A poster named “Former Friend” writes: I have known, met with, spoken dozens and dozens of times to Leib Tropper over the past 30 years. His voice is very identifiable. His personality is very identifiable. It pained me to listen to what was so obviously his voice on the tapes. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to much of the content, once it was clear that it was LT speaking. You don’t resign as head of an organization you founded, and which gave you immense power and prestige in the (Charedi) Jewish world because of doctored tapes. Let’s get real. And let’s hope the leaders get real, while there is still a chance to salvage some of their credibility.
*Vos Iz Neias (VIN): Suffern, NY – Noted Rabbi Abruptly Resigns From EJF; Famous Organization For Conversions
*Yeshiva World News (YWN): Rav Elya Ber Wachtfogel Assumes EJF Leadership, Rav Leib Tropper Steps Down
*MATZAV: Rav Elya Ber Wachtfogel Takes Over As Head of EJF, Rabbi Tropper Resigns
*Unorthodox-Jew (OUJ): Rabbi Reuvein Feinstein Head Of The Coverup For Leib Tropper!
*Failed Messiah (FM): TROPPER: Outreach Rabbi Resigns Amid Cloud Of Scandal
*Rationalist Judaism (Natan Slifkin): Rabbi Leib Tropper Resigns
*Jewish Updates: Rav Elya Ber Wachtfogel Takes Over As Head of EJF, Rabbi Tropper Resigns
“kolpogimbo said…They offer nothing new in this emerging story. Everything they state can be gleaned from blogs etc.”
RaP: You miss the point. It’s the fact that they have now latched on to this horrid story means that the story has now risen above the mere blogosphere as it now enters the mainstream Jewish left-wing print and “legitimate” journalism media.
The NY Jewish Week is read by the movers and shakers in the ultra-Modern Orthodox world and by many influential liberal Jews. It is a paper sponsored by the secular UJA and it’s the armchair reading of the types of people who have no interest in blogs and hardly bother what’s on them.
This paper is dangerous to the frum world because it takes special delight un dwelling on the failings of Orthodox and Charedi rabbis in particular. They almost never dwell on the failings of Reform and Conservative clergy and there are plenty of scandals there all the time.
They are the ones who brought down R Boruch Lanner and inflicted great harm on the OU and its NCSY kiruv branch, so by them now focusing on the Tropper scandal a new and dangerous phase is started, it will harm GENUINE KIRUV and the needs of TRUE GEIRIM and it remains to be seen how they will run with this story in the weeks and months to come.
Once they are featuring this story of Tropper’s downfall, the larger papers like the New York Times and others like it will inevitably follow suit. Once that crowd picks up and runs with the story it will become like going from just a hand-grenade explosion on blogs, to a dynamite explosion on Jewish media to a nuclear explosion as the story goes global and viral as blogs feed off the so-called mainstream media and the main media gets more people focused on it and thus a massive Chillul Hashem befarhesya is created that Tropper will have to give an accounting for at some point.
“It was predictable that neiuf would be his downfall. Midah kneged midah”
RaP: While “Midah kneged midah” is right, it was never possible to know exactly where the already over-burdened rickety Tropper floundering ship would be punctured and finally sent on its way to the depths of oblivion, or of notoriety, simply because there eas so much happening on Tropper’s “ship of fools” at any given moment, from confrontations with other notable rabbis; accusations of major financial wrong-doing; rejection of normative Judaism in favor of a proselytization agenda by EJF that sounded more like a Christian evangelical scheme than anything that was ever taught in any yeshiva; controversial and inciting statements meant to antagonize and humiliate opponents; ongoing and unremitting wars against enemies such as Chabad, Aish HaTorah and Modern Orthodoxy; forging of documents being fraud; lies and cheating of all sorts to gain the upper hand being total amoral; manipultaion of senior rabbis and their views being misrepresented; harsh treatment of genuine converts; spousal abuse; running a personality cult with blind disciples with dangerous consequences; slandering respectable people of all sorts to achieve personal power and control and causing them pain and suffering in their lives; conniving to ruin careers of others and threatening to do so and more…all of which could have been THE moral turpitude that brought down the shameless Tropper, but in the end it was something more primal, his raw lusts and passions that remained entirely untamed as he went about outwardly spouting his religious “holier than thou” creed and blinding many with his ability to utter talmudic insights and say just the right rabbinic thing to impress and cover up for his more nefarious inward lecherous desires and filthy deeds.
A sad and sorry, albeit torrid, tale.
A PROSPECTIVE CONVERT POSTS: I am a prospective convert who was mentored by a rabbi through EJF for a few months. I do not think it’s accurate to say that they actually proselytized. What they do is provide a mentor to gentile spouses of Jews, or non-Jews descended from intermarriages, who are interested in converting. There is no persuasion, talking about why you should convert and so on. And they’re strict: in fact, the reason I stopped the process is that I realized I wouldn’t be able to complete the conversion, because my (born Jewish) wife is not (yet!) willing to commit to being completely observant for the rest of her life.
They also never told me anything about being required to believe that the earth is 6000 years old.
