The co-leader of the rabbis’ staged visit to Agriprocessors, Rabbi Lerner claimed to be an impartial invesigator. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve shown that before. Here’s some new evidence of Lerner’s bias.
The Forward reports:
…Rabbi Pesach Lerner, executive vice president of the National Council for Young Israel, an umbrella group for Orthodox synagogues, publicly slammed one of his member congregations for inviting Uri L’Tzedek’s executive director to speak on “Ethical Issues and Kashrut in Jewish Law.”
“I feel embarrassed for the membership of the Young Israel of Stamford,” Lerner wrote, in a statement published by the blog Open Orthodoxy on July 28. “If they want to be lectured to by a young man with limited knowledge of ethics, of kashrut, of the totality of Judaism, by a young man who has limited experience in life in general, in Judaism more specifically, I guess that is their prerogative.”
Lerner’s tone was so scathing that the blog’s editor, Mark Einhorn, wrote that he had originally been reluctant to publish the statement and had only done so at Lerner’s urging.
These quotes are part of a larger Forward article on the fight between rabbis on the left religiously (mostly non-Orthodox) and Orthodox rabbis over Agriprocessors.
The Forward mentions the 2006 "investigation" by Rabbi Asher Zeilingold – another 3 hour tour – that ‘cleared’ Agriprocessors of the things workers, clergy and law enforcement have now so publicly exposed.
(Rabbi Zeilingold is the rabbi who excommunicated me after first asking me for a meeting and then, as I waited for him, refusing to meet with me without explanation. He excommunicated me two days later without notice or any form of due process.)
Zeilingold would go on to fake an OSHA report and release word of it to the media in another attempt to clear Agriprocessors.
