By Debra Nussbaum Cohen - Staff Writer
The Jewish Week - March 24, 2004
Vicki Polin's efforts have received praise and criticism in the Jewish community.
From an apartment in a fervently
religious section of Baltimore sits a nonobservant Jewish woman working
fervently herself on a project that has become the center of her life
and is making an impact — for good or bad, depending on whom you ask —
in the Jewish community internationally.
Vicki Polin, 44, created and runs The
Awareness Center, an organization devoted to the issue of sexual abuse
in the Jewish community.
Essentially a one-woman operation, the
center exists only on-line, through its Web site,
www.theawarenesscenter.org, and over the phone. Polin and her board
members, who include prominent rabbis and professionals knowledgeable
about issues of sexual trauma, consult with people who turn to the
organization for help.
All sorts of Jews, from all over the
world, contact The Awareness Center for advice, counseling and
referrals, says Polin, who puts in 60 to 80 hours a week on the project.
She says the Web site is visited by about 15,000 people each month —
victims of abuse, called "survivors" in the sexual trauma community,
their family members, rabbis, lawyers, law enforcement officials and
others concerned about the issue.
It is a clearinghouse with layers of
information that includes lists of clergy, therapists and medical
doctors who are sensitive to the needs of sexual trauma survivors,
definitions of different types of abuse, and articles published by The
Awareness Center explaining aspects of surviving and reporting such
experiences.
The site also includes links to relevant sites within other faith communities.
The controversial element in The
Awareness Center's site is its listing of rabbis who are believed to be
sexual abusers. The documents listed were all published elsewhere first.
In some cases the people named have been
prosecuted and convicted by the courts. In others the posting is based
on allegations alone.
And that, say some, is unfair.
"It's a dangerous precedent to have a
Web site listing unsubstantiated accusations made against people," says
one New York rabbi, who asked not to be named.
The site also lists rabbis accused or
convicted of a broad range of sexual misdeeds, from viewing child
pornography several times to rape. But in order to distinguish the
degree of severity of the offense, a viewer has to wade through the
pages of documentation that have been posted.
"It is like guilt by association,"
concedes Rabbi Mark Dratch, an Awareness Center board member and head of
the Rabbinical Council of America's Task Force on Rabbinic
Improprieties.
Rabbi Dratch and others say that the
good accomplished by the organization outweighs the potential damage of
some of its postings.
"People who are survivors of sexual
trauma don't have many places to turn, and Vicki has succeeded, through
the accessibility and anonymity of the Internet, for people to have
resources, have places to call," Rabbi Dratch says.
"If we had more resources we'd be in a
better position to separate different levels of offenses, different
kinds of accusations," says Rabbi Yosef Blau, a dean at Yeshiva
University and Awareness Center board member.
"But without a much larger organization,
at this point this is about all that could be expected to do under the
circumstances. Hopefully people will read the articles and not just see
names on a page.
"It's a tricky business, at what point we go public," he says.
Polin agrees it's a dilemma.
"We're not doing it to hurt people. We're doing it to protect people," she says.
The site also names rabbis without
identifying their denomination. That's because sexual abuse "is a Jewish
problem, not an Orthodox problem, or a Reform problem or an
unaffiliated problem," Polin says. "It's a Jewish problem."
With the help of a law clinic volunteer, Polin hopes to gain status soon as a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization.
The project was born out of her
experience working as a counselor with sexually abused clients in
Illinois, where she lived at the time, through an organization called
Voices, Victims of Incest Can Emerge Survivors.
"I'd get calls from people who were
Jewish, and I found that I had to refer them to Christian resources,"
Polin recalls. "I realized I was handing over Jewish survivors to
missionaries, and that really bothered me. I started telling everyone
that the issue needed to be addressed in the Jewish community, but
nobody did."
She said a number of Christian
organizations were dealing with these issues, "and it always bothered me
that there was nothing like it for Jewish survivors."
Now her efforts are being embraced by
the Jewish establishment, with 140 rabbis of every denomination adding
their names to the list of endorsers. And Polin says she has more to add
but just hasn't had the time to get to it.
In the last few months Polin has been
invited to address the conferences of Jewish Women International and of
the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance.
Her organization is struggling to stay
afloat, though, with a few small donations to support the effort. Polin
says that with more funding, she would like to put together a large
conference — a "summit" — later this year of rabbis and other Jewish
professionals, professionals working in the sexual trauma community, law
enforcement officials, survivors of abuse and their family members.
Another goal is to set up a rabbinic
certification program, "so if we need a referral we can say `this rabbi
has that training,' " Polin says.
"We'll provide about 40 hours of
training so they know the different kinds of offenders and victims, know
the difference between sexual harassment, abuse and sexual assault, and
domestic violence."
One person who praises Polin's work is a rabbi listed as a sexual offender by The Awareness Center.
"I give the Awareness Center a lot of credit," says Juda Mintz,
an Orthodox rabbi who was released this month from a federal prison
into a halfway house after serving 10 months on charges of viewing child
pornography.
"We know that dealing with clergy there
has been tremendous cover-up and denial. There have been concerted
efforts by powers-that-be within the Jewish community to cover up or at
best minimize what is more often than not serious offenses," he says.
"If this is a mechanism by which those
offenses can be uncovered and the community can be sensitized, that is
all to the good. And I say this as a perpetrator."
