Settlement of abuse by popular teacher case to cost L.A. $170 million

Fox News        Once lawyers began digging into Mark Berndt's past, they discovered a three-decade pattern of odd behavior and complaints about the teacher that school administrators either missed or ignored. 

Both students and teachers had complained about the popular elementary school teacher who was eventually convicted of committing numerous lewd acts on his students.

The settlement involving 81 students is believed to be the largest ever for a school sex abuse case, according to victims' lawyers, and increases the public price of the scandal to $170 million when combined with 65 cases settled earlier for $30 million.

"There was a volcano of evidence," attorney John Manly said. "The district settled this case because there as a gun pointed at their head, a legal gun, and it was about to go off and the public was going to find out everything."

Lawyers said none of it would have come to light if it hadn't been for a gutsy pharmacy photo clerk who called police when she discovered the troubling photos and learned Berndt had been processing similar pictures there since 2005.

The 19-year-old woman had only been on the job a month and her supervisors told her not to call police. She did it anyway.

Lawyers for the children said they managed to unearth a dozen incidents involving Berndt between 1983 and 2009 and found that no action was taken to remove him from teaching.

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Har Nof massacre: Rav Chaim Kaniefsky and Rav Reuben

Arutz 7

Rabbi Yitzhak Mordechai Hacohen Rubin, rabbi of the Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in Jerusalem that was brutally attacked on Tuesday, went to visit hareidi leaders on Thursday to ask their participation in a eulogy for the four Jews murdered in the attack, in which a Druze police officer was also murdered. [...]

The hareidi leader explained that "there needs to be an atonement" for the generation so as to merit the coming of the Mashiach, an atonement he argued the victims of the terror attack partially made.

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Rabbi Kraus follows in the footsteps of Rabbi Rackman in "solving" the Aguna problem

Jewish Week    The court, called the International Beit Din, was formed in June and is headed by Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a highly respected former pulpit rabbi in Queens and Religious Zionist of America leader who made aliyah in 2005. It is interpreting Jewish law in new ways — still consistent with tradition, its leaders say — to procure a get, or religious divorce, for agunot, women stuck in marriages with recalcitrant husbands.[...]

While the number of agunot is not known, the problem has gone largely unsolved, pitting traditional Jewish law against those who feel deep empathy for women stuck in loveless marriages. At the root of the issue is the husband’s absolute right when it comes to issuing a get, or Jewish divorce. And while rabbinic authorities offer sympathy for these women, they maintain they are constrained from action in many cases by the boundaries of halacha. The result, at times, has the husband using extortion before granting a divorce, insisting on large sums of money and/or refusing joint custody of children. According to Jewish law, if the agunah marries and has a child, the child is considered a mamzer, illegitimate, and cannot marry a Jew. (This is not true in the husband’s case.)

Concerns about the moral injustice of the “absolute right” principle have led to a myriad of efforts to resolve the agunah problem, or “crisis,” in recent years. In the 1990s, the late Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, a major figure in Modern Orthodoxy and president of Bar-Ilan University, convened a beit din that issued divorces on the basis of kiddushei ta’ot, a Talmudic concept for annulment. The principle reasons that the woman never would have married her husband if she had known he would act in an abusive fashion during the marriage.

While deeply respected on a personal level by his peers, Rabbi Rackman, who died in 2008,was unsuccessful in persuading them to accept his approach, which was considered too lenient. The practical result was that many rabbis refused to officiate at the subsequent weddings of women who had been freed by the rabbi’s bet din.

Rabbi Krauss is introducing the legal concept of get zikui, annulling a marriage based on what is best for both parties. The principle operates on the premise that the divorce will ultimately benefit the husband as well as the wife.

“There is no more relationship — they have gone their separate ways,” explained Rabbi Krauss in an email. “The husband doesn’t want to give the get unless he gets money. It’s not true that he doesn’t want to give a divorce, but he wants money. Deep down, he wants to be free and pursue his life.”

The International Beit Din will not use get zikui to the exclusion of other methods, explained Rabbi Yosef Blau, another of the three judges on the panel and the spiritual adviser at Yeshiva University.

“A number of tools can be used,” he said. “Each case will be evaluated on its own merit. The goal is to free women in a way that the decision will be accepted in the broader community.”[...]

Still, despite support from abroad, the new religious court has already met with resistance here. According to a source close to the court, several leading rabbis at Yeshiva University, including Rabbi Mordechai Willig and Rabbi Hershel Schachter, have already expressed reservations about the court’s methodology. The source wished to remain anonymous in order to avoid “mahchlocet,” public disagreement. [...]

Aside from methodology, the International Beit Din will also implement a new policy of transparency. According to traditional Jewish law, members of the court do not have to give any explanation for their rulings. But Rabbi Ronnie Warburg, director of the International Beit Din and the court’s third judge, explained that “transparency is an imperative.” [...]

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Rav Moshe Sternbuch: Har Nof Massacre

  Rav Sternbuch 

Rav Sternbuch's shul at the time of the attack

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Haf Nof Massacre: Rav Malinowitz

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Practical question: Should I not present the Torah viewpoint because of threats of violence?

Update:see How Debbie Gross "saved" me from being abused at the Convention

I just received this letter from the organizer of the Conference on Abuse where I will be speaking at the beginning of December in Jerusalem. I replied that I still plan to show up. My view on these matters is  the mainstream view of the majority of poskim - no chumros.  Any thoughts?

Rabbi Eidensohn

Shalom u’vracha.

I am writing you concerning your email of a few weeks ago as to whether we will have some form of bodyguards at the conference to protect the speakers against “hecklers”.  Unfortunately, we do not have any funds or way to provide any form of protection to the speaker.  In these difficult security times in Jerusalem, we are hoping just to stay safe from the arab terrorists who seem to be everywhere. 

I would like to alert you to the fact that we have been receiving numerous emails over the past week, from agunot and their families concerning your views and blogs about agunot and the use of the internet.  These emails have been very aggressive and threatening.  I would like to alert you to this fact so that you can reevaluate whether you are prepared both emotionally and physically to deal with what seems to be a large amount of angry participants who are specifically coming to the conference to denounce you and your views.  I am taking their anger quite seriously and relaying such to you.  I hope that you are prepared to deal with their anger and aggression.  I would like you to take all of this into consideration prior to coming to the conference.  I will certainly understand should you decide that this is not the right platform for you at this time.

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Har Nof massacre: Widows ask that everyone be more loving and caring

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