When Victims Rule (pdf)

WALL STREET, JEWISH / ISRAELI ETHICS, AND THE WORLD OF FUND RAISING
versely authoritarian doctor-patient relationship that is the foundation of the
psychoanalytic world itself:
“Is Rosen an exception or is there something about psychotherapy,
something in the very nature of psychotherapy, that tends toward abuses?
A prison warden, a slaveholder, and a psychotherapist have in common
the desire to control another person.” [MASSON, p. 147]
In late 2000, the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles noted with concern a
number of newsworthy cases of sexual abuse by rabbis:
“For those who look up to the American Jewish clergy, it has not been
a good year. Last week, one of the Reform movement’s most prominent
rabbis was suspended from the rabbinical movement for past sexual
misconduct …Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, widely respected as a Jewish
thinker and teacher, resigned as president of the movement’s Hebrew
Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion … The wave of incidents is
refocusing on an issue that has come into public view only in recent
years. In the past, rabbinical misconduct – particularly sexual misconduct
– was rarely discussed publicly. Many advocates for victims complained
that rabbinical associations were more interested in protecting
their members than the people they hurt.” [WIESNER, J., 12-15-200]
Also noted in the article is the sexual harassment “by the late charismatic
Orthodox leader, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach,” a Reform rabbi in New Jersey who
“allegedly hired people to murder his wife,” a “Conservative Cantor in the Chicago
area [who] was arrested … for alleged involvement in a prostitution ring,”
and a “New York rabbi working for [the Orthodox Union’s] national youth
group [who allegedly] sexually harassed and molested teens.” [WIESNER, J.,
12-15-00]
In 1996, a Los Angeles Jewish showpiece, the Skirball Cultural Center and
Museum (a $65 million cultural center created by Israeli architect Moshe Safdie
and founded by Israeli-born president and CEO Uri Herscher), named Robert
Kirschner as its Program Director despite his past as the former rabbi of one of
northern California’s pre-eminent synagogues, Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco.
Kirschner resigned his rabbinical post there in 1992 after four women
(eventually a total of twelve) came forward with complaints of the rabbi’s sexual
misconduct, “involving,” he publicly apologized, “sexual relations outside my
marriage.” At least three of the women reportedly “reached settlements with the
temple’s insurance policy.” [LA TIMES, 11-2-96, p. B4]
In 2000, the Miami-Dade Public Schools district paid a million dollar settlement
to five women, four of them teachers, who charged that Michael Exelbart,
the principal of a school for the handicapped, had sexually harassed them.
Two had been “coerced” into sex, including at the site of “a conservative Jewish
temple in Kendall where Exelbart was an officer.” Exelbart wasn’t fired, and continued
to make $80,000 a year at another position. [KISSELL, T., 4-20-2000]
In April 2001, Jerrold M. Levy, a rabbi at Temple Beth El in Florida, was arrested
for “online solicitation of a juvenile” over the Internet. The synagogue
1078