Marc Shapiro: R. Yudel Rosenberg, R. Mordechai Elefant, and Sexual Abuse

Marc B. Shapiro wrote a typical Seforim Blog grab-bag, and the title shows the strain. He yokes together a correction to his own forgery scholarship, a long meditation on Mordechai Elefant’s memoir, and a short note on rabbinic responses to sexual abuse. The three parts share a thread, but a thin one. The thread is candor about figures the tradition prefers to keep clean.
The strongest section is the small one Shapiro buries near the end. He admits a mistake. Ira Robinson caught him claiming that Medini never signed with הצעיר when in fact the forged haskamah does close that way, and Shapiro writes that he can’t explain why he wrote otherwise. That sentence does more work than it looks. A scholar who built a reputation on catching forgers concedes he misread the evidence and then keeps building his case on the remaining points. He still thinks the letter is a forgery. He just lost one of his reasons and says so. Most polemicists would have quietly dropped the point. He names it.
The Elefant material is the part most readers will remember, and it is also where Shapiro is weakest as an analyst, by his own admission. He says he never knew the man and that everything he offers is speculation. Then he offers two readings of why a rosh yeshiva would dictate a memoir that makes him look, in Rakeffet’s phrase, half gadol and half gangster. Pride, or guilt. Shapiro leans toward guilt and quotes Elefant thanking God that his “shaygetz side” did not pass to his students. That is a fair reading of the text. It is also the reading that lets a great Torah scholar remain sympathetic. The pride reading is harsher and Shapiro mentions it first and then walks away from it. A man who travels the world, collects celebrities and politicians, and dictates the whole thing for publication might simply have enjoyed himself and wanted others to know. Shapiro prefers the man who suffers for his contradictions. Worth noticing that the kinder reading wins.
The abuse section is the one the title advertises and the one Shapiro handles with the most caution. He cites the Aderet talking a family out of going to the police over a rape to avoid hillul ha-shem, and the Tzemach Tzedek declining to remove a rabbi who molested a boy and called it a medical curiosity about testicle size. Shapiro frames these as evidence of how attitudes have changed, and he asks for a scholarly history rather than a prosecution. That framing is generous to the rabbis and probably correct as method. A history that only condemns teaches nothing about how the change happened. But the framing also softens what the sources show, which is that the older logic protected the institution and the abuser and left the victim with nothing. The first reason the Aderet gives, avoidance of hillul ha-shem, Shapiro grants is alive today. That is the honest line in the section, and he states it without ornament.
What ties the post together, if anything does, is forgery and concealment as twin habits. A respected rav like Toledano fabricates documents and even a saint’s grave. A great scholar like Lieberman gets misremembered by Elefant. A community keeps abuse quiet for the same reason it keeps embarrassing memoirs out of print. Shapiro’s standing move across forty years is to drag the suppressed thing back into the light and let it sit there. He does it again here, gently, and the gentleness is the tell. He likes these people. He admires Elefant, he respects Toledano’s learning, he reveres Lieberman. He exposes them anyway, and the affection makes the exposure land softer than a hostile critic could manage.
The Sacks detail rewards attention. Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020) printed Chaim Bloch’s forged universalist Haggadah text as authentic in his own Haggadah, not knowing Bloch’s record. A forgery survives because a trusted name vouches for it without checking. That is the whole problem of the post in one footnote-sized story, and Shapiro lets it pass quickly.
If you want my honest verdict, the post is strong as bibliography and reportage and soft as judgment. The Elefant psychology is guesswork dressed as insight, and Shapiro tells you so before you can object, which is its own kind of cover. The forgery work is careful and the abuse note is brave for where it appears, since the haredi readership he writes for does not welcome it. He calls for study rather than blame, which is the move of a man who wants to keep his sources and his friendships and tell the truth at the same time. He mostly pulls it off.