Rabbi Baruch Lanner is due to be paroled this week.
Yochanan Lavie, a frequent FailedMessiah.com commenter, tells the story of his teenage encounters with rabbinic child abuser Rabbi Baruch Lanner.
These encounters include Lanner kneeing boys in the groin and Lanner sobbing about his own abusive childhood.
My Encounters With Rabbi Baruch Lanner
By Yochanan LavieAfter my family moved around the corner to an Orthodox synagogue, I was attracted to, and envious of, Sabbath observance. Reform Judaism seemed pallid and churchy to me. The Hertz Chumash used back then in our Reform synagogue was a subversive text. It spoke to me; that one could believe in the Torah as divine revelation and not be a knuckle-dragger. My study of Jewish history and lore also convinced me that Orthodox Judaism was more authentic. An article in The Village Voice by Carol Getzoff called “Tripping Out on Torah,” about ex-hippies becoming Lubavitchers made being frum seem cutting edge and cool. Also, corny as it seems now, Fiddler on the Roof was inspirational to me. So I stepped in to the Orthodox shul around the corner, not knowing what reception I would get, and started my spiritual journey. A year later, I convinced my open-minded parents to send me to Frisch, a Modern Orthodox yeshiva high school.
In short, I became a BT without knowing that the letters NCSY could be strung together in any meaningful way. I was fully Orthodox both ideologically and in praxis in high school. I didn’t "convert" through NCSY. I joined NCSY in high school, because I thought it would be inspirational, and help me meet people. I was immediately drawn to Baruch Lanner. He was fat, dumpy, talked like a duck, and dressed in bargain store chic before it was fashionable. Despite that, he was mesmerizing.
Lanner was indeed charismatic. He could leave a room full of kids spellbound, by his intense emotional appeals. Although obviously very intelligent, he preferred to go for the emotional jugular. For example, he talked about his father, who was a Holocaust survivor. I remember one speech (I think in was a Shabbaton in Asbury Park or Seaside Heights- one of those moribund former resort towns). Here is a close paraphrase:
One day my father asked me, “Baruch, what word can you make with the letters of the word moshiach?” I didn’t know, so he hit me. So he asked me again. I didn’t know, so he hit me. Finally, I said “yismach,” pleasure. And that’s the answer he wanted.
In another speech, he was crying about how he used to hate his father, who would lock him in a closet so he could be good. (I couldn’t make this up).
His typical Shabbaton havdalah service would involve dim lighting, a slow, emotionally evocative tune such as “Ani Ma’amim,” a sob story about the Holocaust, a Baal Teshuvah who was having a hard time, or some such thing. It would start off low key and pensive, and then be built up into a screaming, fire-and-brimstone guilt trip. Sometimes Lanner’s partner in crime, Nate Siegel, would be the one haranguing the audience. Nate and Baruch screamed into so many microphones I am surprised they never blew an amp.
Suddenly, after the service, “Boom, boom, boom,” went the drums, and “Yibeneh” would play. The lights would go on and “spontaneous” ruach dancing would ensue in a fast frenzy. From slow, introspective, and mystical, to an emotional crescendo and then a fervid release of energy. For hormone soaked teenagers, this was quite effective; this, despite the fact that Lanner never deviated from this formula. Dear reader, it worked on me….
A source tells me: "Lanner was the model that Mordecai Gafni based himself upon in many ways, particularly the recognition that his acts would likely be overlooked since he was "making kids frum". Gafni worked that circuit in his college years, during the peak Lanner years."
Here are some comments on the Failed Messiah blog:
The accusations against Lanner (and Gafni, Siegel, and Tendler later on) were well known to many; I was in NCSY at the time and knew many of the girls who he would harass, but the operative motto was that as long as they are making people frum it was OK. NJ NCSY advisors had as their operating procedure, make the girls fall in love with you so that they’d want to become frum. Of course, this was all small change compared to what happened when we got to Neveh Yehoshua and ran into Rabbi Ben Zion Sobol, who systematically sodomized perhaps dozens of boys before he was caught; his only punishment was having to work a cushy job at Feldheim as a result. The fact remains that the heros, such as Rabbi Blau, were marginalized at the time, and only when the "outside world" acted, was there some pretense of indignation against these cases of abuse. Sobol, Tendler and Gafni are still out there, of course; the former is still hailed as a "talmid chochom" and accepted in his community because he "did teshuva" as it were. So the situation is only a bit better than it was back in those days, as anyone who follows these things knows. As pointed out above, these are not one time issues; continued vigilance remains the answer.
I’m still not over the fact that Rabbi Willig, who was in charge of the Beis Din in 1989 and found Lanner not guilty, then recanted over 10 years later and apologized in public, is *still* head of the Beis Din today? How can we trust someone who covered up for such a horrible person such as Lanner, be head of beis din, still? Should he not be punished? Shouldn’t he have the decency after ruining the lives of these children and telling the world that the testamony of these children was false, shouldn’t he have the decencey to step down? If the beis din can make an error so large, I think it disqualifies the entire system. He shouldn’t step down, Rabbi Willig should be removed.
In the Sobol case the accusations were already present in 1977, the year the yeshiva opened. The "right thing" was only done when an embarrassing incident transpired that became well known. And the point is that while Neve did the right thing, the community didn’t, he was "protected" as a former Rosh Yeshiva, etc. Plus, Itri money was involved.
By the way, I’d leave Matt Tropp alone, he was young when this happened. I was also there when all this was happening, both as a high school kid and later as an advisor, all of that inner circle- Tropp, Taubes, Siegel (though he had his own problems in NY NCSY) was so mesmerized by Lanner that almost anyone active in Etz Chayim those days was in some ways a victim.
The sad thing was that Gafni was a kid then as well, and who knows how much of this role modeling affected him. When he became the neo-Lanner with GPSY, he emulated Lanner in many ways, but went even further in that he cancelled davening at his Shabbatons, because the important thing "for making kids frum" was hearing him (ie, being seduced by him carrying on, swaying, etc). This whole manipulative bit (making kids cry at Havdala, using Holocaust stories to make kids feel guilty, etc) was deeply embedded in the 70s-80s "kiruv" movement. The Seminar program run by YU had previously been the last bastion against this approach, but it was then given to Gafni to run, and that was the end of that. So there was an implicit societal acceptance of a whole set of means to an end that at the very least facilitated this kind of criminal outcome. We must never allow that to happen again.