… has been sticking to Yeshiva University in the last few years. Ugly plus hypocrisy.
Last year, in the school newspaper, a Yeshiva student published a short story with mild sexual content. The school became hysterical, clapping filters on male students’ computer accounts (no need to do women; they don’t read about sex).
But sex and money issues involving older adults on campus don’t seem to get much of a rise out of Yeshiva’s president and board of trustees.
Of course, when those trustees have until recently included Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, and when your “Entrepreneurial Institute” bears the name of Ira Rennert, you can expect a forgiving attitude toward ways and means of acquiring large sums.
Yeshiva said nothing when the Madoff/Merkin story broke; it simply got its technicians to remove, on the day the story broke, all references to the two of them from its website.
Eventually it had to talk, of course, about its victimization by those bad boys. (The victimization thing isn’t flying too well; Yeshiva “may be at risk for clawbacks.”) But it said as little as possible.
Now yet another scandal has roiled Yeshiva – another sex scandal. It hasn’t responded as aggressively as it did to that evil woman who wrote the short story. In fact, it has said and done nothing for decades about multiple complaints that rabbis at its high school sexually abused boys who were enrolled there.
From the mid 1980s until today … Y.U. officials … have dismissed claims or kept them quiet. Some of these officials allowed [one of the alleged abusers] to leave the Y.U. system and find a new position as dean of a Florida day school without disclosing the abuse allegations. Later, … a Y.U. rabbi warned the Florida school that Finkelstein could be a threat. And when Finkelstein’s next employer, the Jerusalem Great Synagogue, asked whether the allegations that dogged him were true, Y.U. assured the synagogue that there was nothing to worry about.
At this point, there’s a critical mass of ugly coming out of Yeshiva University. No doubt they’ve hired some incredibly expensive public relations firm in the belief that if you throw enough of your students’ tuition money around it will solve problems you created through your own negligence or ineptitude. One more insult piled onto many insults.
At most universities, the president of the school would have resigned by now.
January 6th, 2013 at 7:09PM
Many of us are very proud graduates of numerous schools of Yeshiva University. These comments are made by people who either have no allegiance to the school or have probably never attended. Schools such as Einstein medical school, Wurzweiler school of social work, Cardoza Law school, Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Azrieli, Revel as well as Yeshiva College and the various Religious divisions of YU including REITS and JSS have provided leaders in all fields of the worldwide Jewish and general community.Attacking Yeshiva University in the Forward on an almost daily basis is a wonderful way to sell newspapers. While there are some who have legitimate accusations, there will be many seeking merely to sue for the sake of making money.Stop blaming the entire Orthodox Jewish world for the deeds of a few. RABBI DR. BERNHARD ROSENBERG
January 7th, 2013 at 3:32AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
July 1st, 2013 at 7:40PM
[…] blog in business. It specializes in trustees like Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, infantilizing and sexist rules for its students, conflict of interest among its post-Madoff/Merkin leaders, and decades worth of […]
October 22nd, 2013 at 2:47PM
[…] … Yeshiva could not have done any better. A university whose sexual and financial scandals dwarf the sexual and financial scandals of all other American universities; where the vilest sexual abusers continue to be hired and kept on the faculty until pressure from journalists forces Yeshiva to fire them; where the school’s long history of sexual abusers means that it now faces hundreds of millions of dollars in potential settlement costs from a massive ongoing lawsuit… A school perfectly happy to keep Bernard Madoff on its board of trustees long after suspicions of his massive criminality were rampant but hysterically punitive when a woman student wrote a short story with mild sexual content… […]