Britain’s incoming Parliamentary standards commissioner has called for all UK rabbis to be “properly regulated” as a safeguarding benchmark in the wake of the latest sexual assault allegations against Golders Green Rabbi Chaim Halpern.
Barrister Daniel Greenberg told Jewish News: “It is very important that criminal allegations go to the police and nobody else. Rabbis, however well-meaning, should be told that they must not set up tribunals or hear evidence, because that amounts to witness tampering and actually prevents people from being prosecuted. Criminal allegations must be dealt with in the criminal courts, and nowhere else. That’s a message that the whole community needs to be part of promulgating.”
It was no longer acceptable, Greenberg said, for any profession not to have “a robust, independent and disciplinary tribunal regularity system… rabbis need to have a profession that they can be proud of belonging to, which at the moment they cannot”.
If there were a formal system of regulation set up outside the Charedi community, Greenberg said, “that would start to spread within that community. We would set up a benchmark, against which all communities would want their rabbis to be measured”.
He acknowledged that this was a long-term solution, but added: “That’s not a reason for not doing it. At the moment we’ve wasted 10 years” — alluding to the first set of allegations made against Halpern in 2013. At that time he was arrested but no charges were made against him.
Halpern has strenuously denied the new allegations against him, aired in an Israel Channel 12 programme last week. He described the claims made by the 21-year-old woman as “bubbemeises” — “fairytales” — and also suggested that what purported to be his voice on tapes played during the programme had been imitations by other people.
But a source familiar with Halpern told Jewish News that he was convinced the tapes were genuine. A private investigator, Altea Steinherz, is understood to have compiled the evidence against the rabbi. Halpern has been described as “Charedi royalty” who was thought to be “untouchable” in relation to the allegations.
The source, who asked not to be named, said there was disquiet in Halpern’s Golders Green community and that “some people have left, others have made a point of not being there on Shabbat. There are reports of a meeting with Halpern and members of his community, in which he was essentially challenged as to why he had not sued Channel 12, together with offers to fund such a legal fight”. In Golders Green, the source said, “most people are avoiding Rabbi Halpern’s gaze”, adding that people believed there was “a failure of leadership” in dealing with the matter.
On social media, an Orthodox insider calling himself “If You Tickle Us” says that Rabbi (Yisroel Meir) Greenberg of the Golders Green community, Munks (Golders Green Beth Hamedrash), “is reportedly coming under immense pressure to take a stand. He is said to be torn between the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations culture to drown out the cries of victims, and his upright Munks community, for whom taking a moral stand isn’t some alien goyish idea”.
Yehudis Fletcher, the women’s activist and co-founder of Nahamu, an organisation set up to combat religious extremism, told Jewish News that she and other campaigners had spent the last decade hearing claims from women of alleged sexual harassment by Rabbi Halpern. “This [the Channel 12 programme] is just the latest iteration. We never forgot, people working in this sector did not forget. But for those who are reacting now, we have to ask, where have you been for the last 10 years? The idea that this is suddenly a problem speaks to the depth of the problem. His specific behaviour to women has been in the public domain since 2013”.
She queried those who were currently “suddenly” condemning Rabbi Halpern as “virtue signalling”, and complained that “no-one wants to hold themselves accountable”. She said she had been unable to persuade newspapers in the strictly Orthodox community to stop advertising Rabbi Halpern’s book, Shaarei Chaim. Everyone who had not specifically condemned him, she suggested, was in fact giving their “tacit approval”.
Everyone Jewish News spoke to said complaints against Halpern were a community-wide issue, rather than something confined to the Charedi population in Stamford Hill or Golders Green. One campaigner said: “For more secular people who think it’s nothing to do with them, they will still need the religious community for bris (circumcision) and burial. So it’s in everyone’s interests to recognise this situation affects all of us.”
Greenberg said the problem of sexual harassment was not confined to the strictly-Orthodox community. “But as long as there is no regulatory system, there are going to be allegations of abuse, and victims are going to feel their complaints are never properly investigated. Neither they, nor the people complained of, are going to feel proper closure.”
He added: “There are still shuls which advertise ‘Carlebach Friday nights’. [Charismatic Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, who died in 1994, was widely accused of sexual impropriety, allegations made before and after his death]. We wouldn’t advertise a Jimmy Savile-style Chanukah party or a Rolf Harris-style Chanukah party for children. Every time a shul advertises a Carlebach Friday night, they are sending a message to the victims of sexual predators within the community that we trivialise their experience.”
