Circa 2005, I found this Rabbi Eliezer Eisgrau story so difficult to unravel, it ended my focus on reporting molestation stories. I needed to take a break.
Then as now, I don’t take any side in this story, except to say that I found the allegations troubling enough (and Genendy Eisgrau credible enough) to report them.
I have no doubt, by contrast, that Baltimore’s Rabbi Yaakov Menken is a sexual predator (though not towards children and he has never been arrested).
Genendy is motivated to revisit and expand upon her story now, both here and in a 2013 story in the Jerusalem Post, because, three years after the release of Standing Silent, Rabbi Eisgrau is still the principal of Torah Institute, where he oversees the education of 650 students. She wants her father to be seen by professionals who are trained to evaluate sexual offenders. She wants her father to be deemed safe to continue his position working with young children.
And Genendy Eisgrau remains painfully estranged from her family and the tight-knit Baltimore Orthodox community she grew up in.
“My father did speak to me a couple of years ago on erev Yom Kippur,” Genendy said this month. “He would love to have a relationship with me if I would start from now and pretend nothing happened. I can’t do that.”
She is also not alone. There was at least one other complaint that was filed by the parents of a Torah Institute family through the City State’s Attorney’s Office back in 1999. But the investigation was dropped.
THE JERUSALEM REPORT FEB. 20, 2013:
The last time Nanette Eisgrau spoke to her father was in 1994. She was 19 years old, and her father – Rabbi Eliezer Eisgrau, the principal of the Torah Institute of Baltimore – had found out she had been seeing a secular-trained (but Orthodox) therapist to deal with the emotional fallout from the sexual abuse, she says she endured as a child, inflicted by her father and maternal grandfather.
“My father forced me to perform oral and anal sex repeatedly between the ages of three and seven,” Eisgrau recounts to The Jerusalem Report during a conversation at her home in a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community in Israel. “My grandfather also exposed himself to me, and touched me in my private areas.
“But when I confronted my father about it, he threatened to sue the therapist I had been seeing. He said she had convinced me of things that never happened. There was no fatherly attempt to hear my pain or to try to work through the issue together, just total denial; and he blamed me for trying to ruin his life.”
Following the confrontation with her father, her siblings demanded that she stop “telling stories” in public; and when she refused, the family sought the advice of Rabbi Yakov Hopfer, a respected authority in Baltimore’s Orthodox community, but with no secular training as a psychologist or family counselor.
After brief conversations with Nanette Eisgrau and a psychiatrist who treated her for crisis management following a suicide attempt several years later, Hopfer determined that her accusations were baseless. He advised the family to cut off all contact with her, saying they had to choose between their father and sister – and he advised the community to do the same.
“I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative identity disorder, but it was such a shanda [shame] for them, they just couldn’t deal with it,” she says now. “My mother continued to talk to me for a while after I was cut out – we even tried joint therapy together for a while after I tried to kill myself, but she denied that I had any baggage or any reason to be in treatment.
“What they have done to me since is a lot worse than even the original abuse. They cut me off in the most complete way I can imagine.
What’s even worse, I don’t think it’s only about me. They’ve made an example of me for the rest of the community to make sure that nobody else speaks out about abuse.”