Rabbinical coverup in Austrailan abuse cases

Haaretz   Cyprys, 44, appeared at Melbourne Magistrates Court last week, contesting 53 charges of gross indecency toward minors, including six counts of rape allegedly committed between 1982 and 1991. There are at least 12 alleged victims, including two who now live in America.

Court documents state they were assaulted at various locations, including Cyprys' van, Yeshivah College, Gan Yisrael youth camps and ritual baths.

In a dramatic week in court, testimonies were made public about the alleged role of New York-born Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner, the spiritual leader of Melbourne's Yeshivah College and head of the Chabad movement in the city, who died in 2008.[...]

Rabbi Avrohom Glick, Yeshivah College principal between 1986 and 2007, changed his testimony under oath last week to say that Rabbi Groner had told him on two occasions the names of individuals who were allegedly molested.

R' Bechhofer: Get M'eusa - all questions answered

I will be giving a shiur on Shavuos night, 3:30 am, at Blueberry Hill shul in Monsey http://ohaivyisroel.net/ on the topic of persuading vs. compelling gittin. I will, of course, address all the "issues" raised on this blog. You are all invited to attend!

If there is sufficient interest (email me), then I can give the shiur over again after Yom Tov as a conference call.

KT, GS,
YGB

Regulations to stop Prison Rape

NYTimes    [[ This is especially a problem for jailed child molesters - who are targeted as punishment. ]]

The Justice Department on Thursday issued the first comprehensive federal rules aimed at “zero tolerance” for sexual assaults against inmates in prisons, jails and other houses of detention. 

The regulations, issued after years of discussions among officials and prisoner advocacy groups, address a problem that a new government study finds may afflict one out of every 10 prisoners, more than twice as many as suggested by an earlier survey.

Having Aharon fired: Passive pressure of R' Tam?!

Guest post: The measures taken by ORA and Tamar's other supporters against Aharon are far more than passive, and started well over a year before any beis din order against Aharon of any sort.  For example, Tamar and hers supporters, such as ORA, are attempting to have Aharon fired (and have been doing so for more than a year before any beis din order against Aharon of any sort).

(This is not to mention the effective threats to his life.) To demand Aharon's boss insist that Aharon give a get is to demand Aharon's firing if he doesn't give a get. And the publicity campaign is clearly intended to make Aharon fear for his job should he not give a get. (See below for just a small sample.) ORA took these actions despite the position of Rabbi Schachter (ORA's posek) that pressure on a spouse can only "be done with a legitimate beis din."

;http://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/739308/Rabbi_Hershel_Schachter/Options_for_Helping_Agunot# at 40:00.  

Note also that the parties mutually agreed to bring the case to the Baltimore Beis Din, which held several hearings with both parties participating, and the Beis Din never ruled that a get must be given. Tamar and her supporters have not explained how the child's best interests would be served by Aharon's losing his job.  But then again, for Tamar and her supporters, the best interests of the child have always been secondary at best (or subsumed by the principle that whatever Tamar is convinced will make Tamar happy is necessarily inthe best interests of the child). Why Tamar and her advocates think that Aharon would be more likely to give a get if he were to be fired from his job is mysterious – but those attacking Aharon are mostly interested in making ideological points, getting their names into the newspapers, and fundraising, (some are attacking Aharon to avoid themselves being attacked, while others do so to satisfy the Epsteins), and care little, if at all, as to whether Tamar actually receives a get.

Why some are demanding that a non-Jewish government and its officials intervene in religious disputes within the Jewish community is even more mysterious - and disregards the tragedies such practice has brought upon the Jewish People through the ages.

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ORA essentially threatened Aharon in September 2010 that if Aharon did not do what ORA demanded, ORA would (amongst other things) attempt to have him fired, specifically noting that their campaign against Aharon would be picked up by the newspapers that cover Congress

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The demonstration against Aharon in December 2010 was aimed, at least in part, in having him fired.  For example, there is a poster denouncing Aharon's boss in a Washington Jewish Week picture of the rally.  http://washingtonjewishweek.com/main.asp?SectionID=4&SubSectionID=4&ArticleID=14039
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http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=203305
The plight of an ‘aguna’ reaches Capitol Hill  ==============================================
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-shmuel-herzfeld/dave-camp-has-the-right-to-fire-aharon-friedman_b_1388471.html
Dave Camp: You Have the Right to Fire Aharon Friedman 
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On Dec. 20, [2010,] Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Washington, who supports Ms. Epstein, wrote to [Aharon's boss], accusing Mr. Friedman of “psychological terrorism.” Rabbi Herzfeld urged [Aharon's boss] to “tell Aharon to give the get immediately,” and warned that “it is appropriate to also rally in the vicinity of Aharon’s work place.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/us/04divorce.html

Woman beaten for alleged child abuse

Ynet   Two men were charged on Thursday with assaulting a 70-year-old woman due to what they believed was her involvement in a pedophile ring that operated in a Jerusalem neighborhood, Ynet reported. 

The men, who also suspected that the woman was lecturing children on Christianity, were charged at the capital's district court with aggravated assault, aggravated breaking and entering, conspiring to commit a crime and issuing threats.

According to the indictment, 22-year-old Moshe Schleider and another man, whose identity has yet to be cleared for publication, suspected that the woman and others were sexually assaulting minors in tunnels located beneath her home. 

Yeshiva is an artificial institution - Rav Hutner

This is part of Rav Hutner's talk on why the yeshiva system was instituted. It is the last chapter in the Pachad Yitzhok for Shavuos. I hope to eventually translate it as it is an important chidush.  Basic idea is that the yeshiva system is comparable to the use of incubators. It works but is a not ideal - the true Torah system is for the father to teach his son. Click here for Translation

Chinuch Rav Hutner Pachad Yitzchok Shavuous

20 yr Marriage annuled for invalid witnesses

Jewish Press   Looking for a creative solution, Rabbi Abergel asked the court staff to obtain the couple’s ketubahh and summoned the witnesses who had signed it at the wedding. The Rabbi questioned them at length and discovered that they are “Eaters of treif food and do not observe Shabbat and the commandments.”

In an unprecedented move, Rabbi Abergel decided to annul the marriage of M. and her runaway husband, on the grounds that the witnesses who signed the ketubah were legally improper. This means that M. and her husband had never really married, and so there is no need for a get to permit M. to marry now. The rabbinic court judges adopted the decision, as did the Jerusalem High Beit Din, which is the final arbiter in religious Jewish cases, just below Israel’s Supreme Court.

Man killed for complaining about noise

YNet   The State Prosecutor's Office has decided to charge an 18-year-old Beersheba resident with murder over the stabbing of Gadi Vichman on Thursday. The State had considered an indictment on manslaughter charges but eventually decided on murder.

"It can't be murder. The indictment shows that the victim rammed into him first," Eden Ohayon's attorney said. "I am shocked that the prosecution decided to bring this charge against my client. We expected manslaughter," Rotem Tobul said.

Brooklyn DA responds to attack by Ed Koch

NYTimes    The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, on Wednesday defended his record in the face of criticism over his handling of accusations of child sexual abuse in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.  

In an op-ed article in The Daily News, Mr. Hynes wrote that it was absurd “to suggest that we cover up, downplay or in any way ‘give a break’ to sex offenders in the Orthodox Jewish community.” 

Mr. Hynes also had a pointed e-mail exchange with former Mayor Edward I. Koch, who questioned the district attorney’s policies in a blog post in The Huffington Post. 

Both men were reacting to an article in The New York Times last week that examined Mr. Hynes’s record in these cases and his relationships with influential rabbis in Brooklyn’s growing ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods.

Rally to defend accused child rapist

Fox News

Aleppo Codex - who stole it?

Boston Globe  Friedman’s dogged journalistic curiosity forces him to re-examine every aspect of that shiny heroic narrative. His inquiry yielded “The Aleppo Codex,’’ a thrilling, step-by-step quest to discover what really happened to Judaism’s most important book: who rescued it from the synagogue, how it came to be held by Israel’s Ben-Zvi Institute, and why nearly half of its pages were missing by the time it got there. With the help of a motley crew of Codex enthusiasts, Friedman goes up against a campaign of silence so effective that it is only slightly cracking 50 years later, when all of the major players are dead.

What is all this silence protecting? Nothing less than parts of the founding mythology of the state of Israel. Many of the book’s most astute and well-earned revelations are also its biggest surprises, and it would be unfair to reveal them here. But I will allow myself one spoiler: There was a protracted court battle for ownership of the Codex, between the Israeli state and the Aleppo refugees. In Friedman’s deft characterization: “Ben-Zvi and his comrades had willed a Jewish state into being against impossible odds, almost against the very logic of human events; they had glared at history and watched it bend to their will.” In their eyes, the diaspora Jewish communities had been in exile, and Israel, as the homeland of all Jews, was the rightful heir to their treasures. “The Aleppo Jews, on the other hand, had not subsumed themselves into the Zionist project and its version of history . . . [they] saw the Crown as the symbol of a place almost none of them had ever considered to be exile.’’