Rabbi Pinchos Stolper, the founder and first director of the Orthodox Union’s (OU) youth division, NCSY, died earlier this week. There has been all sorts of praise of his deeds with nary a hint that he enabled the molesting of hundreds of teen girls who trusted NCSY. Stolper, was repeatedly told about Rabbi Boruch Lanner’s molesting by victims, parents, and other NCSY staff. He made believe that these allegations were not true. After Stolper retired, the lid was finally blown by Gary Rosenblatt’s articles in the New York Jewish Week. A few years later Lanner was finally tried and convicted of child molesting and sent to jail. Eventually the OU conducted an extensive investigation confirming the allegations. Yet Stolper continued to be treated respectfully in his retirement and they even have an annual award in his name.
It sticks in the craw of every survivor, especially anyone whose complaints were invalidated by Stolper, to see him being praised. I am tired of the arguments about the good outweighing the “lapses.” There is a special evil in these sorts of lapses. It is a moral calculation that imagines one’s work is so important that it should not be inconvenienced by the problems affecting individual kids. They are discarded as roadkill on the way to the kiruv mission. This is moral bankruptcy.
There are all sorts of things that are conveniently ignored. Why not his death just as he ignored the cries for protection. I would have been content not to post this article but for all the praise being heaped on Stolper. But one’s hand gets forced by torrents of gushing celebration of an enabler’s virtue. No one is going to gush in praise of jailed Lanner. But his enabler is just as culpable. So if you insist on accounting his virtues, don’t omit his evil. If you insist on airbrushing his evil then don’t be surprised when the survivor community insists on reminding you.
FRUM FOLLIES by Yerachmiel Lopin 
The Southern Baptist report only further confirms what I was taught and learned on my own, that abuse occurs in all societies, at the same rate. What religion and other professions allows is a concentration of the abused and the abusers. In addition, power is a narcotic and those with it will ignore anything to keep it. Patrick Russell
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Hello Yerachmiel, I did not want to post a comment, just to make one (and I do not have twitter or facebook). 1. Thank you for all you do for the Jews, I appreciate you more than I am able to say. 2. the nitpickiest of points! I apologize for it in advance, but I might have a shtickel autism: you tweeted about Lanner, Stolper, and girls being abused, and perhaps I missed where you mentioned that he abused boys as well. Signed, still hecking angry at Willig, and Rabbi Cohen of Chicago, and…
You are right, Lanner also abused boys, not sexually but with physical assaults including kicking them in the crotch. He was emotionally abusive to boys and girls and not just to those he abused sexually.