BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

JUDAISM & ABUSE: EXPECTING BETTER This was written a few years back. Despite strides in educating leading rabbinic authorities it seems that nothing much has changed… not yet. Some are truly working on the problem and I beg them to keep working on it. Sometimes preserving a marriage AT ALL COSTS or allowing a manipulative man to make a woman an AGUNAH and then looking the other way - is NOT the way to go. Allowing the verbal & emotional abuse of children in the name of Torah and keeping it hush-hush for appearances is enabling the abuse! Loshen Hara can be a mitzvah if it stops an abuser from taking advantage of his family, his friends and the world at large. If You Beat Him He Will Not Die by Richard Silverstein A personal and theological meditation on child abuse As spiritual communities, it is enormously important that we provide grief work as part of the process of healing [from the effects of abuse]. At the same time, we have to take that lesson of choosing to...

By Carrie Devorah Jewish Women International Magazine published an excerpt from David Berger’s last letter written, 1941, before he was murdered by the Nazis. It stands to consider that David, like many other victims of Nazi degradation, was stripped of his sexual identity, head shaved, dressed in shapeless clothing, then dehumanized with verbal, physical and sexual abuse. When dead, Nazis left their victims, forgotten. David was committed to living eternally. He wrote, “I should like someone to remember that there once lived a person named David Berger.” Victims of other abuses wish to be seen and heard, while still living. Some speak up. Social pressure and religious beliefs step in the way of their allegations being paid credence, so the abuse continues, a tradition, so to speak, passed down within families, even Jewish families, along with recipes for Passover’s French toast, gefilte fish or chicken soup. Victims are reproached with, “he’s a Rabbi/ married family man/ good person,...

As a survivor of sexual, emotional & psychological abuse - I am posting this in the hopes that everyone will read and forward to their Rabbis - Thank you. Barbara Message from The Awareness Center: CALL TO ACTION: Request to all Rabbis on behalf of Sexual Violence Awareness Month Please forward the following message to every rabbi you know! Each week many of our rabbis send out weekly messages and prayers to their congregants. Considering April is Sexual Violence Awareness Month and also a month that represents freedom to the Jewish people, The Awareness Center is asking that all rabbis to send messages of healing, empowerment and growth to those who are who are suffering the life long effects of surviving sexual violence. All survivors of sex crimes are veterans of a war. The messages sent out should be about honoring survivors as if they were hero's of a horrendous war battle. The only true victims are those who lost their lives as a results of the wounds inflicted upon them...

MORE MISOGYNY & STUPIDITY AGAINST ABUSE VICTIMS I read these and think, what were these rabbis thinking? Were they thinking at all? Obviously not. Just look at the results. This must stop. NOW. Rabbinic Rally Against Alleged Get Abuse By Shlomo Greenwald Jewish Press In what was billed as a rabbinic rally, about 40 people staged a protest outside the Brooklyn home of Rabbi Shlomo Blumenkrantz, whom the protesters claim has been enabling men to withhold gets from their wives and use extortion against them, as well as helping to obtain heter meah rabbanim for the men, all of these in ways that run counter to halacha. (Heter meah rabbanim is permission, based on the agreement of 100 rabbis, for a man to marry a second wife, circumventing the longstanding decree against a man marrying more than one wife.) At the rally were Rabbi Hershel Schachter, a rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva University´s rabbinical affiliate RIETS, Rabbi Kenneth Auman, rabbi of the Young Israel of Flatbush and a past ...