The Danger of Spiritual Abuse in the Haredi and Orthodox Jewish Worlds

A year-long exploration and investigation into the subtle but insidious form of abuse in some Haredi and Orthodox communities, especially among those who entered the community later in their lives.

Note: Four years ago, I was on the verge of publishing an extensive exploration into the spiritual abuse in the Orthodox, Haredi, and Hasidic worlds. In particular, as a baal teshuva (Jew who became Orthodox later in life), I was becoming more aware of the dangers of this subtle form of abuse in the world I had joined and would later leave.

It was very important to me at the time that I publish it with a Jewish outlet. It mattered to me that the legitimacy of a publication would contribute to change in the community I was part of. And so I worked for over a year on this piece, after a year of interviews and research.

Shortly before publishing, the publication got cold feet. For a number of reasons, I decided to shelve the piece. But it stuck with me, and I always regretted that decision.

I have now decided to publish it despite the potential for negative repercussions. Besides for the importance of honoring the victims who spoke out for this piece, I also believe the need to understand spiritual abuse is important for all people, not just Jews.

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A soft-spoken rabbi, adorned with a flowing white beard, slightly wrinkled white shirt and frameless glasses sits in front of well-worn volumes filled with Torah as he addresses his thousands of digital listeners.

Rabbi Manis Friedman speaks with a gentle voice, and pauses every now and then to punctuate thoughts with his infamous smile. But the words themselves he speaks are not so gentle, and are often contradictory.

In one of his popular English videos on marriage and intimacy, he laments the fact that many couples aren’t following each and every chumra (stringency) of Jewish law in their interpersonal relationships – even the ones that he seems to have come up with himself. 

Couples with marriage issues? “It’s so clear that their problem is that they’re not tznius (modest) in the bedroom.”

“When they’re intimate, she’s on top. Or they keep changing. There’s something directly affected by that...if you’re messing with the roots, it’s not worth it. It is very not worth it.” 

How does he know this? Why, just by listening to how they speak to each other:

"There's this couple I'm talking to right now. You listen to how they talk to each other or what they complain about to each other. When they're intimate, she's on top.”

He expands on and adjusts his advice in another video: “Whatever the husband wants to do, the wife is doing the right thing by doing what he wants, even if it’s not to her standard of eydelkeit (niceness).” However, he says, the husband should not do the same for her requests. “She wants to listen to you. She just has to learn, get comfortable with it.” 

“Generally a woman is much more lost, much more helpless than the husband.”

How does he know this? He never explains.

“Don’t read books on marriage,” he insists. “There is not a single good one. Read Shulchan Aruch (The Jewish Code of Law). It’s the only intelligent advice. Most of these frum books are psychology dressed up in a [verse]... it doesn’t work.” (Friedman himself has written his own advice on marriage, so we can assume he is not referring to his own work). 

I. Seduction

Friedman is not a fringe rabbi. He teaches on cruises and headlines big retreats. He has nearly 20,000 followers on his English Facebook page. He has written several books on intimacy and hundreds of articles for Chabad.org. He is the director and co-founder of Bais Chana Women International, a kiruv program for teenage girls to explore Jewish texts. His books, written in English, are geared towards the non- and newly Hasidic. His deeper advice and lectures are often for those who are making the difficult next steps from taking on Hasidic and Orthodox belief to integrating into Hasidic culture.

In the past year, I’ve spoken to dozens of newly Haredi Jews, converts, psychologists, rabbis and community leaders about the quiet threat that Friedman and other rabbis pose to the Haredi community, and the Orthodox world at large. 

The experts do not mince words: Friedman, and others like him, are spiritually abusive rabbis who prey on baalei teshuva (individuals who have chosen to become Orthodox later in life), converts and other vulnerable populations.

Abusive may seem like a strong word to use in an age where sexual abuse and harassment is rampant.

But it is precisely this misunderstanding of what abuse looks like, what characterizes abusive behavior,  that must be addressed if we are to face the deeper and more overt forms of abuse.

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Spiritual abuse, in the simplest sense, is wielding psychological power and religious texts in an inappropriate or damaging way over individuals who are at their most vulnerable.

According to Dr. Nachum Klafter – a psychiatrist who has written about abuse in the Jewish world, has worked extensively with the Orthodox community and is himself a baal teshuva – spiritual abuse exists on a spectrum. On one end is the narcissistic leader who uses his followers to “make this person feel wonderful about himself.” In the middle lays the cult leader who abuses the power he has over his vulnerable community by claiming infallibility.  On the farthest end of the spectrum is what we generally think of as classic abusers: Sexual and physical abusers.

As Klafter explains, it is essential that we are able to name and see all these forms of abuse for what they are. Because while “overt abuse is more harmful... subtle abuse is really a problem, and it also is not just a problem for people, it's also a problem for institutions, and I think for communities.”

Rabbi Friedman displays his cultish thinking publicly, laying his damaging rhetoric out for all who are paying attention to see.

But spiritual abuse takes its most insidious form behind closed doors, where charismatic leaders have the opportunity to infect the minds of the vulnerable without the watchful eyes of others. 

I spoke to multiple people who had gone to Friedman for marriage advice, either on the phone or in person, and they described a similar experience: He spent very little time trying to understand their situation and offered very black-and-white advice.  

One person, a baal teshuva Lubavitcher Hasid, described looking for advice regarding dating in the earlier stages of his road on the baal teshuva journey. He was told to call Friedman, who did not know who he was or anything about him.

The person described how he “spoke to [Friedman] for two, three minutes” about severe mental health issues he was facing, asked whether it should prevent him from dating and asked whether or not he should disclose his difficulties with someone he may choose to marry.

“[Friedman] said, ‘Don't be ridiculous. These aren't issues.  And you don't need to discuss them with the one you're dating.  And make sure to send me an invitation to the wedding.’”

That advice, given after a few minutes of speaking to a person, doled out by someone with no training in mental health, encouraging a mentally ill person not to share their illness with a partner they hope to spend the rest of their lives with, is a reminder of how deeply problematic and hidden abuse of spiritual authority is in our community.  Even worse, public criticism of such approaches is discouraged and often punished).  The result is a culture of silence that swirls around these seemingly endless stories of abuse of power.

Klafter described how manipulation is a trademark of cult leaders. “A cult leader claims to be the sole path to enlightenment or redemption,” he told me.

“They say, ‘You can't do this without me. I'm the only one that can serve you’ When they really mean, ‘You're going to be serving me, but I'll say that I'm serving you.’ They might claim that they're infallible, or that they're omniscient, or that they have real ruach hakodesh [divine inspiration] or prophecy.”

When Friedman compared sexual abuse to a bad case of diarrhea, I was disturbed, and I asked my rabbi at the time whether or not I should write about it.  He told me not to because “Manis Friedman has a lot of power.”  Back then, as an earlier-stage baal teshuva, I myself respected the power of my rabbi so much that I deferred to his perspective.

This experience is common for many who have considered speaking out.  It is not just the followers of these rabbis, or the rabbis themselves who have power: It is the society around them that allows them to continue to operate.

Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi, another leader of baalei teshuva who has over 34,000 followers on his English Facebook page and whose videos have been seen hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, has claimed similar insight to Friedman.

He has previously declared that down syndrome and autism are “punishments for sins committed in a previous life.” He has argued that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves because they weren’t religious. After a woman and her children died in a tragic fire, Mizrachi claimed that it was a, “very very strong message from Shamaim [heaven]” and that the reason for the tragedy was because of the immodest women in Jewish communities. 

While all of these statements are disgusting, the deeper danger in making them is the implicit claim of knowledge that no one else has access to. Like Friedman’s repugnant comments about love-making, accepting the claims requires the listener to believe the rabbi has special knowledge, both about Jewish law and about interpersonal relationships. 

When people call out rabbis like Mizrachi, they are often told, even by those who aren’t his followers or those who disagree with his perspective, that that they have no right to speak up due to the fact that the rabbi has helped many people return to religious Judaism.

This abuse of power doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There is a culture and a societal structure that allows such men to continue to operate and that props them up. 

Modern rabbis are not prophets. But spiritually abusive ones convince their followers that they, and no one else, have divine access, a magical vision that would allow the rabbi to know the most private behavior of an individual and interpret the correct course of action. This creates a relationship that is abusive to anyone who buys into the rabbi’s words: if you believe that an individual has divine access, you are convinced not through his logic, but by blind faith.  

For the newly religious, who are in the throes of turning their lives inside out and transforming their previously held views about reality itself, it’s easy to feel like you must defer to those who are more learned and religious. If you don’t yet know what is and isn’t beyond the pale, you have little right to question a rabbi. You are lowly; the rabbi is special.

I myself have had this experience. As a new baal teshuva, I remember how, at the beginning of my journey, I never quite fully trusted my own instincts.  I would ask my rabbis for advice from everything from whether I should write (I wanted to be a writer) to how to deal with parents who were skeptical of my new life choices.

I was blessed with incredible, thoughtful and sensitive rabbis who were at least aware of the power they possessed. I was encouraged to keep writing, and to never do anything to hurt my relationship with my family.  But I have known too many who were not so lucky.  And even now, looking back, I can’t help but be somewhat shaken by realizing just how vulnerable I was, and how willing I was to throw away the most valuable parts of my life.

If a rabbi doesn’t require a level of faith usually reserved for God, then if a rabbi says something dangerous – like, say, comparing sexual abuse to diarrhea or that purposefully killing children in war was justifiable (as Friedman has) – students can express dissent. And if a rabbi isn’t speaking primarily to the newly-religious, they can expect their listeners to argue that their assertions are contrary to Jewish law and values if indeed they are.

To accept an abusive rabbi’s suspect teachings, a person must completely trust the rabbi.  The transmission of knowledge is dependent on believing the teacher actually has a level of insight the learners don’t.

Such leaders create followers who don’t just trust them, but who give up their will to them. While physical or sexual abuse does not always follow, it does not take much for this trust and dependence to go from the realm of the spiritual to the realm of the physical. 

One woman, a baal teshuva in her 60s, who recently left a community made up largely of other American baalei teshuva where she and other followers suffered at the hands of an American rabbi in Israel who advertised himself as a “healer.”   

“I got a phone call from this trusted rabbi friend of mine telling me that all these women came up to him to complain about my husband and tell him that [my husband] was basically molesting them. He was doing bodywork treatments on them.” 

Like the Talmudic Rav Giddel who defended his choice to regularly sit at the entrance to the women’s mikvah by comparing their bodies to white geese, this rabbi would justify his intimate bodywork treatments by saying, “‘I'm such a tzaddik, and nobody should touch women except for me because I'm the only one who can do it. Because my mind is always in Heaven and not on this earth.’”

She recounted his defense when confronted with his actions. He told her, “‘I need to do this because of healing. You need to be healed. You have disease only I can heal it. I'm the only one who has the answer for you, and if you don't let me do this, then you're risking your life.’”

Ultimately, this is what ties so many of these leaders together: Claims of supernatural abilities and insight that require a total abnegation of personal will and thought.

And yet, few of their victims come forward. As one woman, who had been heavily involved in a Jewish kiruv organization until a few years ago and who had been spiritually abused by the leader and face of the organization told me, the fear of retribution can be overwhelmingly powerful. “He has such powerful of numbers behind him. I am sure that's why many many people won’t name names. Rabbis who have huge social media backing can destroy us small fish with one single post.”

Another woman who runs her own spiritual community, but only after suffering spiritual abuse by multiple rabbis, told me that even if victims were to come forward, there’s no real structure in place to handle reports of kind of abuse. “In today's day and age, I’m not sure why people aren't coming out. But then again. To who? How?”

Indeed, one of the most prominent public incidents of spiritual abuse in the Jewish community in recent years was solved not by the community, but with a lawsuit. 

In February, I spoke with Bethany Mandel, a victim of Rabbi Bernard "Barry" Freundel. In 2015, Freundel pleaded guilty to 52 counts of voyeurism and was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison (later reduced due to “good behavior”) after being caught filming women while they were undressing before immersing themselves in the National Capital Mikvah, an independent facility that Freundel was instrumental in founding in 2005. Freundel handled Mandel’s conversion, as he did for many others in his capacity as the vice-president of the Rabbinical Council of America, the world’s largest organization of orthodox rabbis, and head of their conversion committee. As such, he wielded enormous power over those who came to him.

According to Mandel, Freundel displayed characteristics of abusive leaders well before he was caught committing these horrific acts.  But his followers were repeatedly made aware that nothing could be done. “People complained… and nothing was done…” Mandel explained. 

In the end, he had to break the law to finally be held accountable.

An example of his subtle abuses of power was how he often used his convert candidates as “volunteer” secretaries: “He would have candidates working in his personal office doing free secretarial work. There was a very clear understanding that it helps the [conversion] process move along faster,” Mandel told me.

I spoke with one of those “volunteers” (and one of his mivkah victims), Kate Bailey, who converted through Freundel and was also part of his synagogue.  Due to the fact that Bailey could not afford the initial application fee, Freundel offered what at first seemed like a generous proposal: she would work in his office in exchange for his waiving the fee.

Except that the fee was only $150, and her work went on for years.  Like many converts, she felt an implicit message in questioning why he would continue to ask her for work: “I was a little scared to ask about it, because I didn't want to piss him off.”

The work was “at his house usually late at night” and mostly without anyone else present: “I was pretty much always alone with him in his home office.”

It went further: “He would stop by people's houses and ask to watch movies late at night. He would do that stuff with people who were single. It would cross over sexual lines in that way when people were single,” Mandel told me.

Bailey confirmed that she knew one person personally who had experienced this, and after posting concerns about his behavior in a Facebook group heard from others who reported being subject to this behavior.

Again, according to Mandel, “That should have been a red flag, and people mentioned it. Like, ‘No one was in the house. I was in his office alone with him. Isn't that weird?’  And again, nothing was done,” she added.

According to Mandel and Bailey, most people see Freundel’s crimes as isolated, something that came out of nowhere and surprised everyone. But the truth, they argue, is that he had been abusive for years, but that those abuses were not considered serious enough to be dealt with.  His abuses were abuses of power (and in the case of spending time alone with congregants, outright sexual harassment). But to those around him, they were simply not worth dealing with.

As Mandel explained, “What was I think really disappointing to a lot of people who had negative experiences with him, was that it took something so egregious that was also captured on tape for him to be held accountable.” 

She describes how she told others in the community, “I told them right from the start this does not feel right. He's not a good guy. He's using people. He's manipulating people. This process isn't right. And I was ignored. They just put their blind faith in the process and in the sort of rabbinic establishment, and trusted that there was no way that this top rabbi in America was doing something wrong in any capacity whatsoever. It took this.”

In other words, from top to bottom, her community was not built to deal with holding leaders like Freundel accountable, even when he abused his power repeatedly. The only process that did hold him accountable? The law.

II. Power

The Haredi world, in general, has a heavily top-down approach to Judaism. In the Hasidic world, the spiritual leader of the community is known as the “Rebbe,” and is often seen as the conduit through which their community can achieve divine enlightenment. And so, it is understandable that even if the rebbe does not abuse his power (although, of course, many do), a culture that is open to such enormous power being placed in the hands of one man will naturally be more vulnerable to others who push for a top-down approach to Judaism. 

As a person close to Friedman told me, “He was such... he's a name in Lubavitch. It's almost like Reb Yoel [a chassid of the Rebbe who is considered the foremost expert in the Rebbe’s teachings]. It’s like, if Reb Yoel says something about Chassidus,  there's no arguing with that. After Gimel Tamuz [the death of the Rebbe], Reb Yoel is the nearest thing we have to an expert. There is no disagreeing with him.”

The dynamic, he argues, is similar with Friedman, who represents, to a select group of baalei teshuva and vulnerable Hasidic Jews, one of the few voices they can trust with the authority they would hope to give to a rebbe.

It is for this reason that the person who came to Friedman with a question about marriage ended up getting married without telling his wife that he was suffering from a mental illness. They are now divorced, and although the person clarified to me that he takes responsibility for his own actions, if he had never received that advice from Friedman, he would have followed his intuition to be more thoughtful about his approach to marriage, and taken much longer in the process.  Another example of the power even a few words said to a vulnerable person can change their lives forever.

But even outside of Hasidic communities, many spiritual leaders are given a power that goes well beyond most of their training and abilities. Rabbis are expected to counsel their members on interpersonal relationships, parenting, business ethics, financial issues and sexual intimacy, with little to no psychological training. 

As Dr. Klafter explains, “It's very similar to being a therapist, but therapists have lots and lots of training for dealing with this and rabbis don't. They don't have that kind of training...The other thing is therapists have a lot of boundaries in place. All you're doing is you're serving as the person's counselor during specific sessions. But rabbis have far more vast responsibilities for their congregants than therapists do for the patients.”

This is worsened by the fact that abusive rabbis often take on the responsibilities of therapists or even doctors.

The rabbi is not only a person who listens and counsels, but a spiritual leader to whom you are expected to defer on matters of religious law – which, for Orthodox Jews, and especially Haredi Jews, encompasses every area of life, from the kitchen to the boardroom to the bedroom. As such, the scope of potential abuse is often unlimited.

Friedman, for example, is well-known for his “expertise” in homeopathic medicine.  He lectures on it widely, but it goes far deeper than that.  According to the person close to him, “He would prescribe [homeopathic remedies] for emotional health, and mental health.”

And if the person cannot afford his treatment? “He would write a prescription on a piece of paper, and... you put it in your pocket and that was meant to have the same effect.”

(This is known in the homeopathic world as the “paper remedy” and is considered quackery even among leaders in the homeopathic world).

To some, these may seem like foolish, even dangerous, mistakes on the part of a spiritual leader. But as with Freundel’s multiple indiscretions, it is important to recognize this use of power for what it is: Abusive.  It demands that people in a vulnerable state let go of their agency, giving over their rational minds to another person without question.

Is Friedman as abusive as Freundel? 

This is the wrong question. The correct question should be, “How do we stop abuse by rabbis and communal leaders in all forms?”

Because as we have seen, abuse lives on a spectrum.  As Klafter explained, a spiritually abusive leader “don't often have all the characteristics [of abusive leaders].” Rather, he argues, “you could talk about degrees of abuse.”

Abusers prosper not because there is an overt attempt to encourage abuse, but because there is a culture in which leaders are not accountable and are revered as beyond human. In this system, the only factor that separates a rabbi who abuses and a rabbi who doesn’t is whether he wants to or not.

Sadly, these rabbis often use the very structure of Judaism itself to shield themselves from complaints.  According to Dr. Mark Banschick, another psychiatrist who has worked extensively in the Orthodox world, because Jewish law is so vast and intricate, its very complexity can be used to justify horrible things: “There is an explanation for everything. There are all kinds of rationalizations which are really thought out. It’s very hard for people on the inside to see because of this.”

The most common and defining feature of spiritually abusive leaders, Jewish or otherwise, and what makes them so dangerous, is that they claim to be on a higher spiritual level. If the listeners are not at the same spiritual level as these rabbis, then we have no right to question them. We are lowly, and they are special. True discourse is impossible. The opinions of the students are, by default, less valid. 

As Klafter explains, this behavior paves the way for abuse. “The religious leader is really setting up a system for his gratification and aggrandizement, and it requires total devotion… It's like their followers have a total loss of common sense.”

Most of these figures are immune to criticism, but that does not mean that there are no dissenting voices. 

Mizrachi, for example, has been lambasted by some Orthodox rabbis, who wrote in 2016 that he "’reduce[s] complex issues to simplistic and misleading sound bites,’ and his assertions are ‘objectionable, and even dangerous.’ That method may entertain and even stimulate some audiences, but it does no justice to the Jewish mesorah (tradition)."

But the reaction from Mizrachi is no different than any other spiritually abusive rabbi: When he is criticized, he hits back.

For example, in 2014, Mizrachi claimed that one of his female critics (whom he derisively referred to as “one girl”) will suffer in Hell, while bragging that she has brought him positive PR, additional speaking gigs and 10 times as many viewers: “Auschwitz is a picnic. She’s going to be there for eternity.”

In one case, when confronted with advice that had gone wrong, Friedman actually denied ever giving the advice.  The same source close to Friedman described his interaction like this:

“I said, ‘Listen, I discussed this with you.’ He said flatly, ‘I never would have told you that. I could not have said that.’ He's so cool and collected that if he decides that he could not have said it, there's a confidence there that you can't broker.... He sounds so sure. He is saying, ‘There's no way I could be wrong.’”

Making the problem worse, even when these leaders are criticized, they actually use the attention to build their audience. 

Friedman has done so to grow his own following. Despite the fact that he continually causes controversy in the Chabad community, as the person close to him described, “As much as a group of people make fun of what he says and how he says it, there are a group of people who will see no wrong.”

III. Fear 

It is these claims of supernatural power and the inability to accept criticism in any form, to the point of demonization and ostracization of those who do criticize them, that tie these men together – and what makes them supremely dangerous.  

As Klafter explains, the goal is for “their followers to become really profoundly emotionally dependent on them.” 

In order to do this, “they do many things to take away people's autonomy and self esteem in a very deliberate way. They're often very deceptive. They tell people on the outside misinformation about the group to make it sound more benign. They punish people for leaving the group. They make it very hard for people to leave the group. They take away people's capacity to live without the group, their money, their skills, their assets, their independence and they make people increase. They trap people in the group, they punish people for disloyalty.”

One woman who worked closely with an abusive rabbi described an intervention she and others tried to stage for him to discuss his issues (another theme I noticed in my interviews): “There was what I think a very loving and genuine intervention to try to show the person I am thinking of the damage they were causing to themselves and others.”

Instead of being heard, she described how every single person at the meeting was “blacklisted by him.”

Although she would not name the leader, she told me he has thousands of followers on social media, and that the fervency of his followers is one of the main reasons she has remained quiet about her concerns.

As the woman who worked with the sexually abusive “healer” said, “Anyone who challenges him gets thrown to the curb. He'll invalidate criticism on the basis of what's wrong with you. Like, ‘You can't hear anything that I'm saying because you have so much sugar in your system that it's making so much noise inside of your head that you can't actually hear the voice of God.’”

And in Mandel’s case, the result for potential converts might mean more than being kicked out of a community: They may never get the chance to be Jewish.  

Indeed, Freundel was so powerful that if one got on his bad side, they feared he could blacklist them to the point where, in Mandel’s words, they would never have a chance of completing an Orthodox conversion. “You're not a Jew. You'll never be a Jew in America.”

The result is this mutes most criticism before it even happens. According to Mandel, “He could have had me blacklisted at every single Beis Din in the country. So there was no benefit. I knew that people had complained, I knew that nothing had been done. So what was the point?”

These teachers and leaders are essentially mini-authoritarians, dominating their classrooms or their communities with the message that it is only through total acceptance of their teachings that one can achieve one’s goals of spiritual growth.

IV. Threats

A more subtle form of abusive leadership, as Klafter explains, is called “narcissistic leadership.” Through narcissistic leadership, these rabbis create the circumstances that allow them to stay in power. 

A narcissistic leader can be identified by the effect they have on their followers. As Klafter explains, “If the person's interactions with you seem to be increasingly about you taking care of them rather than them taking care of you...if this relationship feels like a drain on me rather than a source of energy for me,” then you may have found a narcissistic leader. 

“There are different levels... Some people are just super controlling, and there's super controlling narcissists out there...and then there are just toxic predators who use their guru-ness to prey on people and get them to give them money or sex or whatever it is that they want.”

One woman, an older baal teshuva, described her experience with a leader well-known for his Shabbat meals in Jerusalem, where abusive actions are often treated as charmingly outlandish and spiritual behavior, in this way: “I've been to his Shabbat table, which was like a nightmare. He's super, super controlling and if you don't agree with him, you're a bad Jew, but I don't know that he's ever said that he thinks that he's the messiah or that if people don't listen to him they're gonna die or go to hell.”

The tolerance in communities for such abuse because it is not the same as other forms of abuse is exactly why it continues.

V. The Scope of the Problem

It is hard to quantify exactly how prevalent spiritually abusive leadership is in the Jewish world, but there seem to be pockets of the Jewish world that are particularly vulnerable to these forms of abuse.

The baal teshuva world and community of converts, filled with the vulnerable newly-religious, is home to many such leaders.

As one woman who has spent close to a decade working with a number of kiruv organizations and finally left in order to start an organization with her husband because of the problems she saw put it, “The tragedy is that egos get huge fast and many of these people work in isolation with no one overseeing the ethics of their practices. 

As was clearly the case with Freundel, even one person wielding enough power can do damage that extends far beyond even their own communities, and that will reverberate for generations.

According to Mandel, “Most of the converts I know who went through Freundel are not religious anymore, or don't want to be religious anymore.”

VI. The Structure and the Potential for Solutions

It is hard to imagine a reduction in abusive leadership in the Haredi world without structural changes to the Haredi world itself. Top-down leadership and communities that value leaders as supernatural, and where criticism is seen as dangerous, are more exposed to the danger of those willing to exploit such a system.  

These rabbis often view themselves in the framework of Hasidic teachings which are steeped in the notion of the the Rebbe, individuals especially attuned to the divine who lead their movements and have a special access to the truth. This framework gives enormous power to Jewish leaders.

And in the baal teshuva and conversion system, where the goal of making people Orthodox often supersedes how healthy the process of making them Orthodox actually is, and where followers are already willing to change their entire way of life, abusive leadership may actually be baked into the approach of many institutions.  

In the case of converts, when a rabbi wields the very power of deciding whether someone can be Jewish or not, a system without checks and balances gives so much power to one person that it is inevitable it will be abused.

And while we may want to place the blame on people who don’t act or hold these rabbis accountable, the real problem is often that no system is put in place at all.

In Freundel’s case, even if the organizations he was part of wanted to hold him accountable, the system set up around him made him essentially untouchable. 

In Mandel’s words: “The RCA didn't have a lot of power. And the shul didn't have a lot of power. The shul has its hands tied by the contract... The only real recourse that I'm aware of within the RCA is to take someone's membership away, and the threshold for that according to the RCA bylines is very high.”

Expecting people to let go of their critical thinking and their personal agency is a problem that exists even outside the construct of abusive leadership in the Jewish world. It will fester in any community where the communal and societal structures favor the powerful and provide no accountability or voice for the vulnerable.

In other words, if we are to truly end abuse of power, and abuse among the powerful, then we must find ways to give those powers back to the people within the Haredi world. From the structure of contracts to the culture that allows such contracts to be agreed to in the first place, the Haredi world’s way of handling power must be transformed from top to bottom.

Until then, things will not change in any meaningful way.