Jennifer Friedlin -
Special To The Jewish Week
Is computer technology shifting the balance of power in
Brooklyn’s insular, fervently Orthodox community?
In
the 1980s, two prominent Flatbush rabbis allegedly closed the
door on a burgeoning sexual abuse scandal by preventing a
rabbinical court proceeding from taking place. Now, two
decades later, an Internet blog has reinvigorated the
allegations, resulting in two multimillion-dollar lawsuits
against a rabbi, a yeshiva and a summer camp for boys.
“Without the Internet, this story never would have
been brought to light,” said Un-Orthodox Jew, the anonymous
blogger who last year began posting angry diatribes about the
alleged abuse and cover-up on
www.theunorthodoxjew.blogspot.com.
On the blog,
Un-Orthodox Jew, who also goes by UOJ and claims to have deep
ties in the “black hat” world, stated that Rabbi Yehuda Kolko
sexually abused a number of male students at Yeshiva and
Mesivta Torah Temimah in Flatbush and at Camp Agudah in
Ferndale, N.Y., while Rabbi Lipa Margulies, the head of the
school, allegedly helped to protect him at the expense of the
victims. All told, three former students of Rabbi Kolko allege
abuse against him in the two lawsuits.
While the blog
has generated heaps of scorn among readers — some people have
said UOJ’s Web posts were less acceptable than the alleged
acts they were revealing — the Web site has also elicited
support as well as a response from at least one alleged
victim.
David Framowitz, a 48-year-old former student
who now lives in Israel with his family, says he first came
across the blog while searching for Rabbi Kolko’s name on the
Internet. His story was chronicled in a May 22 New York
Magazine story.
“I was always typing in Kolko’s name
looking to see if anyone else was molested,” he told The
Jewish Week in a telephone interview last week. “Then one day,
I Googled Kolko and all of a sudden it was
there.”
Framowitz posted his story to the UOJ blog,
claiming that Kolko repeatedly molested him 36 years ago while
he was a seventh and eighth grade student at Torah Temimah and
during two summers at Camp Agudah. He said he told his
parents, but they did not believe him. Now, he wrote, he was
coming out because he felt the time had come to tear down “the
wall of silence.”
In response to the posts, UOJ put
Framowitz in touch with Jeffrey Herman, a Miami-based lawyer
who has litigated sex abuse cases against the Catholic Church.
Herman took the case. He is also representing two other
plaintiffs who go by John Doe 2 and John Doe 3 in the
complaints. The complaints, filed in Brooklyn Federal Court,
all name Rabbi Kolko and Yeshiva and Mesivta Torah Temimah as
defendants, while the complaint on behalf of Framowitz and
John Doe 2 also names Camp Agudah.
Although Rabbi
Margulies is not a defendant in the case, the complaint states
that Rabbi Margulies threatened to expel from the school and
ostracize from the community any child who spoke of the abuse.
Herman said that Margulies also enlisted Rabbi Pinchus
Scheinberg to help quell the fire by telling victims that
sexual abuse had not taken place because there was no
penetration. After allegedly thwarting two beit dins, Rabbi
Margulies told anyone who asked that Kolko had been
exonerated, according to last week’s New York Magazine expose.
No one ever went to the authorities.
Avi Moskowitz, a
lawyer representing Torah Temimah, told The Jewish Week that
the yeshiva “emphatically denies the allegations” and has put
Kolko on administrative leave.
Rabbi David Zwiebel, a
representative of Agudath Israel of America, the owner of the
camp, said that officials in his organization had not heard of
any allegations against Rabbi Kolko, who apparently left the
camp’s employ of his own accord in the
mid-1970s.
“There is nobody currently in the
administration who has any recollection from that time,”
Zwiebel said.
Rabbi Kolko and Rabbi Margulies declined
to comment, while Scheinberg, who is 93 and lives in Israel,
could not be reached.
While the statute of limitations
has expired for a criminal investigation or a civil lawsuit,
Herman said he believes that because of the alleged cover-up
the plaintiffs would have the right to pursue the civil
action.
Herman also noted that a 22-year-old has come
forward with allegations against Rabbi Kolko, but he declined
to provide details. If that case moves forward, it could fall
within the statute of limitations for a criminal
investigation, according to Herman.
Besides blogging,
UOJ — who said he will not reveal his identity because it
would deflect attention from his cause — said he tried several
other avenues to bring the allegations to light, from writing
letters to Jewish and secular newspapers to sending a letter
about Rabbis Kolko and Margulies to thousands of religious
families throughout Brooklyn. But, he said, no one wanted to
listen.
“I have submitted letters to the editor and as
long as they were non-controversial they were accepted. But
once I started snooping around about issues no one was dealing
with, my letters were not published,” said UOJ, who describes
himself as somewhere between 30 and 40 years of age, observant
and married with children. He also says that he comes from a
prominent Orthodox family that made a fortune in real
estate.
Working as an Internet-based Robin Hood, UOJ
said his sole interest in starting his blog was to rattle the
cocoon of Orthodoxy, which, he claims, has enabled those in
power to exploit their followers.
Experts who advocate
on behalf of sex abuse victims have applauded UOJ’s efforts.
They say that because many Orthodox communities prohibit
people from going to secular authorities with allegations of
abuse and that abusers often go unpunished, the Internet
provides one of the only vehicles religious people have for
accessing support.
“In the Orthodox world people don’t
watch TV, they don’t listen to the radios, they don’t read the
papers but everyone seems to be sneaking onto the Internet,”
said Vicky Polin, executive director of the Awareness Center,
a Baltimore-based advocacy group for victims of sexual
assault.
Yet others worry about the Internet’s
potential for abuse.
Rabbi Kenneth Brander, the dean of
Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future, said he
thought that recent Internet chatter is “a reflection of the
fact that victims have not felt heard on this issue.”
Nevertheless, he expressed concern about the harm a vengeful
or mistaken blogger could inflict on an innocent
person.
“Not everything on a Web site can be treated as
truth,” Brander said.
Whether or not the Internet
proves helpful or hurtful or a bit of both, most community
observers say the Web has forever changed the way Orthodox
individuals interact with the world.
“The Internet
poses an incredibly serious threat to the status quo in these
communities — as it does to any society that controls
information and suppresses public dissent,” said Hella
Winston, a sociologist and author of “Unchosen: The Hidden
Lives of Hasidic Rebels.”
“The fact that David
Framowitz was able to connect with UOJ from half a world away,
in only a few seconds, is nothing short of revolutionary,” she
said.
In the wake of the lawsuits and the New York
magazine article, UOJ said he has received more than 400,000
hits to his site. Meanwhile, the alleged abuse has also become
a hot topic on other Jewish blogs.
On the Chaptzem blog
(http://chaptzem.blogspot.com/), which describes itself as
“the one and only heimishe news center,” the host
wrote:
“The whole Kolko-Margulies story has brought to
light some very important questions regarding child abuse. How
do we as a community deal with allegations of abuse? How do we
decide if they are founded or fabricated? … Also, even if the
allegations are founded how do we go about stopping it? How
far do we go?”
According to UOJ, such questions have
been a long time coming. n |
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