On the afternoon of December 27, local time, Chaim Walder, a Jewish rabbi who was carrying more than 20 victims' sexual assault charges, went to the public cemetery in petah Tikva, central Israel, and shot himself next to his son's tombstone.
In addition to his religious position, The 53-year-old Hayim is the most famous children's book writer in the circle of ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Haredi). Since the release of the first volume of the Children Speak series in 1993, his work has sold more than 2 million copies to a worldwide Audience of 9 million Hebrew speakers, sensationalizing the world of Haredi in Israel and abroad. He explains why his work is popular: "Harry's children don't watch TV, they don't play computers, they don't play games, they only have books, and they can't read Harry Potter. ”
Photo of Hayim-Wald before his death / Wikipedia
Relying on his reputation and contributions in the field of children's literature and education, Hayim has been running therapy summer camps with the theme of "Children's Sayings" in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Haifa and other areas since the beginning of 2000, encouraging young people to cooperate with each other and express their inner thoughts. Many Israeli boys and girls wrote to him, sharing their privacy and growing pains.
However, such a fairy tale king was exposed by the left-wing media "Haaretz" in November 2021 to use the treatment course to sexually assault young girls many times.
The 32-year-old woman, who assumes the pseudonym Terra, revealed that she had gone to Hayim's clinic for treatment 20 years ago, and the latter first used verbal provocations to praise her for being "mature and beautiful", and then gradually went out of line with her words and deeds, asking her "if she had menstruation", and when she finally came to menstruation, Hayim had sex with her. Terra believes that Hayim is "cunning and manipulative", "step by step", and he has not yet come out of his mental trauma.
After the incident was exposed in the media, 22 previously silent women came forward to accuse Hayim of using adolescent psychotherapy to engage in sexual assault, spanning from 25 years ago to 6 months ago.
Soon, the northern Israeli city of Zefat established the Rabbi Court (The Rabbi Court (which is ruled by Israeli Judaism) in which three rabbis can be formed as judges) and summoned Hayim to stand trial after hearing testimony from several female victims. Hayingm argued that a judge in the courtroom had earlier publicly denounced sexual assault as a "presumption of guilt," not only denying the charges but also refusing to appear in court for trial.
In the end, several victims provided the court with audio recordings of Hayim coercing them to "keep secrets", which basically confirmed the sexual assault allegations, and the rabbinical court convicted Hayim. With nowhere to go, Hayim then committed suicide.
Occluded sounds in closed circles
English translation of Hayim's Child Speaks / Amazon
In the world of Haredi, rabbis who have mastered the power to interpret everyday life using religious scriptures enjoy a high status and credibility among the faithful. In a recording of another victim's representations with Hayim, Hayim used his rabbinic identity to threaten the victim not to expose the incident because "people will only believe me, no one will believe you."
In addition, the Haredi Jewish community is culturally and religiously closed, and israel is like a state within a state. The faithful of the community have always maintained the habit of "not calling the police when something goes wrong", and in the event of a lawsuit dispute, they do not seek the help or ruling of the secular organs of the state, but turn it over to the highly respected rabbis in the community to decide. This makes it difficult for sexual assaults within communities to be known to the outside secular media and ordinary Israelis. If it were not for the mental trauma caused by the sexual assault by the victim Terra, who would break the convention and directly stab the incident to the secular media, these old cases committed by Hayim would probably be forever sunk in the sea, and more young girls would be victimized in the future.
And even within the Haridy community, after the sexual assault incident, the news is not easy to spread. Most Orthodox Jews, only after Hayim committed suicide, heard about it on the evening news, with little discussion.
The reason behind this, on the one hand, is that the orthodox Jewish belief of Hared Jews has adopted an extremely repressive and evasive attitude towards sexually related matters, such as the prohibition of masturbation, and the fact that women are not allowed to have contact with any men, including their husbands, during the Niddah (seven days after menstruation) period. Some extreme rabbis even bribe secular doctors to prescribe antidepressants to young men in sexual maturity to suppress their sexual desires, in order to achieve the purpose of controlling young men in the community.
On the other hand, orthodox Judaism's "Leshon Hara" (literally translated as poisonous tongue) rule requires that contradictions and disputes between people be resolved by confronting the parties in person, rather than making the city known behind their backs. On the good side, the canon can correct the bad social atmosphere such as saying bad things about people behind their backs and chewing the root of the tongue, and thus become the content that Jews must read every morning prayer, but in sexual assault incidents, especially when the party is a person with both religious and social power, the balance of power between the sexual predator and the victim is too large, and "incivility" has become an invisible hand to cover the victim's mouth.
Rabbis attending Hayim's funeral / Eli Segal
In this sexually sensitive environment, it is extremely difficult to ask women who have victims of sexual assault to stand up to huge community pressure and accuse highly respected rabbis and famous writers.
Ironically, the closure of the community that had been used by Hayim to serve as an umbrella for his own crimes became the driving force behind his desperate path after the incident.
According to the laws of the post-state of Israel, rabbinic court decisions have legal effect only on major events involving religious life such as marriage and divorce and conversion to Judaism, but in cases of sexual assault, victims still need to go through the basic legal process of calling the police, collecting evidence, and filing lawsuits with lawyers in secular courts, and only secular court trials and rulings have legal effect.
In the Hayim sexual assault case, the victims were all from the Haredi community, and no one filed a lawsuit in secular courts. If replaced by ordinary Israelis, "Hayim" could hire a lawyer to defend himself in a secular court, dragging through the air of public opinion, and then maybe he could find a loophole in the procedure to exonerate himself. However, Hayim was a Haredi Jew, and his fame and income came from Haridy, a group that only looked for rabbi and not the police. Therefore, although the rabbinic court's verdict on The guilt of Hayim, although it has no legal effect at the level of national law, it is a "final judgment" in the Haridy group, which also means that the image of Hayim is completely destroyed in the Haridy group.
More seriously, Terra accused Hanim of having sex with himself during Niddah. In The Haridy group, even if it is a legal couple, intercourse during niddah is a scandal that is enough to kill the man's society, not to mention that Hayim's Niddah intercourse is illegal sexual assault, and he himself is a well-known rabbi who is familiar with the scriptures and should be a model of religious behavior.
So, as soon as the Rabbinic court ruled, as a member of the ultra-Orthodox Judaism Haredi community, Hayim had very limited room to turn around.
Repeated reversals of public opinion
In addition to the fact that the victimized women led by Terra played the Metoo spirit to break the silence and actively testify, the public opinion of the Haredi Jewish community around the world was also credited.
After the Hayim sexual assault scandal was exposed by Haaretz, Israel's Haredi Kol Chai radio station immediately stopped cooperating with Hayim. Mothers of The Haredi community used Instagram as a platform to publish photos and videos they had taken Fromm's books from their children and discarded them; Baryar, a harredi woman who had served as a prosecutor of sexual assault, believed that if she continued to read Hayim's work, "it would be a legalization of child prostitution," and she warned Haridy parents that "if their children show insecurity in the future, they must believe their children."
The people of Haridy burn the works of Hayim in their homes /instagram
This is also the attitude of the Tsai Fath region presiding over the trial of the Rabbi court of the Hayim sexual assault case, the Grand Rabbi Eliahu. He listened carefully to and analyzed the complaints of 22 Haridy women and the testimony of relevant witnesses, believing that the testimony of the victims was highly credible and that the sexual assault allegations were not malicious speculation by the so-called left-wing media against religious figures. In the rabbinic court's decision, Eliahu sided with the victim rather than the rabbi,ghám.
Even before the rabbi court ruled, the Haridy Community Bookstore in New York, led by Eichler, with the pressure of revenue loss, immediately removed the best-selling author's books. The bookstore said in a statement: "This is not an easy decision, we will face huge financial losses, but as a company that cares about the interests of the community, we cannot turn a blind eye to the demands of the victims." The famous Jewish literary publisher Feldheim not only removed Haym's books, but also took the opportunity to remove the work of Another rabbi and writer shmuel Waldmann who broke the sexual assault scandal in 2015.
In this regard, many Israeli observers believe that the Hayingm incident is of epoch-making significance for the Haridi community, ultra-Orthodox Jews no longer take the same attitude of covering up their own scandals, especially sexual assault scandals, as they did before, and a layer of window paper has been punctured.
However, with the exposure of Hayim's suicide and the last words "I went to heaven for trial, in a world full of lies, I cannot prove my innocence", public opinion was reversed, and the attitude of some Haredi and even Jewish religious leaders vanished the optimism of previous observers.
The Haridy media inside and outside Israel have begun to whitewash Hayim. Channel Haredi 10 praised Hayim as an "educator who influenced a generation" and highlighted Hayim's defense of the allegations, not even the word "sexual assault" appeared in the article, but replaced it with "accused of illegal acts"; The Lithuanian Hareddi group newspaper Yote Neeman, although it stopped Hayim's column after the sexual assault broke, did not mention the word sexual assault in the news obituary after Hayim's suicide, but praised Hayim as an "important rabbi", "an outstanding writer and educator". In his prime he was robbed of his life."
David Law, the Supreme Leader of the Ashkenazi Jews, came to Hayim's home to attend the funeral and comfort his family, without mentioning anything about sexual assault. Another prominent Haridy great rabbi, Edstan, warned educators in Haredi's group that when talking to students about the Hayinm incident, "even if you have a personal opinion, you should convey the teaching of the Torah scriptures that it is dangerous to publicly embarrass others," and he went on to accuse the victims of sexual assault as "evil people," "slanderers," and "murderers."
Posters supporting victims of sexual assault with the slogan "We Believe in Victims" and "Don't Speak Out" on the sleeve of the cover-up says "Don't Speak Out" / Network
On December 30, two days after Hayim committed suicide, one of the sexual assault victims, Sifla, committed suicide in anger at seeing Haredi's media whitewashing of Hayim. Before committing suicide, Sifla told relatives and friends that her "wounded soul could no longer bear the praise of the media perpetrators."
Sifla's death shook Israeli society again, and public opinion soon reversed again. The jerusalem post, which has always been conservative, published an editorial attacking the Haredi community for claiming that God's chosen people were "full of rotten apples with a glamorous appearance" and questioning rabbi Edstein "spent a lifetime reading the books of the sages without even the slightest sympathy or kindness."
At the civic level, 150 young Harredi visited various Haridy communities in the country and pasted and distributed 320,000 "We Believe in The Victims" posters in three days. These public welfare actions have been reported and supported by the mainstream Israeli media. David Law, who had previously attended Hayim's funeral, also came forward to clarify that he supported the rights of sexual assault victims, that sexual assault must be eradicated from the Haredi group, and that the purpose of attending the funeral was only to comfort Hayim's relatives rather than support Hayim.
Israel's secular class has a long history of dissatisfaction with harredi community privileges (such as non-military service), but given the key parliamentary vote role played by the Haridy group in Israel's ruling coalition, it is unclear whether the Israeli government and society will use sexual assault to break the Haredi independent kingdom to promote intra-group reform, but with Hayim's suicide, his victims can no longer wait for a belated apology.
As Rabbi Eliahu put it, "We had hoped he would make up for his mistakes and apologize to the victims... He could have chosen to educate more people by repentance. We now need to support those victims through this difficult time, whose lives are more important than theirs. (Text/Guan Guan, Editor-in-Charge/ Kwon Wen-woo, from Tel Aviv, Israel)
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