After a lot of hemming and hawing The Agudah (Agudath Israel) has finally come out and said it, they don’t want you going to the police should some form of abuse take place in the frum community. I and almost everyone in the dissident blogging world already knew this – we knew this based on the frum community agenda of “whatever happens in the frum community, stays within the frum community” because God forbid the outside world (any lesser folks who do not wear black hats all the time) see that the frum community has the same issues as any other community. God forbid that we aren’t actually holier than thou.
If my kid was molested by a rabbi God forbid, the last place I would turn to is the Rabbis. I would be calling the police and my lawyers the second I found out that anything funky was going down, but yes many people are stuck in the shtetl mentality, the mentality that everything must be maintained behind closed doors and that the goyim are just out to get us – never to help us.
Some may say that the Agudah has good intentions, they don’t want to be publicly accusing of folks who may not be guilty of anything, but how many times has the Agudah covered up cases such as the famous Kolko thing that have been going on for years? How often is the Agudah and other frum organizations guilty of protecting their own asses instead of the little non-rabbinic people’s.
To me it seems as if the frum community leaders don’t want to admit there’s any sort of issues going on, instead of facing the problems they cover them up, brush them under the rug and act as if there’s a few loose screws here and there, but nothing to tell to any sort of authority – yet every day I’m reading about another arrest and another court date set for another “frum” guy caught molesting, raping or trying to kill someone – but before contacting authorities ask your LOR (local orthodox rabbi) if it’s halachically ok to tell anyone non-Jewish about your child getting raped by his rebbe at the mikvah – it could hurt someone’s shidduch resume and we don’t want that.
62 comments for “Agudath Israel says to tell Rabbi – not police in cases of abuse”