kilos of heroin from France in the bindings of Hebrew prayer books."  "In my lifetime in this city," declared another Jewish critic in the Village Voice, "I have never encountered anyone as rotten as Bernard Bergman."
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/22wallst.htm (references removed)

Rabbis David and Alan BRIGHT

In yet another drug case, an Orthodox Jew (a mashgiah: "a religious officer who sees that kosher restaurants maintain their Jewish dietary codes"), David Bright, was arrested at New York's La Guardia airport in 1996 with a briefcase containing $200,000 in cash.  He was arrested and accused of laundering $2 million for drug cartels.  Upon release, he "disappeared."  At the same time, Bright's brother, another Orthodox rabbi � Alan Bright � also disappeared.  This second Bright, notes the Chicago Tribune, "was a rabbi in Medellin, Colombia � a South American city that is home to the notorious Medellin drug cartel."
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

Rabbis Jacob BRONNER and Efroim STEIN


NEW YORK � Two New York City rabbis have been sentenced to nearly three years in prison for embezzling $2.5 million meant for training counselors for elderly Holocaust survivors.  Efroim Stein and Jacob Bronner pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy charges.  Prosecutors said Stein passed funds to his synagogue and to subcontractors in exchange for kickbacks, and put his relatives on the payroll.
Rabbis Sentenced, Canadian Jewish News Internet Edition, 23-Aug-2001 www.cjnews.com/pastissues/01/aug23-01/international/briefs.htm

Rabbi Arieh DERI

Israel's powerful ultra-Orthodox Shas party found itself Wednesday about to be deprived of its most charismatic figure, Arieh Deri, sentenced to a three-year prison sentence for fraud and corruption after an appeal hearing at the Supreme Court.
Israel: Powerful Political Leader-Rabbi Sentenced to 3 Years Jail for Fraud and Corruption, Casals & Associates, 12-Jul-2000 support.casals.com/aaaflash1/busca.asp?ID_AAAControl=2671

Rabbis Mikhail DUSHINSKY and John DOE

In 1997, a rabbi associated with Israel's Ministry of Religious Affairs, Mikhail Dushinsky, was caught in a scandal when he was secretly filmed telling a young couple (two news reporters posing as a Jewish man and his non-Jewish pregnant girlfriend) that he would do a quick under-the-table conversion to Judaism for her (which would expedite access to social services in Israel) for $15,000.  "Don't tell her what's going on," Rabbi Dushinsky told the undercover reporter, "She shouldn't think Judaism is something you buy with money."  After the tape was broadcast on Israeli TV, "dozens of other converts and aspiring converts" came forward with stories of "being subjected to the same sort of extortion."  Rabbi Alan Lew notes a similar tale in America:

When [a dying Jewish man's] wife realized that she couldn't be buried next to him because she wasn't Jewish, she decided she wanted to convert, but only on her terms.  She wasn't willing to go to the mikvah, she wasn't willing to study, she wasn't willing to be interrogated by rabbis.  "I've been married to a Jewish man for forty years," she said.  "That ought to be enough."  I said I couldn't convert her under those circumstances, so she found a rabbi who would, an Orthodox rabbi who agreed to convert her for a large sum of money and no other requirements.
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

Rabbi Leon EDERY

TORONTO � A Toronto rabbi has been sentenced to a year of house arrest and must a pay of fine of $32,229, in a tax evasion scheme that issued false receipts in the names of three registered charities.  [...]

In 1995 alone, for example, the value of receipts issued was almost $1 million, while actual donations totalled $312,000.
Ron Csillag, Rabbi convicted in tax evasion scheme, Canadian Jewish News, 07-Jun-2001, in Freedom Site www.freedomsite.org/pipermail/fs_announce/2001/000575.html

Rabbi Hertz FRANKEL

Prominent Satmar Rabbi Hertz Frankel last year pleaded guilty to diverting $6 million in taxpayer money over 20 years to Bais Rochel, the girls� yeshiva he proudly led in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Debra Nussbaum Cohen, Rabbis And Scandal: Are We Losing Faith?, The Jewish Week Internet Edition, 28-Jul-2000 www.abbc.com/crime/moral/rabbis-crime.htm

Rabbis Bernard GRUNFELD and Mahir REISS

In still another recent major drug laundering case in America, in 1997 two more New York City-area Orthodox rabbis, Bernard Grunfeld (an "administrator" at a yeshiva) and Mahir Reiss, both of the Bobover Hasidic sect, were indicted with ten other men on charges of laundering $1.75 million in drug money; they even helped buy the Colombian drug cartel an airplane.  Rabbi Reiss, a frequent visitor to Israel, was described by the New York Times as the "most senior player in the case."  His brother Abraham (who "collected cash from a stash house operated by the drug dealers in Manhattan" was also arrested as was Israel Knoblach, a yeshiva "associate."  Abraham Reiss the philanthropist also sat on the Board of Directors of the Orthodox girls school Manhattan High, rubbing elbows with fellow Board member Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations.  Jack Pinski, "from one of Colombia's wealthiest Jewish families," remained a fugitive.  Between August 1995 and May 1996 $19 million was deposited in bank accounts using the address of a yeshiva, Mesivta Eitz Chaim.

And as the London Observer observed about U.S. governmental favoritism towards Jews in this case:

In a bizarre twist, the judge put ... defendant Abraham Reiss under house arrest when it emerged that his brother was serving a prison sentence for the same offenses, and that to have both sons in jail would be "a double hardship" for the parent.
"Money launderers are the indispensable partners of major drug traffickers," Zachary W. Carter, a federal prosecutor, told the press regarding the Grunfeld-Reiss case, "The cynical act of using religious institutions to conceal drug proceeds is particularly reprehensible."  "These cases don't seem to be dramatically different from those involving other ethnic groups," noted Assistant U. S. Attorney Lee Dunst, chief prosecutor in the case, "Except, that is, for allegations that the bank accounts of religious institutions are used for money laundering.  That seems to be unique."

But there were other noteworthy peculiarities.  The Jewish Week, for instance, noted an Israeli newspaper report that "the Reiss brothers recently bought land in Israel's West Bank for tens of millions of shekels....  The paper reported there is suspicion that some of the money for the land deals came from Columbian drug profits....  The attorney representing the two settlements [where the rabbis bought land] was Shlomo Deri, brother of Arye Deri, the head of the [Israeli] Shas Party who is under indictment for a corruption scandal that touched Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu."

The 20,000 Bobover Hasids, of which Grunfeld and the Reiss brothers were leaders, is the largest Hasidic community in Borough Park, Brooklyn, which is known for its Orthodox populations.  The arrests of the rabbis was particularly bewildering, said the New York Times, because "in the pious Bobov community drug addiction is virtually unheard of."  "Everybody in this community is a rabbi," Dov Hiskin (the Democratic Assemblyman who represents the largely Hasidic district that includes Borough Park) sarcastically told reporters, "If you have a beard, they call you a rabbi."  Hiskind � a former member of Rabbi Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League � is a well-known personality in New York City, described by the Times as "one the most ardent and visible advocates of Jewish causes on New York City's political scene."  "[The Bobov Hasids] are completely shocked by the terrible allegations," Hikind announced the next day, "and hope and pray they are not true."
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

Rabbi Joseph GUTNIK

Joseph Gutnik, a Chabad rabbi and one of the richest men in Australia, even filed "a libel suit against the magazine Barons and its mother company, Dow Jones.  The magazine published an article linking Gutnik's name with that of Nahum Goldberg, a businessman accused of using an Israeli charity fund to launder money.  The article claimed that $24 million had been laundered � Goldberg was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.  In October 2000 The Age reported that the judge in the Goldberg case had criticized the Israeli government for not being more cooperative with the Australian investigators who were trying to follow the trail of funds through the local banks."
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

Rabbi Meyer KRENTZMAN and Gabbai Andor GALANDAUER

In 1994, in Montreal, Canada, Rabbi Meyer Krentzman, a former director of the Canadian Zionist Federation, a former director of the Jewish National Fund of Montreal, and a former director of the Jewish Educational Council, was arrested for selling heroin and cocaine to an undercover police officer.  An associate, Andor Galandauer, a voluntary official at the Beth Zion Congregation synagogue, was also arrested; Galandauer's past included activism with the Jewish Defense League.  "As recently as the fall of 1992, Krentzman was hired to preside over the synagogue's auxiliary service during the High Holidays, Rosh Hoshannah and Yom Kippur.  Galandauer acts in a voluntary capacity as the synagogue's gabbai � the person who chooses people for honors during services."
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

Chief Rabbi Israel LAU

The same year, Agence France Presse announced that "Israeli authorities are investigating Chief Rabbi Israel Lau in the latest corruption scandal to tarnish the country's Orthodox Jewish community."  [Renaudie] Lau was accused of demanding $500-$2500 to officiate weddings on about a hundred occasions, a service that was supposed to be free.
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

Rabbis Menashe LEIFER and Alexander SCHWARTZ

In 1994, 23 people were arrested in a drug laundering gang that included Borough Park (New York) rabbis Alexander Schwartz and Menashe Leifer, lawyers Harvey Weinig and Robert Hirsch, policeman Michael Kalanz, retired fireman Richard Spence, a Swiss banker, and the Honorary Consul in New York for Bulgaria.  "The key destination for the cocaine money was Zurich," noted the (London) Daily Telegraph, "where it was allegedly fed into Swiss accounts by husband and wife bankers Leon and Rachel Weinmann."  The New York Times noted that the ring was "one of the biggest drug-money laundering operations the authorities had ever uncovered in New York."  Rabbi Schwartz was captured with $267,830 in cash stuffed inside a money vest in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

Rabbi Shalom LEVITIN

Another Israeli drug laundering ring, led by Adi Tal, a former El-Al airline security guard, was broken up by American authorities in 1988.  Eleven members were arrested.  "An important member of Tal's laundering ring," notes Kapit, "was Rabbi Shalom Levitin, a Lubavitch Hassid, head of the Chabad branch in Seattle.  It is assumed that all the considerable political power of these Hassids were exerted in favor of that laundering ring."  "I was motivated by my desire to help my brethren in need," explained Rabbi Levitin, "with funds being transferred to Israel."  "People in the community know that he is only concerned about helping Jewish people," said Mark Goldberg, President of Congregation Shareiev Telfilah-Lubavitch."  Levitin got off easy with a $10,000 fine and a 30-day sentence in a half-way house.
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

Rabbi Abraham LOW

In 1994 still another Hasidic rabbi, an especially prominent one, Abraham Low, of the Mogen Abraham synagogue in Los Angeles, was arrested with a Jewish businessman, Alan Weston, and an African-American woman, Charlesetta Brown, on charges of a drug laundering project worth about $2 million.  It involved elements of the usual scenario: Hasidic diamond dealers in New York City and the bank accounts for Orthodox Jewish religious charities.  "The cash would be delivered to Hasidic diamond dealers known to the rabbi."  Brown also offered to sell an undercover FBI agent "assault rifles, pistols, bullet proof vests, and knives � "any quantity ... on a regular basis."  When the FBI received the tip about Rabbi Low's drug laundering activities, he was already under investigation in a $189 million "check kiting" scheme and a "promissory note scheme in which the Bank of America might lose $70 million."

A request was made by Low's lawyers to the court to dismiss the charges because of alleged "outrageous government misconduct" by an FBI investigator and "anti-Semitism."  Efforts to have the case dismissed against Low included the accusation that an FBI agent cursed at one of the rabbi's associates and that an FBI informer had spoken an "anti-Semitic slur" to Low and "declared that the Torah was a piece of toilet paper."  The prosecutor in the case argued that the claim that Rabbi Low "had been singled out because he is Jewish is a smokescreen to divert attention from his lawbreaking."
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm

Rabbi Jacob LUSTIG

A rabbi who skimmed hundreds of thousands of dollars from the sale of instant bingo cards was given three years of probation Tuesday and ordered to do 400 hours of community service.  Rabbi Jacob Lustig, 72, was also ordered to forfeit more than $920,000.  Judge Fred Cartolano spared Lustig and three others from prison but said: "You'll always be remembered as a felon, as a thief."
Ohio Rabbi Sentenced in Bingo Scheme, USAJEWISH.COM 09-Jun-1999 www.usajewish.com/scripts/usaj/paper/Article.asp?ArticleID=494

Rabbi Jonathan MALTZMAN

In 2001, "Montgomery County prosecutors ... opened up an investigation into the handling of a charity fund at one of the Washington area's largest synagogues [Congregation Beth El in Bethesda, Maryland], after its senior rabbi reimbursed $300,000 to the fund because of questions about how he had used the account."  The rabbi, Jonathan Maltzman, "transferred more than $220,000 from the charity fund to his brokerage account at Fidelity; used $7,950 from the fund for his child's b'nai mitzvah parties; and used about $11,500 to pay his self-employment taxes.  An additional $62,000 was withdrawn in cash at ATMS  ...  About $700,000 had passed through the fund during the 11 years Maltzman administered it, [but] only about $20,000 could be identified as having gone to charities."
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/22wallst.htm (references removed)

Rabbi Fred NEULANDER

We have already met killer Rabbi Fred Neulander in our sex crimes section above, and it should be little wonder that someone capable of murder is capable also of lesser economic crimes:

Later stepped forward an embittered man, Myron Lewin, who also claimed that Rabbi Neulander had also "cheated me" in Levin's purchase of a $16,000 Torah.
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/22wallst.htm

Rabbi Bentzion PIL

SAN FRANCISCO � Rabbi Bentzion Pil, founder and former director of the now-defunct Jewish Education Centre, was sentenced last month to nine months in a halfway house and three years probation, and fined $10,000.  In 1999, Rabbi Pil pleaded guilty to a single count of illegally structuring $1.7 million worth of bank deposits, and intentionally evading federal reporting laws on currency transactions.
Rabbi Sentenced, Canadian Jewish News, 01-Feb-2001 www.cjnews.com/pastissues/01/feb1-01/international/briefs.htm

Rabbi Joseph PRUSHINOWSKI

Fraud upon others to benefit the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community was perfected to a science by yet another rabbi, the so-called "Robin Hood rabbi," Joseph Prushinowski.  This man, an ordained rabbi, and described as "an international economic menace" and "one of the world's most wanted con men," was sought for ten years by the FBI, Canada's Royal Mounted Police, Scotland Yard, the New York Police Department, and the Dutch police.  His media nickname stemmed from the fact that he kept little of the money he scammed for himself; most went to projects in his ultra-Orthodox community � the Hasidic Tasch sect.  He was arrested most recently, in Israel, in 1998.  He was the principal player in a series of frauds that caused "banks, building societies and insurance companies" to lose over $200 million; other fraudulent schemes stripped the world's banks of another $200 million.  Originally born in Israel, Prushinowski emigrated to America but first fled the arm of the law in 1977 (because of a $1.5 million bank scam early in his crime career), rushing back to Israel.  He eventually returned to the U.S., however, and in 1981 began a three year sentence in prison.  He later settled in Canada, "running frauds around the globe by telephone, fax and Telex."  Prushinwski's main partner, Selig Waldman, also Jewish, in his most recent frauds, "jumped bail [in 1990] and is now thought to be in South America."
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

Rabbi Jonathan SACKS

In England, that same year [1998], the (London) Independent headlined a story "Chief Rabbi Rocked by Fraud Scandal."  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is "seen by many Jews and non-Jews as the spiritual center of British Jewry ... is technically the Chief Rabbi only of the United Synagogue, the main Orthodox movement with 70 congregations in the United Kingdom."  Suddenly he was "embroiled in deepening turmoil."  Police were investigating "allegations of fraud at Jewish cemeteries in east London" and "the disappearance of highly valuable texts from a religious library."
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/22wallst.htm (references removed)

Rabbi Yisroel SCHENKOLEWSKI

In 1999, one Rabbi [Yisroel] Schenkolewski of Lakewood, New Jersey, was accused of "accepting a $500,000 donation to a school he runs in exchange for using his political clout to help the donor get a CO-generation plant built.  The prosecutor at the trial admitted he "botched" the case and the rabbi went free.
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

Rabbi Nochum STERNBERG

In addition to the information on Rabbi Nochum Sternberg below, we are also provided with some reinforcement for the comments above concerning the Jewish "law of the informer" (din moser):

In 1991 another hassidic rabbi, Nochum Sternberg, and his wife Esther, were jailed for contempt of court for refusing to testify, on religious grounds, against fellow Jews in a tax-fraud scheme involving $20 million.  The Jewish Week noted that their attorney, Nathan Lewis, argued that "Jewish law has a strong religious prohibition against informers who testify against other Jews in a secular court."  Both Sternbergs had already served prison terms themselves years earlier in another tax fraud.
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)

Rabbi Hanock TEITELBAUM

Three years earlier [that is, in 1991], another pious Hasidic Teitelbaum � Hanoch � was sentenced in Rockland County, New York, to 20-months to five years in prison for stealing $1 million in mortgages, loans, and welfare payments.
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/23drug.htm (references removed)


To repeat � the above listing of economic wrongdoing among Jewish clerics is cursory, and was abandoned early because of an excess of data.

Furthermore, my own view is that most Jewish clerics involved in kosher certification are engaged in something close to extortion or restraint of trade, as I have already explained in my letter to you of 27-Mar-2002, and that ultimately this will be recognized and a public outcry will follow and prosecutions will begin; however, as in the absence of sufficient publicity mine is still a minority opinion, I do not insist on it in the present letter.  The surfeit of kosher-unrelated economic wrongdoing among Jewish clerics removes any urgency from including the kosher certifiers.

With the sums stolen that are cited above being so large, two questions naturally arise:

Some rabbinical sin does not readily fall into the categories of sexual/doctrinal/economic, as for example the following:

Rabbi Austin Yoncy FELD

In 1992, another rabbi, Austin Yoncy Feld, and his brother were held in a San Francisco-area jail on charges that they planned to murder a Palo Alto child psychiatrist, Saul Wasserman, and his wife.  Recently arrived from Jerusalem, police found in the rabbi's car "six plastic handcuffs, two knives, ski masks, detailed floor plans of the house, photographs of the Wassermans, a key to every door in the house, a bouquet of flowers and the location of a shotgun in the house."  Police suspected the plan was motivated by the Wasserman's daughter, a student in Israel, who accused her parents of sexually molesting her when she was a child.
Jewish Tribal Review jewishtribalreview.org/22wallst.htm

Of interest because it is the first case that we have come across in the present letter of a religious cleric moonlighting as a hit man � a juxtaposition of traits that our press might place on the front page if the cleric were a priest, but not when he is in fact a rabbi.  Despite the undoubted interest of sins in still other categories, I need not extend our discussion to them, as the accumulation of instances of sexual/doctrinal/economic sins above is more than sufficient to support certain conclusions.


Top   Sex Sins   Doctrinal Sins   Economic Sins   Conclusions   Bottom

Conclusions and Questions

What's It All About?

Jewish control of the media permits Jews to launch a preemptive disinformation strike at others for sins of which Jews themselves are most guilty.  For example, when Jews themselves have been among the leading war criminals throughout the interval of living memory, they stage show trials featuring the exaggerated or imagined war criminality of others.

What the evidence presented in the present letter suggests is that Jewish clerics find themselves in an extremely vulnerable position.  Rabbinical sex crimes are widespread and egregious, probably more widespread and egregious than those of Christians.  Rabbinical doctrines and practices would, if exposed to Western gaze, seem as backward and savage as those of the Taliban.  And rabbinical economic crimes are staggering.

The response of Jews to their vulnerability is not to reform themselves, but to attack others.  With their reserve of good-will nearing depletion from their decades-long assault on Islam, Jews nevertheless open up a second front against Christianity � a venture which perhaps underestimates the strength of the two giants being flagellated.

On this second front, Jews select as their immediate target the only one available.  They cannot attack Christians on their hidden and shameful doctrinal sins, as the Christian sacred texts are already known to all, so widely disseminated that they stock a bureau drawer in every hotel room in Canada, whereas it is the Jewish Torah and Talmud that have been concealed from view, for the sufficient reason that they contain a vast amount of inexcusable material.  And they cannot attack Christians for their economic sins either, as the discrepancy between Christian and Jewish criminality here is too gaping and too obvious.  The only opportunity for attack is upon sex sins, as the Jewish predilection to witness tampering, and Jewish skill in evading the clutches of the law, combined most especially with Jewish influence over the press, renders feasible the portrayal of the Christian clergy (Catholic being emphasized at the moment) as the great sex sinners of our day.

The Assault on Christianity Continues

In the nine days since that CNN broadcast of 06-Apr-2001 first awakened me to the topic of clerical fallibility, the media feeding frenzy around the Catholic church has continued unabated.  I have not followed it closely, but everything I do see reinforces my view that the activity is largely gratuitous.  Currently, Boston area lawyers are discovering that if they advertise that money is to be made by claiming sex abuse, many hundreds of people do come forward claiming to be victims, in fact hundreds more per priest than one might imagine possible, and the press finds that it can sell more newspapers if it credits the hundreds of claimants rather than registering incredulity.  Under this modus operandi, whatever the priest John Geoghan really is guilty of is submerged under a flood of mercenary claims.  My letter to Al Gore of 11-Sep-2000 has described how litigation lawyers like Fred Baron are able to inflate their incomes by engineering a flood of spurious claims; and a substantial portion of the Ukrainian Archive is dedicated to documenting how the Jewish-holocaust industry is able to stay robust by similarly engineering the testimony of a flood of false survivors.

Most recently, the press has been demanding the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law for the sin of having known of Geoghan's abuse but simply moving him from parish to parish � however, that the same evasion is a hallmark of rabbinical sins is not acknowledged in the coverage.

If even some of these most recent accusations are true, and some very well may be, then let all who deserve punishment receive it to the fullest degree, and let all imperfect institutions be restructured so that the same abuses can never happen again � but let it also be demonstrated that this is something more than a Jewish war on Christianity by subjecting the many Jews who have done worse to their proportional castigation, both on the news and before the courts.

Other Comparisons Worth Making

From the glimpse that we have gotten of how 60 Minutes executives treat their female employees, we are able to imagine that television takes delight in pointing its finger at priests in order to distract attention from the orgy of molestation by television executives:

But the charges against [60 Minutes Executive Producer Don] Hewitt make Clinton's alleged behavior look like clumsy courtship.  One woman described to Hertsgaard how Hewitt slammed her against a wall, pinned her there and forced his tongue down her throat.  � Carol Lloyd

Women who worked in the "60 Minutes" offices described to Hertsgaard a sexually charged environment that had more in common with a drunken frat party than a professional newsroom. � Carol Lloyd

From which arises the question of what a comparison of sexual transgression among Catholic priests and among CNN staff would yield � for all we know, it's among CNN staff that sin is concentrated more strongly, and there that society's intervention would yield the greatest salvation.

Or, perhaps the rate of sexual misconduct among priests is minuscule compared to the sexual misconduct practiced by American presidents or senators or congressmen or mayors or police chiefs or plumbing inspectors, and so that it is not alter boys who stand in greatest danger of having their privates groped, but government employees.  Perhaps the rate of sexual misconduct among priests pales in comparison to the sexual misconduct practiced by doctors or lawyers or teachers or child-care workers.  Recollecting how many of the sex sinners above were teachers or child-care workers, the question naturally arises of whether the misbehavior might be characteristic of workers in these fields, irrespective of their religion � but all of these are questions too subtle and too tortuous for our mass media to ask, and perhaps requiring an attention span too prolonged for television viewers to endure.


And now we turn to the question of what you can do, both in your capacity as journalist, and in your capacity as aspiring parliamentarian:

Can you help reverse the corruption of the press?

In its mindless subservience to Jewish leaders, the Canadian press neglects its obligation to serve the wider public interest.  Surely both journalists and politicians (both aspiring and actual) � especially when combined into one person, as in your case � are under an obligation to comment on this degradation of the press, which will be the indispensible first step toward correcting it.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) presents Canadians with a special case.  Here we have a highly prestigious and influential conduit of information to Canadians, one that is heavily subsidized by the dollars of taxpayers most of whom are not Jews, and yet one that is slavishly responsive to Jewish influence.  What to do about the media generally may have no easy answer, but what to do about the CBC is not so problematic.  The first step could be an investigation of CBC participation in the Jewish crusade against Christianity.  Once the public hears the results of this investigation, its indignation will be impossible to ignore.

Your own affiliation with the National Post puts you in a strong position to help upgrade the quality of that newspaper.  Specifically, it must be a simple matter for you to get a listing of all the National Post articles that deal with the sexual/doctrinal/economic sins of the clergy, broken down by the religion, which listing would provide a ready measure of the relative importance to the National Post of the incompatible missions of promoting understanding and undermining Christianity.  You would be making a positive contribution both to the National Post and to the Canadian people by getting the National Post to stop following the example of more senior Jewish newspapers:

The New York Times, which is read and probably influences many American Jews, has published in-depth analyses of Christian and Muslim fundamentalism but has refrained from presenting similar articles describing Jewish fundamentalism [...].
Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Pluto Press, London and Sterling Virginia, 1999, p. 159.

Can you help stop the self-destruction of the Jews?

Are you unaware that affording any group impunity for crime will increase its crime rate?  Are you unaware that granting any group impunity for lying will multiply its liars?  Are you unaware that affording any group impunity for molesting children will increase its rate of sex abuse?  Are you unaware that granting any group impunity for killing will proliferate its murderers?

Jewish control of the press and of government has been used to win for Jews a measure of impunity on all fronts, than which nothing could be more self-destructive.  The Jews' worst enemies could not have drawn up a final solution for the obliteration of the Jews that was more dependable than the plan Jews have themselves chosen to implement.  In your support of this plan, you act against the interests of the Jewish people just as if you were their worst enemy; in my opposing this plan, I act in the interests of the Jewish people just as if I were their truest friend.  The wisdom that Jews have lost, and that they must recapture if they are not to perish, is that every group is obligated to treasure its mechanisms for self-correction and self-cleansing; the more such mechanisms are de-activated, the faster the group regresses.  Accepting any grant of impunity is the same as de-activating a mechanism for self-correction.  If you are not sure you see this phenomenon in action anywhere, just look at Israel.

Can you muster the courage to speak out against Israel?

We read above concerning rabbinical drug-money laundering that "the role of Israel is, in many cases, to make the connection between the religious Jewish communities of New York and the Colombians."  Thus, it may be supposed that among Israel's many sins is its participation in the drug trade in America.

America's War on Terrorism is in fact almost entirely a war against the opponents of Israeli criminality, and America's War on Drugs is necessarily in part a war against Israel's promotion of the drug trade in America.

Are you doing your share as a journalist to bring Israel's several insidious roles to the attention of the public, and would you do your share as a parliamentarian to make Canadian support for Israel contigent on its beginning to divest itself of some of its criminality?

Can you help strengthen education in scientific method?

The underlying errors that make this entire debacle of Jews assaulting Christianity possible are errors of scientific method.  No journalist trained in scientific method is capable of participating in the media war on Christianity without demanding clarification and qualification and elaboration, and thus without approaching truth.  No member of the public who is trained in scientific method is capable of being fooled by media disinformation as undisguised as the disinformation which is the subject of the present letter.  Better education in scientific method would have made the fiasco of the Jewish attack on Christianity less likely, and would in fact afford all groups enhanced protection against hatred.

By way of further illustration, I wonder how many television viewers were able to properly evaluate a defense of celibacy offered by the same Cardinal Roger M. Mahony with whom I began the present letter � when he said that 90 to 95% of child sex abuse is perpetrated by family members (presumably ones living at home and so that cannot be priests).  Someone uninstructed in the ways of correlation may be left with the feeling that indeed a strong piece of evidence has been put on the table justifying the cardinal's conclusion that celibacy cannot be a cause of sex abuse.  For some people, in fact, the cardinal's evidence may seem to suggest even that the celibate are less prone to sex abuse, and that therefore celibacy may offer protection against sex abuse.

However, the reaction of anyone who has studied correlation will be different.  It will be that what Cardinal Mahony is offering as corroborative evidence is in fact an elementary and classical fallacy � the fallacy of the single row.

For the sake of argument let us accept the figure of 90%, and let us imagine that it is based on the simplified data below, in which 9 out of a total of 10 sex abusers were observed to be non-celibate.  Recollecting my admonitions at the beginning of the present letter that a correlation can only be established if all cells of the fourfold table are filled in, we notice with dismay that the two bottom cells have not been:

CELIBATE
No Yes
A
B
U
S
E		 Yes 9 1
No ? ?

The fallacy of the single row is revealed by demonstrating that the data being offered is in fact compatible with a correlation opposite to the one being recommended.  For example (imagining data that are easy to grasp, and without regard to how unrealistic they might be), the two lower cells might be filled in as below, with the completed table showing only 9/900 = 1/100 non-celibates practicing sex abuse, but fully 1/2 of all celibates practicing sex abuse:

CELIBATE
No Yes
A
B
U
S
E		 Yes    9 1
No 891 1
900 2

In short, the reason that most sex abusers are non-celibate may be that most people in the society are non-celibate � which is to say that the imbalance in the upper row may be only a reflection of the imbalance in the totals underneath the table.

The moral that we may draw from the above demonstration is that with inadequate training in scientific method, the innocent may defend themselves ineptly by offering fallacies whose underlying data are compatible not only with their own position but also with the contrary position, and we see from anyone not grasping that the cardinal's argument was flawed, that without training in scientific method, the recipients of persuasive communications may have difficulty distinguishing valid arguments from fallacies.

We may contrast as well the constructiveness and sanity of reading scientific literature that describes such things as the fallacy of the single row, as compared to the destructiveness and insanity of reading religious literature that recommends such things as the killing of a three-year-old for the sin of having been raped.





Lubomyr Prytulak



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