Why is Yeshiva University probing my Holocaust survivor parents’ marriage?

At what point does legal defense become moral failure?

I ask this not as a lawyer, but as a Jewish adult who once was a Jewish child in the care of a Jewish institution – a student at a prominent yeshiva high school in Manhattan, entrusted to educators and administrators who claimed to uphold Torah values.

More than four decades later, I and others are plaintiffs in a civil case rooted in long-standing allegations of abuse by school officials. The courts will ultimately decide the legal merits. But recent events compel a broader public reckoning – not with the facts of the case, but with the tactics of the institution defending itself.

Recently, Yeshiva University – one of the pillars of American Modern Orthodoxy – approved shocking legal demands that are impossible to explain away. In recent court filings by its outside law firm, Seyfarth Shaw LLP, the university demanded documentation relating to the private lives of both abuse victims — and their parents.

It includes this written demand of me:

Copies of any family therapy and/or couples therapy records of Plaintiff’s family/parents from the period of Plaintiff’s childhood through Plaintiff’s 18th birthday, sufficient to show the existence, if any, of family or marital instability, economic instability, employment instability, and/or other circumstances or conditions within the home that had an adverse impact upon Plaintiff or Plaintiff’s family.

Back in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, many parents were Holocaust survivors. Yeshiva University is now demanding proof of instability from homes that were rebuilt from ashes — an implicit attempt to suggest that the trauma we carry from childhood could have come from anywhere but their campus.

Adding insult to injury in the same letter, Seyfarth demanded I produce:

Documents sufficient to show any online dating website in which Plaintiff has registered and/or participated at any time.

This is not discovery. It is desecration.

Yeshiva University might argue that these requests fall within its legal right to probe a plaintiff’s mental health history. That may be true under civil discovery rules. But legality is not the same as legitimacy – and certainly not the same as decency.

Let us be clear about what this is: an attempt to wrap the trauma of childhood sexual abuse victims around the marriages and private struggles of their Holocaust survivor parents. It is a deliberate tactic meant to reframe pain as pathology, to turn survivors into suspects, and to sow shame where there should be support. To me, this feels like intimidation by legal proxy – using the cover of “discovery” to humiliate, retraumatize, and grind down those who have already endured too much.

It is one thing for a secular institution to seek tactical advantage. It is another entirely for a religious university – whose values are supposed to include empathy, accountability, and basic human dignity – to weaponize a survivor’s family history in order to undermine their credibility. The law may allow it. Jewish conscience must not.

This goes beyond litigation. This is a policy decision – made by an institution with a center for Jewish ethics and a law school that touts itself as a beacon of moral leadership. It is a defense strategy that no longer defends only its institution, but now actively assaults the dignity of those it once failed to protect.

The cruelty of this moment is not incidental – it is cyclical. According to multiple sworn complaints, George Finkelstein, then associate principal of Yeshiva University High School for Boys (MTA), deliberately targeted the sons of Holocaust survivors. He isolated them, preyed on their silence, and exploited the reverence their families held for Jewish authority. Now, nearly half a century later, the university’s defense team is further traumatizing those families by seeking highly personal historical records. The institutional tactics now being used evoke a form of psychological harm that, to me, mirrors the abuse of the past.

And it fits a pattern. Another key witness – an assistant principal and trusted former guidance counselor in the 1970s who lives in Israel and voluntarily agreed to testify recently – abruptly withdrew from giving his deposition after he was contacted by Yeshiva’s attorneys. According to a legal filing, he has subsequently become unavailable and his testimony is now permanently lost. This raises serious concerns and could be perceived as an effort to influence a key witness’s cooperation.

The Jewish community has often looked to its institutions to do the right thing – if not in real time, then in the long arc of truth and teshuvah. But what happens when the institution refuses to reckon at all? When it fights harder against victims than it ever fought against predators?

This is not only about Yeshiva University. It’s about the values we claim to teach in our schools, the accountability we claim to demand from leadership, and the moral imagination we are so quick to summon when pointing fingers at others.

I do not write this to influence any court. I write it to spur a conversation that has fallen far too quiet. We cannot let institutions wrap themselves in Torah while discarding its essence. We cannot let them hide behind procedural strategy while shredding the moral fiber of our community.

If the university’s trustees approved these scorched-earth tactics – or turned a blind eye to what legal counsel did – it is not just Yeshiva University President Ari Berman, his general legal counsel Avi Lauer, and his lawyers who must step aside. The board itself must answer for any role it may have played. No institution that spends millions of dollars over more than a decade to evade a reckoning with victims can credibly claim to be built on Torah or ethics.

There must be a full accounting. A dismantling of the legal culture that has made intimidation its core defense. And yes, a tabula rasa: new leadership, new standards, new safeguards. That must include the immediate severing of ties with Seyfarth Shaw LLP – the law firm that has aggressively pursued this strategy with apparent disregard for its ethical implications.

Because if this is how Yeshiva University defends itself, the price is not only paid by its victims. It’s paid by the soul of the very community it claims to serve.

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Mordechai I. Twersky, a journalist, advocate, and survivor of institutional abuse, is the original lead plaintiff in the sexual abuse case against Yeshiva University.