FREEHOLD, N.J. -- While sexual abuse of minors by priests has shaken the Roman Catholic Church this year, a smaller-scale but still painful scandal over sexual abuse by a charismatic rabbi has reverberated through the nation's Orthodox Jewish community.
The Jewish scandal came to a head Thursday, when a jury of six men and six women here in central New Jersey found Rabbi Baruch Lanner, 52, guilty of abusing two teenage girls. Once a rising star among Jewish educators, Lanner had been principal of a private religious high school as well as a full-time, high-ranking official in the youth movement of the Orthodox Union, an association of more than 1,000 synagogues.
Lanner's case has some striking similarities to the revelations of misconduct in the Catholic clergy. During his 30-year career as a Jewish youth leader, he sexually, physically and emotionally abused dozens of teenage girls and boys while his colleagues failed to believe or act on the allegations, according to a stinging internal investigation by the Orthodox Union.
Much as the Catholic scandal erupted from reporting by the Boston Globe in January, the story of the Lanner case was broken in June 2000 by New York Jewish Week. Since then, the Orthodox Union, like the Catholic Church, has been consumed by public apologies, personnel changes and establishment of stricter policies against abuse.
"I only came this year, so it is not my mea culpa personally, but this organization has apologized, we have said we were wrong, we should have known better, we should have acted sooner," said Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, who took over in January as the Orthodox Union's executive vice president, its top paid staff position. "At this point, we are so sensitized that it is hard to believe there could be any allegation of abuse, on any level, local or national, that is not going to be reported and acted on very quickly."
Yet there are also major differences between the Jewish and Catholic scandals. One is scale.
Lanner is hardly the first American Jewish clergyman accused of sexual abuse. Lilith, a Jewish feminist magazine, caused a furor in the spring of 1998 with an article reporting numerous accusations of molestation of teenage girls by the late Shlomo Carlebach, an Orthodox rabbi famous worldwide for his melodies. The cantor at New York City's largest Reform synagogue also was charged in February with sexually molesting his nephew.
But none of the country's major Jewish movements -- Reform, Conservative or Orthodox -- face anything like the tidal wave of criminal charges and civil lawsuits, involving hundreds of priests, that have hit the Catholic Church.
Another difference is structural. While some bishops have shuffled abusive priests from parish to parish, rabbis are hired and fired by the boards of directors of individual synagogues. "An offender could conceivably be dismissed by one congregation and get a job in another one, but there is no superior rabbi in a position to shift an offender from here to there," Weinreb noted.
Lanner's offenses, both proven and alleged, also differ from the typical cases among Catholic clergy, which involve molestation for sexual gratification in secret. According to a 54-page public summary of the Orthodox Union's internal investigation, much of Lanner's abusive behavior took place openly, and much of it was not sexual but physical, particularly his alleged propensity for kneeing teenage boys in the groin.
Peter Boser, the assistant Monmouth County prosecutor, urged the jury in his summation to "keep in mind, one possibility of sexual contact is to sexually gratify the defendant. . . . But also, if he does it for the purpose to humiliate, to degrade, that is also sexual contact."
The two victims, now 21 and 23, testified that Lanner engaged them in increasingly personal -- and often lewd -- conversations in nighttime phone calls when they were students from 1992 to 1996 at Hillel Yeshiva High School in Ocean Township, N.J. As principal of the school and a leader of the National Council of Synagogue Youth, they said, he controlled both their academic and social lives and punished them when they resisted his physical and emotional embraces.
Monmouth County Superior Court Judge Paul F. Chaiet has ordered reporters not to disclose the victims' full names. One of them, identified as M.L., testified that on about four occasions, Lanner put his arm around her and touched her breasts through her clothing. The other victim, identified as M.C., said he touched her breasts, legs and pubic area, also through her clothing.
M.C.'s mother testified that in 1996, she picked up a telephone extension in her home and was stunned to hear Lanner, who is divorced and has three grown children, tell her 14-year-old daughter that "someday you'll be my wife."
Lanner's defense attorneys sought to persuade the jury that M.C. and M.L. were bent on revenge because they had a "rotten time" in high school and Lanner had punished them, appropriately, for serious academic and disciplinary problems. A parade of 14 teachers and school administrators testified that Lanner's office had glass walls with open blinds, making it impossible for him to touch a female student without being noticed.
Ultimately, the trial hinged on the victims' credibility. After two weeks of testimony and two days of deliberations, the jury convicted Lanner of the most serious charges against him, including aggravated criminal sexual contact and endangering the welfare of a child. At his Sept. 13 sentencing, he could be sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.
Lanner, a heavyset, gregarious man who kissed his lead attorney's hand at the end of the trial, responded to the verdict with a Hebrew phrase meaning, "Blessed is the true judge" -- the Almighty.
One of Lanner's lawyers, Fred M. Zemel, said he is convinced that the jury was influenced by months of news coverage of clerical abuses.
"It was in the back of everyone's mind. It's a volatile atmosphere," he said. "This was a lynch mob, and they lynched him."
Boser, on the other hand, noted that the jury was not told about the Orthodox Union's internal investigation in 2000, which found 10 women who accused Lanner of sexual abuse and "credible testimony" from witnesses describing abusive sexual conduct by the rabbi toward 16 others.
The Orthodox Union has not publicly released the full, 332-page report, citing the privacy of those who provided information and a desire to withhold "salacious or sensationalistic" details.
"Lanner, in street terms, was and still is a control freak," Weinreb said. "The things he is accused of doing were all a power trip . . . But there is no question that the Lanner case has turned the attention of everyone in the Jewish educational world to the problem of abuse."