Haredi Rabbonim Open New Child Abuse Hotline In RBS

An email was sent out the other day, and has since been passed around and spread further, announcing the formation of a[nother] organization in RBS that will deal with claims of child abuse. The organization, called "Maaneh" is more haredi in structure, presumably, and that is probably the main difference between it and Magen.

Here is the bulk of the information that was in the email. The rest of it, the part I am not including, was fundraising to get a base of support and help get it off the ground stably.

A few years ago, an organization was conceived of and formed by a few Rabbonim here in RBS, who also decided that it should remain "under the radar" as long as it is able to, and certainly as long as it is still organizing its structure and its manpower, and establishing its ties with the relevant governmental agencies.

The name of the organization is Maaneh, and it is dedicated to work towards prevention, education, and treatment of forms of child abuse which exist and occur.

BH, the organization is up and running for a while already, has the necessary ties with law enforcement and social governmental agencies, and has a highly professional team in place for all aspects of the problem, from a crises hotline to a treatment center, to a training center for counselors, to a community relations center which has informational forums for those who need to recognize the issues.

The Director of the Center is R' Aryeh Levi, who, together with Dr Ephraim Rosenbaum, work under the guidance of a Rabbinical Committee to have the Center function as it should.

I see this as a very positive development.

But first, let me add, I don't see here, and haven't seen elsewhere, contact information. What should someone do if chas v'shalom they are in a situation in which they must contact Maaneh? It does not say anywhere. I guess they can call Dr. Rosenbaum's home number as listed in the phone book. I guess they would have to go to their rabbi (assuming the persons rabbi is affiliated with Maaneh rather than Magen or perhaps encouraging the person to avoid both and just go directly to the police) and he would direct them to Maaneh. Or maybe they are just not yet ready to announce that info yet, and are still structuring the organization before announcing to the wider public.

I see this as a very positive development. For the most part.

Is there going to be a redundancy of services? Probably. Will there be confusion (e.g. who to call)? Perhaps, probably not. Will there be a division along lines of affiliation? Most likely.

But so what?

We have a redundancy of services and divisions already in every other locally provided service, whether public or private. And where we don't already have such inefficiency and redundancy, someone somewhere is striving to create it.  Be it shuls, tzedaka organizations, mikvas, shops, activists - we have too much of everything except clean streets and clean parks (and of course we don't have too many swimming pools or other forms of entertainment locally), so why not this too? That should be the worst of the problems.

This is a breakthrough. As someone said to me, this is probably the very first time a group of haredi rabbonim are acknowledging there is a problem and that it must be dealt with differently than the way it was previously dealt with. While before things were kept quiet, the rabbonim ran the investigation before involving the authorities, now they are working together with government agencies, counselors, etc. This is ground-breaking in the haredi world! Nowhere else in the world, that I am aware of, has a haredi community  even acknowledged the problem, let alone moved towards implementing such a solution.

The biggest problem I see, the thing about this that upsets me, is the possible perception now that there is so much abuse in the neighorhood happening that we need two organizations to handle the load!

Is this better or worse than Magen? I have no idea. Only time will tell, though I hope there will never be enough cases to get that much information. Will; there be a redundancy? Yes, but so what. If there is a lack of trust among different communities (or even if it's not a lack of trust but a sense of different communities do things different ways) , so just like each has its own kashrut organizations, mikvas, poskim, dayanim and whatever else, so now they each have their own child abuse hotlines as well. Nu nu. Redundancy of services should be the worst of our problems.

As said above, I hope both of our community organizations dealing with child abuse have to deal with a lot of boredom due to a lack of incidents.


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