Convictions for 3 rabbis for forced divorces

The Associated Press
July 7, 2017

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A federal appeals court Friday upheld the convictions of three Orthodox rabbis for their roles in a ring that used brutal tactics to force unwilling Jewish men to divorce their wives.

A three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed arguments by the rabbis that the convictions should be overturned on a number of grounds, including the right to religious freedom.

Rabbis Mendel Epstein, Jay Goldstein and Binyamin Stimler were convicted in 2015 on charges of conspiracy to commit kidnapping. Epstein, 70, lives in Lakewood, New Jersey, while Goldstein, 61, and Stimler, 41, are from Brooklyn.

Epstein, who was accused of being the ringleader, was sentenced to 10 years. Goldstein got an eight-year term, and Stimler a three-year sentence.

The attacks were carried out from 2009 to 2013 in New Jersey, New York City and other locations. Prosecutors said the group used brutal methods and tools, including handcuffs and electric cattle prods, to torture the men into granting the religious divorces, known as gets, which their wives were seeking.

Jewish law mandates that the get be presented by a husband to a wife to make a divorce official.

During his sentencing in December 2015, Epstein told District Judge Freda Wolfson that he got caught up in his tough guy image, which he said helped him persuade men to give their wives the religious divorces. Epstein said he was helping the women out of a sense of compassion because they couldn’t remarry without it.

Epstein’s attorney, Peter Goldberger, argued before the appeals court in January that Wolfson erred during the trial by not allowing evidence that explained the rabbi’s religious beliefs. The attorneys also argued that federal authorities didn’t get a warrant to obtain private cellphone records and that the evidence against Stimler wasn’t enough to justify a conviction.

The appeals court judges dismissed those claims.

___

This story has been corrected to show that the rabbis appealed in December 2015, not in January 2017.

https://apnews.com/4b6e24ba24ef41a397373e711cf81cb9

Book Examines 1994 Supreme Court Case on School District for Hasidic Sect

Mark Walsh
Education Week
April 12, 2016

Twenty-two years ago this month, I flew to Newark, N.J., rented a car, and drove north, crossing the border into New York state to find, in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, the village of Kiryas Joel, an enclave of Hasidic Jews of the Satmar sect.

I was there to gather information for an Education Week story previewing a U.S. Supreme Court case that would soon be argued about the public school district created by New York state lawmakers for the village.

Members of the Satmar sect, which originated in what is now Hungary and Romania, had migrated to the area from more than 50 miles away in the Williamsburg section of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. They were looking for space, and quiet, as the secular world was closing in on their Williamsburg neighborhood, but also a place where they could maintain an insular community of their conservative Jewish faith.

Children in the village attended private yeshivas, segregated by gender, but the education of the village's inordinate number of children with disabilities had presented challenges for parents and policymakers for years. Ultimately, the politically well-connected sect sought and received help from the New York legislature and then-Gov. Mario M. Cuomo—a school district for the village of Kiryas Joel, and millions of dollars of state and federal aid that came with it, to serve children in special education.

The village had had difficult relations with the surrounding Monroe-Woodberry school district, compounded by the Supreme Court's 1985 decision in Aguilar v. Felton that meant teachers from the public school district could no longer provide services in the private religious schools. The few Kiryas Joel parents who were willing to send their children with disabilities to Monroe-Woodberry schools faced insensitivity, including episodes in which one Satmar child was cast as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in a Christmas pageant.

Louis Grumet was the executive director of the New York State School Boards Association at the time, and a former aide to Cuomo, a Democrat. He could not believe that Cuomo would sign the bill creating what Grumet believed was a violation of the state and federal constitutions.

In a new book about the episode, The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel: The Rise of a Village Theocracy and the Battle to Defend the Separation of Church and State (Chicago Review Press), Grumet recounts his role in the unusual case and provides an engaging historical account that is generally fair to the Satmars' arguments as well.

Grumet had grown up as a Jew in West Virginia, so he knew something about being a religious minority in America. He had gone to work for Cuomo when the future governor was secretary of state of New York.

"Over the next few years, I became Cuomo's go-to 'bleeding heart'—handling issues related to poverty, integration, Native Americans, people with disabilities, and similar matters," Grumet writes. "It was some of the most enjoyable work of my career, and I had a near worshipful relationship with Cuomo, whom I saw as a brilliant lawyer and committed progressive politician."

Grumet went on to become assistant New York state commissioner of education for more than five years before settling in as head of the state school boards association.

In 1989, as Gov. Cuomo considered the bill sent to him by the legislature to create the Kiryas Joel Village School District, Grumet went to see his old boss, thinking there was no way that Cuomo, whom he viewed as a committed constitutionalist, would sign a measure creating a public school district for a theocratic religious sect.

Grumet was disappointed to learn that Cuomo intended to sign the bill, and that the governor was angered by Grumet's objections at this late stage of the process. 

"I asserted that if the governor signed it, the courts would knock it out," Grumet writes. Cuomo ushered him out of his office with a dismissive question, "Who's going to sue?"

"'I will,' I responded," Grumet writes. "The governor smiled at me with a condescending grin that I had seen many times when I worked for him."

The rest of the book is a crisp account of the legal odyssey of the school district, which was struck down by the New York state courts, including its highest court. To the joy of the Satmar sect, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to issue a stay of the New York high court's decision, and it soon granted full review of the case. Many legal experts thinking the court might use the case to bring some clarity to its often-confusing church-state jurisprudence, particularly the three-part "Lemon test" for evaluating government action on religion, from the 1971 case of Lemon v. Kurtzman.

Grumet describes a meeting at National Education Association headquarters in Washington of all the groups on his side, including the teachers' union, civil liberties groups, and religious groups such as the American Jewish Committee and the Baptist Joint Committee. Most of these groups had participated in religion cases at the Supreme Court for decades, and they were a bit concerned Grumet was planning to entrust the oral argument to his relatively green staff counsel, Jay Worona.

"During the meeting, the various groups managed to divide the important legal and policy arguments among themselves, and it wasn't until Worona left to take a personal phone call that an ulterior motive for the meeting became apparent," Grumet writes. "The instant Jay left the room, the meeting abruptly shifted to a discussion of whether this wet-behind-the-ears whippersnapper from Upstate New York was of sufficient experience, stature, and pedigree to take this important case to the U.S. Supreme Court."

Grumet stuck by his man, and Worona argued the case against Nathan Lewin, a high-powered attorney hired by Kiryas Joel.

In the end, the Supreme Court did not use the case to reconsider the Lemon test, which remains in force. On June 27,1994, the court ruled 6-3 in Board of Education of the Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet to uphold the New York Court of Appeals, with a splintered majority.

"In this case, we are clearly constrained to conclude that the statute before us fails the test of neutrality," Justice David H. Souter concluded in a part of the decision that was joined by four other justices. "It delegates a power this court has said ranks at the very apex of the function of a state, to an electorate defined by common religious belief and practice, in a manner that fails to foreclose religious favoritism. It therefore crosses the line from permissible accommodation to impermissible establishment."

Throughout the process, Grumet relished his time in the media spotlight and in constitutional battle. 

"As I finished reading the opinion and paused to ponder the fact that I had been part of a case that upheld the establishment clause, I was overwhelmed and humbled," he writes. "But there was little time for reflection. ... There were calls to make and calls to return."

Grumet stresses that throughout the legal battle, he remained convinced that the children with disabilities in Kiryas Joel would not suffer because some way of educating them would be worked out. He details the epilogue of what happened after the U.S. Supreme Court finished with the case, which itself is an interesting tale of Empire State power and politics.

There is one little flaw in this otherwise fine book: Grumet, and his editors at Chicago Review Press, failed to catch multiple misspellings of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's name. It is spelled "Ginsberg" several times, even on the same page or the same sentence in which the name is correctly spelled.

Grumet writes that after the decision, he held out hope that he and Cuomo could "resume our friendship and let bygones be bygones." That was not to be, as the governor continued backing new forms of legislation designed to maintain a separate school district for Kiryas Joel until he was defeated for re-election in 1994 by Republican George Pataki.

It isn't quite clear if, or how much, Grumet spoke to Cuomo after the episode. Cuomo died Jan. 1, 2015. Grumet says in his note on sources that he conducted interviews with "virtually all the major actors" in the curious case of Kiryas Joel—"the exception being Governor Cuomo, who would not submit to an interview."

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/school_law/2016/04/book_examines_1994_supreme_cou.html

My secret life as a gay ultra-Orthodox Jew

BBC
April 11, 2016

 

Chaya, not her real name, is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman who is gay. Here she describes her struggle to accept her sexuality, and why she has to keep it a secret from those who would make her choose between her identity and her family.

I would lose everything if I came out. We are a tightly knit community and I think few people realise just how isolated we are. In the world I live in, being gay is the equivalent of being a bad person. It's seen as an evil desire that is completely unnatural.

People I have grown up with would wonder what else I could be capable of. Few would believe that I could still be religious and if I did eventually leave the Haredi community it would mean losing my job, my home and potentially my children.

It's just easier for everyone to pretend that there is nothing different about me. In fact, most people prefer to act as though homosexuality does not exist.

I was still at school when I first tried telling a rabbi I was gay but all he said in response was: "It's just a phase, it happens to a lot of girls."

It's true that it's not unusual to have same-sex experiences when growing up. Our schools are completely segregated so girls and boys have little to do with each other from the age of three. The strictest families will even discourage brothers and sisters from playing together.

Children will experiment. I started when I was 12 but it was supposed to be something that we would all grow out of. I was different and as I got older my classmates started calling me a lesbian even though I was no longer doing anything.

It became increasingly difficult to ignore so I tried telling my mother when I was 16. It took so much for me to actually come out and say it but she just looked straight at me and quashed it immediately. We haven't discussed it outright since.

Soon after, my parents began to arrange a marriage for me. There is often a matchmaker involved in problem cases like mine. A successful engagement can earn them up to £15,000. But my family decided that they wanted to find me a husband themselves. Everyone was involved in the process except me.

Once the background checks were done and a boy was approved, we met for about half an hour. It took place in the dining room. His family and my family sat around a table talking awkwardly for a few minutes until eventually everyone else went out and left us to be awkward together.

Despite that, I think I was relieved to be engaged. I hoped that being in a committed relationship would finally help me feel that I belonged. But in the months before I got married, I started seeing a girl. We kept it secret and broke it off just before the wedding. It might sound strange but I still thought that I would be able to put it all behind me.

As the wedding got nearer I began to feel more apprehensive. I knew that we were expected to consummate the marriage on the wedding night, although it does not always happen until the next day because the celebrations can go on until five in the morning. Even though contraception is frowned upon, I was put on the pill to make sure that I would not be on my period on the night. Neither my husband nor I knew what we were doing. He was too rough and it went on and on.

We are encouraged to have large families and I became pregnant quickly. If I had wanted to take the pill after the wedding I would have had to ask a rabbi for permission. I felt it would be unthinkable to ask for it before I'd had at least two children.

Once you are pregnant that child becomes both a hostage and your hostage taker. You are held hostage by your child. We are expected to have eight or nine children and I kept getting pregnant. My feelings built up inside me until one day I was walking down the street in a little cul-de-sac somewhere. There was so much noise in my head that I started saying "I'm gay, I'm gay, I'm gay!" out loud.

It made me feel like I had to do something about it. Eventually, I told my husband. I think he already knew I was gay but he'd convinced himself that it was just a latent desire rather than an integral part of my identity.

We still don't know what we are going to do. We have children together and a family set-up that works. If my husband and I separate we would lose all of that. I think we would all lose something if we broke apart so I may well stay married.

I hope my family can stay together, although I don't know what shape that would take. People have all kind of arrangements. Rabbis have different ideas than some about how you should keep people together. In a case like mine, instead of trying to find a way in which we could both be happy, it think it will be just that I need to conform and fulfil my duties as a wife, which of course goes against the very grain of my being.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews in the UK

• The majority of Haredi Jews live in London - Hackney council estimates there are around 30,000 members of the community in its borough.
• The number of ultra-Orthodox synagogue members has risen steadily over the past 20 years.
• A third of Jewish children under five have Haredi parents, according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research.
• Ultra-Orthodox Jews are predicted to make up the majority of British Jews by the end of the century.

It's hard to live with the knowledge that if I just conformed, that this house would run so much more smoothly. It makes me feel like it's all my fault. But if being Orthodox Jewish and gay was not compatible then I don't think that God would have made me this way.

I was created like this with a plan, even if I don't know what it is yet. My faith has become a real comfort to me but it took me a long time to reach that point. My religion involves ritual, prayer, worship and acts of faith that are meaningful and I don't see why I should have to give that up.

I think it's a mistake to choose one aspect of your identity over another. This is not just about my sexuality. It's also about being able to be an individual within the community and about having a sense of self. The traditional role of an ideal wife is a strong woman who heads up the family and submits to her husband in areas of spirituality.

The woman is supposed to be the queen of the house. Her husband may still be learning the Torah full time in the early years of their marriage and it's often left to the woman to bring in most of the money. But although she might work outside the home, it's supposed to be in a refined way.

Many women work as teachers in the community's private schools or as secretaries. There is a focus on the way you look because you are supposed to be attractive to your husband but not attractive to other people.

It's a fine line to tread. You have to be covered from your elbows to your collar bone to your knees, all inclusive. Some take it further and say that skirts should be mid-shin so that when you sit down your knees will be hidden. Your hair is always supposed to be completely covered and you're not supposed to draw attention to yourself.

If someone does not fit in, people will talk about it. I'm ambitious, my home does not define me and I'm also not particularly feminine. Women usually have a large support network. Our extended families mean lots of sisters and female cousins who can help each other with the everyday tasks such as cooking and looking after the children. But they stop offering to help when you do not quite act like everyone else.

People have always called me a troublemaker. Some blame my current difficulties on my so-called lack of modesty. They say my skirt is too short and my tights are not quite thick enough. Even my hair is a topic of conversation.

In my culture, we always cover our heads in some way. It's usually with a wig if I am working, but the rest of the time I will use a hat or a snood. Underneath it all, I keep my hair cut short. Ironically, I can get away with it because shaving your head is seen as a sign of piety. Many women will have their heads shaven by their mother-in-law on the morning after their wedding. But my hair is something different - it's a style that I have chosen.

I suppose I have reclaimed my hair. But there is still a lot of my work to be done to reclaim my religion. There are a lot of people out there who are distorting it and it's not theirs to distort. Spirituality does not belong to them.

I own my religion. I'll always be Jewish - it's part of my identity, just like anything else is. I have even invented a word for it. They have ultra-Orthodoxy and modern Orthodoxy. But I call it honest Orthodoxy. I don't know, maybe in 40 years' time it will be a movement.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35978328

From polygamy to incest, confronting the Old Testament's strange sexual standards

Jonathan Merritt
Religion News Service
April 8, 2016

 

One of the biggest hurdles to believing the Bible is the content of the first testament. Though many conservatives claim that the Christian scriptures teach only one model for marriage—one man and one woman for life—the truth is not so simple.

A standard modern baseline for sexual contact among both believers and the non-religious—mutual consent—is never considered. Young women are coerced to marry or sold into marriage by their parents with regularity. The book of Numbers, for example, records God commanding Israelite soldiers to marry conquered virgins (while slaughtering everyone else, including children). And while polygamous and incestuous relationships are not explicitly celebrated, they are regulated by Israel’s God-given laws. The most prominent polygamous relationships are blessed by God with children and financial gain.

These passages are deeply troubling, and despite the wishful thinking of some Christians, are difficult to reason away. But Dr. David Lamb does his best to contextualize and explain these matters in Prostitutes and Polygamists: A Look at Love, Old Testament Style. He holds degrees from Stanford and Oxford Universities and is professor of Old Testament at Biblical Theological Seminary. Here we discuss how he deals with the strange sexual standards found in much of the Bible.

RNS: The ancient culture of the Old Testament world is much different than our own. Many people say that we can’t project our moral norms on an ancient culture, but that doesn’t rectify that the Old Testament records God commanding some pretty awful stuff. What role does culture play in interpreting these passages?

DL: Culture plays a huge role in biblical interpretation. A person from the Old Testament would be shocked at how inhospitable most people are in the West. We don’t know our neighbors, and we don’t invite anyone who rings our doorbell to join us for a meal or stay overnight. When it comes to their expectations of hospitality, we would appear to them to be barbarians.

We want our actions to be evaluated not based on ancient values of hospitality, but on how we treat people and love them in our own context. We need to do the same to the characters in the Old Testament. As we do our homework on culture, the problems in the Old Testament don’t disappear, but they become less problematic as we gain insight into why God does what he does.



RNS: Abraham was a polygamist and David was an adulterer, murderer, and possible rapist. Yet the Bible calls these men “righteous.” What am I missing here?

DL: Abraham and David were both deeply flawed individuals. Abraham lied to Pharaoh about his wife, Sarah, profiting handsomely as he traffics her and essentially serves as her pimp in Egypt. While most people think of David and Bathsheba’s relationship as a mutual affair, which would still be wrong, I think it was more like a power rape. We shouldn’t be shocked that the Bible tells stories of screwed up saints.

What made these four sinners righteous is what makes all of us sinners righteous—a humble declaration before God that we have done evil and need him to create a clean heart and to renew a right spirit within us.

RNS: Abraham wasn’t the only polygamist. Jacob and Solomon and many other people that Christians revere were too. There is no condemnation of polygamy in the Old Testament, and in some cases it is encouraged. What is the Old Testament’s position on polygamy?

DL: Scripture is clear from the beginning that God designed marriage to be between one man and one woman. But post-fall, non-ideal forms of marriage appear, and God worked within that system to help provide justice, particularly for the wives in situations where they might get exploited.

The example of Jacob might help here. We may think polygamy was primarily for the benefit of the husband. But Jacob was looking for just one wife: Rachel. It was everyone else who wanted to give him more wives. His father-in-law gave him Leah, because he wanted her to have security. Then Rachel and Leah offered Jacob their maidservants as his concubines to produce more children. Because of their non-ideal polygamous family structure, Jacob’s family was plagued with conflicts, and yet God was still able to work through it, to bring good for the nation of Israel, and ultimately, for the world.



RNS: Cain married his sister, and the Bible doesn’t come near condemning this. Actually, there was a good bit of this sort of thing happening. So what is the Bible’s position on incest exactly?

DL: We’re not really sure who Cain married, but we do know Abraham married his half-sister, Jacob married two sisters, Isaac married his cousin, Moses’ father married his aunt. I could keep going, but I’ll stop. Yes, there’s a lot of incest in the Bible. But we need not to assume that just because the Bible records a behavior, it approves of it. An absence of condemnation does not constitute an affirmation. Eventually, incest is severely condemned, and most of the biblical examples of incest occur before the laws were given that condemn it in Leviticus 18 and 20.

While incest may seem weird, something that only royal families have to worry about, tragically it occurs frequently today in contexts of sexual abuse. Many of the victims are children. Into incestuous contexts, both ancient and modern, God’s laws tell family members, mainly men, that members of your own family are off-limits, and the consequences will be severe.

RNS: Some have argued that the Bible–all of it–presents only one model of marriage, sex, and family: “one man and one woman for life.” With the numerous pictures actually present in the text, this seems to be reductionistic if not dishonest. What say you?

DL: In Prostitutes and Polygamists, I discuss the Bible’s many examples of sexual relationships beyond the “one man and one woman for life.” It also includes many examples of murder, but no one thinks these examples should be interpreted as exemplars. Just because the Bible records something doesn’t mean it’s endorsing it. It takes work to understand how these non-ideal examples are to be understood. While there is no explicit condemnation in the text, the gang rape of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19 is clearly meant to be viewed as horrifically evil.

The laws that may seem to condone polygamy, don’t actually advocate for it, but merely legislate what to do when it happens. Polygamy was assumed. In ancient contexts of warfare, there could be far more women than men. Polygamy could provide security for some of the unmarried women. The Bible does have an ideal, and yet it still practically addressed the reality of a broken world.

RNS: You note that words related to homosexuality are never used in the Old Testament, even though two verses mention it briefly. You add that the Old Testament is more concerned about the topic of goat-boiling than homosexuality. Do American Christians place more emphasis and weight on this topic than the Old Testament, in your opinion? What’s the remedy?

DL: Some Christians emphasize homosexuality too much, thinking it’s the biggest sin. Others, too little, thinking it’s too controversial. The remedy? To focus on Sodom.

If you ask people about Sodom, they’ll tell you it was destroyed by fire and brimstone for homosexual behavior since they wanted to gang rape Lot’s angelic visitors. However, readers of Prostitutes and Polygamists may be shocked to learn Sodom’s backstory. The biblical text never records the residents of Sodom performing homosexual acts, but it makes it clear they were guilty of injustice and inhospitality, and therefore deserved judgment. But beforehand, God was gracious toward Sodom—slow to anger, delivering them in battle, and warning the residents of the city to flee. Abraham even risked his life on two separate occasions for the residents of Sodom. Wouldn’t it be great if more Christians were like Abraham, risking their lives for people associated with the sins of Sodom?

http://jonathanmerritt.religionnews.com/2016/04/08/how-to-deal-with-the-old-testaments-regressive-sexual-standards/

CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE IN COMMUNITY RAMPANT, AUDIENCE TOLD

Ron Csillag
Canadian Jewish News
April 1, 2016

 

Jews must put aside fear of shaming their community, their families and themselves, as well as perceived prohibitions of turning to secular authorities, to fight a growing wave of child sexual abuse, speakers told an audience at Shaarei Shomayim Congregation.

Speakers addressing a packed sanctuary on March 31 made blunt, often harrowing assessments of childhood sexual abuse in Jewish communities, saying the problem is rampant and is too often ignored or denied outright.

There was a large Orthodox contingent in attendance, and speakers stressed that Orthodox and chassidic communities offer much resistance to dealing with the sexual abuse of children. It is time to end the silence, they said.

MC Benny Forer, a graduate of Ner Israel Yeshiva north of Toronto, and now a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, recounted how his best friend had been sexually abused and killed himself on Yom Kippur in 1993.

There is an “astonishing” amount of sexual abuse in Jewish circles, Forer said. “We have to stand up and say this is unacceptable.”

The session was organized by Jewish Community Watch (JCW), a five-year-old New York-based group that raises awareness of child sexual abuse, exposes abusers, and offers programs, referrals and services for victims and their families.

The organization gained recognition “throughout many Orthodox Jewish communities all over the world,” it states on its website. “The team has championed, through the backlash and resistance of a grandfather culture concerned more for the image of the community than the lives of the victims, to ensure that every Jewish victim of [abuse] has a place to be heard and to be validated.”

Orthodox Jews must not allow halachic terms to cover their unwillingness to face up to the issue, said Rabbi Yosef Blau, a mashgiach ruchani (spiritual adviser) at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.

The term mesira, one who hands over a Jew to outside authorities and “is understood to describe a terrible individual, is misused,” Rabbi Blau said.

There are also “important exceptions” to lashon hara (hateful speech), he added.

“The Halachah indicates very clearly that [if] there is a danger to the community caused by the action of someone, and [that] the internal mechanism of the community cannot protect [it] from that individual without being permitted or obligated to utilize the secular authorities to ensure that people are protected,” Rabbi Blau said.

“We can’t allow justifications and rationalizations to get in the way.”

If a school where an abuser has taught, or a parent with knowledge of an abusive teacher does not pass along information about him, “each one of those bears responsibility for the abuse that’s going to follow,” Rabbi Blau said.

Det.-Const. Joel Manherz of the Toronto Police Service Sex Crimes Unit’s Child Exploitation Section took the audience through the mechanics of laying a police complaint.

Manherz is assigned to the case of Stephen Joseph Schacter, a former teacher at two Toronto-area Jewish day schools, who is facing several sex crime charges involving minors, based on witnesses having come forward.

“Finding the courage to come forward doesn’t mean finding the fortitude to call police,” Manherz said. “It means being resolute in your actions and words. It means being prepared for the possibility that people may know you have come forward with the intention of making your community a better and safer place to live.”

When it comes to giving evidence, “you are in control.”

He said that under Canadian law, there is no statute of limitations for prosecuting sex crimes involving children, and that teachers and clergy may be prosecuted themselves for failing to report such actions.

The evening also heard from the Orthodox father of a child who had been abused by his counsellor at a Jewish summer camp in New York state. The child came forward with the allegations three years after they happened, following bouts of depression and rebellious behaviour.

The effect on families of abused children can be devastating, the father said. “We need to be better educated,” he said. “We cannot rely on anyone else.”

In a stirring address, Meyer Seewald, who co-founded JCW with his brother Shneur in 2011, said the only way to combat child sexual abuse is first to admit it happens in the Jewish community.

Despite “much opposition” from rabbis, Seewald, himself a survivor of sexual abuse, said he can “almost guarantee” that every rabbi knows of at least one case of abuse. Sexual abuse “is our dark little secret. It’s only a matter of time before it explodes in our face.”

Statistics show that between one in three and one in five girls, and one in five and one in six boys are victimized by sexual abuse, Seewald noted, and the most common form is incest.

JCW now has 12 full-time employees and spends up to $40,000 a month defraying the cost of therapy for victims.

“We have a huge problem,” he said. “A day does not go by that I am not personally contacted by a victim.”

But, “we will find you and you will be exposed,” he pledged to abusers, “and that goes for those covering up the abuse.”

To applause and cheers, he said the previous administration at Toronto’s Eitz Chaim Schools, where Schacter once taught, should be held accountable for his actions.

http://www.cjnews.com/living-jewish/health/child-sexual-abuse-in-community-rampant-audience-told

The Outcast

RACHEL AVIV
The New Yorker
November 10, 2014 ISSUE

Sam Kellner's reputation in the Hasidic community of Borough Park, Brooklyn, began to suffer in 2008, when his teen-age son told him that he had been molested by a man who had prayed at their synagogue. Kellner's first instinct was to run the man over with his van, but he didn't know if his anger was justified. Molestation was rarely discussed in the community, and it didn't seem to Kellner that any of the prohibitions in the Ten Commandments explicitly related to it. The most relevant sins—adultery and coveting a neighbor's belongings—didn't capture the depth of the violation. Kellner couldn't pinpoint what was lost when a child was sexually abused, since the person looked the same afterward. But he sensed that molestation was damaging, because he knew a few victims, and they had gone off the derech, or religious way. "They became dead-enders, lost souls, outcasts," he told me.

Kellner, a heavyset man with hazel eyes and a long, graying beard, never spoke about sexual matters with his six children. They would take classes about the human body (with a focus on how to get pregnant) only after their marriages were arranged. Kellner took his son to a modesty committee, called vaad hatznius, which enforces standards of sexual propriety among Borough Park's hundred thousand ultra-Orthodox Jews, the majority of them Hasidic. Vaad hatznius disciplines residents who freely express their sexuality or behave lewdly. In a community where non-procreative sex is considered shameful, molestation tends to be regarded in roughly the same light as having an affair. When children complain about being molested, the council almost never notifies the police. Instead, it devises its own punishments for offenders: sometimes they are compelled to apologize, pay restitution, or move to Israel.

Kellner had once been a top administrator at the Munkacz synagogue and yeshiva, in Borough Park, but he had fought with other leaders about financial and educational policies. He had left the job and started a toner business, collecting discarded cartridges and reselling them. His son's alleged abuser, Baruch Lebovits, was the descendant of a rabbinic dynasty, a prominent cantor with twenty-four grandchildren. Kellner told vaad hatznius that he wanted to report his son's abuse to the police, because he didn't trust that the issue could be dealt with internally.

The committee granted him permission, as long he had the approval of a rabbi. The rabbi would have to make an exception to the Talmudic prohibition against mesirah, the act of turning over another Jew to civil authorities. According to some interpretations of Talmudic law, a Jew who informs on another Jew has committed a capital crime. He is a "wicked man," who has "blasphemed and rebelled against the law of Moses," the twelfth-century Torah scholar Maimonides wrote. The law was meant to protect the community from anti-Semitic governments. Kellner said, "The way history tells it is that if a Jew was arrested he was thrown in jail and never heard of again."

Hasidim, whose movement emerged in the eighteenth century as a mystical, populist alternative to traditional Judaism, are defined in part by their concern for self-preservation. Kellner is the son of Hungarian Holocaust survivors who re-created in Brooklyn a community that had been destroyed by the war. Men dress in black frock coats; married women wear long skirts and hide their hair, which is considered alluring, under shawls or wigs. They speak Yiddish, and resist television, the Internet, and other secular forms of entertainment. Hasidic parents take literally the Lord's order to "be fruitful and multiply"—they intend to replenish a culture devastated by the Holocaust—and Hasidim are now the fastest-growing segment of the Jewish population in New York City. Sixty per cent of the city's Jewish children, many of them Hasidic, live in Orthodox homes.

Kellner, who was a member of a synagogue that is closely affiliated with the Satmar sect, the largest Hasidic community in New York, wasn't sure that the prohibition against mesirah made sense in a country where, he said, "the justice system is credible enough." Although the Satmar community distrusts secular government, it participates fully in the democratic process. Hasidim typically vote as a bloc, delivering tens of thousands of votes to the politicians their leaders endorse. In exchange for the community's loyalty, politicians have given Brooklyn's Hasidim wide latitude to police themselves. They have their own emergency medical corps, a security patrol, and a rabbinic court system, which often handles criminal allegations.

Kellner sought counsel from Rabbi Chaim Flohr, the leader of an institute where rabbinic scholars study how the teachings of the Torah translate to contemporary dilemmas. After listening to Kellner's story, Flohr called the modesty councils in Borough Park and Williamsburg (where there are sixty thousand Hasidim) to see if other children had reported being molested by Lebovits. Flohr wrote in an affidavit that "numerous complaints and allegations of a similar nature had been made against Baruch Lebovits dating back over a long period of time." Flohr told Kellner that he was justified in going to the police, because Lebovits could be considered a rodef, or pursuer, someone who is endangering the lives of other Jews. In a letter, Flohr wrote, "Behold I make known in the public arena: to praise an honest man, namely Mr. Shloma Aron Kellner, may his light shine, that how he acted in regards to the government was based on a query before a rabbinic court and was done according to our Holy Torah. . . . It is forbidden to trouble him or humiliate him."

With the rabbi's approval, Kellner took his son, whom I'll call Yossel, to the offices of the Brooklyn Special Victims Unit, in Crown Heights, to speak with Steven Litwin, the senior detective. A studious and introspective boy, Yossel explained that Lebovits had offered him a ride home from a school outing late at night, then reached over to the passenger seat and molested him. He said that Lebovits was soon moaning and grunting. He told his teacher what had happened, but the teacher said that Lebovits was a "respected person" and instructed him not to think about the incident again.

Litwin found the boy's "claims to be extremely credible," he wrote in an affidavit. But he told Kellner that the crime was a misdemeanor, and that it was unlikely that Lebovits, a first-time offender, would receive jail time. Disappointed, Kellner said that Lebovits had molested other boys, too. "O.K., so help me find them," Litwin told him.

Kellner went back to the modesty council and was given the name of another boy, Joshua, who had complained about Lebovits. (All victims' names have been changed.) Joshua said that, starting in 2000, when he was twelve, Lebovits sometimes drove alongside him while he was walking to school, honking his horn and encouraging him to get into the car, where Lebovits performed oral sex on him. Joshua said that, on other occasions, Lebovits molested him in the mikvah, a ritual bath that was in the basement of his synagogue.

Joshua had gone to a yeshiva for students with developmental disabilities. His family was poor, and he begged for charity outside synagogues and weddings, a common practice in Borough Park, where the poorest members of the Hasidic community live and pray next to the wealthiest. They patronize the same businesses on Thirteenth Avenue, a commercial strip of kosher restaurants and shops. Although Kellner had never met Joshua, he drove to his house and offered him work helping to plan the wedding of a mutual acquaintance. Kellner gradually steered the conversation toward Baruch Lebovits, and urged Joshua to report his abuse. Joshua became jittery and hyper. "Listen, unless you go to the authorities, you'll never feel relaxed," Kellner told him. "You'll never feel unviolated."

On March 6, 2008, Joshua told Detective Litwin that he had been molested by Lebovits on more than thirty occasions over four years. Once, he said, Lebovits had picked him up on his way to school and anally raped him in a building near his yeshiva. After each encounter, Lebovits apologized and promised he would never do it again.

Five days later, Baruch Lebovits was arrested in front of his house. Although Joshua's name wasn't publicly released, everyone in his neighborhood seemed to know that he had gone to the police. Natalie Hadad, his best friend, said, "People would call him and say, 'If you testify, bad things are going to happen to your parents. If you testify, you're going to get thrown out of Borough Park.' "

A few months later, Kellner spoke with Dov Hikind, the assemblyman who represents Borough Park. Hikind hosts a weekly radio program, and he had recently dedicated three shows to the problem of sex abuse among the ultra-Orthodox. Hikind said that, after the show, more than a hundred victims had called or visited his office to complain about multiple offenders. One of the victims was a twenty-year-old named Aron, who said that Lebovits had repeatedly molested him in his car, beginning when he was sixteen. A year later, he fell in with a clique of teen-agers who were known to be O.T.D., or off the derech, and he began using heroin or cocaine almost every day.

Aron had tried to leave the Hasidic community, but he struggled to assimilate into the secular world. Many of the yeshivas in Brooklyn teach in Yiddish and provide less than two hours of secular education a day. Aron had a heavy Yiddish accent, a rudimentary grasp of written English, and no diploma. In a video filmed by a friend, Aron complained about his limited education and social skills. He said that he didn't know how to interact with women—he had been forbidden to mingle with them or look them in the eye—and no one had taught him "what your body is about." He had struggled to process what was happening when Lebovits, a pious man, put his mouth on Aron's penis. "My head, like, exploded," he said. "Call it an epiphany, I guess."

Aron's schoolmate Boorey Deutsch said that he and his friends had known that Aron was molested by Lebovits. "We saw them together," Deutsch told me. "And every day we saw Aron breaking down. He stopped playing with us. He hung out in the corners. Then we started bullying him. I even recall slapping him once in the face."

Aron felt that he had little to lose when Kellner urged him to report his abuse. Ian Christner, a mental-health advocate who worked with Aron, said that Kellner adopted a paternal attitude toward Aron, who was often so high that he nodded off in the middle of conversations. "Sam Kellner saw the way that victims in the community were suffering," Christner told me. "He is a real tough guy, and he has got a sense of fairness. It's not a high-placed sense of social justice that comes from being a scholar. It's simple and straightforward. If he feels like people have wronged him or his family, he'll make sure that they hear about it."

In October, 2008, a second indictment was brought against Lebovits, naming Aron as a victim. A few weeks later, Aron was invited to the home of Berel Ashkenazi, the spiritual adviser of his former yeshiva, who was a colleague of Baruch Lebovits's son. It was a Friday afternoon, a few hours before businesses closed for Shabbat. Ashkenazi served Aron food, made polite conversation, and then, Aron said, offered him between five and ten thousand dollars to drop out of the case. (Ashkenazi denied this, and said that Aron came to him seeking compensation.)

Although Aron disliked Ashkenazi, he was tempted by the offer. He told Kellner that he needed the money. "Don't be crazy!" Kellner shouted. "I could get you two hundred thousand dollars!" Kellner, who barely had enough money to support his family, told me that he was willing to say anything to keep the case intact. He asked a rabbi, Yisroel Makevetzky, if he had permission to report Ashkenazi to the police for tampering with a witness. Makevetzky held a hearing on the matter in a yeshiva classroom on the edge of Borough Park and concluded that Aron was a moser, an informer. He ruled that Ashkenazi was right to dissuade Aron from testifying in criminal court, "as this is a serious transgression." In his ruling, he wrote that Ashkenazi should "help the young man in following the just path, and will begin in this after the young man removes himself from the jurisdiction of the secular courts."

Aron eventually described the situation to Detective Litwin, who documented the incident in his notes, and forbade Aron to accept money from anyone. Aron's father, Abe, who owned a kosher Italian frozen-food company, lost several customers because of the case, but he supported his son's decision to go to trial. Abe told me that the Mishnah, the first major work of rabbinic literature, says that it is the obligation of the community to stop a rodef from making his next attack. "It's in the books," he told critics. "Look it up!"

Soon, Aron became the object of intimidation and threats. A Hasidic medical volunteer, who helped Aron with his addiction, told me that "at some point people started reaching out to me. The messages were never specific, but it was pretty obvious that I need to read between the lines: you need to let him relapse. You need to let him crack." The medical volunteer (who, like many people I interviewed, requested anonymity, because he didn't want to be ostracized by his community) met with Litwin. "I tried to explain to him that there is no way he's going to get the type of coöperation he wants," he said. "Unless you really understand how this community works—what tactics are used to intimidate these victims, to prevent them from coming forward, to manipulate them into feeding the authorities wrong information—you will never deliver."

On holidays, it used to take Kellner an hour to make his way into the synagogue, because he had so many people to greet. Now only a few people in his prayer group responded when he made conversation. Some yelled that he was a moser. He began saying his daily prayers elsewhere. He also let his interest in his toner business lapse. He was too inflamed. "When it comes to your kid, you overdo it—you lose your mind," he said.

He didn't dwell on the insults—in response to criticism, he usually shouted that Rabbi Flohr had approved everything—but he worried about the effect on his children. Yossel found the case so embarrassing that he denied his participation to his brothers and sisters. "There was never talk in my house about this whole Lebovits thing," Kellner told me. "My other kids heard people talking on the street, and they used to have to ask my wife, 'Which one of us was molested?' "

Kellner worried that the psychological dysfunction he saw in Joshua and Aron could eventually afflict his son. He wondered if it was possible that Lebovits had nothing do with their fragile mental states; maybe it was just a coincidence that, on top of all their problems, they had been molested. "I was hoping to wake up one day and they tell me there's a new study and we've all made a mistake," he said. "Molestation doesn't make any permanent damage. It's no worse than yelling at your kid."

But Yossel already seemed more cautious and isolated. He was no longer welcome at his yeshiva in Borough Park. "They ignored me and my son, and, when summer was over and the new school year started, they gave me a hard time," Kellner said. "They said, 'Oh, maybe you need special ed for your child.' " In the fall, he sent Yossel and his younger brother to yeshivas outside the city. Kellner never contemplated moving, because all the major Hasidic communities—in upstate New York, Jerusalem, London, Montreal, and Antwerp—were connected, and he assumed that everyone already knew his story. The idea of moving to a non-Hasidic neighborhood was too far-fetched to consider. "What are we going to do—give up our beliefs, our religion, our everything?" he said.

In the fall of 2009, Kellner was notified of a summons issued by Rabbi Makevetzky to participate in what was described as the "case of Mr. Shloma Aron Kellner, may his light shine, and the Lebovits family in the matter of injury of the son." Kellner assumed that the hearing was a trap, designed to force his son out of criminal court. He told the rabbi that he would coöperate only if someone else paid for the hearing—the rabbi charged a hundred and fifty dollars an hour—and for the cost of being represented by a secular lawyer. An acquaintance of one of Lebovits's sons paid Kellner's expenses. Then, Kellner said, the man came back with an offer: Kellner should accept two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to drop the criminal case. (Lebovits's oldest son, Chaim, denied that this happened. He added that Kellner was always looking for money.)

Kellner was insulted by the offer. "What would I say to my son?" he said. "That I took money so he could be used as a prostitute?" At a meeting at the district attorney's office, he told Detective Litwin and three prosecutors in the sex-crimes division that people were trying to bribe him. According to one official at the meeting, Kellner complained that the only victims who were willing to come forward were already outcasts. He warned, "Stay on top of them, or the other side will buy them off."

Not long after, Kellner drove to the home of one of Lebovits's sons, Meyer, whom he had known since he was a child, to complain about an invoice that he had received from Rabbi Makevetzky. He had been charged eighteen hundred dollars, even though the negotiations for the rabbinic court had collapsed. Meyer, who surreptitiously recorded the conversation, didn't directly address Kellner's concern about who would pay for his expenses. Standing on the sidewalk in front of his house in Borough Park, he began speaking of the shame that his family was enduring, and he accused Kellner of violating a law in the Torah. "You cannot punish a person unless you warn him," he told him.

Kellner insisted that the modesty council had tried to warn his father and had given him opportunities to coöperate. "I am not going to justify myself now," he said. "Perhaps it was half right. Perhaps it was three-quarters right. Perhaps it was only a quarter right."

"Didn't you put together an entire case?" Meyer said. "Didn't you become God's police?" He said that, if Kellner had warned him directly, "I would have taken care of the problem. We would have done everything."

"I don't believe that you will ever understand," Kellner said. "But I cannot go to a person and tell the person that his father did it."

The men began arguing about whose reputation had been hurt more by the case. They were both upset that the allegations would prevent their children from marrying well. Kellner begged Meyer to persuade his father to plead guilty, so that his son wouldn't have to testify at a trial. But Meyer said that the prosecution wasn't offering his father the plea deal he wanted: no jail time, just probation. He suggested that, if Kellner didn't want his son to be exposed, he should pull him out of the case.

"I cannot drop it," Kellner said.

"But you don't want to go to trial!"

"But after all my child was treated unjustly!"

"True."

"I don't want to drop it," Kellner repeated.

"So you want to settle?" Meyer asked.

"No!"

Kellner had hoped that all three victims would testify at the same trial, but a judge ruled that trying the cases together would prejudice the jury. Joshua's case was scheduled to go first. In November, 2009, the prosecutor, Miss Gregory, met with Joshua at her office, and he seemed ready for trial. Three weeks later, she received a message from John Lonuzzi, then the president of the Brooklyn Bar Association. Lonuzzi, a civil attorney, said that Joshua would no longer be coöperating with the prosecution, because it was causing him "severe stress" and he was "suffering from a variety of psychological issues." In an affidavit, Gregory wrote that she made multiple appointments to meet Lonuzzi and Joshua, but all the meetings were cancelled. When Joshua didn't comply with four subpoenas, she mentioned to the chief assistant to Charles Hynes, the district attorney, that she was concerned about the possibility of witness tampering, but no one followed up. After Joshua dropped out of the case, he confided to Detective Litwin that he had never retained Lonuzzi and didn't know who had. Litwin wrote in an affidavit that Joshua said that he was under pressure and was afraid, but he wouldn't elaborate. (Lonuzzi denied this account, and said that he had no involvement in witness tampering.)

Aron's trial began in March, 2010. With no material evidence or eyewitnesses, it hinged on Aron's credibility. Lebovits's lawyer, Arthur Aidala, the current president-elect of the Brooklyn Bar Association, dwelled on Aron's history of sneaking into synagogues late at night and stealing cash from charity boxes. Aidala told the jury that Aron had fabricated a story about being abused so that he could extort money from the Lebovits family. "He disrespects the court and our system," Aidala said. "The whole thing—he made it up to get money. He didn't get the money, and now he is stuck."

The only witness for the defense was Berel Ashkenazi, the spiritual adviser at Aron's yeshiva. Ashkenazi testified that Aron was a "nervous child" who "didn't have patience." He told the jury that Aron was pursuing the charges against Lebovits in order to pay for his drugs. "It bothers me that he wants to lie about an innocent person," he said.

Gregory, the prosecutor, asked Ashkenazi, "Do you consider Aron to be a traitor for what he is saying against the defendant?"

"What means the word 'traitor'?" Ashkenazi asked.

"Let me ask you this," Gregory continued. "Do you understand the concept of amesirah?"

"Mesirah?"

"Maybe I am not pronouncing it, but isn't that a Jewish person is not supposed to perform—"

"A Jewish man is not allowed to go to court without the permission from his rabbi," Ashkenazi said.

"And if that Jewish person doesn't go to his rabbi are there any consequences?"

"I never heard," he responded. "I don't know."

"Sir, wouldn't such a person be stigmatized in your community?"

"The rabbi will talk to him," he said.

"Isn't it possible that a consequence of that could be that this person would be stigmatized within the community?"

"It depends."

"It depends on what?"

"Depends on how he did it," he said.

The jury found Lebovits guilty on eight counts of sexual abuse. In the month between the conviction and the sentencing, nearly eighty people sent letters to the judge, requesting mercy for Lebovits. They described him as charitable, kind, blessed with a beautiful singing voice, and compassionate toward helpless people. Zalman Teitelbaum, one of the two Grand Rebbes of Satmar, the highest authorities among the Satmar Hasidim, wrote, "In the name of Almighty God and for the sake of compassionate justice, I appeal to your God-given wisdom to treat Mr. Lebovits with the utmost understanding."

The judge, Patricia DiMango, sentenced Lebovits to the maximum penalty on eight counts, to run consecutively, for a total of up to thirty-two years—a harsher sentence than anyone had expected. The average sentence given to defendants convicted of similar crimes is two years. She said, "It is imperative for courts to send a clear and unequivocal message that abusing and harming children will not be tolerated."

One of Kellner's relatives told me that after the trial "no one talked about the real issue, the victims. Instead, they talked about the problem of Sam Kellner going on a crusade." He believed that the lengthy sentence "triggered everything. Now the Lebovits family would not let this go down. They were going to spend millions of dollars and fight, fight, fight."

Aidala, Lebovits's defense attorney, told me that the trial was one of the worst and most surprising losses of his career. Immediately, he began second-guessing his strategy. A year before, he had given the district attorney's office a tape of a recorded conversation that he thought indicated that his client's family was the target of extortion by Kellner. After discussing it with sex-crimes prosecutors, Aidala had dropped the subject.

Now Aidala wanted to broach the topic of extortion again. He was comfortable in the district attorney's office, where he had begun his career. He was close to the D.A., Charles Hynes, who had been in office for twenty years, and to his family, and to several top officials. He had volunteered on all of Hynes's reëlection campaigns and frequently attended his fund-raisers.

On April 27, 2010, six weeks after the trial ended, Aidala went to the district attorney's office and met with the chief of the rackets bureau, Michael Vecchione, who was also a friend. Initially, Aidala didn't focus on Kellner. He spoke about a case that was easier to substantiate: he said that, days before, a friend of Kellner's named Simon Taub had extorted the Lebovits family. Taub had said that his son had been molested and threatened to go to the police unless he was compensated by the family. A few weeks later, in a sting operation, detectives from the rackets bureau wired Chaim Lebovits, a businessman who had made a fortune in oil and diamonds. Chaim went to Taub's home and caught him on tape accepting money.

After he was arrested, Taub said that prosecutors told him, "If you coöperate with us, you will be home in an hour." They pushed him to implicate Kellner in an extortion plot. Taub said that he didn't have the information that the prosecutors wanted. "To coöperate, I had to lie," he told me. Instead, he pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny and was sentenced to probation. The alleged abuse of his son was never investigated.

Chaim told me that the crime was a "miracle," because it lent legitimacy to his family's complaints. Soon, they insisted that Kellner had been after them, too. They said that Kellner had offered to "make the case go away," but they had refused. As evidence, they gave the rackets bureau the audio recording that the sex-crimes division had already heard. The recording captured a conversation in Yiddish between Meyer Lebovits and Kellner about who would pay the costs of the rabbinic court. The English translation provided to the district attorney's office was so laden with emotional outbursts and Talmudic references that it is possible to miss the context and understand only that Kellner is asking for money. An assistant district attorney requested that Meyer Lebovits be given a polygraph test, to see if he was lying about his family being extorted by Kellner, but Vecchione said no. According to a prosecutor with knowledge of the case, "There was a strong sense that the investigation was a favor that Mike Vecchione did for Arty Aidala, a very close friend." (Vecchione and Aidala deny that their friendship affected the case. Vecchione disputes many details of this account.)

The rackets bureau encouraged the Lebovits family to get information out of Aron. Under the guidance of Vecchione, who is now retired, the family paid for one of Aron's friends, also a drug addict, to take Aron to a rented house in Florida and question him about the case. (Vecchione denies knowing about the video before it was made.) The friend pretended to be making a movie of Aron's life, and enlisted two young filmmakers (also from Hasidic families) to direct the video. They urged Aron to open up about his relationship with Kellner. "In order for me to build the script of your life, I have to know the whole twist," one of the filmmakers says, in the footage.

Aron, who was smoking marijuana for much of the filming, was less interested in talking about the case than about his sense of estrangement. Sitting on a cream-colored sofa, in a T-shirt and black jeans, he looks like a patient in his first therapy session, relieved that someone is finally listening to him. "I feel like an atheist, but I feel bad feeling like an atheist," he told the filmmakers. "I want to live up to the place where I come from, to be Jewish." He spoke, too, about his bond with Joshua, who had disappointed him by dropping out of the case. He said that when Joshua described his abuse to the grand jury, before the indictment, the court reporter wept while typing. "If you saw [Joshua] speaking, you'd have cried," he said.

The filmmakers tried to direct the conversation away from Aron's emotions. They seemed confused by the fact that Aron had risked his reputation by testifying in court, asking what he had gained. "Kellner told you he was going to give you money?" one of them said.

"This wasn't the thing—no," Aron said.

"You never got money?"

"No, that's not true, that's bullshit."

"What could Kellner sell you?"

"Nothing. That is the joke, that's what I want to say."

The filmmakers seemed unhappy with his response. One told Aron, "You would never have gone to court if not for that jackass Kellner [who] wanted money."

"No, no, no, no," Aron said.

"That's how I want to make the movie," the filmmaker persisted. "He's a crazy man, this Kellner."

"Do you want to hear the truth?" Aron continued. "He let me go the truthful way. I proceeded truthfully and honestly."

"But why did Kellner have the power to schlep you?" the filmmakers asked.

"Who didn't have the power to schlep me?" he said. "I had such a soft heart."

Aron was proud that he had gone through with the trial, unlike Joshua, who he said had been pressured and offered money. "They terrorized him," he said. "They took real victims, and they shot down their lives." He said that he had expected Lebovits to call him, beg for forgiveness, and say, "I'm an elderly man, please don't do this to me." He figured that, if Lebovits had apologized, he would have dropped the case. "I'd say, O.K., I'm sorry. Whatever. And we forgive each other."

The video did not produce information useful to the district attorney's office, but the Lebovits family was still confident that they could prove that Kellner was an extortionist. Chaim told me that Hynes specified for his lawyers exactly which kinds of evidence they would need to arrest Kellner. "They said that, if you can provide A, B, C, D, E, and F, then we will move in with the indictment," Chaim said. (Hynes, through his lawyer, declined to comment for this story.)

The Lebovits family hired a Hasidic private investigator named Joe Levin, who runs a company called T.O.T. Consulting—the letters standing for the Yiddish phrase tuchis afn tish, or "put your ass on the table." Levin said that at his first meeting with Chaim, at the Plaza Hotel, he was instructed to find anything that might cast Kellner in a negative light. (He said that he was so troubled by what he observed that he felt justified in telling me about his work for the family.)

Beginning in the fall of 2010, Levin bugged Kellner's van, and he and his employees followed him. He listened to hours of Kellner's conversations each week. But he came up with little related to the case. "It was devastating," Levin told me. "I really went nowhere."

After he had been working on the case for a few months, he said, he was asked to drive to the home of a friend of Hynes, where a birthday party was being held. Levin said, "It was a very fancy house, and people just came in and out." Meyer Lebovits attended the party briefly, he said, and was joined by twomachers, or "big shots," who mediate between secular political figures and the community. Levin stayed within three hundred feet of the house, because he had been asked to record the machers' conversations. It is not uncommon for Hasidic power brokers to record conversations to use as leverage. (Meyer denied going to the party.)

After the party, Levin said, the relationship between the Lebovits sons and the district attorney's office immediately became much warmer. He was surprised by how frequently the Lebovits family received updates about the investigations. When he overheard phone conversations, "It did not sound like law enforcement talking to a criminal's family. It sounded like two good friends." Levin said that he can remember few cases where the pressure on him was higher. The message he got from the Lebovits sons was "Now we have the O.K., so anything you bring to us, we are going to be able to do something with it. "

In late 2010 and early 2011, Aron was summoned to the district attorney's office a number of times and interrogated about his relationship with Kellner. His father, Abe, told me that Aron, after being the key witness for the prosecution, now felt as if he were being treated as a criminal. Aron had little information to offer. He repeatedly insisted, as he had at trial, that he had never accepted money.

Joshua proved a more forthcoming witness. After failing to communicate with the sex-crimes division for nearly a year, he reappeared with his lawyer, John Lonuzzi, to say that Kellner had "brainwashed" him. "Lebovits never molested me," he said. "Everything I said was false." He said that he made up the story because Kellner gave him a hundred dollars a week and Detective Litwin took him out for meals.

Lebovits's cousin Moshe Friedman, the publisher of an influential Yiddish newspaper, Der Yid, and the adviser to Zalman Teitelbaum, the Grand Rebbe, also accused Kellner of criminal behavior. Testifying before a grand jury in March, 2011, he said that Kellner came to his office and begged him to persuade the Lebovits family to hand over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Yosef Blau, the senior spiritual adviser at Yeshiva University, said that he was amazed that Friedman would testify before a grand jury, given the community's rules against informing on other Jews. "It's extraordinary that this major figure in the community is willing to be a moser to get Kellner," he said. He believed that Friedman got involved because "Kellner's behavior was seriously threatening to the community's power structure."

Two weeks after Friedman's testimony, Kellner came home after shopping in Williamsburg and found a tall man in casual clothing standing outside. The man had a companion, who flashed a police badge and instructed Kellner to get inside his Jeep. The driver took a circuitous route through Borough Park, and Kellner began to worry that he was being kidnapped. Yossel, who had watched his father being taken away, called the police. "An unmarked car just picked up my father," he told a sergeant. "There were no lights, no nothing."

Twenty minutes later, Kellner arrived at a familiar building, the office of the district attorney, in downtown Brooklyn. He was placed in a holding cell in a hallway. His wife brought him his diabetes pills and his prayer book. He fell asleep to the sound of officers talking about a ring of criminals with stolen credit cards. He wondered if he was being apprehended for some sort of violation with his toner business or if he had accidentally got involved in a drug bust.

In the morning, he was handcuffed and escorted to Kings County Supreme Court, two blocks away. He was greeted by a crowd of local reporters, who took pictures as he walked down the hallway to court. Kellner's lawyer, Israel Fried, said that when he handed Kellner the indictment he appeared "bewildered and shell-shocked." The indictment said that he had made "repeated demands to Meyer Lebovits, the son of Baruch Lebovits, for payments in excess of $50,000, in return for which the defendant Kellner would, through the defendant Kellner's ability to control the coöperation and the content of the testimony of the complaining victims, cause the dismissal of criminal charges." He faced up to twenty-one years in prison.

At a press conference that morning, Charles Hynes announced the charges while standing beside an easel with a large photograph of Kellner's face on it. He told a room full of reporters that "child abuse has to be prosecuted vigorously, but we also have to be very, very careful about false complaints." Later, on a Jewish radio show, Hynes said, "We're confident we have the case. . . . I believe there was a substantial effort by Mr. Kellner to gain money, for his own benefit, by making up stories."

A day after Kellner's arrest, Lebovits's appeals lawyers, Alan Dershowitz (the former Harvard law professor, who worked on the O. J. Simpson case) and his brother, Nathan, persuaded an appellate judge to free Lebovits on bail, pending the determination of his appeal. Alan Dershowitz, who grew up in Borough Park, told me that "the Kellner information put the government in a difficult position: on the one hand, they are proclaiming that my client was extorted, and, on the other hand, they are claiming that he is guilty of eight felonies." Within a week, Lebovits was released, after thirteen months in prison. He arrived in Borough Park in time for the first night of Passover and led a Seder at his home.

Kellner was in jail for about thirty-two hours, which he saw as punishment for putting Lebovits in prison for thirty-two years. Although he had acted for what he thought were good reasons, there was also a part of him that had wanted revenge, and it was this impulse, he believed, that God was punishing. "When you hurt someone, you better make sure your motivations are pure," he told his son. "Because if your intentions aren't pure, you are going to pay the price."

Yossel's case against Lebovits had been dismissed six months earlier, without explanation. No one from the sex-crimes bureau had notified him or his father. Yossel told me that if he had a friend who was molested he would advise him to avoid the secular courts. "Why would you report to the police if you're just going to shame yourself and open your wounds and be more destroyed?" he said.

Yossel was a "Cadillac of a boy," one rabbi told me, but he had reached his twenties and had yet to marry. Hasidic families typically marry off their children in descending order: the younger siblings wait for the older ones to be matched, ideally around the age of eighteen. Kellner's four youngest children had been stalled since 2008, when their father first went to the police. Kellner said that his brothers thought he was crazy for allying himself with loners like Joshua and Aron. "They tell me, 'You've ruined the family,' " he said. "And the truth is I'm starting to think maybe they are right. If your job is to protect your child, maybe the best thing to do is keep your mouth shut."

At night, unable to sleep, Kellner paced his house, going over all the details of his indictment. At times, he almost admired the Lebovits sons for spending so much money to save their father. "They honored their father so much," he said. "You can't take that away from anyone." He described their activities as if recounting the chess moves of an opponent. "They masterfully put this thing together," he said. "Amazing stuff." His anger was directed largely toward the district attorney's office. "A thug can only go so far on his own," he told me.

A Hasidic businessman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that in parts of the Hasidic community there was widespread speculation that Kellner had been framed. He said that Kellner had become the prime example of "how devastated you will be if you go against the rabbis." He said that Flohr, the rabbi who had granted Kellner permission to go to the police, was an outlier in his approach toward molestation. "He's not a major power broker," he told me. "He's a nobody when it comes to internal, high-level politics." The businessman believed that Kellner had made himself vulnerable as a target, because he had been sloppy and uninformed in his interactions with law enforcement. "He didn't understand the legal system, so he was meddling too much," he said.

In the spring of 2012, the guilty verdict against Lebovits was vacated because of a prosecutorial violation: two pages of Detective Litwin's notes (about Berel Ashkenazi, the defense witness) hadn't been disclosed until halfway through the trial. The district attorney's office promised to retry Aron's case, but Aron, who was now twenty-four, didn't want to go through a second trial. "He can't take the pressure anymore," his father, Abe, told me. Aron felt betrayed by the friend who had taken him to Florida, and now saw conspiracies in daily life. When his car broke down, he wondered if Lebovits's sons had hired someone to fill the tank with the wrong kind of fuel. When he got in a motorcycle accident, he suspected that the Lebovits family had arranged the collision.

Several weeks after the conviction was overturned, one of Baruch Lebovits's in-laws approached Abe outside his synagogue and said, "Maybe we can make a closing to this case." Abe was exhausted by the case, which had hurt his business and restricted the synagogues where he could pray, so he told the Lebovits family that he would agree to negotiate a civil settlement. He asked for several hundred thousand dollars, but they said that was too much. They changed their minds after the trial of Nechemya Weberman, a Hasidic sex offender who, in early 2013, was sentenced to more than a hundred years in prison. "When Weberman got a guilty verdict, all of a sudden it was hot, hot," Abe said. "They were willing to agree to my number."

Abe could not disclose how much money he received except to say that it was enough for his son to "build a house, to build a life." In exchange, Aron sent a letter to the district attorney's office stating that he was satisfied with the punishment that Lebovits had already served. Abe and his son were represented by an attorney named Michael Ross, who Abe said had been recommended to him by the Lebovits family and who worked for free. Ross met with Hynes and explained that Aron did not wish to testify at a second trial. Aron wrote to me on Facebook (the only medium through which he felt comfortable communicating) that the Lebovits family, their lawyers, his father, and Ross handled the details of the civil settlement. "I had no qluo of anything what wuz going on beind closd doors," he wrote. (Ross declined to comment, except to say, "Any matter that I'm involved in, the client will always be fully informed.")

By the time the civil settlement was finalized, Hynes was deep into a campaign for reëlection and was confident that he had the support of the Hasidic community. In early 2013, in an e-mail to a colleague, he asserted that an opponent's "threat about my not getting the Satmar vote is pathetic." Hynes had been supported by the Hasidic bloc for two decades and worked diligently to maintain an amicable relationship with leading rabbis in the community. He had a history of offering unusually light plea deals to Hasidic offenders, whose names his office kept confidential—a practice unique to the Hasidic community. Der Yid, published by Lebovits's cousin, ran a full-page notice explaining that community leaders had benefitted from an "open door with Charles Hynes for the past 20 years" and "know firsthand what happens . . . when they got themselves entangled with the law, how district attorney Hynes worked very sensitively and mercifully to avoid sending them to jail." Jews who supported Hynes's opponent, Ken Thompson, were "informers and accusers from the dregs of the Jewish community," who intended to "toss Jews in jail whenever it's possible!"

In less religious circles, the policies of the Hynes administration came under scrutiny. The links between the Kellner and Lebovits cases were analyzed by two blogs, Failed Messiah and Frum Follies, which are written by ultra-Orthodox Jews who became disillusioned, and by Hella Winston, a contributing editor at Jewish Week, who for the past several years has investigated the community's approach to sex abuse. In the months leading up to the election, other news outlets exposed the Hynes administration's record of using unreliable or coerced witnesses to secure prosecutions: three guilty convictions had been overturned, and a panel was reviewing dozens of cases handled by a discredited detective. There were also leaks from within the office, which revealed that Hynes made little distinction between the work of the office and the goals of his campaign: he used asset-forfeiture funds to pay for a political consultant and sought political advice from a judge.

Hynes lost the election, in November, 2013, by fifty percentage points. Minutes after he gave a concession speech, Aidala put his arm around him, walked him to his car, and held the door open for him, according to a privately recorded video.

During Hynes's last weeks in office, Abe said, he got calls from the Lebovits sons, who were concerned that their civil agreement was no longer strong enough. They now requested a letter stating that Aron was not in good health. "They said they had some information from the higher guys in the D.A. that they need that letter to make the case go away," Abe told me. In exchange for the letter, Abe said, Baruch Lebovits agreed to apologize to Aron in person—something that Aron had been asking for since the negotiations began. But on the morning of the meeting Aron refused to leave his house. "He was never convinced that they were not scheming," Abe told me. "He didn't want to fool around with these people anymore."

For almost three years, as Kellner's extortion case dragged on, the rabbis in his community urged him to take a plea deal. They warned him that, as a Hasid, he would never get a fair trial. "They say you are guilty just by having the big beard," he said. His rabbi told him, "If you know you didn't do it, what do you care? It's between you and God."

Kellner had a new attorney, Niall MacGiollabhuí, who began working on the case in the spring of 2013. An Irish immigrant, MacGiollabhuí was dismayed that the rackets bureau had relied on evidence with little regard for the culture from which it emerged. "They are lifting things out of that community, dropping it into the wider world, and stripping the things of context," he said. MacGiollabhuí initially assumed that Kellner was exaggerating when he told stories about being followed and secretly recorded, but then audio recordings of Kellner's private conversations surfaced on a new Web site called Sam Kellner—Alleged Jewish Mob Ringleader Revealed. MacGiollabhuí discovered that his own calls, too, were being recorded. He complained to the district attorney's office that Kellner's van was bugged, but no one investigated.

When the new district attorney, Ken Thompson, took office, last January, MacGiollabhuí warned two prosecutors in an e-mail, "At the moment, your office is being openly mocked in his community."

Eric Gonzalez, the counsel to Thompson, told me that the new administration was skeptical of the Kellner indictment. Four prosecutors had asked to be removed from the case, because they didn't believe in it. He said that it seemed as if "the decision had been made to prosecute Kellner, and they were going to go forward with that prosecution whether it was the right thing or the wrong thing to do. And here you had multiple senior people saying it was the wrong thing to do."

A new prosecutor, Kevin O'Donnell, conducted a review of the case in early 2014 and determined that Meyer Lebovits was not credible and the recording of him talking to Kellner was "ambiguous at best." "There are motives of certain witnesses that go beyond this case," he said at a hearing in March. He told the judge that Joshua's statements were "wildly inconsistent" and supported by "no credible evidence." In one interview, Joshua said that Lebovits might have molested him, but he wasn't sure. "Could be a different Lebovits," he offered. A week later, he said that he'd never even seen Lebovits. Joshua had recently moved to Israel, and he acknowledged that whenever he wanted to return to the United States he requested permission from a man named Zalman Ashkenazi, who paid his airfare. Records obtained by the prosecution show that Ashkenazi, who is the brother of the defense witness at Aron's trial, made monthly payments to Joshua's father. (Ashkenazi denied that Joshua needed his permission to travel.)

When O'Donnell signalled that he would submit a motion to dismiss the case against Kellner, MacGiollabhuí said that he wanted to go to trial. He didn't understand how a case had been brought against Kellner, and he wanted to put people on the witness stand. "The people in my client's community are entitled to it," he told the judge. "They are entitled to know why it is that victims of pedophiles in my client's community don't get the justice that victims in other communities get."

MacGiollabhuí consented to have the case dismissed only after O'Donnell told him, last March, that the district attorney's office would undertake an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Kellner's indictment. But an investigation was never announced. Months later, MacGiollabhuí wrote to the prosecutor, "I now believe that I was lied to." (A spokeswoman from the D.A.'s office said that an investigation was never promised.) Gonzalez would not acknowledge whether or not there was an ongoing investigation, but he did say that "this district attorney is very concerned about the amount of money and effort used to prevent the Baruch Lebovits case from seeing the courtroom." He said that Aron's civil settlement seemed to be a "very calculated way of buying the victim off."

Two months after Kellner's case was dismissed, Lebovits pleaded guilty to molesting Aron and avoided a second trial. The prosecution was severely compromised by the settlement. In May, Lebovits was sentenced to two years in prison. "You wanted to have it your way," Aron said to Lebovits at the sentencing hearing. "He still won't apologize to me in person," he went on. "He never apologized to me. That's it." Lebovits was released after eighty-three days.

Supporters of both Lebovits and Kellner continue their efforts at intimidation. Two people told me they were afraid that I had been hired by the Lebovits family. Others alerted Kellner that I was a secret agent of the district attorney's office. When I met Chaim Lebovits, in a suite at the Plaza, he told me that if I continued to work on this article I would make a fool out of myself and ruin my career. Chaim vacillated between lightheartedness—he played the shofar, a musical instrument made out of a ram's horn, and encouraged me to have children immediately, before I was too old—and loud rants about Kellner's evil strategic intelligence. He told me that I could not rely on the documents that the district attorney's office had compiled, because Kellner "talked a smart language," and when it was translated into English his criminal intentions weren't as evident as they were in Yiddish.

Not long ago, Kellner and I met near the office in Crown Heights where Detective Litwin worked before moving to a new unit. Kellner wanted to talk to me only in public spaces, so that he did not violate the prohibition in his community against meeting with a woman alone. As officers walked in and out of the building, they stared at us, apparently confused that a Hasidic man was chatting with a secular woman.

Kellner was still consumed by the case. It was as though he believed that if he recited the details enough times he might figure out exactly what had happened. Since his case, he said, the rabbis had become even less willing to permit victims to go to the police. Recently, when a father whose daughter had been molested asked for advice, Kellner told him, "If you go to the police, you're probably going to end up with zero."

Three officers walked past us for the third time, and Kellner, who almost never turns down an opportunity for conversation, asked them if they knew Steve Litwin. "Steve and I worked together on a case," he said. "Then the D.A. turned against me. And no one stood up for me."

"Really," one of the officers said, casually. He suddenly seemed less interested in us.

"Basically, the D.A. destroyed me."

"Well, Steve doesn't work here anymore," the officer said.

"Yeah, but the question is, Who's going to come here anymore?" Kellner asked.

"None of these guys work here anymore," the officer said. "They're all gone."

"They ruined me," Kellner went on. "This is what is left of me."

"Well, keep fighting the fight," the officer said, as he and his partners walked away.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/outcast-3

With new chief rabbi, black Hebrew-Israelites make bid to enter the Jewish mainstream

Sam Kestenbaum
The Washington Post
October 30, 2015

The chief rabbi is installed in a ceremony that hasn’t been seen in 16 years.
Israelite leadership leads the congregation in prayer over their new chief,
seated in the middle, hands open. From left to right: Rabbi Eliyahu Yehudah,
Rabbi Yeshurun Levi, Rabbi Baruch A. Yehudah, Chief Rabbi Capers C. Funnye,
Rabbi Sholomo Levy, Aaron Funnye and Rabbi Yahat Yehudah
Photo by Carlos Javier Ortiz

The Israelites walked slowly, chanting in Hebrew and wrapped in loose white robes. A reverential silence spread across the crowd as one figure emerged above the rest. Hundreds had gathered to witness a sacred moment. “I came so that my children’s children would remember this day,” said one Israelite. “Hallelujah,” called another.

It was a scene out of the Torah: after years of uncertainty a new leader was being installed.

But these Israelites, unlike their biblical namesakes, had not come from scattered desert encampments, but from Georgia, New York, California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Delaware. They were gathered not on a craggy mountain overlooking the valleys of the Holy Land, but deep in the Southside of Chicago.

And their new leader? South Carolina-born African American rabbi, Chief Rabbi Capers C. Funnye Jr.

Funnye has already made headlines. He’s the cousin of Michelle Obama and the first African American to join the Chicago Board of Rabbis. He has spent his career redrawing racial and religious boundaries. In sermons Funnye quotes from Malcolm X, Marcus Mosiah Garvey and old spirituals, but also Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rabbi Louis Jacobs and the Talmud.

“My blackness and my Jewishness, they synthesize,” said Funnye on the day of his installation as chief rabbi last weekend. His office was lined with weathered books on Judaism; a map of Africa hung on the wall. “I’m not in anybody’s box. We need this community recognized by the Jewish people. And I am their spokesperson.”

The Hebrew-Israelites, whose practice of Judaism draws from early black nationalism and its message of empowerment, have lived for nearly a century on the fringes of the Jewish world. There have only been two other chief rabbis in this group’s history; the last died in 1999.

Since then, “something hasn’t been right, something hasn’t been in the correct order,” said Rabbi Sholomo Ben Levy, president of the board. “Today we are able to get back in order.”

The new chief rabbi of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis, the main rabbinical body in the Israelite world, wants to both bring unity to the group and reach out.

“We have to build bridges,” said Funnye, “amongst ourselves and to other communities.”

Funnye was nominated as chief rabbi last fall. Earlier this year, he released his vision plan and spoke about his platform in a series of public meetings. A specially-formed electorate body made up of rabbis representing their communities, in this country and abroad, took a vote at the beginning of the month.

The results came in on Oct. 4. It was unanimous.

And finally, following Sabbath services at Funnye’s home congregation, Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago, a chief rabbi was installed.

“The International Israelite Board of Rabbis,” Levy said during the ceremony, “have elected and elevated our brother Rabbi Capers Funnye to the highest honorable office of chief rabbi to the Israelite congregations of the United States, the Caribbean, Africa and around the world under our auspices.”

The congregation’s choir, rivaling any gospel group, sang in a mixture of Hebrew and English; the crowd was dressed in its finest: colored kufis, knit skullcaps, dashikis and white prayer shawls.

“My father devoted his life to a movement,” said Rabbi Shalem Knaizadek Yeshurun, whose father was an early Israelite rabbi in Brooklyn. “Now we can show to the world: we’re not going to let that legacy die. We have a chief rabbi now, we talk for ourselves.”

A struggle to be accepted by the mainstream

This branch of Israelites traces its history back to Harlem where, in 1919, a Caribbean-born man named Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew founded one of the county’s first black synagogues, the Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation.

A charismatic cleric from St. Kitts, Matthew taught that African Americans had ancient connections with the biblical Israelites and that they should leave Christianity and return to Judaism. New members went through a ritual process of return, Levy said, which they viewed as comparable to conversion.

The synagogue became the center of a movement and branches spread to other parts of the country and abroad.

Matthew wasn’t only interested in reaching out to black Americans. He also sought connection with mainstream Jews and wanted his growing community to be accepted. Matthew applied to join the New York Board of Rabbis (twice), but was turned down because he was ordained by an earlier Israelite teacher, not from a recognized school. One early critic dismissed the community as having “nothing to do with Judaism.”

Things got slightly better in the next decades. But not by much.

The ’60s and early ’70s saw failed attempts to usher the Israelites into the mainstream, spearheaded by (largely white) Jewish liberals who ultimately pushed for conversion instead of accepting the Israelites’ claims to the religion, and history of practice, at face value.

To many Israelites, then and now, the politics of conversion is a fraught topic, said Rabbi Baruch A. Yehudah, executive secretary of the Israelite board and second-generation Israelite. “I’m not going to allow you to tell me who I can be or can’t be. I was born like this. My knees have bowed to no other God. I’m not asking for anyone’s permission.”

Starting in the late ’70s, the second chief rabbi, Rabbi Levi Ben Levy, re-vamped both the Israelite rabbinical board and the rabbinical college. Independent of the Jewish world, Israelite groups blossomed across the country.

There are some groups who identify as Israelites but embrace a more separatist message. The board, however, recognizes all practitioners of Judaism, regardless of their “race, tradition, or terminology.”

Funnye studied at the Israelite rabbinical academy but also decided to enroll in Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago. And, after consulting his Israelite rabbi, Funnye also went through a conversion in a Conservative rabbinical court.

“I know who I am,” said Funnye, recalling his thought process and decision to go through a conversion. “I just want you to be comfortable, too.”

Unlike some of his predecessors, Funnye said, he didn’t feel like the conversion took anything away from his being an Israelite. It would also open doors.

“I am an Israelite and a Jew,” Funnye said. “We’re not trying to emulate or pattern ourselves after any Jewish community. We are our own community.”

Today, a dozen U.S. congregations are associated with the board, where membership in each synagogue ranges from under 75 to hundreds.

Funnye’s vision is expansive. He looks to the Caribbean, South America and Africa. Already the board has ties with synagogues in Barbados, Uganda, Ghana, and over thirty in Nigeria. Funnye wants to build more, also reaching out to the Lemba Jews of South Africa.

New chief rabbi helps Israelites find their place

During his 30 years of leadership in Chicago, Funnye’s synagogue in Chicago emerged as one of the most popular Israelite congregations in the country. He was accepted on the Chicago Board of Rabbis (making him the first Israelite to sit on any city board) and is also board president at the city’s Jewish Council of Urban Affairs.

Rabbi Debra Newman Kamin, spiritual leader of Am Yisrael, a Conservative synagogue in Chicago, has watched Rabbi Funnye’s steady rise as a leader. Twenty five years ago, Rabbi Kamin says, his congregation was a “mystery to Chicago Jewry.” Now Rabbi Kamin regularly visits his synagogue with her congregants. “He has worked hard to be part of the Jewish community.”

Michael B. Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and close friend of Funnye’s, flew in for the weekend. “You are part of the Jewish people,” said Oren, speaking to a crowd of Israelites. “You are a part of the nation state. And we are proud and delighted to have you.”

On a drizzling afternoon in Chicago, the board presented Funnye with a signed scroll, giving him his new authority as chief. The sun, struggling to break through all morning, finally did. The sanctuary was bathed in light.

Would the community embrace Funnye’s desire to work with wider Jewry? Could they leave past divisions behind? And would wider Jewry accept the Israelites? There was a group prayer on Funnye’s behalf. And, for a moment which seemed to stretch on, Funnye stood silently. Children crowded to the front, the crowd watched expectantly. The size of his mandate came to him, he explained later, and he prayed for guidance.

“I accepted the position because many of my elders and teachers have passed,” said Funnye. “Now, when I go anywhere, they will be with me. I will be speaking on behalf of them and their descendants.”

Sam Kestenbaum is a writer based in New York City. You can reach him on Twitter at @skestenbaum

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/10/30/with-new-chief-rabbi-black-hebrew-israelites-bid-to-enter-the-jewish-mainstream/