Holy Hypocrites?

BERGER, JOSEPH

Holy hypocrites? A recent spate of Orthodox Jewish crime leads to intense soul searching. JOSEPH BERGER Though the definition of a has id is laced with numerous historical and philosophical...

...Why would a Jewish family want to pay the full measure of taxes or turn over a son to the army when the government of the Czar or Stalin was blatantly oppressing Jews...
...Gerald Shargel, a defense lawyer in the New Square case, says people in the community take a measured view of the convictions because "unlike the garden variety fraud case, you didn't have people lining their pockets or building trophy houses or driving around in luxury cars...
...Much of these activities were designed to address the extent of poverty in a community caused by raising many children and the emphasis given to religious studies...
...The prosecution of individuals alienates the community...
...The trial, which ended with his conviction, revealed that both husband and wife had at times used cocaine...
...He was only trying to help the yeshiva, they said...
...Once enrolled, the young men would qualify for suite and federal tuition grants of as much as S2,400 a year as well as other forms of living assistance...
...We've allowed ourselves sometimes to rationalize these unfortunate trends in our community as being perhaps misdeeds that still help people survive or make it economically...
...Yes, the village's young men had eschewed college education I because it would have forced them to mingle with the treacherous secular world...
...Rabbi Mahir Reiss, one of those convicted in the case, got 27 months in jail and a $6.3 million fine...
...Still, there was considerable embarrassment within the village...
...Thousands of Jews who had escaped the Nazi onslaught by fleeing to Russia forged documents so they could gain entrance to the United States...
...For 20 years, prosecutors charged, at least 59 Hasidic housewives had received $6 million in federal funds earmarked for remedial education...
...According to a complaint filed in Federal Court in Manhattan, Schick responded to allegations by saying, "I'm a wicked person...
...What I seem to be seeing is [a] rather brazen quality of defiance in the Hasidic community that they have the right to trump whatever law is not consistent with their community's need," she says...
...But in the wake of a federal jury's conviction of four Hasidim in the Judaic studies scheme—three of them from New-Square—comments were far more candid...
...Meanwhile, the young Skverer scholars would get to study with considerable financial support...
...There have been many expressions of shame or at least deep concern about how these public sins appear to the Jewish and gentile worlds...
...So people on the street speculated that the administrator of the main Bobover yeshiva, Mesivta Eitz Chaim, could not have been aware that the money was drug related and must have thought he was merely helping someone evade taxes or onerous banking rules...
...They have one moral standard within die tribe and one moral standard outside the tribe," says an Orthodox rabbi who requested anonymity...
...The attitude of Jewish law toward secular law is ambiguous...
...The fact is, many Orthodox commentators say, the incidence of crimes in the Hasidic community is still negligible...
...Congress, still heavily influenced by anti-immigrant and sometimes anti-Jewish sentiments, managed to write a refugee bill that effectively denied immigration to any Jews who had spent time in the Soviet Union, a group that included many I holocaust survivors...
...There's a need to survive, and the survival instinct sometimes blurs rules and regulations that one may regard as technical...
...But when the person is a Hasid, somewhere in the story it will usually come out, and that's the reality...
...There is a sense that they've been subject to a double standard of prosecution," adds Rabbi Mayer Schiller, spokesman for the Skverer and a Yeshiva University teacher...
...In general, our community has been identified as cutting corners and being sharp, and that is in part an instinct ingrained in us socially through all the years of living in the ghettoes under an authority that was not democratic and where you couldn't survive according to the rules of the game...
...There may be another factor that helps explain the scandals, one that has infected other religious minorities...
...That is why a Hatzolab ambulance will answer calls from non-Jews as well as Jews, even on the Sabbath...
...In Cincinnati, Ohio, Rabbi Jacob Lustig was charged with felony theft after underreporting bingo proceeds in 1996 and 1997...
...The women were paid for teaching remedial reading students at Beis Rachel—but they never actually taught any classes...
...David Zweibel, executive vice president for government and public-affairs of Agudath Israel of America, says a mentality may have been inherited from the European ghettoes, where "survival was predicated in part on bribing the authorities and smuggling things past the authorities...
...Interviews among the Skverer Hasidim, for example, suggest a widespread feeling that the community's misdeeds (taking federal tuition assistance for specious courses) arose from technical violations—the interpretation of "academic course," "class," "teacher," and "assistance...
...In 1996 a 35-year-old Hasidic father of seven from the heavily Orthodox hamlet of Monsey, New York, was arrested for attempted murder after he beat his estranged wile unconscious with a hammer...
...If that wasn't shame enough, in February 1999 a Hasidic man in Borough Park was convicted of first-degree rape and sexual abuse for molesting his daughter...
...When entire occupations were closed to Jews, cutting corners was often the only way to make a living...
...Back in the early 1990s, much of the Hasidic world was consumed by a kidnapping case...
...No one called him the Conservative Jew...
...We believe very strongly that nobody pocketed any money," a Hasid named Henry Braun said...
...And the cases are not limited to New-York...
...Naturally, there has been a welter of defensive responses—accusations against prosecutors of bias and anti-Semitism and accusations that the media have been hyping stories about otherwise prosaic vices only because they involve broad-bearded, dark-suited men...
...They talk of the hubris that comes to even modest people with exposure to wealth and power, and they mention the tortured justifications that take place when an entire community lives on the economic edge...
...Whenever [the non-observant commentators] see anything done, they point the fingers right away and blow it out of proportion to prove that the Orthodox community is not ethical, [and] is not following the commandments," says Rabbi Frankel...
...Sometimes the talmudic reasoning can be stretched so far it amounts to casuistry to justify an obvious wrong...
...Imagine then the embarrassment that has regularly been rippling through the American Jewish community as it reads headline after headline about Hasidim and other strictly Orthodox persons being hauled off to court, or jail, for sordid crimes from laundering drug money, sexually abusing children, and kidnapping to bribery, theft of government money, and even attempted murder...
...Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, leader of a small Hasidic sect, was eventually sentenced in 1994 to 4 to 12 years for taking a teenager, Shai Fhima Reuven, away from his mother...
...Once in America, it became easy to cultivate a cavalier disposition toward legal niceties...
...But the largest challenge is to see how we address some of the underlying causes of desperation...
...They point out that Hasidim are as vulnerable to temptation as everyone else...
...In assessing the scandals, many Orthodox leaders feel the non-Orthodox world enlarges and spins these stories to make them something they are not—examples of greed and sharp dealing—because it despises the air of self-righteousness that the Orthodox carry about them in the pursuit of their distinctive lifestyle...
...Hasidim are judged by a more harsh standard than are the president and administrators of Harvard, Stanford, and NYU," wrote Lewin in an article for the Jewish Press (New York) in April...
...Perhaps even more embarrassing to Borough Park residents was an unrelated case in which the bank accounts of the local Bobover yeshiva were used to launder $1.75 million of what turned out to be Colombian cocaine money...
...Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Reform movement's congregational arm, called Rabbi Frankel's conduct a chillul Hasheni (desecration of God's name) because it was such a "profound embarrassment for the Jewish community...
...the boy's mother claimed he was brainwashed...
...The village's young men could enroll in a new Judaic studies program that the college—looking for new sources of revenue and also heavily reliant, in the goodwill of local politicians—was starting...
...They view the taking of public money as not that bad," says one rabbi speaking on the condition of anonymity...
...The council's leader was charged with funneling public dollars for the yeshiva tuition of his children...
...There would be courses in the Bible—something most colleges offer, though these could be in Hebrew—and even classes in the biological principles of kosher slaughter...
...Some articles and sermons even question the wisdom of Hasidic immersion in politics and suggest a return to insularity and isolation...
...steal from him, but they may cut comers here or there because their view is so inner-centered they lose sensitivity toward the outsider...
...These activities were not motivated by individual greed or criminal intent to line one's pockets," he says...
...It's time to rethink our ways...
...One scholar notes that a Jew is under no halachic obligation to return a lost possession of a gentile but must do so for a Jew...
...The relations have become so warm in Rockland County, home of the Hasidic centers of Monsey and New Square, that when Hasidic leaders marry off a son or daughter, the guests often include the gentile county executive and gentile legislators and judges...
...There has also been much gloating by more secular Jews who are tickled to see some of their Orthodox brethren unmasked as hypocrites...
...Their theories, complex and subtle, would make for a fine doctoral dissertation...
...But this program, the college officials promised, would mostly entail independent study with mentors, precisely the kind of study New Square men had traditionally done...
...In Williamsburg, New York, the sell of the ultrapious Satmar Hasidim, Rabbi Hertz Frankel, the principal for secular studies of the Beis Rachel yeshiva for girls, pleaded guilty in April to federal charges of conspiracy...
...That may have left an imprint on the Orthodox psyche," Zweibel says...
...What is going on here...
...Politicians have come to know that by capturing the blessings of a few Hasidic leaders they can virtually guarantee the votes of the entire community—one whose members can be as assiduous about turning out at the polls as about buying shmira matzos on Passover...
...The rabbi's lawyers contended Shai voluntarily fled a dysfunctional family...
...That case awaits trial...
...In spite of the fact that we should be at a higher standard, the reality is that everybody is all too human," said Hikind, the assemblyman who escaped conviction in the Borough Park scandal...
...People are tempted to do things they should not do...
...But beyond the criticism, the spate of scandals over the past few years has mostly touched off a campaign of intense soul-searching among American Jews—not the least of it on the streets and in the synagogues of Orthodox neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Borough Park...
...Participating in the distribution of drugs would be a grave sin indeed...
...Young men swaying over a page of Talmud, they argued, can magically transform into college students studying Judaic studies at Rockland County Community College...
...In the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, New York, where European remnants of the Gerer, Bobover, Belzer and other sects have built the largest Orthodox neighborhood in the United States, local assemblyman Dov Hikind, a yarmulke-wearing Jew, and executives of the neighborhood's major Jewish community council, were charged with bribery and theft for misappropriating $300,000 of government money...
...They felt justified in taking government money for such an untraditional program of study because they knew the government was financing other untraditional programs of study: If a school of hypnosis could receive government funding, why not a beis midrash...
...A few months later, Bernard Freilich, a prominent rabbi, was charged with witness tampering for purportedly making death threats against the daughter so that she would not testify against her father...
...You are trying to get money to allow people to study Torah and support a community (that] is independent and doesn't burden the public school system, [thereby] saving the state and municipal government money...
...An attitude developed that whatever we can get from them is giving them back their due," Stern says...
...We shouldn't get the idea that these people are lawless...
...Federal prosecutors, the Skverer argue, chose to pursue these violations even though violations of similar gravity—inflated federal reimbursements for research costs—were prosecuted civilly when discovered at institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and New York University...
...Have the Hasidim absorbed the insular, sinister scruples of another immigrant subculture, the Mafia, without the violence...
...In the despotic, anti-Semitic regimes of prewar Poland, Hungary, and Stalinist Russia, the government was often seen as the enemy...
...The government and New Square together ought to address the root economic problems," he says...
...Very often this will go along with [the] rationale 'we're paying taxes and we don't use the public school system, so we're saving the government money.' "The other part of it is they tend to have a disdainful view of the non-Jew, his life, his institutions...
...After the Holocaust, the U.S...
...Hikind, who helped pass bills that sent hundreds of thousands of dollars of state funds to the community council, was acquitted of receiving a $45,000 bribe, but one council official pleaded guilty and another, Rabbi Elimelech Naiman, was convicted of making payoffs to Hikind...
...These officials have gradually become conversant with arcane rituals like the wedding songs of the badkin, or jester, drat are unknown to most secular Jews...
...Scholars say there are passages that insist that the law of the land is the law for Jews as well, and that a Jew cannot perform actions that generate animosity among non-Jews...
...By the early 1990s, federal prosecutors in the office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District in New York started getting serious...
...What irks such sensible commentators as Zweibel of Agudath Israel of America, is that careful distinctions are abandoned in the rush to condemnation...
...The college would not only get the tuition money, but also curry favor with local politicians dependent on Hasidic votes...
...When I visited New Square shortly after the indictments, there was universal support for those charged...
...from Sikhs in California who demand the right to walk into schools carrying concealed knives because of their code of honor, and from churchgoers in Texas who argue they can tear down their own historic building because their right to practice religion supersedes the city's preservation laws...
...The temptation to exploit the government is particularly irresistible because politicians and politically canny government officials fall over themselves to throw aid at Hasidic communities...
...People are very sensitive to the question of chillul Hashem, and people feel bad that the non-Orthodox world thinks the Orthodox world is, God forbid, stealing," says Rabbi Schiller, the New Square spokesman...
...They cite the sociological legacy of the Hasidim and other fervently Orthodox Jews hailing from a tyrannical 1 Europe, or else they muse about the corruptive politics of the American pork barrel...
...Prosecutors argued that Rabbi Helbrans intended to convert Shai into a more observant youngster...
...When 1 conducted interviews in the Bobover community in Borough Park in June 1997 after 2 rabbis were among 12 people charged with laundering drug profits for Colombian drug dealers, people were shocked not by the actual criminal charge (money laundering was seen as an evasion of technical government banking rules), but by the fact that the money was the fruit of the drug trade...
...Young New Square men have studied this way for generations, starting back in the Ukrainian village of Skver and continuing to do so when their rebbe brought them to America after the Holocaust...
...A cynical, suspicious outlook was passed down and instinctively transplanted to American soil...
...Many of the Hasidic young men of New Square can be found dairy in the village's study halls, their faces buried in tall, moldering volumes of Talmud, their eyes glowing with the excitement of rabbinic disputation...
...Indeed, some of the more notorious cases reflect the sad variety of human frailties...
...To the extent the allegations are true, that deserves the condemnation of the community...
...Rabbi Schiller argues that instead of just going after fraudulent programs, the government must find ways of helping the impoverished young men of New Square—perhaps by concocting job training programs that would not violate the lifestyle of the villagers...
...Meanwhile, America's sheen of democracy had its own blemishes—flaws that nourished opportunism and corruption...
...People make mistakes...
...While some crimes were the work of aberrant individuals or idiosyncratic family disputes, others entangled distinguished rabbis and bedrock communal institutions in schemes that involved dozens of accomplices...
...Still, there are other halachic and talmudic passages that give the laws of Torah priority over the laws of the land and make stealing from a government a far lesser offense than stealing from an individual...
...David Schick, an Orthodox lawyer who routinely arranged meetings with political heavyweights to support local Orthodox causes, allegedly defrauded investors of up to $200 million in real estate schemes...
...Have they institutionalized a double standard, adopting a fastidious attitude toward their communal religious life and an "anything goes" stance toward the outside world...
...The Hasidic community in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, has also dealt with alleged Orthodox wrongdoing...
...Within the Orthodox communities themselves, concerning cases like New Square and Williamsburg—where American laws were broken with widespread communal complicity—the debate about right and wrong can be as labyrinthine as any blat of Talmud, drawing on history, politics, and ethics, and venturing far beyond black and white...
...New Square has low income housing named not after the Rambam or Rashi but after Mario M. Cuomo, the former New York governor...
...JOSEPH BERGER Though the definition of a has id is laced with numerous historical and philosophical meanings, at bottom the word signifies a pious, righteous Jew— one who clings rigorously to the dictates of the Torah and follows the most ethical precepts in his dealings with fellow human beings...
...Although they were first perceived as strange intruders in a mostly Christian and conservative rustic region of Rockland County, the Hasidim of Monsey and New Square became a political force to reckon with, and their dealings with county politicians, gentile or Jewish, became uneasily intimate...
...So in the early 1980s, it was no surprise that the president and other officials of Rockland County Community College came to New Square leaders with an offer they couldn't refuse...
...The story behind the New Square episode helps illuminate how an entire pious community went astray...
...Ln New Square, New York, seat of the Skverer Hasidim in Rockland County, hundreds of the village's young men were paid a total of $10 million dollars of federal government tuition and housing assistance for doing something they would have done anyway—studying Talmud in the beis midrash (house of study...
...Some of the warts on our body as a people of Torah glaringly contradict our mission...
...Politicians] are cheating or wasting money, so why not put it to the high service of furthering our community," is the way Stern describes the Hasidic thinking on government largesse...
...Marci A. Hamilton, a professor of law at the Benjamin Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University, is struck by the defendants' insistence in some of die criminal cases that the misappropriations were justified because the money was used for religious and communal purposes...
...Four men, the masterminds of the scheme, were sentenced last October to prison terms ranging from two and a half to six and a half years and ordered to pay fines and restitution to the government totaling $31.5 million...
...It was a win-win situation for everybody...
...that led prominent people to cross that line...
...Perhaps less observant Jews exaggerate the significance of such episodes to compensate for their envy of the growing Orthodox community, some say...
...We Jews, too, have become somewhat taken in by the pursuits and trends that cut corners in halachah and in ethics," he said...
...In April, Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, head of Agudath Israel of America, obliquely but pointedly addressed the matter at a daylong conference on ethics and balacbab (religious life) in workaday life...
...If you look at where the indictments come from," says Stern, "they come from the least acculturated part of the Orthodox community, which has been trying to replicate the European experience internally...
...Those who have struggled to understand the roots of this paradox of piety and criminality offer no glib explanations...
...In 1997 they brought an indictment that charged six New Square Hasidim, including village leaders, with fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy...
...At a time when the right-wing Orthodox are assailing the legitimacy of Reform and Conservative Judaism in Israel, the bad news about Hasidic rabbis is actually good news...
...Lustig was given -WO hours of community service, three years' probation and a $1 million fine...
...Marc D. Stern, assistant executive director of the American Jewish Congress, calls this current spate of offenses, "a hangover from Europe...
...In 1991, lawyer Nathan Lewin points out, Stanford and its personnel avoided criminal prosecution and merely had to pay back millions of dollars for spending government research money on a university yacht and improvements on the president's home...
...An Orthodox man caught fondling a woman on a plane gets news coverage that hundreds of other such cases don't receive...
...When Ivan Boesky had his heyday, I don't think he was ever identified by his Jewish denomination," says Rabbi Avi Shafran, director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, the umbrella group for more traditional Jews...
...At worst, they said, the defendants were scratching about for means of bolstering the perennially struggling yeshivas, where teachers and administrators are grossly underpaid...
...They wouldn't...
...When government inspectors sometimes inquired about where classes were held and why almost none of the students went on to get degrees, village leaders stretched the truth to fend off further inquiries...
...Instead the paychecks were turned over to other women in the community who actually did the teaching, but did not have the required credentials...
...They note fine distinctions in the Talmud: Jews behave one way with Jews and another with non-Jews and secular governments...
...Hamilton hears the same lands of rationales from Christian Scientists who claim they should not be prosecuted if a child dies of a treatable illness left untreated in the name of religion...
...What made the program especially beguiling was the economic benefits it brought to a segregated village of 7,000 Hasidim, where men struggled to support families with seven and eight children...
...There is the belief that gentile colleges and universities that have been discovered doing similar things were let off with fines and a slap on the wrist while [the Orthodox] were subject to criminal prosecution...

Vol. 25 • February 2000 • No. 1


 
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