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| New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, and Agudah's Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel |
This is why I supported the Child Victims Act that allows a one year window going back up to 50 years for survivors of sex abuse to sue their abusers and the institutions that in some way protected them. Until that law was passed, survivors missed he deadline set by the statute of limitations (which was a common occurrence since they are often reticent to speak about it publicly for years) had no recourse. Now they have a year to actually get a modicum of justice for what happened to them and what they continue to go through.
This is an eminently fair law. Judgments are not automatic. Survivors will not just be able to show up at the door of their abuser or the institution that enabled him and have a huge check written out to them. They will have to go to court and prove their claims. For a variety of reasons, old claims like these are difficult to prove. It will not be a cake walk. But at least they will now have an opportunity to try. And if they succeed they will finally get some justice if not total relief from the mental anguish they must still feel many years after the fact.
That being said, I find the angry nature of allegations made against Agudah by survivor advocates to be grossly unfair. Here is what Asher Lovy, Za’akah’s Director of Community Organizing is an unfair attack against Agudah said on Za’akah’s Facebook Page.
Over the last 13 years, Agudah fought vociferously against the Child Victims Act. Along with the Catholic Church, Boy Scouts of America, the UFT (United Federation of Teachers), and various insurance lobbies, Agudath Israel claimed that the laws were unnecessarily and unfairly punitive, and threatened the future of Jewish education as we knew it.
Unlike the Catholic Church, they didn’t even pay lip service to the idea that sexual abuse is prevalent in the community, or attempt to even make a show of caring about survivors. While the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Fund established by the Church to address abuse allegations is far from a perfect or even good step forward… it is at least the beginning of an acknowledgement on the part of the Church of the horrendous abuse and coverups that were rampant for decades.
Neither Agudah nor any other Jewish institution has done anything similar. All they’ve done was attack the people advocating for the Child Victims Act, malign and impugn the bloggers and watchdogs who have been educating the community about the severity of the problem, and claim that survivors who wanted the right to sue their abusers and institutions that covered up for them were just angry moneygrubbing liars with axes to grind inflating the scope of a problem that barely existed.
I have said recently that despite my disagreement with Agudah about the Child Victims Act, I am nevertheless convinced that their opposition to it was a principled one. They have legitimate fears that Jewish education as we know it will be irreparably damaged by multi million dollar judgments against them. It is a matter of preserving Judaism itself in their eyes.
If religious day schools, Yeshiva high schools, are bankrupted and fail, who will teach our children? To go back to the public schools and try and educate our children religiously at home has proven to be a colossal failure in the past – before day schools proliferated.
I know that there are people that say things are different now. That today it could work. But if past is in any way prologue, there will be a great deal more Jews opting out of observance than there are now. The culture they will become fully immersed in will surely have a huge impact.
It is one thing to appreciate the permissible things that the general culture has to offer while one is fully immersed in a religious environment that can teach them the difference between what is and what is not permissible or appropriate. It is another to be fully immersed in that culture and associate with peers that have no limits in their lives. Not in terms of food nor in terms of Shabbos.
True there might be a lot more students today that will survive under those conditions than was the case in the past. But they will surely not be as Jewishly enriched as they would be if they were in a day school and yeshiva high school. And there will surely be a lot more students that will opt out of observance altogether – influenced by their non Jewish or not observant teachers and peers..
As I said, when Agudah strives to hire attorneys that can successfully defend them, they see it as an existential issue. Agudah should not be expected to just sit by passively while there is the prospect that Jewish education as we know it might be bankrupted.
There has been a lot of angry rhetoric gong both ways. That is not uncommon in situation where each side accuses the other of nefarious motives. But to say (as does Asher Lovy) that Agudah has done nothing is untrue and unfair. They may not have set up a fund for survivors like the Catholic Church has. But they have acknowledged the error of how they dealt with abuse in the past and have tried to correct it. While they are not fully on board with everything survivors justifiably advocate, that does not make them the nefarious self serving individuals Asher paints them as. By the same token, I do not consider Agudah’s accusations about survivor advocates to be accurate either. It is not all about the money.
But the fact is that there is a lot of money involved. Enough so that if every judgment went in favor of the survivors many of them would become instant millionaires while Jewish education might be irreparably damaged because of the certain bankruptcies many of them would suffer by such huge judgments.
There are always two sides to every issue, some might say there are three sides; the plaintiff's side, the defendant’s, and the truth.
How to get justice for both sides is the real issue. That is beyond my pay grade. I see truth on both sides.
But here’s an idea that might work. There ought to be some way to limit the amount of judgments for the plaintiff so that it would not bankrupt Jewish education. (No clue what an appropriate limitation would look like.)
As much as a survivor might suffer, making him or her an instant multi millionaire at the expense of Jewish education does not seem like a just outcome.
I am not saying that judgments should not be substantial where they are deserved. But justice tempered with a little mercy might go a long way to curbing the enmity on both sides and help to preserve a system whose success at educating masses of Jewish children, while not perfect - is nevertheless responsible for the exponential growth of observant Judaism in our time.