Is there anything the American Jewish community can learn from the turmoil currently engulfing the Roman Catholic Church?
The answer to that troubling question is, unfortunately, a qualified yes.
While the specter of clergymen sexually molesting children is currently most closely identified with Catholicism, it is by no means limited to that body, nor to any religion, including Judaism. Witness the sentencing this week of Rabbi Baruch Lebovits of Brooklyn for eight counts of sexual abuse.
The Jewish community in all its branches has already seen its own share of such horrific stories in recent years. The plague of pedophilia, and other abuse, has not spared the Jewish world.
The fact that we know of such cases is ironically encouraging. This bears witness to the fact that victims of sexual abuse are, however slowly, beginning to step forward and testify, and that the legal system is beginning at last to deal with those who perpetrate such crimes.
Yet we remain dissatisfied with the level of interest that the Jewish religious leadership itself has shown regarding the issue. Additional measures can be taken to help facilitate the reporting of alleged abuse, the fair investigation of such allegations and if warranted the prosecution of the perpetrators of sexual molestation.
More troubling still is a code of silence that continues to exist in some quarters of the religious Jewish community, a code which seems not only to seek to protect accused perpetrators (and, by implication, to enable them to continue their predation), but to ensure that the subject remains invisible and unspoken.
If Jews can learn anything from the current Catholic and Vatican imbroglio regarding sexual abuse, it is that the denial of such unpleasant truths, or the effort to sweep them under the rug, is the worst possible course to take.
