Israel: Ultra-Orthodox Rabbis, Activists Take on "issue of pedophilia in the community"

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Religious leaders take on the issue at rare public gathering in Haredi town of Bnei Brak, dismiss rumors of ‘cult’ hunting children on street 

Times of Ahmad | News Watch | UK Desk
Source/Credit: Haaretz
By Aaron Rabinowitz | August 9, 2017

In a rare gathering that took place Saturday night in Bnei Brak, ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) rabbis and activists spoke publicly for the first time on the issue of pedophilia in the community, providing a glimpse into how attackers and victims are dealt with.

The assembly was convened following a wave of rumors about a “missionary cult” that was snatching children, sexually assaulting them, inciting them against their parents and even threatening to murder them. These rumors were making local parents hysterical, especially since dozens of children had complained in recent months about strangers who approached them, grabbed them and sexually assaulted them. An in-depth examination, however, showed that the panic was apparently unjustified; although there had been cases of children being assaulted, these attacks had been perpetrated by pedophiles acting alone and not as part of any network or cult.

The story is also rooted in cases that took place earlier in Jerusalem. In 2011 a number of suspects were arrested in a series of attacks on children in the Nahlaot neighborhood. Residents believed there was a wide network of pedophiles in the area who had attacked dozens of children, but an intensive police investigation uncovered no evidence of this, although there had been a few individual instances.

A few years later there were rumors of a similar network operating in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sanhedria. In August 2016 police arrested a number of people suspected of spreading the rumors about a “missionary cult” and using them to extract hundreds of thousands of shekels from people who contributed to help stop the imaginary cult.

After similar rumors started in Bnei Brak a few months ago, activists and rabbis who intervened determined that these were groundless and that a significant number of the children’s reports could not be proven sufficiently or were outright lies.

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