A Sober Analysis of the Weberman Verdict

Weberman and an attorney at trial

The following is an article in the Forward. It does cast somewhat of a shadow on the verdict as the author suggests. I agree with her that it would be helpful if more victims came forward and make their experiences public. 

I have been assured by my contacts in that community that there are more victims who have indeed come forward privately but fear retribution if they were to go public. I hope that some of them do summon the courage to come forward so that there can be no mistake about Weberman's guilt. The article follows in its entirety. 

On December 10, Nechemya Weberman, an unlicensed youth and marriage counselor in the Satmar community of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, was convicted of 59 counts of sexual misconduct against a minor.

As in any trial, the judge reminded the jurors that the defendant’s guilt must be proved “beyond reasonable doubt.” But with Weberman now facing a possible prison sentence of 25 years or more, it is worth asking what exactly has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and whether it was Weberman’s community as much as his actions — deplorable if true — being judged in the docket with him.

The Brooklyn district attorney’s case hinged exclusively on the credibility of the team’s single witness — the young woman accusing Weberman of sexually abusing her during each of their counseling sessions, which often took place multiple times a week, beginning when she was 12 and ending when she was 15. Though there have been reports of other victims, both from religious support groups for victims as well as from the DA, none have come forward. Weberman has flatly denied the allegations. When asked if he had ever touched his accuser inappropriately, he said, “Never, ever.” Absent DNA evidence, the case is a he said, she said. The verdict hung ultimately on whose testimony the jury found more credible.

Related Hasidic Sex Abuse Victims Advocate Hit With Bleach Nechemya Weberman Convicted in Sex Case Most Brooklyn Abuse Cases Involve Kin Weberman’s defense team questioned the accuser’s credibility by arguing that she had two very strong motives for wanting to harm Weberman. First, the accuser’s sister owed the defendant $35,000, the first $10,000 of which was due six days before she went to the police to report Weberman. And second, Weberman had assisted the accuser’s father in taping her having sex with her 18-year-old boyfriend when she was 15, leading to the boyfriend’s arrest. On the stand, Weberman’s accuser denied that she knew of his involvement in the arrest, stating that she learned of it only this past summer, though Weberman’s name was explicitly stated as an accomplice during her original complaint to the New York City Police Department, two years ago.

The defense team also pointed to discrepancies noted when comparing the accuser’s testimony in court with her conversation with the arresting detective, to whom she made the original complaint. Furthermore, the top two counts for which Weberman was standing trial were on dates of alleged abuse that didn’t match the victim’s statement to the NYPD. For these reasons, Weberman’s attorney argued, none of the evidence against his client is provable beyond reasonable doubt, and the case should be dismissed.

On the other side of the aisle, the DA’s office painted Weberman as a sexual predator with a harem of young girls to satisfy his every sexual need. But their main attempts to discredit him came not from testimonies of other victims, of which there were none, but rather from his shady business dealings and his position in the male-dominated Satmar world. They said he used a credit card belonging to his charity organization to pay tuition for one of his children, and later used the same credit card to purchase lingerie (his wife maintains that the charge was hers; she purchased clothing for a young woman who was the recipient of Weberman’s charity). They mentioned the fact that Weberman allows people to call him “Rebbe” despite not being ordained. They mentioned the fact that he charged a whopping $150 a session for “counseling” despite being unlicensed.

But beyond the connotations and stereotypes suggested by this evidence and certainly reiterated in the media, the DA’s case focused on the rules of the Satmar world; the stringency of the dress code; the suppression of free thought; the laws of yihud, or seclusion, governing women and men’s conduct; the regime of terror that the Va’ad Hatznius, the modesty council, allegedly metes out upon young women; the beit din, or private courts, and most of all, the injunction to maintain an absolute separation of the sexes. An expert was brought in to go over the details of this community’s lifestyle, all of which were portrayed as draconian, misogynistic and enabling of sexual abuse. The clear implication was that the accuser was victimized not only by Weberman, but also by his form of religion.

In this context, the accuser was portrayed as a hero in her attempts to escape from this repressive and alienating environment. Her process toward secularization was represented as emancipation from the world of the defendent toward the world of the jurors. She stood up for herself in school — questioning God and the necessity of modesty laws — becoming an outcast; now she stands up to the accused, who is backed by the Satmar establishment “like a god in Williamsburg,” the accuser said.

But one of the main signs of this secularization was hidden from the jury. The judge didn’t allow the tape showing the accuser having sex with her older boyfriend to be admitted into evidence — an expected but monumental decision, as it turns out. One alternate juror who I spoke with while observing the trial, a Brooklyn resident in his mid-30s, said he was “split down the middle” as to whether he would have convicted. The alternate juror said that seeing a sex tape would definitely have made him question the credibility of the witness. While it would be deeply problematic for a young woman’s testimony to be discounted simply on the grounds of her not being a virgin, or even on the grounds that she might be the only victim, it would be equally problematic for a man to be accused of a crime he might not have committed because a jury had been alienated by his religious choices.

Based on the evidence actually presented in court, only the accuser and accused, and not the jury, can be said to know what happened between them during those sessions, beyond reasonable doubt. The testimonies of those who have heretofore refused to come forward would be required to tip the scales. While the value of using reasonable doubt as a standard for judging criminal acts, especially rape, may be debated, as might the Satmar community’s business dealings and handling of teenage behavior, Weberman was not on trial for his community or his business dealings, though at times this seemed like the DA’s central and more damning argument against him.

Batya Ungar-Sargon is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer who teaches at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. 

Pro Palestinian Jews

This morning I watched 2 videos bearing the fruits of the Satmar anti Israel Hashkafa. They were featured in a Ynet article. To be clear, I realize that the Satmar Rebbe did not approve of such actions. But his hateful words about Zionism (even Religious Zionism) most definitely inspire the actions of his Neturei Karta followers.

These are people who support the objectives of Hamas: the destruction of the State of Israel. Using the same language as do Palestinians - calling Yom Ha’atzmaut the” Nakba” (day of catastrophe) – they spoke at a pro Palestinian rally yesterday. This anti Israel rhetoric was made to the sound of cheers from the crowd.  

Even if one agrees with his philosophy about dismantling the State of Israel because they believe it violates Halacha (i.e. the 3 oaths) for Jews to have their own government in the land of Israel before the advent of Moshaich, do they really think that dismantling it would be done at no cost to Jewish lives?

Do they really think that - with over a hundred years of indoctrination of the Arab people to think of Jews as Nazis – it is going to just end now in one big beautiful love fest? Do they think that all the Jews who live there now will be allowed to stay? Intact? In their homes? …and continue to live their lives as they do now under a benign Palestinian government?

If Israel were to relinquish their control of the land and give it ‘back’ to the Palestinians there would be a blood bath of major proportion. The Jewish people of Israel, including the remaining elderly survivors of the holocaust would be swept clean out of the country. Palestinians do not want a Jewish presence there of any kind.

Where are the 6 million Jews living in Israel going to go? Miami Beach?

I am beyond appalled by these people. The term useful idiots comes to mind. That is what they are. The term ‘useful idiot’ was coined in the 60s during the cold war between the former Soviet Union and the US. It referred to well intentioned people who used the same arguments made by the Soviets to oppose American policy with respect to them. Our enemies loved Americans who made their arguments for them.

Nerutei Karta may be well intentioned. But they are stupid beyond belief.

Are I-phones Really All that Bad?

Interesting take on the Charedi push to ban smart-phones. Very similar to my own view. I have always said that Charedi rabbinic leadership is right about what’s wrong with it. My only dispute has always been in how to handle it – and the fact that they are so consumed about what’s wrong with it that they ignore or discount what’s right with it. In any case the following Tablet article tells the story.

Had you ambled through some of Jerusalem’s more stringently Orthodox neighborhoods last month, you would have come across a slew of strongly worded pashkvilim—publicly posted ads informing the faithful of the latest rabbinic declamations—targeting a mighty foe: the smart phone. “They will bring about a spiritual Holocaust on all those who use them,” read one ad. Another, specifically targeting iPhones, called users of the world’s most coveted gadget impure beings who are “immersed in filth 24 hours a day and spawn their stench on all those around them.”

It’s easy for us moderns to laugh at such archaic language and portray the rabbis as addled reactionaries. But they aren’t wrong. Smart phones, now used by more than half of Americans, may not be as cataclysmic as Jerusalem’s bearded sages suggest, but their affect on our souls, largely unexamined, is far more detrimental than most of us care to admit.

The most damning argument against smart phones is also the most obvious one. “You’re holding a small device,” Rabbi Mordechai Bloy, the secretary of Israel’s Rabbinical Court, recently told a television interviewer, “and you make a touch here and a touch there, with an iPhone or an iPad or any smart phone, and just like that, he’s in another place. You can be in the synagogue, but you won’t really be there anymore.”

You needn’t stray further than a restaurant or a park to realize the merit of Rabbi Bloy’s claim; chances are you’ll see a good number of people sitting and staring into small screens, unaware of their surroundings and inattentive to their companions. With smart phones offering us the opportunity of communicating with an endless parade of absent friends and strangers—plus a windfall of distractions—we are rarely ever in the here and now: Some other place and time always beckons. 

Our technologies, as MIT professor Sherry Turkle suggested in her brilliant book Alone Together, determine the architecture of our intimacies; give us the capacity to replace the fear and wonder involved in unmediated human contact with controlled bursts of information, and we won’t be able to resist.

But the greatest calamity heralded by smart phones, perhaps, has to do not so much with how they’re used but with how they’re built. Use a computer to get online, and you are, to borrow Eric Raymond’s famous metaphor, in a bazaar. It’s noisy, chaotic, and full of seedy fellows trying to lure you into their dark corners, but it also allows you a tremendous amount of freedom. Consider the following: Most of what we do online involves using a graphic browser that enables us to surf from site to site; 76.3 percent of Americans use either Chrome or Firefox as their browser of choice; and both Firefox and Chrome are open-source browsers. This means that anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of programming can access the source code and apply it to make new and useful things. And HTML, the language with which websites are created, is simple and intuitive enough to allow almost anyone establish a presence online.

Smart phones, on the other hand, are cathedrals, confined spaces governed by a distinct hierarchy. They run apps, and apps are much more difficult to create, allow for no unsanctioned usage, and are sold through centralized and capital-intensive distribution systems tightly governed by the phones’ makers. Even if you possess the considerable skills required to create the next great app, you have to play by Apple’s rules to get it into the tens of millions of iPhones squirming in pockets across the country.

Such strictures make for a very different experience of interacting with technology; the evolution of electronic games is a case in point. As the gaming industry dawned, in the early 1980s, games were played on personal computers, and anyone could simply type a command and view the game’s code. If you were curious, you could mess around and rewrite it, run the program, and observe the changes, until you figured out what each line of code meant and did. This is how generations of nerds were introduced to computer programming. But their younger brothers and sisters weren’t so lucky: By the late 1980s, electronic gaming occurred mainly on video game consoles, which were walled gardens—unless you were an electrical engineer and could physically rip the box open and rewire it, you had no way of tweaking the content of the cartridges you fed into your Sega or Nintendo.

A similar thing is happening now with smart phones. Kids curious about how the machines work find themselves in a highly restricted environment governed by a handful of corporations. Fewer and fewer of them know the intense pleasures of learning by trial and error and inventing something new just for the heck of it. And if such an approach is detrimental for technological progress, it is also bad for the soul. The more we depend on smart phones as the organizing paradigms of our lives, the less control we have over how we communicate, consume information, and forge bonds with other humans.

The rabbis, then, have it right. Their reasons for banning smart phones may be different—they are primarily concerned that device owners will use them to access corrupting content like pornography—but their hearts are in the right place. We may not want to follow their advice and banish our iPhones altogether, but we should heed their warning and realize that our new shiny forms of connectedness come at a steep spiritual cost.

Two Honorable Men

There are two things that can be gleaned from the following story in the Forward. 1) Jack Lew is a walking Kiddush HaShem, and 2) The President truly respects Judaism and its practitioners. Here is the Forward article in its entirety:

When Jack Lew was appointed chief of staff to President Obama in January, many in the Jewish community wondered how he could observe Shabbat in such a demanding position.

Luckily, Lew has the most powerful man in the world to keep track of time as the sun starts to dip low in the sky on Friday afternoons.

“I saw the president on many occasions on Friday afternoons look at his watch, and ask: ‘Isn’t it time for you to get going?’” Lew said, “or, ‘Why are you still here?’ The president was not checking the clock “because he doesn’t think I can keep time,” Lew said. Rather, the extra care on this issue reflects the President’s wish “to remind me that it’s important to him, not just to me, that I be able to make that balance.”

Lew, who is Orthodox, revealed the details about his keeping Shabbat in an extraordinary interview with the Forward that touched on his need to observe the Jewish holy day.

“And he’s respected that time and again,” the chief of staff said of Obama.

The chief of staff noted it was Obama who brought up the issue of Shabbat when first offering Lew the job.

“He raised it with me saying: ‘I know that things are going to come up where there’s an emergency on Saturday or that you need to be here. I know you well enough to know that this is not an issue. I want you to know that I’m never going to ask you to work on Saturday if it’s not really necessary. It’s important for me that you know that.’”

On his behalf, Lew provided the President with his own assurances.

“I’ve made it clear,” Lew said, “that you don’t have to wonder if there’s a crisis whether I’m available. If you need me, I don’t even consider it a violation of my faith to be doing the things I need to do to make sure people are not in harm’s way.”

In practice, this arrangement has worked out well. On Fridays, Lew leaves the White House before Shabbat begins and he is off on Saturdays. In the cases where his presence was needed on Shabbat, the chief of staff usually walked to the White House and back.

Rabbis he consulted with assured Lew that when there is a real necessity, Jewish tradition approves of working on the Sabbath. The number of times Lew actually had to work in Saturday has been “limited,” he said.

Lew had dealt with the potential conflicts between observing Shabbat and working in top level positions under President Bill Clinton, when he served as the White House budget director. Clinton made sure not to have his top budget adviser busy from sundown Friday to the end of Saturday, and Lew made himself available when emergencies occurred.

“I have found that if you are true to your own beliefs, people respect it,” Lew said. “I’ve found that President Obama considers it a sign of strength and value that there is something in my life that reflects principles that I adhere to.” 

One Picture - 1000 Words

I can't think of a more fitting tribute to Rabbi Asher Lopatin and his goals at YCT than this picture of him speaking to Rabbi Yehoshua H. Eichenstein. His goal at YCT which he has been hired to lead is to make it more open - to the right. As I said in my own tribute to him on my main blog, if there is anyone who can do it, it is Asher Lopatin.

For more on this story read the JTA article on it. Here is an excerpt:

Lopatin says he wants to ground the students more firmly in Orthodoxy by exposing them to the “full Orthodox spectrum.” That includes, he said, exposure to and instruction from haredi Orthodox yeshiva leaders.

“When it comes to things like Gemarah and halachah and hashkafah and Tanach,” Lopatin said, using the Hebrew terms for Talmud, Jewish law, philosophy and Bible, “those are things that need to be taught fully, classically Orthodox. Those are the main meat and potatoes of smicha” – rabbinic ordination. 

This is a great goal and a change of direction sorely needed by YCT. Will it be enough to gain acceptance by the wider Orthodox community? Time will tell.

Filling a Void

This looks like a movie I want to see. In fact Fill the Void  may be a movie even Charedim may want to see. That's because it was made by a Charedi Jew - a woman by the name of Rama Burshtein (pictured). Which means that it probably adheres to Charedi standards of Tznius.

Most depictions of Orthodox Jews  end up as silly caricatures. Although we are depicted as good people - we  are also depicted as overly clumsy... or overly eccentric...  or ridiculously foolish or extremely naive. I guess that's the way non Jews or secular Jews see us. But director Burshtein knows what Orthodox Jews are really like since she is one of us. We are people. Not caricatures. That should mean that unlike other films where Orthodox Jews are featured we will get some realistic images and scenarios here.

One of the pluses of this film is that it seems to be getting some good reviews from mainstream reviewers like the one in the entertainment industry rag, Variety. Hopefully this means a bit wider distribution than is ordinarily the case. which means that more people will see it and see us in a more accurate light. And that is a hood thing... and about time it happened.

Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik at the RNC

I can't say I'm surprised. But I sure am proud to say I know him. From the Associated Press (AP) via VIN:

An Orthodox rabbi from New York City’s Yeshiva University has been chosen to give the invocation at the opening session of the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik (Soh-loh-VAY’-chick) said Monday that it is an extraordinary privilege to deliver Tuesday’s invocation. He said he has been teaching courses about the connection between Jewish ideas and American democracy and that makes it all the more meaningful.

Soloveichik is the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva. He is also associate rabbi at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun (Kuh-HEEL’-ath JESH’-uhr-run ) in New York.

The head of New York’s Roman Catholic Archdiocese, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, has been chosen to give the benediction on the night Mitt Romney accepts the Republican presidential nomination.