Fischer spoke with me and I shared with him my scant memories of Teitel and my impressions. As he says in the article, I was in email contact with a few old friends to see if anyone had remembered anything more. The impression I had from my memories and from chatting with a few different friends was that Teitel had kind of just passed through. Stayed for a couple of years (nobody was even sure for how long, but we all thought that it was about 2 years or so), but then moved on. He had not made any lasting relationships or connections. Perhaps he was a loner, perhaps it was just not enough time for a kid to make a lasting relationship.
Some interesting excerpts:
Tytell’s arrest has brought scrutiny to population groups that are identified with him: settlers, ultra-nationalist religious Jews, and Orthodox American immigrants to Israel. And while much is now known about Tytell’s years in the West Bank settlement of Shvut Rachel, where he moved in 1999, almost nothing has been revealed about his upbringing in Orthodox communities in various cities in the U.S. (In fact, nearly all published reports, and even his Wikipedia page, spell his name “Teitel,” an adequate transliteration of the name from Hebrew, but incorrect.)
But in interviews with more than a dozen former classmates, camp counselors, teachers and others who knew him and his family during those formative years, a portrait is beginning to emerge of the young Jack Tytell.
Described by some as a “loner” who had trouble making friends, Tytell was on the move for much of his childhood as his U.S. Navy dentist father took the family from posting to posting. He is said to have developed a certain fascination, or even romance, with guns and weapons. But the picture is complicated by the fact that Tytell never seemed to bully anyone or exhibit any violent behavior.
And whether in his teenage years religious or political ideology helped shape him, or provided the framework for his later alleged acts, seems an open question. When he heard of Tytell’s arrest in October, Ed Codish, who taught English at Akiva when Tytell was there, wasn’t surprised, he told The Jewish Week. But thinking back to the high school kid he knew in Detroit, Codish concluded that the alleged crimes were probably “pathological, not ideological.”
[...]
Although the parents wanted to fit in with the various Orthodox communities they joined, their transience, coupled with their relative newness to observance in general, appeared to make it difficult. They were not antisocial or non-communal, although they exhibited some social awkwardness, according to family acquaintances. They had affinities toward the more haredi end of the American Orthodox spectrum and lived in more “black hat” neighborhoods in Chicago and Detroit, but they were unabashedly Zionist. Their choice of schools for their children reflects the same ambivalence; they sometimes sent their children to Modern Orthodox co-ed schools and sometimes to more haredi single-sex schools, even occasionally switching from one school to another in the same community.
Read Fischer's full article here.
(thanks to the many people who sent me the link to the article)
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