Vicki Polin emails:
I was just playing around on a web page that pulls up archived web pages. I was looking for some old links that I misplaced. I was looking for The Awareness Center‘s original web page.
The history of The Awareness Center is that it started off as the name of a holistic counseling cooperative that focused on sexual trauma in Chicago. The original web page was for that center. If I remember correctly the first pages I put was back in 1997 or 1998.
The web page always had information about clergy abuse of various faiths. It wasn’t until late in 1999 that I started transforming The Awareness Center’s web page into an organization that focused on sexual violence in Jewish communities.
In 2001 The Awareness Center started to become an organization. 2003 was the year that The Awareness Center was incorporated as a non-profit organization.
From what’s been archived the following link is the first page I can find that talks about clergy sexual abuse. It’s from 2001.
Here’s the first archived page on sexual abuse in Jewish communities from back in 2001.
Originally when I googled the terms "incest" or "sexual abuse" and Jewish all that came up was porn sites and anti-Semetic sites. When I googled "clergy sexual abuse" and Jewish, nothing came up.
All I can say is that we have come a long way from our early years.
