Religion’s Role Raised In Greer Trial

Many victims of childhood sexual abuse wait years to report what happened — especially when that occurs in an insular community.

Forensic psychologist Gavriel Fagan — an Orthodox Jew who works with other Orthodox Jews who experience abuse — made that case Wednesday in the criminal trial of accused child-rapist Rabbi Daniel Greer.

Fagin was one of two forensic psychologists who testified on day three of Greer’s trial in Superior Court on Church Street, addressing a central issue in the case.

Greer faces charges of sexual assault and risk of injury to a minor.

Fagin argued that it would have been extra difficult for a yeshiva student who’s been abused to turn in his rabbi over to the police.

Prosecutors brought those two experts — who have each interviewed hundreds of people who said they were molested as minors — in to explain why Eliyahu Mirlis waited a decade before coming forward with allegations that Greer raped him repeatedly from 2002 to 2005.

That question had been hanging over the fourth-floor courtroom all this week. Willie Dow, Greer’s defense attorney, has hit on that point again and again in his cross-examination. He left up timelines in the courtroom that showed Mirlis continued to visit Greer in New Haven until 2014 and didn’t meet with a detective until 2016.

Even Mirlis’s wife, Shira, testified on Wednesday morning that she’d often been ​“confused” that her husband couldn’t cut Rabbi Greer out of his life for so many years after the abuse.

When they made near-monthly trips to New Haven, she said, she fought with him the whole two-hour ride, trying to show him the whole community was ​“twisted.” When he let Greer hold their firstborn son in a circumcision ceremony, she said, she found his presence ​“very upsetting.” And whenever she urged her husband to go to the police, she said, he shut down the conversation.

“I always told him to report it,” Shira Mirlis said on the witness stand. ​“He didn’t want to discuss it. He wasn’t ready.”

That afternoon Gavriel Fagin, the owner of Tikunim Counseling Services, a private therapy practice in Brooklyn primarily for Orthodox Jewish men who have perpetrated or suffered from sexual abuse, sought to explain what might have been going on in Mirlis’s mind.

Fagin never interviewed Mirlis. He admitted under Dow’s cross-examination that it would be inappropriate to make any conclusions about the case.

But in drawing on what he has learned from sitting across from hundreds of others with similar accusations, he said that reporting a sexual assault by a rabbi would have been particularly fraught for an observant Orthodox Jew.

As jurors have heard throughout the trial, Orthodox Judaism is the most traditional branch of the religion. That’s what Greer and Mirlis both practice.

Its male adherents dress modestly, usually wearing yarmulkes often dark suits and a full beard.

“We find it very fashionable,” Fagin said, jokingly. ​“One of the most important precepts in Orthodox Judaism is modesty: how one speaks, walks down the street and dresses, it kind of permeates everything from the moment one wakes up until sleep.”

“Why is that important?” asked Maxine Wilensky, the senior assistant state’s attorney prosecuting the case.

“I think that it’s this notion of trying to be the best person one can be, whether that’s interpersonally between man and his fellows, between man and God, or between man and oneself, being insightful and self-aware,” Fagin said. ​“A more modest lifestyle allows those features to exhibit themselves most.”

Boys often attend private religious schools, known as yeshivas. Classes often run all day — Fagin said his kids are gone from 6:45 a.m. until 9:30 p.m. — as they learn about Orthodox customs and rules. They read up on how those rules and customs are described in scripture (the Torah, which contains the first five books of the Old Testament) and thousands of years of rabbinic interpretation (collected in the Talmud).

Together, the tradition identifies 613 commandments that Orthodox Jews are expected to follow, Fagin said. That includes keeping kosher (never mixing meat and dairy, avoiding shellfish and swine, buying only those meats certified as having been killed according to Jewish practice) and observing the Sabbath by not driving or working or turning on or off electricity.

“To learn about 613 anythings, it takes a while,” Fagin added.

“Would The Rabbi Like A Glass Water?”

That’s why, from an early age, adherents are taught to look to a rabbi for guidance on all matters, religious and secular. They’re taught that rabbis should be treated with a ​“tremendous amount” of respect, Fagin said. Some even address them in the third person, as in, ​“Would the rabbi like a glass of water?”

“To not have a rabbi, it’s like driving nowadays without G.P.S.: you don’t know where you’re going,” Fagin explained. ​“The rabbi is so important simply because questions come up all the time. You need somebody to ask, whether it’s to plan a life event or open a business.”

But amid all those rules, there’s not much discussion of sexuality, aside from a strict prohibition on any sexual relations before marriage, Fagin said.

Fagin focused on that in his dissertation in 2005, when he tried to figure out why so many Orthodox Jewish men don’t report childhood sexual abuse.

Part of it, he said, is that ​“it’s very hard to talk about something you don’t really know about.”

Many parents feel so uncomfortable talking about sex at all that they’ll refer to genitals, for boys and girls, as the ​“front tuches” and the ​“back tuches,” he said. And there’s no word in Yiddish for sexual abuse, he said.

That’s starting to change, Fagin added, but ​“I think we’re probably lagging about 10 to 12 years behind the general culture.”

Oher dynamics within the faith make reporting sexual abuse difficult, especially when a rabbi is the perpetrator, he added.

For instance, kids are taught early on that they’re violating God’s law by ​“speaking evilly of someone or gossip-mongering,” Fagin said. ​“It would be seen as poor character on my part to mention an individual by name, rather than just sharing the difficulty and asking for help.”

Fagin said that community is especially important to Orthodox Jews — a network that could be lost by taking down the man at its center.

Many Orthodox communities set up their own schools, ambulance services, neighborhood patrols, rabbinical courts and supermarkets. Members are expected arrange meals when neighbors are sick and open houses to strangers for big events. And three times a day, they need at least 10 men to get together to pray, a quorum known as a minyan.

“It would be very difficult to engage in Orthodox practice without some community support,” Fagin said. ​“Truly, it’s everything.”

In his cross-examination, Dow tried to undercut Fagin’s expertise. He caught Fagin using two different numbers for how many clients he’d seen. He questioned how Fagin could draw his conclusions about the dynamics for Orthodox Jews without basing them on peer-reviewed research.

“It’s much like asking me what people think in Westville about garbage collection,” Dow said at one point.

Previous coverage of this case:

• Suit: Rabbi Molested, Raped Students
• Greer’s Housing Corporations Added To Sex Abuse Lawsuit
• 2nd Ex-Student Accuses Rabbi Of Sex Assault
• 2nd Rabbi Accuser Details Alleged Abuse
• Rabbi Sexual Abuse Jury Picked
• On Stand, Greer Invokes 5th On Sex Abuse
• Rabbi Seeks To Bar Blogger from Court
• Trial Mines How Victims Process Trauma
• Wife, Secretary Come To Rabbi Greer’s Defense
• Jury Awards $20M In Rabbi Sex Case
• State Investigates Greer Yeshiva’s Licensing
• Rabbi Greer Seeks New Trial
• Affidavit: Scar Gave Rabbi Greer Away
• Rabbi Greer Pleads Not Guilty
• $21M Verdict Upheld; Where’s The $?
• Sex Abuse Victim’s Video Tests Law
• Decline at Greer’s Edgewood ​“Village”?
• Rabbi’s Wife Sued For Stashing Cash
• Why Greer Remains Free, & Victim Unpaid
• Showdown Begins Over Greer Properties
• Judge: Good Chance Greer’s Wife Hid $240K
• Sex Abuse Too Much For Many Jurors
• Potential Greer Juror Grilled On ​“Truth”
• Greer Jury Finalized
• Greer’s Accuser Recounts Sexual Abuse
• Attorney Grills Greer Accuser