‘And for the sin of silence’: The OU and Baruch Lanner

The leaders of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations (Orthodox Union, or OU), the most prominent organization of its kind in the country, have chosen not to respond to Judy Klitsner’s call for the organization to do teshuvah (repent) for actions and inactions in its past handling of sexual abuse allegations.

In her essay, posted in this season of reflection and repentance, Klitsner, a prominent Bible scholar and Jewish educator, urged the OU to take responsibility for decades of silent complicity regarding the abuse of children for more than 30 years at the hands of Baruch Lanner. An Orthodox rabbi and educator, he was a leading official of OU’s youth group, the National Conference of Synagogue Youth (NCSY), and he worked with and supervised teenagers.

The scandal first came to light when a Jewish Week investigative report I wrote in 2000 detailed charges against Lanner by more than a dozen former NCSY members. It led to his arrest and conviction for criminal sexual contact and child endangerment; he was sentenced to seven years in prison, served nearly three years, and was released on parole in early 2008.

Klitsner was one of several women who, as victims of Lanner as long as 50 years ago, reached a settlement with the OU this summer. The women had sued the OU in November 2021, making use of a brief “lookback” window, lifting the statute of limitations for sexual abuse of minors in New York and New Jersey, allowing them to come forward and sue their abusers and enablers. The suit charged the OU with negligence and failing to protect children — that instead the organization protected itself by ignoring or dismissing complaints about Lanner’s “willful, malicious and wanton” actions, in the words of the suit, for decades.

As a 16-year-old NCSY member in New Jersey in the 1970s, Klitsner sought to rebuff Lanner’s attempts to kiss and caress her, she noted in the initial Jewish Week report. “He began to strangle me with all his strength,” she recalled, “and it wasn’t until he saw that I was losing consciousness that he threw me down and walked away.” She added that when she later told Lanner, who was in his mid-20s at the time, that she would tell his supervisor of the incident, he laughed and said his supervisor already knew of his behavior.

Other women and men interviewed in the initial report had similar stories of sexual, physical, psychological and verbal abuse, and said their appeals at the time to NCSY rabbis and leaders were ignored or dismissed.

Much positive change has taken place in the Jewish community over the last 24 years. Awareness of child abuse is widespread, as are written protocols regarding child safety and protection, including those established by NCSY. But there are those who feel that systemic cultural change is still required in the Orthodox community, including the OU, which, as Klitsner notes, “to this day has offered no unambiguous admission of responsibility or guilt, nor has it made any attempt at true restorative justice.”

After the settlement was finalized, she reached out to tell me that she had written an essay, motivated by the feeling that she and other victims share that the OU’s ongoing silence over the decades “implicates” the organization’s “current leaders along with those of the past.” (She did not divulge to me the names of the other litigants and did not discuss any details of the settlement or the process that led to it.) I offered to write this report, seeking responses to Klitsner’s message from the OU leadership, as well as from former Lanner victims, communal leaders, and experts on dealing with abuse in the Jewish community.

Several days ago, I emailed Rabbis Moshe Hauer and Joshua Joseph, who as executive vice presidents of the OU are the organization’s professional leaders. I wrote that I was seeking comment on Klitsner’s proposal that the organization take three steps toward teshuvah, based on Jewish values and tradition.

A day later I received a brief email reply from the OU’s chief marketing officer, which included a link to NCSY’s Child Protection Policies and this one sentence: “The Orthodox Union does not comment on active litigation.” In fact, though, as I pointed out to the rabbis and marketing officer in a follow-up email and voice message, the settlement with the women was final. There is no “active litigation.”

I did not hear back from them.

The apparent takeaway is that, consistent with a decades-long pattern — and the core of Klitsner’s and the other women’s grievance — the OU remains silent, no doubt more swayed by the advice of their current attorneys (in avoiding potential financial harm to the organization) than by the wisdom of rabbinic sages who called for justice and compassion in upholding Jewish law and ethics.

“Unfortunately, the OU has responded no differently than the Catholic church or the Boy Scouts of America did,” avoiding accepting responsibility for the harm caused to young victims of abuse, said a noted psychologist who deals with the issue in the Orthodox community. “It’s the classic approach,” he said ruefully.

OU Said No, Rabbis Said Yes

There was a time, though, when the OU was responsive to an effort by a small, ad hoc group within the Orthodox community seeking to upgrade and standardize child protection and abuse prevention policies for synagogues and other organizations by loosening the organizational grip. Rabbi Yosef Blau, who was spiritual adviser to students at Yeshiva University for many years and is an outspoken advocate for victims of sexual abuse in the community, was part of the group. He said it was formed in 2015 at the request of the rabbi of a large Orthodox congregation on Long Island. Another member said the group met several times with the OU about joining the project, and that the OU even paid for some outside professional guidance. Both he and Rabbi Blau recalled, however, that several years later, the OU, under new leadership, decided not to participate in the project on the advice of its attorneys.

The group then took its project to the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), a membership organization, affiliated with the OU, for Orthodox rabbis. It adopted the protocols and has distributed them to all of their members. A psychologist who helped form the ad hoc group said two different RCA rabbis have consulted with him about issues they faced in their congregations and found the protocols “very helpful.”

One apparent difference between the 17-page OU-NCSY Child Protection Policies and the RCA’s 36-page Child Protection Policies is that the NCSY document says questions about whether to report abuse allegations should go through the organization’s general counsel. The RCA protocol in that situation is to contact the police or the appropriate law enforcement agency. Many child protection activists prefer the latter approach so as to avoid the possibility, or even the appearance, of in-house attorneys stifling potentially embarrassing situations for the organization.

The RCA has been on record for many years in protecting the “physical safety and the spiritual integrity of our community.” An RCA statement in 2013 asserted that “there is an unequivocal halachic and moral obligation for everyone, victim and community member alike, to report all reasonable suspicions of child abuse to the civil authorities.”

No Apologies

Four women victims I spoke with in recent days said they were more upset at the behavior of the OU than at Lanner, who they felt was psychologically troubled. They expressed hurt feelings that, besides being dismissed or rejected at the time they made complaints about Lanner’s behavior decades ago, they have never received a personal note or phone call from a lay or professional OU leader to inquire about their physical or mental health. “What would it cost to say ‘we’re sorry,’ even afterwards,” said Laya Silber, who was smacked so hard in the face by Lanner when she was 18 that he nearly broke her jaw. “It saddens me that it took a lawsuit for them [OU leaders] to respond, because they were forced to.” (Silber was not eligible to be a litigant in the lawsuit, according to the terms of the “lookback” window.)

Several of the women spoke of feeling less connected to their faith as a result of their experience. Naomi Freistat, who was 15 when Lanner punched her in the stomach after she rejected his attempts to kiss her, said she still keeps Shabbat. “But I have nothing to do with organized religion and religious organizations. And I don’t trust rabbis,” she said. “It makes me sad.” She would have abuse victims consult with trained professionals rather than rabbis, and she advocates for women playing a more significant role in OU decision-making.

One woman echoed Klitsner’s ironic observation that the OU, known internationally for its reliable symbol of kosher food, was, as she put it, “not trustworthy when it comes to protecting children. There’s more to the idea of kosher — labeling something as suitable or appropriate — than food.”

Marcie Lenk, a professor of Jewish texts who, as a teen, was harassed and embarrassed by Lanner’s lewd comments about her body, pointed out that the OU’s own 2000 commission of inquiry confirmed The Jewish Week’s allegations and created a private document that has never been made public. Consistent rumors say it dealt with inappropriate financial connections between Lanner and OU/NCSY staff and lay leaders. “As long as there is still a cover-up, the OU remains an institution not to be trusted,” said Lenk, who was also not eligible to be a litigant in the women’s suit.

How can the community play a role in reducing abuse and ensuring that abuse victims are heard? Rabbi Blau said that abuse victims deserve proof that the OU has learned its lesson, and that it should adopt and promote the three steps Judy Klitsner described in her essay. One woman I spoke to said that “if institutions had moral courage, they’d say to victims, ‘We [current leaders] weren’t here at the time but that’s no excuse. What can we do to make you feel whole?’” Others suggested the OU should hold a conference on teshuvah regarding abuse and begin by offering a full and detailed apology for the past and a plan for the future.

“We are still hurting because when we as teens spoke out about Lanner, our words were rejected,” says Marcie Lenk. “We were called rebels or liars by those we wanted to trust us and protect us. They didn’t hear us,” she said. “But God heard us.”

For Judy Klitsner and her fellow litigants, the hope is that in the wake of their lawsuit and settlement, the current leaders of the OU will, at long last, hear them, too.