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Investigation into Conservative movement’s youth programs identifies ‘hypersexualized culture’
(JTA) – An investigation into sexual abuse and misconduct in the Conservative movement’s youth group programs over the past seven decades identified an “overly sexualized culture” and collected accounts of alleged abuse from 40 victims.
Most of the allegations included in the investigation took place between 1987 and 2019 in the New York City area, and the alleged perpetrators are no longer affiliated with the Conservative movement, according to the report. The report urges the movement to keep its current practices around protecting children in place. It also urges the movement to improve its implementation of safety measures and record-keeping, and to “advance a healthier culture for teens.”
The investigation commissioned by the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the movement’s umbrella organization for congregations, was based on documents and interviews with the victims. It turned up allegations of “wrongful sexual contact, reports of grooming, reports of an over sexualized culture, and other boundary-crossing behaviors” at programs run by the movement’s youth group, United Synagogue Youth, known as USY. (The Conservative movement’s network of Ramah camps is not under the United Synagogue’s auspices.)
One section of the 20-page report is dedicated to the culture of sexualization within the Conservative movement’s youth programs and includes reports of inappropriate games and pressure on teens to engage in sexual activity with one another. The report comes amid a time of reckoning over child sexual abuse in the Jewish world. It is the latest in a series of similar investigations commissioned by major Jewish religious organizations that examine sexual misconduct against teens in Jewish youth movements, camps, schools and other institutions.
The investigation did not corroborate the allegations and did not discover “widespread or systematic abuse,” according to the report, which was written by UCSJ and approved by Sarah Worley, the attorney hired to gather information and draft recommendations. No one implicated in the investigation currently works or volunteers in the movement, according to Worley’s investigation. Every adult accused of sexual misconduct has been barred from future participation.
The report doesn’t name anyone, victim or perpetrator. At least one former employee of the youth group, former USY Nassau County, Long Island, divisional director Ed Ward, is the subject of multiple lawsuits accusing him of sexual abuse of multiple teens. He worked for USY until 2020.
Following an initial report on one of the lawsuits in the Times of Israel in 2021, additional allegations against Ward emerged. USCJ is a co-defendant in that lawsuit. A second suit alleges that Ward’s abuse took place as recently as 2018. Days after those allegations were published, USCJ launched its investigation into misconduct at USY. The Times of Israel said Ward did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
“USY must ask itself what about its own identity allowed this to transpire, and what must it do to ensure that it can never happen again,” Rabbi Jordan Soffer, one of Ward’s alleged accusers, told the Times of Israel in 2021. Describing a time when he says Ward took him into a bathroom and masturbated in front of him, he said, “I came up with every excuse I could think of. I’m tired. I can’t. I’m embarrassed. I told him I wanted to leave. He told me to stay until he finished.”
Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, CEO of the USCJ, said in a statement on Wednesday’s report, “We fully condemn past misconduct as reported to Ms. Worley and we remain committed to providing a safe and enriching environment for our Jewish teens without exception.”
The bulk of recent misconduct reported to Worley took place in the New York City area and was allegedly committed by two perpetrators, while the programs on the West Coast saw more cases in earlier decades.
Among the cases summarized in the report was a victim who said that an adult staff member threatened to blackmail them with a graphic photograph while at camp in the 1980s. In the 1990s, one unnamed adult staff member allegedly sexually assaulted teens across four separate incidents. Five reports to Worley said that a single staff member encouraged teen campers to masturbate as a group in the 2000s, an allegation that was made against Ward in 2021. Allegations in the 2010s included groping of a teen by a staff member and sharing of a graphic video.
The report also describes a culture in which teens felt pressure to engage in sexual activity with each other. In particular, the report describes the “Point System,” in which participants in USY activities received a certain number of “points” for “hooking up” with another USY member, based on that member’s position in the youth group. Similar systems exist in other Jewish youth groups as well. “Multiple victim/survivors and others reported their concern with the Point System and offered it as an example of the hypersexualized culture that they believe pervades USY and its programs,” the report says.
“Some explained that sexualized ‘traditions’ had been developed and passed down over generations, and in some instances, victim/survivors said they felt torn between their reluctance to participate in these traditions and their sense that, as teens in the Conservative movement, their participation was expected,” the report says.
Only one of the allegations of sexual misconduct occurred since 2020. The misconduct involved an adult staff member grooming a teen through text messages.
The Conservative movement’s investigation overlapped with a similar reckoning taking place in the Reform movement, which carried out three investigations into sexual misconduct, including one that was focused on Reform youth programs.
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At Chabad Hanukkah party in California, hours after Bondi Beach massacre, joy defied grief’s shadow
PACIFIC PALISADES, CALIFORNIA – A familiar sight at public gatherings, especially Jewish ones — young men in Hasidic garb wrapping black leather tefillin straps around the arms of strangers — felt different here Sunday evening as Rabbi Shimon Goldberg helped Rick Entin fulfill the commandment at a Hanukkah block party in the Palisades. The mitzvahs of tefillin and lighting candles had become acts of defiance and joy as the gathering grieved the 15 people killed at a Chabad Hanukkah event in Sydney.
The attack cut deeply in the close-knit Chabad community, whose brand — and vulnerability — lies in the proud public practicing of Jewish rituals. Some of them were personally connected to Rabbi Eli Schlanger, the Chabad emissary who had organized the Sydney event, and died in the attack.
Yet they were celebrating Hanukkah on Sunday with a group that knew something about resilience: 11 months earlier, the Palisades fire tore through this area, destroying thousands of homes, including Entin’s just up the street. For many, the Hanukkah event was the first time they had been in Jewish community in the Palisades since the inferno. This was the occasion the Palisades Chabad — whose campus was damaged in the fire — had planned to commemorate, and from which its leaders would not be deterred.
“Whoever was strategizing this terrorist attack, they want the Jews not just in Sydney, but even in Los Angeles to fear showing up for a Hanukkah event,” said Goldberg, head of a local Chabad-affiliated nonprofit, as he placed a tefillin box atop Entin’s forehead. “This we won’t allow them to do.”
The 38th annual Palisades candlelighting was always going to be bittersweet; many there remained displaced by the fire, and some remain unsure whether they will rebuild. Jewish leaders who planned the event said they did not need to change the program due to the terrorist attack — it was already about celebration in the face of loss.
So, too, is Hanukkah, a holiday that tells of a miraculous jug of oil found amid great ruin. And both Chabad and Kehillat Israel, a Reconstructionist synagogue in the Pacific Palisades that co-sponsored the event, had, miraculously, found the spark on an otherwise gloomy day.
Overlooking the street that had been blocked off for the event were vacant lots where homes had stood a year earlier. But melancholy was hard to come by as one walked through the teeming masses at the event. Kids sat for glitter tattoos and balloon animals; lines snaked for latkes and jelly donuts and hot chocolate, all free. Old friends exchanging long-overdue hugs could be heard saying I’m so sorry about your house. On stage before the candlelighting, a gaggle of youngsters delivered a spirited rendition of “I’m a little latke.”
“It’s almost like the Maccabees,” said Chayim Frenkel, Kehillat Israel’s longtime cantor. “They went into the Temple, cleaned it up, found the menorah, found the oil. And surrounded by the rubble of what the Greeks did, we brought light and hope.”
The Palisades Chabad members in attendance were putting on a doubly brave face: The fire had damaged part of the school on the campus of Chabad of Pacific Palisades, according to Rabbi Zushe Cunin, its director. Classes have still not returned to the building.
“It’s been hard,” Cunin said. “So much trauma, a lot of people have not resolved things, their house, their insurance, their struggles. But Hanukkah is a time to rise above that. Tonight is about strengthening our resolve.”
Cunin’s son, Mordechai, was among the group channeling that resolve through tefillin. The mitzvah — which is required only of Jewish men — was one the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, had implored his followers to promote in order to hasten the arrival of the Messiah. Mordechai and his yeshiva buddies reported having wrapped at least 10 men that day, including three first-time wearers.
It was not lost on the tefillin crew that Schlanger — whose nephew is Mordechai’s classmate — died doing what they were doing now — helping Jewish people from all walks of life connect to Judaism. But to Goldberg, that was only reason to lean in.
“When someone leaves this physical world, their soul is still there, but they can’t do mitzvos,” Goldberg said. “When we think of Rabbi Eli, we are his hands and feet. He can’t put on tefillin today — but we can put on tefillin for him.”
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In the fight against K-12 antisemitism, we are grateful for allies – but are not afraid to call out antisemitism when we see it
Recent articles in the Forward spotlighted important conversations around combating K-12 antisemitism that took place at the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly, but missed critical distinctions about our commitment to working with partners throughout the K-12 space and our stance on teachers’ unions. In particular, they ignored the distinction between the two largest teachers’ unions in the US – the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
Federations throughout North America work closely with educators and educational leadership. We are grateful to the many educators committed to doing right by their students and by the Jewish community, and to our many allies in the education space – including the AFT, led by Randi Weingarten, and its New York affiliate, the UFT, which recently partnered with the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York on a curriculum and training about Jewish Americans.
We are committed to ensuring teachers have access to the content and knowledge they need to accurately educate about Jewish communities, Israel and antisemitism and to provide safe learning environments for Jewish students. Increasingly, however, we also see instances of organizations and individuals encouraging teachers to use materials and trainings that seek to disconnect educators from those positive resources, or worse, to provide resources that harm Jewish students and foster classroom antisemitism.
Some union spaces have become toxic even for Jewish teachers. The recent debate at the NEA’s Representative Assembly about boycotting the ADL, as well as a union resource guide linking to a third-party source erasing Israel off the map and sympathizing with the Holocaust, were shocking. We are grateful that NEA leadership vetoed the boycott resolution and apologized for the link, but we are reminded of the need for vigilance and organizing so that this type of resource is not recommended – even inadvertently – to educators. We stand ready to work with the NEA to help ensure that biased and ultimately harmful teaching materials are legitimized.
Both nationally and at the local level, Federations are proud of the educational partnerships that make our schools better and stronger. We are grateful every day to the educators who teach our children and seek out accurate information and ways to teach critical thinking that enable the foundation of our future democracy – and our safety within it. We are eager for additional partners and partnerships. But at the same time, we will not stand by when antisemitism is enabled in the classroom.
Our commitment is to promote policies and actions that enable Jewish children and teachers to be safe in school and take pride in their identity, and to ensure that Jewish identity, culture and resilience are celebrated and accurately taught.
The post In the fight against K-12 antisemitism, we are grateful for allies – but are not afraid to call out antisemitism when we see it appeared first on The Forward.
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Her daughter left the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration just before the shooting, then asked, ‘Mommy, why do they hate us so much?’
The daughter of an American expatriate living about two miles from the mass killing at a Hanukkah celebration in suburban Sydney, Australia, escaped the carnage by coming home to change clothes, her mother said.
“She’d been there earlier that afternoon, on the bridge where they were shooting. She came home, changed her clothes, and was getting ready to go again,” said Michelle Stein-Evers, a former Los Angeles resident and a co-founder of the Alliance of Black Jews in 1995.
“She and her friends were on their way back to Bondi to go to the party and have something to eat, and they were stopped by the police,” Stein-Evers said. “She found out why, and she started calling everyone to let us know. Her best friend’s cousin was killed. Another best friend’s cousin was shot in the leg.”
Her daughter, who is 22, had previously locked down her Facebook account out of privacy concerns and requested that her name not be used. As the massacre unfolded Sunday, she turned to social media to search for information.
“‘Oh my God, there’s bodies everywhere,’” Stein-Evers said her daughter told her.
She also asked where her father was, amid rumors — later proven untrue — that the neighborhood where he had gone to play tennis was also affected.
Stein-Evers said the events were unfolding within minutes of their home, where she was alone after her daughter headed back toward the beach.
“It was scary. It was nothing but sirens — sirens and sirens — and helicopters,” she said.
Stein-Evers said she knew the first victim publicly identified among the dead, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who helped organize the celebration.
“He was, by consensus, one of the nicest guys in the Jewish community in Sydney,” she said.
Antisemitic incidents have been rising in Sydney and across Australia since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Stein-Evers said, adding that her daughter stopped attending the prestigious University of Sydney because of campus protests.
“She was constantly being heckled, asked, ‘Where are you from? Are you Jewish? Are you an Arab? Why aren’t you with us?’” Stein-Evers said. Her daughter would not respond to the questions and eventually enrolled in distance learning through a college in Melbourne.
Stein-Evers, who has lived in the Middle East — including in Muslim-majority countries — as well as Europe and the United States, said she now has concerns about her own safety.
“I was never scared to be a Jew in America. I was never scared in Germany,” she said — a fear she said is now shared by her daughter.
“When she came home last night, she was in tears,” Stein-Evers said. “‘Mommy, why do they hate us so much?’”
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