Tzedek-Tzedek

[David Morris: I was approached by an adult survivor of child sex-abuse, and asked if I would be willing to publish this. I considered not publishing, because the imagery is so shocking, particularly to the Jewish orthodox sensitivities I share. On reflection, I think the lesson of this piece is that, in the same way a victim's anger must be directed (solely) to the perpetrator and his enablers, so our shock must be directed solely to the violation, and not to the healing process]  SURVIVING and HEALING From childhood sexual abuse Part one Anger is an important part of healing.    Survivors of childhood sexual abuse blame themselves for what happened.    This belief causes a tremendous amount of shame and is one of the reasons why they often never disclose the abuse.    The following piece may shock the reader.    The visualization exercise of going back in time to the place where the abuse happened and placing the anger and respons...

You'll excuse the comparison, because the alleged crimes are very different, but the inability of the international legal system in over twenty years to bring Abraham Mondrowitz to justice, reminds me of the failure to bring John Demjanjuk to justice. In both cases, the international legal system, involving extraditions (Israel, USA) and the abject failures of courts on both sides of the Atlantic to deliver justice, have only delivered humiliation for all those who fight for a victim's right to see justice done, and to have the chance to attempt closure, even decades later. According to The Awareness Center's file on Mondrowitz , he was born in Tel Aviv in 1947 and later moved with his family to Chicago . He is the son of a prominent rabbi.  In the late 1970's Mondrowitz moved to Brooklyn , NY and in the late 1970s presented himself to Orthodox educational institutions as a rabbi and clinical psychologist. While in New York Mondrowitz provided psychological trea...

A woman aged over thirty, recalled for the first time during therapy that she was sexually abused as a child by her father, and a Haifa court has now found the father guilty of child sex crimes, all these years later. Expert witnesses explained to the court that ‘forgetting’ a trauma is a common self-protection response in abuse victims a condition called dissociative amnesia. This is symptomatic in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Our brains apparently have an ‘erase’ button, which can delete painful memories, as a means of preserving functionality. I suppose it’s a bit like a doctor’s decision to sever a gangrenous limb, to save a patient’s life. As a post-traumatic response, the brain shuts down some memory, and otherwise continues functioning normally. The reason this case is an important precedent is: 1. The long time (20 years) between the abuse events and the court case; 2. The long period during which the events were forgotten by the victim; 3. The reliance on one wi...

Motty & Mali Borger had been married for just two days when Motti “fell” from a seventh-floor balcony at the Avenue Plaza Hotel on 13 th  Avenue at 47 th  Street in Brooklyn , NY . It is reported that Motty had disclosed to his new bride that he was a victim of sex abuse, and that when she was asleep, he went to the balcony and threw himself off. I have no idea as to the veracity of the reports about the background to the Motty Borger case. We should clearly leave the investigation to the police and relevant authorities, while encouraging anyone with information related to the case to report it immediately to the police.  What is certain, is that the effects of child-abuse often have long term impact upon the victims/survivors, resulting in severe psychological, psychiatric and physical illness even decades later; and there are many cases in which abuse victims have tragically resorted to suicide. Indeed there is initial research which indicates that...

By A Guest Writer - A Survivor of Abuse I was one of those “kids at risk” who went off the derech and no one could figure out why. I was from a chashuv family. I was a good kid, a quiet kid. I had everything going for me. My grandfather was a Rosh Yeshiva. No one knew, or wanted to know, that for years I was molested in the yeshiva by my grandfather the Rosh Yeshiva and also by some of his students. One of those students was my father. When I tried to talk about it no one believed me. They said I was crazy. They said I was lying. They said I was saying it to get attention. (I could think many better, less painful, ways that I could have gotten attention!) They said I had a memory problem. They said I had a “vendetta” against my father. They said everything they could think of to try to discredit me and to avoid the truth. They were in denial. What's unusual about my story is not that I was molested by frum yeshiva bochurim and a Rosh Yeshiva. Child sexual abuse knows no social or r...