List of Victims Grows Along with Liability

(from combined services)

Yeshiva University released last week its long awaited report about abuse in several of the University’s divisions, which found systematic abuses that were not treated properly by the school administration. Meetings were held with members of the faculty, who were advised to adhere to a gag order, since the cases were in litigation. The University is closely following the advice of its attorneys, although University President Richard Joel “expressed shame” about the findings by the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. YU was not shown the report before it was posted on the law firm’s website.

Investigators found that abuse was, “carried out by a number of individuals in positions of authority at the high schools at various times,” even after abuse was reported to school officials. They also found that until 2001, the University failed to respond properly in multiple instances or “failed to appropriately act to protect the safety of its students.”  Or it ignored allegations altogether, which led victims to think that they were not believed.

More than 145 witnesses were interviewed at great length, but their stories were not revealed in the report. Since the news broke last December, the amount the school is being sued for has now almost doubled, in excess of $680 million, with more victims coming forward. While the situation has improved dramatically since 2001, Joel promises the University will do better by its students.

Joel, a lawyer who once worked in the District Attorney’s office, is the person who cleaned up the Baruch Lanner mess at the Orthodox Union and revamped Hillel. He took over as YU president in 2003 and promised that going forward, the YU administration will act “with halachic urgency” to improve the way they handle abuse cases.

One powerful reaction came from one of the victims, Rabbi Irwin Kula of CLAL, who did not file against the school, though he and his brother were both abused. Objecting to the way the report was written and how matters were handled by Yeshiva University, Kula wrote an article in The Forward, where he bared his heart and complained about how the report was structured. At the end, he concluded that by hiding individual stories, by taking down the stories of the victims and not letting the public know how these things came to pass, the University and their lawyers effectively shut down future, progressive action on abuse in the Jewish community. Kula asked, and not rhetorically:

“What won’t we have? We will have no serious ethical or spiritual reflection about the relationship between patriarchal all-male adolescent communities and sexual predators. We will not have any conversation about the relationship between highly hierarchical religious cultures in which idealization and transference are common psychological features and lead to abuse of power. We will have no collective thinking about possible common causes for such abuse shared with other religious communities that have been guilty of similar crimes. And of course we will have no public conversation—by a religious and spiritual institution, no less—about the difference between legal categories of civil liability and the psycho-spiritual and psycho-social category of healing and teshuvah.”