Case of Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak Brizel

Case of Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak Brizel

Modesty Squad - Jerusalem, Israel

Bnei Brak, Israel

 

Accused of molesting several male children.  Allegations were made of a cover up.   

Shiye Brizel's book, "The Silence of the Haredim,"discloses the story of his father's molestation of boys, and how he chasidic world covered up the sex crimes.

If anyone has any more information on this case (including photographs), please forward it to The Awareness Center

____________________________________________________________________________________ 

Disclaimer: Inclusion in this website does not constitute a recommendation or endorsement. Individuals must decide for themselves if the resources meet their own personal needs.
 

Table of Contents:   

  

1999

1. His Song is The Song of Middle Israel  (12/10/1999) 

2000 

1. Sodomy in the synagogue - Mother went out of her mind  (02/01/2000)
2. Though Shalt Not Expose Sex, Crime and Hypocrisy (02/27/2000)

____________________________________________________________________________________ 

His Song is The Song of Middle Israel

By Yoram Bronowski

Ha'aretz - December 10, 1999

Global News Wire

 

Citation for the book: Brizel, Chie. Shetikat ha-Haredim / Shiye Brizel. -- Tel-Aviv : Yediot Aharonot ; Sifre Hemed, 1999. 220 p. ; 21 cm. Title on t.p. verso: Hasidims silence. (A possible English title is "Silence of the Ultra-Orthodox". I don't know if it was ever published in English).

 

What is Spain?

 

An abominable silence

 

Arapali tried to explain what makes Amichai's poems so popular, even among people who are not poetry freaks. "Anyone can pick up an Amichai poem and find himself in it," said the professor, alluding to the profound yet simple humanity in Amichai's work. Somek spoke about the poetry of Amichai as "an island of sanity" in our mixed up world, seemingly an odd way to describe poetry, yet amazingly apt when it comes to Amichai, a poet of civilian life, an anti-romantic (in the sense of romanticism as the "beautiful malady," the source of the passionate verse produced by the Romantics). It was romanticism, and especially East-European romantic nationalism, which gave birth to the idea of a national poet. No wonder that Amichai, the yekke, endowed with some of the more admirable traits of German-born Jews, objects to this term, alien to the spirit of his poetry. He refuses to be a national poet. Amichai's song is the song of Middle Israel (he has written about his longing for "Middle Jerusalem"), the song of the Israeli as he lives from day to day, in richness and in poorness. The surprise guest on this show was Ada Yardeni, the daughter of Amichai's good friend Dicky, who was killed in the War of Independence and is often mentioned in his poems. Any sense of "gimmick" soon disappeared in the face of the beauty and refinement of this woman, who was helped by Amichai to discover the father she never knew, who died when she was just a baby. Throughout the program we saw archival photos of the young Amichai, gun in hand, and the older Amichai, reading poetry or out for a walk: a moving album for lovers of Yehuda Amichai.

 

But that evening, on "Meet the Press" (19:15), we saw him as he is today - or almost (the interview was taped, contrary to the norm for this program). Guy Zohar talked to him after his return from the United States, where he underwent a serious operation. He has since recovered from his illness "which we shall not name," said Guy Zohar, although he had already named it a moment earlier: cancer. Not that Amichai is afraid of the word, but as he politely agreed, spelling it out was not necessary.

 

It was a straightforward television interview. Amichai, incidentally, praised our television, which he feels is better than American TV, although Zohar knows that is not a great compliment. Anyhow, the questions were ordinary, and that was perfectly appropriate, with Amichai's answers also excelling in a wonderful ordinariness, not at all put on. "I've never played the poet," he told Zohar, who depended a little overmuch on cliches, but did ask a good question about what price the family paid for having a famous father. "No price at all," responded Amichai.

 

Amichai is also well aware of the character of eternity in our day. "Even eternity is not eternity," he said, as if reciting a line from one of his poems. In effect, all his simple, human, down-to-earth, yet often wise, replies could have come straight out of a poem. Amichai knows about relativity and the vanity of fame and eternity, but he doesn't knock the million dollars that come with the Nobel Prize - a prize that somehow, as you watch him, you can't help wishing he will win. French-Spanish relations, or perhaps we should say the puzzle and the challenge to France posed by its neighbor to the west (no less puzzling and challenging to France, perhaps, than its neighbor to the east - Germany), was the subject of a recent installment of the excellent French culture magazine "Bouillon de Culture," taped at the new Guggenheim Museum in the Basque city of Bilbou. I missed the first showing of this program, but there was a repeat this week (Saturday, TV5, 15:15), so that I, too, had the opportunity to meet the writers and artists of Spain - first and foremost Jorge Semprun, a French writer and Spanish statesman, symbol of the eternal bond between these two countries.

 

Semprun began the interview, hosted by Bernard Pivot, with a quote from "Meditations on Don Quixote," by the greatest Spanish philosopher of the century, Ortega y Gasset. "Mi Dios, que es Espana?" Gasset asks. "My God, what is Spain?" This is a question that keeps Spaniards awake at night, claimed Semprun, who cannot answer it any better than the Frenchmen who have been pondering the "myth of Spain" for hundreds of years.

 

One way of addressing this dramatic question is humorously, as demonstrated by the Catalonian actor Jose Maria Flatts, who repeated it over and over in different intonations - as a reproach, a complaint, a prayer, a mini-drama. What is Spain? Spain is...Spanish, he splutters. The problem of Spanish identity is that Spain is so diverse, so hugely heterogeneous that the heterogeneity of every other European country is dwarfed by comparison.

 

In the course of the discussion, we discovered "only" four major languages: Castilian (what we call "Spanish"), Catalonian, Basque and Galician (spoken in Spanish Galicia), three of which were represented around Pivot's table. But the diversity and heterogeneity actually goes much further than that, and even Catholicism cannot pave over the incredibly numerous cultural differences.

 

Bernardo Atxega, a Basque writer, defended his language. It is the "great language of a small people," he said, a language like no other in Europe, whose origins have stumped the experts for years (it appears to be related to a number of Caucasian dialects). Flatts, the Catalonian, described his childhood, very different from that of a Spanish child, and his embrace of French as a linguistic and cultural refuge from Catalonian insularity. Semprun, Spain's former minister of culture who lives in Paris most of the time, hailed Spanish diversity as a creator of opportunities.

 

Pivot began the discussion by asking each of his guests which event in Spanish history was most significant in his or her eyes. The youngest guest, Jose Angel Manas, the author of a successful novel (also climbing the charts in France) called "I Am a Frustrated Writer," was only four when Franco died, but he sees this date, and the end of Franco-ism, as the foundation stone. Another author, Carmen Posadas, goes back as far as 1492, a date connected in her mind primarily with the discovery of America.

 

A third author, Reverte (I didn't catch his first name) also cited the end of Franco-ism, under which Spanish culture had been frozen. Because Franco claimed ownership over the classics - Cervantes, Velasquez, and so on - they lost all their charm for young people. "No one reads Cervantes any more," said Reverte. "It is only taught at universities."

 

This sparked a great outcry in the studio. Pivot related that on a recent three-day trip to Madrid, he dropped in several times to listen to the adventures of the Man of La Mancha being read from start to finish at a hall packed with hundreds of people. The provocative Reverte, retreating just a bit, declared that Don Quixote had nothing to do with Spain, but that Sancho Panza was indeed a true representative of the Spanish soul.

 

Shiye Brizel is an ultra-Orthodox man in his thirties. At the age of 11, he walked into the empty women's section of the synagogue where his family prays and chanced upon his father, a scribe and a respected figure in Bnei Brak, lying on top of a 16-year-old boy in a position that could only mean one thing. Brizel told this to Yair Lapid ("Yair Lapid Live at Ten," Sunday, Family Channel, 22.05) in one of the most shocking interviews I can recall on this program, which has been around for quite some time.

 

Brizel has just published a book, "The Silence of the Haredim," in which he relates the story of his father, the Haredi homosexual, his mother, who already knew of her husband's sexual orientation as a 19-year-old bride, and the hypocritical efforts to hush up cases like these in the ultra-Orthodox community.

 

Listening to Brizel, it was hard to think of a crueler community - not that being a homosexual in Israel in general is so easy, even today. "We, the enlightened," Yair Lapid properly pointed out, "do not see anything wrong with homosexuality." For the ultra-Orthodox, however, homosexual love is an abomination. As one hopeless fool among our country's leaders put it last week, homosexuality is a genetic problem, and if he were minister of health, he would set aside money to cure these sick people. God save us from the possibility that a man like him should ever become a minister of health in Israel.

 

On "A New Evening" one day last week, incidentally, one of the Shas ministers, Shlomo Benizri, found himself face to face with a friendly, highly intelligent lesbian. Minister Benizri (I hope to God he's not the minister of health...) began to explain to her that "she has a problem." Well, so do you, she replied. "You're Haredi."

 

I was reminded of this remarkable scene as I heard Shiye Brizel, an educated, likable man, telling Lapid that he remained ultra-Orthodox even after confronting all the abominations he describes in his book (written together with Efrat Ben-Tsedek). Judaism, he said, "is a very beautiful religion." Imagine that, I marveled. It goes to show you the power of faith. Today, Brizel and his family live very far away from the Haredi community.

 

Apropos Haredim, on the excellent program "Discussing Matters" (Saturday, Channel Two, 9:30), which also dealt with attitudes towards homosexuality, the most intelligent man on the panel, Yaron London, called Minister Benizri a "dumbbell." Perhaps that wasn't the most appropriate epithet, especially since London was talking about one of the most cunning men ever to serve in the Israeli government, but his apology was grossly exaggerated. Even courtesy has its limits.

 

Erratum: Germaine Greer's book "The Female Eunuch" appeared in 1970, and not as stated in this column last weekYehuda Amichai is 75, and Channel Two did the right thing in celebrating this important cultural event on Saturday, in the wake of a number of other parties held in the poet's honor. One of them, sponsored by the Jerusalem Municipality, featured well-known singers performing Amichai's poems set to music: "At a Glance" (Saturday, 11:00), launched Amichai Day with an exceptionally lovely program that included tapes of Shlomo Gronich, Yoni Rechter, Rikki Gal and others performing at this party. In the course of the program, Avirama Golan interviewed the poet Ronny Somek and Prof. Boaz Arpali, author of an excellent book on Amichai's poetry.

____________________________________________________________________________________ 

Sodomy in the synagogue - Mother went out of her mind

by Shahar Ilan

Ha'aretz - February 1, 2000

And the Modesty Squad Kept Silent: For Many Years, Yaakov Yitzhak Brizel, The Nephew of the Founding Leader of the Modesty Squad, Sodomized Ultra-Orthodox Boys. The Greatest Reabbis Knew - And Did Nothing

  

Though Brizel was a scion of the Brizel family, which founded the Modesty Squad, the mysterious organization that imposes moral order on the ultra-Orthodox ghetto, like most ultra-Orthodox children he had no idea what a homo was. As he sensed that he had been told something terrible, he left school in the afternoon and went home. "Mother, what is a homo?" he asked. His mother blanched, but she kept the secret: "When you grow up, you'll know, Shaiya, when you're big you'll know," she replied.

 

Shaiya Brizel was already very tenacious. He decided that such a difficult problem could be solved only by the rabbi of Bnei Brak, Rabbi Yaakov Landau, one of the most important of the ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who has since died. "My name is Shaiya Brizel," he told the rabbi. "I've come to you to tell you what happened at my school and to ask you a question." Landau, it turns out, knew exactly what the secret was. "I will not explain to you what a homo is," he replied. "I will tell you only that I know who your father is, and he desecrates the name of the Lord in public."

 

Now it had become official. Brizel understood that his father, a respected Torah scribe, had transgressed a huge prohibition of the Torah. But only his older friend, Menachem, was prepared to explain to him what that prohibition was. Menachem used the means known to every ultra-Orthodox child. He took the Book of Leviticus and opened it to 18:22: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is an abomination."

 

What is the punishment, Shaiya demanded. Menachem could not evade it: "Whosoever shall do any of these abominations, even the souls that do them shall be cut off from among their people" (18:29).Had the father, Yaakov Yitzhak Brizel, the nephew of the founder of the Modesty Squad, Eliezer Brizel, contented himself with homosexual relations with adults, it is reasonable to suppose that we would never have heard his son's story. However, in his book, "The Silence of the Ultra-Orthodox," published a few weeks ago, the son claims that for decades his father seduced and sodomized yeshiva students. He committed the act in empty synagogues during the hours between prayers and in other places.

 

The greatest of the ultra-Orthodox rabbis, claims Brizel, like Rabbi Landau and the halachic sage Shmuel Halevi Hausner of Bnei Brak, knew and kept silent. The father was a Hasid heart and soul, and went to a number of rebbes. One of these, the Rebbe of Kretschnif from Rehovot, expelled him from his following after he discovered the truth. But the twin brother of the rebbe from Rehovot, the Rebbe of Kretschnif in Kiryat Gat, was happy to accept the father among his followers. Ultimately, claims Brizel, it was not easy for the Rebbe from Kiryat Gat to be picky when he could win such a respected adherent.

 

The reknowned Brizel family, one of the pillars of the extreme ultra-Orthodox wing known as the Eda Haharedit, had no need to bring the Modesty Squad into the affair; it was involved in any case. The Brizel family used its enormous influence to hush up the affair, again and again.

 

Did you ask your grandfather's brother, Rabbi Eliezer Brizel of the Modesty Squad, why he kept silent all these years?

 

"No, he was not a person I could talk to. He was older than me by 70 years. He wasn't someone I could hold an ideological discussion with."

 

Did you ask anyone in the Modesty Squad why they kept quiet?

 

"I know why they kept quiet: because no one has the strength to meddle with Brizel family. Every time anyone submitted a complaint against my father to a rabbinical court because of what he did, my uncle would immediately show up at the court and close the matter."

 

The proud father with the look of an honored rebbe, who observed all the commandments from the slightest to the most important, used to pray at a certain yeshiva with the young boys. There, claims Shaiya Brizel, he hunted his victims. When the head of the yeshiva discovered the true reason that the respected Torah scribe was praying fervently at his yeshiva, he did not contact the police, but confined himself to expelling the father from the synagogue and transferring the problem to someone else's territory.

 

Before the publication of his book, Shaiya Brizel met with the yeshiva head. "You are right that we covered up for him," admitted the man. "I and a few other rabbis...I was busy trying to calm things down and hushing up the affair so that it would not get publicized." The rabbi also begged Brizel to give up the book. "Shaiya, these things happened a long time ago. Your father is old and can no longer sin."

 

But Shaiya is also a Brizel, and when he goes into battle he uses all the means at his disposal. He published the book using real names. His entire family and almost all the rabbis appear under their own names. Only the names of some of the localities and the head of the yeshiva are disguised. To protect himself from a legal point of view, Brizel held a series of conversations with members of his family and rabbis, in which he demanded explanations of why they had covered up for his father's misbehavior. He secretly recorded all these conversations, even with his mother.

 

"If I had written without the names it would have been fiction and this certainly did not suit me," he explained. "I wanted things to change, for ultra-Orthodox society to know that it can attempt to hide things and be hidden, but even if it takes 30 years, a Golem will always rise up against its creator and reveal everything. In this case, I was the Golem."When Rachel Brizel, the daughter of a good Bnei Brak family, married an arranged match from the glorious Brizel family, she had no idea that she was destroying her own life. After six months, she caught her husband having sex with another man. In that case, at least it was with an adult.

 

Shaiya Brizel relates that some of the boys with whom his father had relations sent letters of complaint to their own fathers; in the discreet ultra-Orthodox society they had no one else to whom they could complain.

 

"When she read these letters, my mother went out of her mind," writes Brizel. "Every such letter made her want to demand a divorce. Again and again batteries of mediators, the Brizel rabbis, would show up, whose job it was to calm her down so that, heaven forbid, she would not destroy the good name of the Brizel family. They could live with the fact that one of their own had raped minors, but for them divorce was an impossible situation."

"We, the children," he relates, "became objects of derision." He recounts that in ultra-Orthodox society there is a special scornful look that is used when a person who has someone with a bad reputation in his family is identified. But this does not always end in dirty looks. Twice, once during prayers in a synagogue, and once during a Gemara study hour at Rabbi Eliezer Shach's Ponevezh Yeshiva, ultra-Orthodox men who were strangers to him touched his sexual organ, presumably on the assumption that he followed in his father's footsteps. The first time, he made a fuss, only to discover that the only thing that interested the people there was to hush the whole thing up. The second time, he made do with a whispered warning to the man.

 

How do you feel about your father?

 

"I pity him and hate the way he behaved. He should have remained single. A person is not supposed to bring children into this shame."

 

Shaiya Brizel is now 36 and the father of three; he works as an accountant. His father, 65, was forced to leave home several years ago and return to his elderly parents' apartment. Shaiya wrote this book after a suicide attempt in June of this year. "For all those years I was half dead. For the past five years I have been getting psychological treatment. During my talks with the psychologist I decided that I was going to spew out all this ugliness in the form of a book."

 

He took into account that there would be violent reactions to the book. These have not occurred, perhaps because the book, which only came out a few weeks ago, has not yet roused the expected tempest. Brizel suffers from a serious heart defect, which could cause his death. As a way of protecting himself, he has deposited a letter with three lawyers that contains serious allegations about the Eda Haredit, and he has informed the relevant people.

 

Recently, he has moved to a new apartment, and he lives in the National Religious sector of a mixed community of National Religious and ultra-Orthodox families. Naturally, he started praying at the only Hasidic synagogue in the settlement. After the book came out, associates of the local rebbe informed him that he was persona non grata. Ironically, this same rebbe had come to the area after being compelled to leave several other communities on suspicion of having sodomized his pupils. In ultra-Orthodox society, revealing that acts of sodomy have been committed is a far graver offense than committing them. On the day the book was published, Brizel met with the head of the Hachemei Lublin Yeshiva, Rabbi Avraham Vazner. "He told me that publishing the book was a million times worse than what my father had done, and warned me that I would not be able to find marriage partners for my children."Ha'aretz has been unable to obtain a response from Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak Brizel. At his parents' home, a woman replied: "We don't care. Shaiya is a liar and there is nothing more to be said."

 

Ha'aretz also requested the Brizels' response through the Eda Haredit activist Yehuda Meshi- Zahav. By the time the article went to press, there was no response through this channel either.

 

Several weeks ago the father responded to the women's magazine La'isha, saying that he would sue the publishers, which has not yet happened. It is unlikely that it will happen. Shaiya Brizel was ready to put off publication of the book, on condition that the family sue him in a rabbinical court, in which the affair would be aired. He has said that no one in the family was prepared to take up the challenge.

 

In the conversation with La'isha, the father said that he was indeed a homosexual, "But I have had treatment and today I am no longer like that. All this is behind me."

 

In reply to a question as to whether he had sexual relations with minors, he replied: "Perhaps I will talk about that some other time." He accused his son Shaiya of being "the only one who is after me. He has destroyed my life...He wrote this only for the money. He wanted money from me...Because of him I separated from my wife."

 

Shaiya's sister, Rivka Hubert, spoke with great anger to the La'isha reporter about the fact that her brother had revealed the names of the persons involved, and declared: "We deny everything it says in the book.At the age of 11, Moisheleh, the strongest fellow in the talmud torah (school for ultra-Orthodox boys), went up to Shaiya Brizel and said to him: "Kid, I want you know that your father is not the holy man you think he is. He is a homo".

____________________________________________________________________________________ 

Though Shalt Not Expose Sex, Crime and Hypocrisy

By Phil Reeves

The Independent (London) - Sunday February 27, 2000

AT FIRST glance, Chie Brizel, an accountant, seems to conform to the cruder stereotypes of his profession. He has a clerical air, reinforced by a large pair of spectacles and an impeccable office.

 

He lives in a small apartment in Petakh Tikva, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He is devout, soft-spoken, orderly, and about as flashy as a paper-lip. He is not, in other words, the kind of man you would expect to expose a scandal of religious hypocrisy, crime and sex at the secret heart of Israel's ultra-Orthodox world.

 

Mr Brizel, 36, father of three, belongs to a family that were highly regarded members of the "haredi" (ultra-Orthodox) sect; his father's uncle was the founder of the Modesty Squad, the shadowy organisation which imposes moral order. The squad has beaten up haredim who are deemed to have gone astray, and burned down their homes.

 

So there was shock and, among the haredim, anger when Mr Brizel published The Silence of the Haredim, a book alleging that his father had seduced and sodomised teenage boys in empty synagogues, and that the Modesty Squad hushed it up because of his family's status.

 

The ultra-Orthodox regard homosexual sex as a profound sin. As his father held the elevated position of a Torah scribe, who obeyed every other aspect of the scriptures to the tiniest detail, and as his alleged victims were as young as 14, Chie Brizel's accusations could hardly have been more serious.

His claims were seized on by the national media, who were only too happy to find further evidence of corruption within the haredim, whose self- imposed segregation, secrecy and intolerance has long been the source of resentment among Israelis.

 

Within three hours of circulating a proposal for his book, he had five publishing offers. Once the book was out, Ha'aretz, the country's most staid newspaper, devoted a half-page to it.

 

Mr Brizel says he produced the book as a form of self-therapy and saw it as the only way to get the issue into the open. In the fundamentalist world of the haredim, victims of sexual abuse are usually too frightened and too alienated from mainstream society to complain to outsiders. The police are generally distrusted.

 

"Sex education in the haredi community is so undeveloped that the victim of abuse has no idea whom to turn to," Mr Brizel told The Independent on Sunday. "The only person he knows he can talk to is the perpetrator. We used to get letters to my father from his victims, asking why he had assaulted them."

 

Mr Brizel also admits he wanted to expose the hypocrisy of haredi leaders, who forbid people from owning televisions or mobile phones and dictate their sexual practices to them.

 

"My greatest anger is against the community leaders, not my father. They are the ones who let the show go on. If it had been anyone else, the Modesty Squad would have broken his arms and legs without a second thought."

 

He says the author's fee, which he claims was modest, was insignificant compared with the emotional stress involved in writing it. Mr Brizel has been ostracised by the haredi community into which he was born. He is also alienated from most of his family, whom he secretly tape-recorded in order to gather evidence to back his accusations in case of a lawsuit.

 

One senior rabbi told him that publicising the scandal was "100 times worse" than the allegations against his father. In this benighted world, it seems the eleventh commandment has acquired a communal dimension: thou shalt not be found out.

 

____________________________________________________________________________________ 

FAIR USE NOTICE

Some of the information on The Awareness Center's web pages may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. 

 

We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. 

 

For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml . If you wish to use copyrighted material from this update for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

____________________________________________________________________________________