‘And For The Sin Of Silence’

Will the Orthodox Union ever do teshuva for its role in the Baruch Lanner scandal?

In the hands of those we trust: Child safety organizations emphasize the importance of creating safe environments and providing education to prevent abuse.

Dear Reader,

We are in the season of teshuva (repentance), as the Hebrew month of Elul gives way to Tishrei and the High Holy Days. More than any other time of year, this is a moment for individuals and institutions alike to engage in self-reflection, acknowledge shortcomings and commit to better practices. 

It is in this spirit that Between The Lines is posting two pieces here. 

First is this poignant and heartfelt essay by Judy Klitsner, an internationally renowned Jewish educator. In it she calls on the most prominent Orthodox Jewish organization in America to take responsibility for decades of silent complicity regarding the sexual abuse of scores, if not hundreds, of children in its charge over a period of more than three decades.

The second piece – my news report, below – follows up on responses, and non-responses, to Klitsner’s essay and to the three steps she has urged the Union of Orthodox Congregations (OU) to take on the path to teshuva.

As always, I welcome your feedback, and encourage you to share these pieces with friends and colleagues.

Thank you for your support, and I wish each of you a  new year of renewed hope and faith – and brighter horizons.

Shanah Tovah,

Gary

Why We Sued The Orthodox Union For Its Role In A Sexual Abuse Scandal

A three-step call for the OU to make amends for its past actions and inactions.

Judy Klitsner

I am one of several women who recently sued the Union of Orthodox Congregations of America. My fellow litigants and I made use of a brief “lookback” window in which the statute of limitations for sexual abuse of minors was lifted in the states of New York and New Jersey. 

Our lawsuit, which has now resulted in a settlement with the OU, was based on the abuses we, as teenagers decades ago, experienced at the hands of Baruch Lanner, an Orthodox rabbi who as director of regions for the OU’s national youth group, NCSY, worked with and supervised teenagers for more than 30 years. 

Why would we bring a case against a major Orthodox Jewish organization, famed for its trusted supervision of kosher products and whose current leaders weren’t in any way involved at the time of the abuse and coverup? The sad truth is that the OU enabled a sexually aggressive, manipulative, and violent figure to prey freely on many hundreds of vulnerable, trusting teenagers over the course of the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Without the OU’s silent complicity— its sustained refusal to heed the glaring red flags raised by Lanner’s behavior and its refusal to respond to the many warnings it received from this group of litigants and many others— Baruch Lanner’s disastrous abuse would simply not have been possible.  

It is hard to overlook the irony of the world’s most reliable symbol of kashrut supervision failing to extend its supervision to its own chosen youth director. This prolonged, willful failure left us, and countless others, defenseless in the face of Lanner’s habitual patterns of grooming, sadistic psychological manipulations, and sustained violent and sexual assaults.  

We brought our lawsuit because, on the OU’s watch, enormous harm was caused to a great many people. And although ultimately, Lanner was tried, convicted of child sex abuse, and sent to prison for his crimes, to this day the organization itself has offered no unambiguous admission of responsibility or guilt, nor has it made any attempt at true restorative justice. 

From the 1970s until today, although the OU has changed leadership numerous times, the organization’s silence has been a constant. The OU’s leaders were silent throughout the decades of Lanner’s abusive employment, and they remained defensively silent in the aftermath of the public scandal prompted by Gary Rosenblatt’s courageous investigative expose in The Jewish Week more than 24 years ago. (See “Stolen Innocence”)

The OU’s silence persisted even after a commission of inquiry – which the organization’s leaders themselves appointed – delivered its damning findings about the OU’s failures. The group’s leaders made sure that the full findings were never released to the public. Today’s silence is but an organic extension of those earlier silences, and it implicates the OU’s current leaders along with those of its past.

A Violation Of Jewish Values

It bears noting that in recent years, leaders of other major Jewish denominations have recognized their responsibility for the historic crimes of their institutions and have sought to make amends by following the dictates of a traditional teshuvah process. Non-Orthodox Jewish streams have far exceeded the rabbis of the Orthodox Union in heeding that call of Jewish values and Jewish law. 

Tragically, throughout the years, whenever the OU’s leaders briefly broke their silence, it was to speak in the cautious language of liability and not in the traditional language of teshuvah and Jewish ethics. Instead of an explicit, itemized admission of institutional wrongdoing and a solemn, detailed undertaking to correct past errors, we heard only the evasive non-admissions instructed by the organization’s many lawyers. For example, the OU expressed its “distress that behavior like this could have occurred within [their] organization,” while vaguely apologizing for “suffering these young people suffered as a result of Rabbi Lanner’s actions.”

Unable to get the attention of the OU in the language of Jewish tradition, we decided to speak to them through the language of the American court system. Sadly, as has been documented by Professor Timothy Lytton in his book, Holding Bishops Accountable: How Lawsuits Helped the Catholic Church Confront Clergy Sexual Abuse, the only proven engine of change in religious institutions has been the financial consequences of lawsuits. In observing the OU’s behavior over the years, we applied Professor Lytton’s thesis to our situation. We concluded that to induce the OU to do better in the future, we would need to get their full attention by suing them for damages. 

Three Steps Toward Teshuvah

Now that all the formal proceedings are behind us, here are three steps, with their roots in Jewish values and tradition, that we propose to the leaders of the OU for making amends:

First, we call on them to deliver a long-overdue viduy (public confession) in which, with detailed itemization and without qualification, they assume responsibility for, and ownership of, their actions and their disastrous inaction. 

Second, we call on the OU to commit to creating a better future (kabbalah le-atid) by following the lead of many other Jewish institutions in working with an established anti-abuse organization (whether external to, or from within, the Jewish community) to conduct a full assessment and to ensure ongoing compliance with best practices.  Such an alliance, which goes far beyond the employ of lawyers, would help the OU work proactively and systematically to prevent abuse within its ranks and to address abuse effectively and with transparency should it occur.  

Third, we call on the OU to extend these efforts to its many affiliates, taking moral responsibility for the public’s safety even when technicalities and legalities might allow the organization to turn a blind eye to situations that leave the public unprotected. 

Toward Greater Safety In The Future

We did not undertake this lawsuit lightly. We knew when we began that we would face years of personal discomfort and pain, and that the process would consume valuable time. We knew that some would question our motives, even to the point of suspecting vengeance or avarice. But we decided to move forward in the hopes of bequeathing greater safety to our grandchildren and to the generations to follow. Although the Jewish world, along with the wider world around us, has made important strides in child protection in recent decades, we are still far from creating a culture of safety for every precious soul that enters our domain. As Orthodox women, our profound wish is to see our Orthodox institutions serve as positive role models in enacting that essential culture shift. 

For decades, we watched as the OU violated the biblical prohibition of “do not stand idly by while your neighbor’s blood is being spilled“ (lo ta’amod al dam re’echa). Our fervent hope is that the OU will now, at long last, eschew silence and inaction and embrace, through word and deed, our most sublime Jewish values. We call upon the OU to reach beyond that which is technically legal, toward the Torah’s greater standard of doing what is “right” and “good” (ve-asita ha-yashar ve-ha-tov). We pray for a day when lawsuits are no longer necessary, when we are all united in building toward the Torah’s ultimate challenge: “ve-haya machanecha kadosh,” may your camp, in which every human being is protected and safe, be holy.

Judy Klitsner, a contemporary Bible scholar, author and public speaker, holds the Joshua Bakst Chair in Tanakh at the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. She is the founding board chair of Sacred Spaces, an organization that seeks systematically to address abuse in Jewish organizations. While other litigants in this case have expressed many of the views expressed above, the author takes sole responsibility for her words. 

No Response From The Orthodox Union

But victims and others support Judy Klitsner’s call to action. 

Gary Rosenblatt

The leaders of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations (OU), the most prominent organization of its kind in the country, have chosen not to respond to Judy Klitsner’s call for the organization to do teshuva (repent) for actions and inactions in its past handling of sexual abuse allegations. 

In her essay (above), posted in this season of reflection and repentance, Klitsner, a prominent Bible scholar and Jewish educator, urged the OU to take responsibility for decades of silent complicity regarding the abuse of children for more than 30 years at the hands of Baruch Lanner. An Orthodox rabbi and educator, he was a leading official of OU’s youth group, the National Conference of Synagogue Youth (NCSY), working with and supervising teenagers for more than 30 years.

The scandal first came to light when a Jewish Week investigative report I wrote in 2000 detailed charges against Lanner by more than a dozen former NCSY members. It led to his arrest and conviction for criminal sexual contact and child endangerment; he was sentenced to seven years in prison, served nearly three years and was released on parole in early 2008. 

Klitsner was one of several women who, as victims of Lanner as long as 50 years ago, reached a settlement with the OU this summer. The women had sued the OU in November 2021, making use of a brief “lookback” window, lifting the statute of limitations for sexual abuse of minors in New York and New Jersey, allowing them to come forward and sue their abusers and enablers. The suit charged the OU with negligence and failing to  protect children — that instead the organization protected itself by ignoring or dismissing complaints about Lanner’s “willful, malicious and wanton” actions, in the words of the suit, for decades.

As a 16-year-old NCSY member in New Jersey in the 1970s, Klitsner sought to rebuff Lanner’s attempts to kiss and caress her, she noted in the initial Jewish Week report. “He began to strangle me with all his strength,” she recalled, “and it wasn’t until he saw that I was losing consciousness that he threw me down and walked away.” She added that when she later told Lanner, who was in his mid-20s at the time, that she would tell his supervisor of the incident, he laughed and said his supervisor already knew of his behavior. 

Other women and men interviewed in the initial report had similar stories of sexual, physical, psychological and verbal abuse, and said their appeals at the time to NCSY rabbis and leaders were ignored or dismissed.

Much positive change has taken place in the Jewish community over the last 24 years. Awareness of child abuse is widespread, as are written protocols regarding child safety and protection, including those established by NCSY. But there are those who feel that systemic cultural change is still required in the Orthodox community, including the OU, which, as Klitsner notes in her essay, “to this day has offered no unambiguous admission of responsibility or guilt, nor has it made any attempt at true restorative justice.”

After the settlement was finalized, she reached out to tell me that she had written an essay, motivated by the feeling that she and other victims share that the OU’s ongoing silence over the decades “implicates” the organization’s “current leaders along with those of the past.” (She did not divulge to me the names of the other litigants and did not discuss any details of the settlement or the process that led to it.) I agreed to post her essay here and offered to write this report, seeking responses to Klitsner’s message from the OU leadership as well as former Lanner victims, communal leaders, and experts on dealing with abuse in the Jewish community.

Several days ago I emailed Rabbis Moshe Hauer and Joshua Joseph, who as executive vice presidents of the OU are the organization’s professional leaders. I wrote that I was seeking comment on Klitsner’s proposal that the organization take three steps toward teshuva, based on Jewish values and tradition. Those steps, as I noted to them, are: 

. offer “a long-overdue viduy (public confession), taking “responsibility for, and ownership of, their actions and their disastrous inaction”;

. “commit to creating a better future (kabbalah le-atid)” … by “working with an established anti-abuse organization … “to assure ongoing compliance with best practices” and be “an alliance which goes far beyond the employ of lawyers”;

. “extend these efforts to the OU’s many affiliates, taking moral responsibility for the public’s safety even when technicalities and legalities might allow the organization to turn a blind eye to situations that leave the public unprotected.”

A day later I received a brief email reply from the OU’s chief marketing officer, which included a link to NCSY’s Child Protection Policies and this one sentence: “The Orthodox Union does not comment on active litigation.”  In fact, though, as I pointed out to the rabbis and marketing officer in a follow-up email and voice message, the settlement with the women was final; there is no “active litigation.” 

I did not hear back from them.

The apparent takeaway is that, consistent with a decades-long pattern – and the core of Klitsner’s and the other women’s grievance – the OU remains silent, no doubt more swayed by the advice of their current attorneys (in avoiding potential financial harm to the organization) than the wisdom of rabbinic sages who called for justice and compassion in upholding Jewish law and ethics.

“Unfortunately, the OU has responded no differently than the Catholic church or the Boy Scouts of America did,” avoiding accepting responsibility for the harm caused to young victims of abuse, said a noted psychologist who deals with the issue in the Orthodox community. “It’s the classic approach,” he said ruefully.

OU Said No, Rabbis Said Yes

There was a time, though, when the OU was responsive to an effort by a small, ad hoc group within the Orthodox community seeking to upgrade and standardize child protection and abuse prevention policies for synagogues and other organizations by loosening the organizational grip. Rabbi Yosef Blau, who was spiritual adviser to students at Yeshiva University for many years and is an outspoken advocate for victims of sexual abuse in the community, was part of the group. He said it was formed in 2015 at the request of the rabbi of a large Orthodox congregation on Long Island. Another member said the group met several times with the OU about joining the project, and that the OU even paid for some outside professional guidance. Both he and Rabbi Blau recalled, though, that several years later the OU, under new leadership, decided not to participate in the project on the advice of their attorneys.

The group then took its project to the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), a membership organization, affiliated with the OU, for Orthodox rabbis. It adopted the protocols and has distributed them to all of their members. A psychologist who helped form the ad hoc group said two different RCA rabbis have consulted with him about issues they faced in their congregations and found the protocols “very helpful.” 

One apparent difference between the 17-page OU’s NCSY Child Protection Policies and the RCA’s 36-page Child Protection Policies is that the NCSY document says questions about whether or not to report abuse allegations should go through the organization’s general counsel. The RCA protocol in that situation is to contact the police or the appropriate law enforcement agency. Many child protection activists prefer the latter approach so as to avoid the possibility, or even the appearance, of in-house attorneys stifling potentially embarrassing situations for the organization. 

The RCA has been on record for many years in protecting the “physical safety and the spiritual integrity of our community.” An RCA statement in 2013 asserted that “there is an unequivocal halachic and moral obligation for everyone, victim and community member alike, to report all reasonable suspicions of child abuse to the civil authorities.” 

No Apologies

Four women victims I spoke with in recent days said they were more upset at the behavior of the OU than at Lanner, who they felt was psychologically troubled. They expressed hurt feelings that, besides being dismissed or rejected at the time they made complaints about Lanner’s behavior decades ago, they have never received a personal note or phone call from a lay or professional OU leader to inquire about their physical or mental health. “What would it cost to say ‘we’re sorry,’ even afterwards,” said Laya Silber, who was smacked so hard in the face by Lanner when she was 18 that he nearly broke her jaw. “It saddens me that it took a lawsuit for them [OU leaders] to respond, because they were forced to.” (Silber was not eligible to be a litigant in the lawsuit, according to the terms of the “lookback” window.)

Several of the women spoke of feeling less connected to their faith as a result of their experience. Naomi Freistat, who was 15 when Lanner punched her in the stomach after she rejected his attempts to kiss her, said she still keeps Shabbat. “But I have nothing to do with organized religion and religious organizations. And I don’t trust rabbis,” she said. “It makes me sad.” She would have abuse victims consult with trained professionals rather than rabbis, and she advocates for women playing a more significant role in OU decision-making.

One woman echoed Klitsner’s ironic observation that the OU, known internationally for its reliable symbol of kosher food, was, as she put it, “not trustworthy when it comes to protecting children. There’s more to the idea of kosher – labeling something as suitable or appropriate – than food.” 

Marcie Lenk, a professor of Jewish texts who as a teen was harassed and embarrassed by Lanner’s lewd comments about her body, pointed out that the OU’s own 2000 commission of inquiry confirmed The Jewish Week’s allegations and created a private document that has never been made public. Consistent rumors say it dealt with inappropriate financial connections between Lanner and OU/NCSY staff and lay leaders. “As long as there is still a cover-up, the OU remains an institution not to be trusted,” said Lenk, who was not eligible to be a litigant in the women’s suit.

How can the community play a role in reducing abuse and ensuring that abuse victims are heard? Rabbi Blau said that abuse victims deserve proof that the OU has learned its lesson, and that it should adopt and promote the three steps Judy Klitsner described in her essay. One woman I spoke to said that “if institutions had moral courage, they’d say to victims, ‘We [current leaders] weren’t here at the time but that’s no excuse. What can we do to make you feel whole?’” Others suggested the OU should hold a conference on teshuva regarding abuse and begin by offering a full and detailed apology for the past and a plan for the future. 

“We are still hurting because when we as teens spoke out about Lanner, our words were rejected,” says Marcie Lenk. “We were called rebels or liars by those we wanted to trust us and protect us. They didn’t hear us,” she said. “But God heard us.”

For Judy Klitsner and her fellow litigants, the hope is that in the wake of their lawsuit and settlement, the current leaders of the OU will, at long last, hear them, too.