In 2016 we covered the Newsweek story about the Ultra-Orthodox community and the sexual abuse allegations against a Rabbi at one of the more prestigious schools, Oholei Torah of Brooklyn. At the time, it did not get much coverage beyond Newsweek which ran a comprehensive piece on multiple allegations against the rabbi featured in the story and Oholei Torah.
It should come as no surprise, these stories are tricky to write and the circulation of them gets shut down fairly quickly.
In a lawsuit by an anonymous Plaintiff who had the courage to finally seek justice, a Motion to Dismiss has been filed by Defendant claiming, among other things, that there were insufficient facts pleaded and that Oholai Torah did not have a duty to the Plaintiff such that negligence can be found.
We leave it to the reader to decide for yourself if you could possibly come to the conclusion that the Defendant seeks in its pleadings, namely that a school cannot have a duty of care inferred upon it.
We hope that the judge does not allow the Defendant off this easily. But in Kings County one never knows.
More importantly we ask this: is it plausible to consider that this will be the defense strategy of every institution, religious or otherwise, faced with accusations of failure to provide a safe learning institution such that sexual abuse could occur on its premises?
And, if that is the defense strategy, perhaps parents need to consider this when choosing the institutes of learning for their children. Perhaps parents need to demand contracts get signed in the private school setting wherein the school is paid privately and by virtue of that payment has a duty of care to its students.
[EXCERPTED]
Child Abuse Allegations Plague the Hasidic Community
BY ELIJAH WOLFSON ON 03/03/16 AT 6:12 AM EST
“Twelve-year-old Ozer Simon hadn’t grown up Hasidic, but after his parents divorced, his mom became a baal teshuva, a secular Jew who has “returned” to religious ways, and enrolled him at a yeshiva. He immediately fell behind because the other kids had been studying Hebrew since they were toddlers, so when Rabbi Joseph Reizes, a new teacher recently arrived from Brooklyn, offered to tutor the child, his mother jumped at the opportunity.
But when she asked Simon how his first lesson went, she could tell “something was really wrong.” Simon told her the rabbi hadn’t taught him anything; instead, he’d asked the boy to lie down and take a nap. When he did, the older man lay down on top of him. The next school day, Simon’s mother went to Rabbi Avrohom Korf, principal of the boy’s school, and told him what had happened. “I said to him, ‘If Reizes continues to teach here, I’m going to go to the newspaper. Or whatever it takes,'” she recalls. “The next thing I know, the guy is gone.”“
…..
“When contacted by Newsweek, the child whose parents brought the complaint to the school in 1996 didn’t want to speak about it publicly, but other students from that class say Reizes long had a reputation for inappropriate behavior. Bibi Morozow, 31 years old and now living in Florida, says a relative was molested by Reizes while attending Oholei Torah in the 1990s. (When reached by Newsweek on the phone, the relative declined to be interviewed.) “Reizes was always touchy; he’d put kids in his lap,” says one student who asked to remain anonymous because he feared being shunned by his community.“
…..
“Oholei Torah conducts its seven-plus daily hours of religious lessons mostly in Yiddish. According to more than a dozen former students across three decades, it provides almost no lessons in science, math, English grammar or history. (The school did not respond to queries about its curriculum.) Many of these students go home to an apartment with no television, no Internet, no newspapers and no books except religious texts. Many will not gain the basic knowledge of how to navigate the world until they are married off around age 18, like how to write a check, how to order General Tso’s chicken or even what sex is. When you’re a child in this environment, you don’t question the fact that you can’t identify your own state on a map. And when you are molested, you don’t ask questions about that either.“
LOSTMESSIAH 