What happens to bad guys after they die? Sometimes, they are turned into good guys.

The practice of reputation laundering happens not only in life but also after death. It seems our community has still not learned the hard lessons about how we talk about abuse and abusers.

The Jewish community has been mourning the deaths of some big names recently. Unfortunately, the process of recalling people’s deaths sometimes involves selective memory, or what I call “reputation laundering”. Especially if the dead person was an abuser, or a supporter of abuse. It’s the practice of shifting the narrative away from a person’s damaging behaviors and turning them into other things — philanthropist, great educator, or even a tzaddik.

I coined this term years ago when I was working in fundraising for a major Israeli institution that had received a massive donation from a man who was wanted for murder. In fact, we all knew how he made his fortune, and it was not through behavior that was legal or ethical. But the organization took the money anyway, built new buildings, completely rebranded the institution, placed the donor on its board and the boards of other big institutions, and voila! No longer suspected gun-for-hire. No, no, no. Megadonor! Philanthropist! Great visionary!

Reputation laundering. It works every time.

We saw some of this earlier in the year when serial rapist Chaim Walder was given a bit of reputation laundering after his self-inflicted demise. Although dozens of his victims had come forward to describe his abuse, after his death, even the Israeli Chief Rabbi himself chose to console the family of the perpetrator rather than the victims, as if to say that preserving his name is more important than protecting the community from sexual abuse. His supporters screamed about “lashon hara” and respecting the dead, and some even called his victims “murderers” for “causing” him to commit suicide. (For the record, he did that to himself — and it was the ultimate act of avoiding responsibility, robbing his victims of justice, and controlling the narrative.)

Last week, we saw another case of posthumous reputation laundering with the death of Rabbi Pinchas Stopler, longtime head of NCSY. His many glowing tributes failed to mention one important factoid about him: that he spent years — possibly decades — covering up sexual abuse in NCSY. Scores of former disciples of Baruch Lanner came forward to talk about his abuse, and Stopler admitted that he knew about it all, but ignored the complaints because Lanner “has had such a magnificent impact.” What’s worse, due to his being star-struck by Lanner, he decided to completely dismiss the complaints he heard as being of “no real substance.” In other words, he would gaslight Lanner’s victims with the idea that they must be making things up, while proclaiming the guy who abused them to be “magnificent”. This stuff is not in the obituaries. And it is important. Because his behavior involved classic silencing techniques, especially in the fact of a high-profile abuser.

Lanner was what a classic example of the type of educator Pail Shaviv called a “Pied Piper” — a teacher or counselor who seems popular and charming but in fact is manipulative and often abusive and always, according to Shaviv, leaves a big mess in his wake.

‘Pied Pipers’—charismatic teachers who misuse their charisma—tend to break boundaries and in doing so become very attractive to their students, especially if their home situations are less than ideal. The Pied Piper becomes substitute a father figure and certain adolescents willfully follow them in an almost abnormal way. Often, very often, these Pied Pipers turn out to have a sexually abusive dimension.

They can be brilliant in inspiring students to go beyond their wildest expectations, and are often regarded (by their following of students, by parents, and by the Board or the community) as the ‘most important’ or ‘best’ members of staff. There is always, however, a price to be paid. The teacher’s personality becomes the center of the classroom rather than the course content. A ‘Pied Piper’ will deeply affect and influence some students—but will almost always leave a trail of emotional wreckage in his/her wake.

Pied Pipers get away with their abuse because their bosses, boards, and supervisors prefer to keep the image of popularity rather than protect their students. Sometimes even parents support the Pied Pipers. I wish this weren’t true, but this dynamic came up time and again in my research. Pied Pipers are everywhere, loved and adored by adults around who look away at the other stuff.

An even more egregious case of posthumous reputation-laundering that took place recently came with the death last month of Zechariah Wallerstein, a self-appointed religious celebrity who has been extolled since his death as some kind of great tzaddik or something. In fact, for decades Wallerstein engaged in an array of tormenting tactics of emotional abuse with girls who were seeking spiritual guidance and psychological care.

Zecheria Wallerstein. Serial abuser and master narcissistic manipulator of religious girls — lionized after his death.

Wallerstein ran a religious retreat called “The Ranch” in which he specifically targeted vulnerable young women or girls. He found those who were struggling with family issues, who had eating disorders, who were depressed or emotionally struggling, who were in spiritual processes like becoming religious, and the like. He used those vulnerabilities to play with his victims’ minds and manipulate their behavior and self-concept while centering him in their lives.

Netanel Zellis-Paley compiled a list of some of these stories in his Twitter feed. He writes, “Instead of supporting them and their healing, he made their already difficult lives worse. If they had scars, he opened their wounds. If they needed a warm listening ear, he gave them the cold shoulder. If they needed a roof over their heads, he threw them out on the street.”

Here are a few example:

• He told victims of sexual abuse to “get over it”

• He told a girl struggling with anorexia that she had to work on her relationship with Hashem, stop talking to boys, and to work on being more tznius.

• He said “homosexuality causes earthquakes”

• He told a girl who was struggling with her parents that “the reason you have a terrible relationship with your parents is because you have a terrible relationship with hashem and if you had better Emunah in hashem you would get along with them and also if u would work on your tznius that would help too.

• If a girl was experiencing trauma, he would tell her to become more religious or cover her body more.

I heard many stories like this in collecting my research, this pattern of control and manipulation by a rabbi or religious teacher. It’s way too familiar, and even predictable in its ubiquity. Many abusers specifically target people who are in vulnerable states or who are seeking out guidance and mentorship. It is part of the profile.

I would like to point out a few important points about Wallerstein that apparently are not obvious to everyone:

This is emotional abuse. It is narcissistic control, in which the abuser assumes all the knowledge and authority in the victim’s life. It is when the abuser inserts himself in the victim’s intimate life and in her relationship with her own mind and person and self-concept for his own purposes.

This is spiritual abuse. When the abuser is also a gatekeeper to religion and spirituality, or when the abuser uses religious language, codes, and norms to manipulate, this damages the victim’s relationship with their religion and spiritual life. It robs the victims of their religiosity, using confused messages to promote obedience and conformity, and centering the abuser as a kind of messenger of God, almost God himself.

This is sexual abuse. Although Wallerstein did not, apparently, sexually touch the girls, we know that that’s not an excuse. Many forms of non-contact sexual abuse are extremely traumatizing. Think Barry Freundel and his mikveh cameras. He never touched the victims, yet his actions still, very clearly, constituted sexual abuse. Non-contact sexual abuse is where the abuser controls and manipulates the sexual behavior and self-concept of the targeted victim, as Wallerstein did. And combined with the tactics of spiritual abuse and emotional abuse, it can be very damaging.

Wallerstein, for example, imposed on his victims to dress a certain way and behave a certain way according to his authority (sexual abuse), making comments and assumptions about their sexuality, aggressively judging them, and telling them what to do and how to dress/act claiming that this was both what God wanted (spiritual abuse), and that it would miraculously alleviate their trauma (emotional manipulation). He would do this, by the way, while also sitting privately with girls, which breaks the rules of “yichud” that is supposed to protect women and girls from this kind of thing. (Spoiler: It doesn’t)

I spoke with Shana Aronson, Director of Magen that assists victims of sexual abuse in the Orthodox world, and she had some fascinating insights about this:

Not only is it wrong to say that we are protected by these laws, but it is not about that at all. Sexual assault is not about how the victim dressed or acted. It’s about a predator who makes a decision to take advantage of someone in this way.

Which is ironic, because in theory those laws are there for precisely this purpose— to keep things like this from happening.

The reason it’s not working is because even though women and girls are trained from an early age to keep these laws, they are also trained to listen to their rabbis and authority figures no matter what. So, if a rabbi comes and says, ‘It’s okay to break yichud with me,’ they go with that rather than refusing or telling anyone else about the interaction. The view of rabbi as ultimate knower of all things and an ultimate authority stymies their ability to experience these rules as protection.

Abuse takes place because there is a predator in the room who sees other people not as whole beings but as objects in their landscape. Predators are able to manipulate situations, manipulate religious language and other cultural codes, and target people’s vulnerabilities to get them to do what they say.

This kind of behavior is so ubiquitous that our community is accustomed to calling this “leadership” or “education”. But it is not. It is abuse.

Shana Aronson, Director of Magen

And as Shana Aronson says, the key is to teach everyone that this is not okay. So that when victims are targeted, people are able to recognize the signs and call it out:

We can be using laws of yichud and tzniut to protect women and girls who want to live by these halakhot. We have to teach them to listen to themselves, and to trust their own feelings and knowledge, and not to trust a rabbi— or anyone, regardless of how lofty a position they hold— who says, ‘Break these rules for me. It’s okay because I say so.’ We can be training women that when a rabbi or any person does that, that is a red flag. If you feel like a line is being crossed, it probably is. And teach them to trust their instincts and feelings, while they are using these laws as protection.

I would add that we have to teach this not only the victims, but also the observers. We should all be talking back to that and not standing by silently or sticking our heads in the sand while behaviors that are predatorial or supportive of abuse are lauded.

That’s on all of us.

When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture is now available for pre-order. Out on June 14, PG.

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