ReasonableMatic
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“Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg—who is 63 with a long, graying beard—recently sat down with me to explain what he described as a "child-rape assembly line"
among sects of fundamentalist Jews.
He cleared his throat. "I'm going to be graphic," he said.
A member of Brooklyn's Satmar Hasidim fundamentalist branch of Orthodox Judaism, Nuchem designs and repairs mikvahs in compliance with Torah Law. The mikvah is a ritual Jewish bathhouse used for purification.
Devout Jews are required to cleanse themselves in the mikvah on a variety of occasions:
Women must visit following menstruation, and men have to make an appearance before the High Holidays, such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Many of the devout also purify themselves before and after the act of sex and before the Sabbath.
On a visit to Jerusalem in 2005,
Rabbi Rosenberg entered into a mikvah in one of the holiest neighborhoods in the city, Mea She'arim.
"I opened a door that entered into a schvitz," he told me. "Vapors everywhere, I can barely see. My eyes adjust, and I see an old man, my age, long white beard, a holy-looking man, sitting in the vapors.
On his lap, facing away from him, is a boy, maybe seven years old. And the old man is having anal sex with this boy."
The child sex abuse crisis in ultra-Orthodox Judaism,
like that in the Catholic Church,
has produced its share of shocking headlines in recent years.
In New York, and in the prominent Orthodox communities of Israel and London, allegations of child molestation and rape have been rampant.
The alleged abusers are schoolteachers,
rabbis, fathers, uncles—figures of male authority.
The victims, like those of Catholic priests, are mostly boys. Rabbi Rosenberg believes around half of young males
in Brooklyn's Hasidic community
—the largest in the United States and one of the largest in the world—
have been victims of sexual assault perpetrated by their elders. Ben Hirsch, director of Survivors for Justice, a Brooklyn organization that advocates for Orthodox sex abuse victims, thinks the real number is higher.
"From anecdotal evidence, we're looking at over 50 percent. It has almost become a rite of passage."
Vice article link: The Child-Rape Assembly Line
SCUST!!!
