We sued the Orthodox Union and settled; now we want it to make amends

I am one of several women who recently sued the Union of Orthodox Congregations of America (renamed the “Orthodox Union”). My fellow litigants and I made use of a brief “lookback” window in which the statute of limitations for sexual abuse of minors was lifted in the states of New York and New Jersey.

Our lawsuit, which has now resulted in a settlement with the OU, was based on the abuses that we, as teenagers decades ago, experienced at the hands of Baruch Lanner, an Orthodox rabbi who, as director of regions for the OU’s national youth group, NCSY, worked with and supervised teenagers for more than 30 years.

Why would we bring a case against a major Orthodox Jewish organization, famed for its trusted supervision of kosher products and whose current leaders were not in any way involved at the time of the abuse and cover-up? The sad truth is that the OU enabled a sexually aggressive, manipulative, and violent figure to prey freely on many hundreds of vulnerable, trusting teenagers over the course of the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Without the OU’s silent complicity — its sustained refusal to heed the glaring red flags raised by Lanner’s behavior and its refusal to respond to the many warnings it received from this group of litigants and many others — Baruch Lanner’s disastrous abuse would simply not have been possible.

It is hard to overlook the irony of the world’s most reliable symbol of kashrut supervision failing to extend its supervision to its own chosen youth director. This prolonged, willful failure left us, and countless others, defenseless in the face of Lanner’s habitual patterns of grooming, sadistic psychological manipulations, and sustained violent and sexual assaults.

We brought our lawsuit because, on the OU’s watch, enormous harm was caused to a great many people. And although ultimately, Lanner was tried, convicted of child sex abuse, and sent to prison for his crimes, to this day, the organization itself has offered no unambiguous admission of responsibility or guilt, nor has it made any attempt at true restorative justice.

From the 1970s until today, although the OU has changed leadership numerous times, the organization’s silence has been a constant. The OU’s leaders were silent throughout the decades of Lanner’s abusive employment, and they remained defensively silent in the aftermath of the public scandal prompted by Gary Rosenblatt’s courageous investigative expose in The Jewish Week more than 24 years ago. (See “Stolen Innocence”)

The OU’s silence persisted even after a commission of inquiry — which the organization’s leaders themselves appointed — delivered its damning findings about the OU’s failures. The group’s leaders made sure that the full findings were never released to the public. Today’s silence is but an organic extension of those earlier silences, and it implicates the OU’s current leaders along with those of its past.

A Violation of Jewish Values

It bears noting that, in recent years, leaders of other major Jewish denominations have recognized their responsibility for the historic crimes of their institutions and have sought to make amends by following the dictates of a traditional teshuvah (repentance) process. Non-Orthodox Jewish streams have far exceeded the rabbis of the Orthodox Union in heeding that call of Jewish values and Jewish law.

Tragically, throughout the years, whenever the OU’s leaders briefly broke their silence, it was to speak in the cautious language of liability and not in the traditional language of teshuvah and Jewish ethics. Instead of an explicit, itemized admission of institutional wrongdoing and a solemn, detailed undertaking to correct past errors, we heard only the evasive non-admissions instructed by the organization’s many lawyers. For example, the OU expressed its “distress that behavior like this could have occurred within [their] organization,” while vaguely apologizing for “suffering these young people suffered as a result of Rabbi Lanner’s actions.”

Unable to get the attention of the OU in the language of Jewish tradition, we decided to speak to them through the language of the American court system. Sadly, as has been documented by Professor Timothy Lytton in his book, Holding Bishops Accountable: How Lawsuits Helped the Catholic Church Confront Clergy Sexual Abuse, the only proven engine of change in religious institutions has been the financial consequences of lawsuits. In observing the OU’s behavior over the years, we applied Professor Lytton’s thesis to our situation. We concluded that to induce the OU to do better in the future, we would need to get their full attention by suing them for damages.

Three Steps toward Teshuvah

Now that all the formal proceedings are behind us, here are three steps, with their roots in Jewish values and tradition, that we propose to the leaders of the OU for making amends:

First, we call on the OU to deliver a long-overdue vidui (public confession) in which, with detailed itemization and without qualification, they assume responsibility for, and ownership of, their actions and their disastrous inaction.

Second, we call on the OU to commit to creating a better future (kabbalah le-atid) by following the lead of many other Jewish institutions in working with an established anti-abuse organization (whether external to, or from within, the Jewish community) to conduct a full assessment and to ensure ongoing compliance with best practices. Such an alliance, which goes far beyond the employ of lawyers, would help the OU work proactively and systematically to prevent abuse within its ranks and to address abuse effectively — and with transparency, should it occur.

Third, we call on the OU to extend these efforts to its many affiliates, taking moral responsibility for the public’s safety, even when technicalities and legalities might allow the organization to turn a blind eye to situations that leave the public unprotected.

Toward Greater Safety in the Future

We did not undertake this lawsuit lightly. We knew when we began that we would face years of personal discomfort and pain, and that the process would consume valuable time. We knew that some would question our motives, even to the point of suspecting vengeance or avarice. But we decided to move forward in the hopes of bequeathing greater safety to our grandchildren and to the generations to follow. Although the Jewish world, along with the wider world around us, has made important strides in child protection in recent decades, we are still far from creating a culture of safety for every precious soul that enters our domain. As Orthodox women, our profound wish is to see our Orthodox institutions serve as positive role models in enacting that essential culture shift.

For decades, we watched as the OU violated the biblical prohibition of “do not stand idly by while your neighbor’s blood is being spilled“ (lo ta’amod al dam re’echa). Our fervent hope is that the OU will now, at long last, eschew silence and inaction and embrace, through word and deed, our most sublime Jewish values. We call upon the OU to reach beyond that which is technically legal, toward the Torah’s greater standard of doing what is “right” and “good” (ve-asita ha-yashar ve-ha-tov). We pray for a day when lawsuits are no longer necessary, when we are all united in building toward the Torah’s ultimate challenge: “ve-haya machanecha kadosh,” may your camp, in which every human being is protected and safe, be holy.

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While other litigants in this case have expressed many of the views expressed above, the author takes sole responsibility for her words.