Sexual harassment revelations rock US Reform rabbinical school

SEXUAL harassers led the Reform movement’s rabbinical school for more than three decades, according to an explosive new report commissioned by the school.

Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk, the president and then chancellor of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion from 1971 to 1996, and his successor, Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, who served until 2000, both harassed and assaulted women at the seminary, according to the report.

While the allegations that led to Zimmerman’s suspension in 2000 had broken into public view earlier this year, Rabbi Gottschalk had never before been named in public allegations.

In addition to leading the institution and teaching students, the men were also responsible for ordaining generations of Reform rabbis.

Rabbis Gottschalk and Zimmerman are among six prominent former male employees of the seminary to be named in the report, the outcome of an independent investigation into the school’s past handling of sexual abuse allegations.

Over the course of the inquiry, investigators spoke to 170 past and present faculty, staff and students from the seminary who answered an open call for participation. The conversations revealed that while conditions at the seminary have improved in recent years, a “good old boys’ mindset” existed for decades across the school’s four campuses in the US and Israel, harming generations of Reform rabbis and professionals.

Many of the women interviewed described facing critical comments about their weight, appearances, pregnancies and very presence in a rabbinical school that ordained its first woman in 1972, under Rabbi Gottschalk. Students and faculty alike recalled discrimination against queer students.

“The pain that many witnesses have harboured based on their experience at HUC – some for decades – was palpable,” the report said. “Many witnesses broke down in tears, while others commented on the years they have spent in therapy.”

The seminary will take the findings seriously and will act on them, according to Sue Neuman Hochberg, chair of the board of governors.

“Numerous members of the HUC-JIR community described the lasting harm caused to them from conduct that is antithetical to the core values of this institution and, quite simply, unacceptable,” Hochberg said in a statement.

Of the six men named in the report, four are dead. They are Gottschalk; Rabbi Michael Cook; Stephen Passamaneck, a professor of rabbinic literature whose misdeeds, the report says, included filling his HUC computer with pornography; and Bonia Shur, a liturgy professor who was widely known to have touched female students forcibly.

The two who are living – Zimmerman and Steven Cohen – have previously been the subject of public allegations.

Among the allegations the investigators heard consistently was that Rabbi Gottschalk was widely understood to be a “womaniser” who routinely pressured female HUC students to come to his apartment, where he would proposition them or physically assault them.