Case of Michael Hersh, Father
Past President, Chevra Hatzalah, Volunteer Ambulance Corporation, Inc. (Brookyn, NY)
Case of Miriam Hersh, Mother
Case of Rabbi Aharon Schechter
Past President, Chevra Hatzalah, Volunteer Ambulance Corporation, Inc. (Brookyn, NY)
Case of Miriam Hersh, Mother
Case of Rabbi Aharon Schechter
Families Rabbi, Yeshivas Chaim Berlin - Brooklyn, NY
Case of Worldwide Association of Specialty Programs & Schools (WWASPS)
Tranquility Bay - Jamaica, West Indies
Case of Worldwide Association of Specialty Programs & Schools (WWASPS)
Tranquility Bay - Jamaica, West Indies
This is a case of alleged child abuse and neglect.
As of March 25, 2008 there are not allegations of a sex crime.
As of March 25, 2008 there are not allegations of a sex crime.
 | |
Michael Hersh
|
 |
Rabbi Aaron Schechter
|
 |
| Students at Tranquility Bay lay prone on stone floor. |
___________________________________________________________________________
On March 20, 2008 The Washington Center for Peace and Justice, Inc. filed a federal lawsuit today on behalf of a Isaac Hersh, a 16 year old Brooklyn boy seeking injunctive relief to stop his abuse and to gain his release from a notorious behavior modification facility in Jamaica, West Indies, where he was sent after being brutally seized at the behest of his parents, Michael and Miriam Hersh. Michael Hersh is a former student of Yeshiva Chaim Berlin in Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, and a disciple of Rabbi Aaron M. Schecter, dean of the Yeshiva.Joshua Ambush, the lead counsel in the case, announced the filing of the action against the parents of Isaac Hersh. The father is Michael Hersh, CEO of Chevra Hatzalah Volunteer Ambulance Corps, Inc., the largest all-volunteer ambulance service in the United States. The complaint also names the State Department for constitutional and civil rights violations.
 |
Save Isaac Hersh
|
Ken Kay is the president of the tightly knit group of Utah men who run these outposts with their families, under the umbrella company World-Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), whose leaders, critics say, try to hide their role in running the schools by running them under different names. Ken's son Jay, a college dropout who ran a mini-mart in San Diego, now oversees Tranquility Bay.
Table of Contents:
2006
- TranTranquility Bay and Worldwide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS)
2007
2008
- Letter: Tranquility Bay in Jamaica (03/04/2008)
- Tranquility Bay: helping or harming Cayman's youth? (03/06/2008)
- Tranquility Bay is 'private jail', author says (03/12/2008)
- Editorial : Taking care of our troubled youth (03/12/2008)
- Jamaica rehab worse than prison (03/18/2008)
- Press Release: Federal Law Suit Filed To Rescue Child From Modern Day Concentration Camp
- CALL To Action (03/23/2008)
- Jewish family sues Jamaican reform school for troubled teens (03/25/2008)
- City Room - Metro (03/25/2008)
- Cayman Minister orders Tranquility Bay probe (03/26/2008)
- Government to probe Tranquility Bay (03/27/2008)
- Isaac Herish is Free and Back in the USA . . . But let's not forget the rest of the children at Tranquility Bay!!! (03/28/2008)
- I was beaten and bound in boot camp, claims Brooklyn ultra-Orthodox teen (03/28/2008)
- Breaking: Brooklyn Teen Released from Jamaica (03/30/2008)
- Does Anyone Know How Isaac Hersh is doing? (04/01/2008)
- US teen rescued from local juvenile facility (04/01/2008)
- Isaac Hersh Is Not Safe and NEEDS to be in Houston (04/02/2008)
- Two Lawsuits Draw Attention to the Abuse Suffered by Troubled U.S. Teenagers Sent to Boot Camps Abroad: Why the State Department Should Push for an International Prohibition (04/03/2008)
- Does my teen need help? (04/07/2008)
Tranquility Bay and Worldwide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS)
Tranquility Bay, located in the small town of Treasure Beach Jamaica, is a center where mostly American children between the ages of 12-19 are locked down and controlled for every moment of their day in an effort to "reform" them. The reasons for reform range from having a "bad attitude" to gang and drug related activity. Tranquility Bay is associated with the Worldwide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), which has had all of its facilities, overseas, shut down (except Tranquility Bay). The New York Times said "it has a reputation as the harshest of them all" referring to Tranquility Bay's reputation in the network of behavior modification schools. I attended Tranquility Bay in 1999, and am very interested in seeing that the kids there now are not subjected to any form of mental or physical abuse. The views expressed in this site are true and factual to the best of my knowledge. Though I attended Tranquility Bay in 1999, I stay in contact with students and parents from WWASPS affiliate schools and programs every week to try and make sure the information is always up-to-date. Tranquility Bay needs some major work!
No More Nightmares at Tranquility Bay?
By John Gorenfeld
AlterNet - January 23, 2006.
Largely unregulated, the teen rehab industry has scarred thousands of kids for life. Now one lone congressmember is pushing to stop the abuse.
From the Czech Republic to Costa Rica and Mexico, cops have seized American overseers for caging or mistreating American teens at harsh "boot camps" run under foreign flags to escape U.S. law.
But here at home, the companies that ship teenagers to remote reform schools can freely go about their business in many states. You can dial 1-800-355-TEEN to reach the sales staff of Teen Help, LLC, who can arrange for your child to be spirited away. They might put you in touch with "escorts," guys who can pull up to your driveway in a van and transport even the most defiant child to the airport. The next destination is up to you: a "tough love" school here in the 50 states, like Majestic Ranch in Utah or Spring Creek Lodge Academy in Montana?
Or perhaps Tranquility Bay, a barbed-wire discipline facility in Jamaica, where some of the approximately 250 teens can find themselves confined against their will and marched around by guards. Only the devil stands in the way of your consumer choice. The devil, that is, and a lone congressman, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.
Just ask Ken Kay. He's the president of the tightly knit group of Utah men who run these outposts with their families, under the umbrella company World-Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), whose leaders, critics say, try to hide their role in running the schools by running them under different names. Ken's son Jay, a college dropout who ran a mini-mart in San Diego, now oversees Tranquility Bay, where he had admitted to the media that he squirted pepper spray on his charges in the past.
As a teen at Tranquility Bay, you can't call home and are escorted between rooms by Jamaican "chaperones." Talk out of turn and your punishment might be that a trio of guards wrestles you to the ground. "They start twisting and pulling your limbs, grinding your ankles," a student told the British newspaper The Guardian. Not knowing when you'll go home, you might take cold showers and watch "emotional growth" videos. The promise is that you will return a respectful, happy teen. But many WWASPS alumni who've banded together at online survivor websites like Tranquility Bay Fight and Fornits say their lives haven't been saved, they've been devastated.
Several WWASPS schools have been shut down after abuse claims. Tranquility Bay's counterpart, High Impact, a WWASP affiliate in Mexico, closed in 2002 after dark stories emerged. Teens said they were kept in dog cages. Two parents, Chris Goodwin and Stephanie Hecker, told the Rocky Mountain News their children were made to lie in their underwear for three nights with fire ants roaming over them and were threatened with a cattle prod if they scratched.
In December, Rep. Miller asked Congress's nonpartisan General Accounting Office (GAO) to launch a fact-finding probe into similar schools, claiming the $1.2 billion teen rehabilitation clinic industry is shrouded in secrecy. Miller's office is awaiting word from the GAO on the investigation request. After a call to the GAO, AlterNet was told no decision had been made yet as to whether to launch the study, which would look into whether the industry was receiving special tax treatment or using fraudulent marketing techniques. Asked why he requested the probe, Rep. Miller explained, "Far too little is known about the so-called 'behavior modification' industry, even as it has surged in size since the 1990s, and that is why I have asked the GAO to review it... There is no excuse for allowing children to be placed in unlicensed programs where their physical or emotional health is jeopardized."
But company president Kay told AlterNet he questioned the congressman's motives. "I think that he must just want to be powerful, or seen as, 'oh, the guy that saved all these children from abuse,'" says Kay. "My fear is that he has a vendetta."
The WWASPS schools rake in about $80 million a year. Claiming to enlist about 1,250 students (the official number has dropped from 2,500 in 2003), the company schools are part of a wider industry, estimated to hold 10,000 teenagers, that is rarely covered by the news media.
Miller, senior Democrat on the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, is pushing for a bill, H.R. 1738, to increase state licensing of the teen control trade and hold Americans who run foreign discipline schools accountable to U.S. laws. Company president Kay, however, suggested Miller may also have a partisan, anti-Republican motive against WWASPS.
It's true that WWASPS is generous to the GOP. The schools and "teen transport" company are run by a web of cell-like corporate entities that deny their interconnectedness -- but share family members, billing addresses and other obvious signs of affiliation. At the top is founder Bob Lichfield, who lives in Utah on a posh ranch, his lifestyle and political presence fueled by tuition payments. According to the Salt Lake City Tribune Bob Lichfield and his family and business associates have given given over $1 million to GOP politics at the local and national level.
The lobbying seems to have paid off. Seeing as how the National Mental Health Association has categorically condemned juvenile boot camps as counterproductive "bullying," the goal would appear to be keeping oversight out of the hands of mental health experts. Like some timber companies and others, a number of "troubled teen" companies have promoted the idea that they should be their own watchdogs. While the rules are tightening this year in Utah, a frontier is opening in Montana. As Michelle Chen reported in the NewStandard, a pro-WWASPS plan is winning out in the state over a tougher one, coinciding with WWASPS school Spring Creek Lodge Academy's $50,000 lobbying push to water down the rules. Instead of the state Department of Health, the new plan lets industry insiders watch over schools such as Spring Creek and others. And there will be exemptions for "faith-based" schools.
So far, WWASPS hasn't chosen the God loophole, but its officials attach such religious zeal to teen control that the "faith-based" label would fit the company snugly. "Do I believe that God is finding a way for teens to get help? I do," Lichfield once told the Los Angeles Times. "Do I believe that Satan is interested in thwarting it? I do." Asked in December about his boss's remarks, Kay waxed philosophical: "If you have a spiritual side, I think you can truly believe that there may be some adversarial part of our nature and makeup that gets involved." Then there are other adversaries, some of whom Kay has called "wackos" -- a steady parade of unhappy mothers and teens, as well as the pesky foreign cops who have arrested camp leaders at Kay's schools for "human rights violations."
The company has spent the last decade trailblazing an unregulated frontier. Like manufacturers, they've outsourced to foreign countries which have different laws and standards. A predecessor like STRAIGHT, Inc., from 1976 to 1993 the foremost teenage drug rehab outfit in America, was driven out of business by liability and sued for false imprisonment and manhandling of children. But as industry watchers have discovered, the early 1990s saw new business models emerging for "tough love."
WWASPS' approach has been a goldmine. By splintering its business empire into fragments -- including Teen Help, Adolescent Services, Inc., and Teen Escort (the teen retrieval arm) -- it has received much more leeway to conceal accountability and money trails, its critics argue. Draw a map of the network, Utah state prosecutor Craig Barlowe told the New York Times in 2003, and you'll see "a lateral arabesque with no hub except for these connections in Utah." Barlowe was pursuing a child abuse charge against the director of a WWASP-affiliated school at the time.
On the consumer end, parents are offered thousands of dollars in sales incentives for finding new kids or promoting WWASP schools, the New York Times has reported. The schools' hunger for pupils has created a proliferation of promotional websites -- like FamilyFirstAid.org -- beckoning mom and dad to ship the kid to the "friendly tourist Island [sic]" of Tranquility Bay, the "prime forest land" of WWASPS' Spring Creek Lodge and other pleasurable-sounding destinations. (As author Maia Szalavitz documents in her upcoming book, Help at Any Cost, at WWASPS program Paradise Cove in Samoa, which is now shuttered, kids caught scabies, and guards confined bad kids to a 3 feet by 3 feet plywood chamber that teens referred to as "The Box.")
School of hard knocks
Two Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, Lou Kilzer of the Rocky Mountain News and Tim Weiner of the New York Times have written exposes of the kennel cages, bug infestations, unqualified staff and confinement to punishment rooms that have been passed off under the Harry Potter-esque language of "boarding school." Rep. Miller's spokesman Tom Kiley said that substandard education is just one of the areas of concern that the GAO needs to help resolve about WWASPS and the wider industry. This August, one facility with the prestigious name "Academy at Ivy Ridge" in New York had to refund more than $1 million after pretending to offer legitimate high school diplomas.
WWASPS eludes the attention and regulation it might receive if its institutions were presented as health care facilities instead of schools. There is little to show for them as high-water marks in American education, however; when not being bombarded with Tony Robbins motivational tapes, kids learn by rote and fill out multiple-choice tests. While a promotional website claims that "more than 80 percent of the graduates of these programs go on to attend some of the best universities and professional schools in the country," Kay didn't respond to a request for an example of a student at an Ivy League or other top school. Referring to WWASPS-affiliated institutions, Maia Szalavitz said admissions officers are unlikely to be impressed by the education, which not only stresses conformity over critical thinking but can include long stays in solitary confinement.
Over two years ago, Rep. Miller was turned down by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft when he asked him to investigate possible crimes revealed in the New York Times reports. "Congressman Miller sees this as a top priority," says Miller's spokesman Kiley. "The promise is that your child is going to be treated with respect, and that these are the people meant to help them. In fact, the opposite is happening."
The money linking WWASPS and Republicans, says Kiley, "definitely sends up red flags," but he wouldn't go so far as to claim a web of connections. Miller's proposed End Institutional Abuse Against Children Act, would give states $50 million to help license schools, establish new criminal and civil penalties for leaders of abusive programs and let the government regulate overseas camps that are presently beyond the arm of the law. Right now, the State Department warns that it "has no authority to regulate these entities."
Company president Kay, however, told AlterNet that local authorities already do a "great job" regulating the schools.
Under Montana's new plan, that board, dominated by industry insiders, will be responsible for making sure companies avoid some of what has befallen WWASPS's 450-teen Spring Creek Lodge Academy campus in Thompson Falls, Mont., in the last three years. Such as the time that Karlye Anne Newman from Denver, days shy of 17, hanged herself in a bunkhouse there in 2004. Or making sure the firm doesn't again allow a man like former employee Keith Wood, 31, in the proximity of troubled youth. Wood last February went to nearby Plains and shot a romantic rival seven times with a Glock pistol before turning the weapon on himself.
According to a 2004 report in the Missoula Independent that re-opened Karlye's forgotten death, the kids are forbidden to speak of her suicide -- or spread tales of Jamaica, a distant island that looms over them as a fate worse than Montana. "That's a Cat-4," a student said when the paper asked about the dead girl. "We can't talk about Karlye." A card around the student's neck helpfully informed the reporter that a Cat-4 meant losing rank in the program, meaning staying longer at the camp and costing dad thousands more in tuition. Tuition at the lodge runs at about $40,680 a year, a typical figure for these schools.
Abuse, says Kay, doesn't happen anymore often than in the public school system. "That doesn't mean we're gonna shut down the public schools," he said.
Unless, of course, if your middle school principal kept girls in multi-day "stress positions" similar to the kind approved by Donald Rumsfeld for use on Muslim prisoners. As Maia Szalavitz relates in "Help At Any Cost," that was the case at a WWASPS school for girls in Mexico. It was called Sunset Beach and was shut down after being raided by local police in 1996. Authorities seized and later released overseers Glenda and Steve Roach. A company official blamed "the local legal system" for the ensuing closure of the school.
But across the world in the Czech Republic, two years later, authorities reached similar conclusions after finding that the WWASPS-affiliated Morava Academy was holding kids in windowless rooms and forcing them to remain on their stomachs for days. Czech cops arrested and released the overseers on bail for illegal imprisonment and torture, the British Guardian reported.
The accused were the Roaches, the same people arrested in Mexico. At press time AlterNet could not locate the Roaches for comment or determine the outcome of their case, though industry watchdog group International Survivors Action Committee has claimed to have located them in the Bahamas living under new names. Czech press reports paint a cloudy picture as to their whereabouts, with Glenda leaving the country before trial on a health waiver, and Steven "at large" to avoid criminal investigation, according to Radio Prague and other sources.
But somehow, according to WWASPS officials' statements to the press, it was the teens' fault for being "master manipulators" who'd tricked the European officials into thinking there was abuse. In 2003, a dramatic teen uprising in Costa Rica at the company's Dundee Ranch school brought WWASPS to the attention of Times national security reporter Tim Weiner. The uprising began after a visit by Costa Rican officials, who told students they had more rights under local law than WWASPS allowed them. "They told us you have the right to speak, you have the right to speak to your parents, you have the right to leave if you feel you've been mistreated," 17-year-old Hugh Maxwell told the Times. "Kids heard that and they started running for the door. There was elation, cheering and clapping and chaos. People were crying."
Six people told the Times that staff beat the children to stop them from leaving. As order collapsed, Costa Ricans seized control and hauled off the founder's brother, Narvin Lichfield, in handcuffs for holding kids against their will, releasing him a day later. In a statement, the company complained that the Latin American prosecutor, with his "Rambo-like tactics," had told kids they could "do whatever they wanted, without consequences." According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Narvin Lichfield was charged in Costa Rica with "aggravated privation of liberty, coercion and international crimes." A Costa Rican judge ordered him to stay in the country for six months, but ultimately Lichfield did not stand trial.
An evil world without consequences, populated by lying teens, is what WWASPS's officials and pro-company parents often say they're up against, a nearly metaphysical threat. Participating families must attend motivational seminars on the struggle. Ex-participant Karen Lile, a piano seller in Northern California, has written an essay alleging that she suffered "distress and emotional shock" from a Teen Help "discovery seminar" she attended at a Holiday Inn which, she wrote, encouraged her to keep her child in the program. Witnesses at similar events describe the atmosphere as rising to the fever pitch of religious revival road shows, with adults wailing and beating on chairs.
So how are mom and dad talked into keeping their kids at a foreign detention center? The pamphlets for one Teen Help-affiliated school show kids playing basketball and wandering amid natural wonders, rediscovering lost innocence. As long as parents ignore the small letters warning, "Not all Photos [sic] taken at the facility," they can tell themselves they are buying a snooty private education.
And they are told it's this or death on the streets. "If your child needed a kidney transplant to save their life, you would come up with the money," Kay said. "If the value of your child's life isn't worth the cost of a new car " And they're warned not to believe teens who may spin tall tales of abuse. After a high school basketball player named Paul Richards was sent to Paradise Cove in Samoa, Szalavitz recounts in her book, his parents received a newsletter, "WHUTZ UP in Paradise Cove," offering a lesson in how to avoid being "manipulated" by letters from the front.
The lesson presents a sample letter reading, in part: "It is not the camp you promised ... The [program staff] are mean and beat me when I do something they don't like."
The young basketballer later told Szalavitz that "working" his own $2,000-a-month "program" meant letting groups of shaved-headed teens belittle him for refusing to "see the light" and be grateful. "They just circle you up, and they all start yelling at you at the same time and say how shitty a person you were," he said. "'You're worthless, you're pathetic, you're a piece of shit, you're a compulsive liar and nobody likes you,' just basically stuff 'til they broke down your self-esteem."
Was a shipment to the Jamaica security complex appropriate for a teenage girl who'd been sleeping around? Kay, asked the question, stressed that being flown to a school like Tranquility Bay is "a child's right." Teens "should expect that their parents have the right to step in on their behalf and make some decisions for them," he said. Some kids have entered WWASPS-affiliated schools for no infraction more serious than fighting with a stepmother. No court order is required.
Szalavitz says there's no evidence for the legitimacy of the "treatment" at most of the schools, which operate in a regulatory climate without consequences. As there is no research into long-term effects, she'd like to see studies done on whether any WWASPS alumni have been left with post-traumatic stress disorder. Some parents have described their kids' WWASPS transformations with language more "Dawn of the Dead" than "Dead Poets Society." Alex Ziperovich, 16, emerged from Spring Creek Lodge "35 pounds lighter, acting like a zombie," his mother, a Seattle attorney, told the New York Times.
Where's the outcry?
Why haven't stories like the ones by Weiner and Kilzer, Pulitzer winners both, caused a public outcry and swift government reaction? Do press accounts give WWASPS too much equal time? "It's a ridiculous way of covering things. We don't cover any other kind of health care that way," Szalavitz says, suggesting the press wouldn't be so charitable to non-doctors who claimed to have a new method for extracting tumors. Most news features take the he-said-she-said approach familiar to us from recent reporting on Intelligent Design: "WWASPS isn't for everyone ..." But, says Szalavitz, "This is not a story of 'some people go to this church, some people go to that church.'" Szalavitz added, "We're selling what they stamped out of psychiatric institutions 100 years ago."
Oddly enough, WWASPS president Ken Kay himself has raised unsettling questions about the programs Rep. Miller is waging his battle to regulate. During a period in 2002 when he'd split with WWASPS, he told the Rocky Mountain News' Kilzer: "These people are basically a bunch of untrained people who work for this organization. So they don't have any credentials of any kind. We could be leading these kids to long-term problems that we don't have a clue about because we're not going about it in the proper way ... How in the hell can you call yourself a behavior-modification program -- and that's one of the ways it's marketed -- when nobody has the expertise to determine, is this good, is this bad?"
Kay has since rejoined WWASPS as president. Asked in an email interview in December whether his concerns had since been calmed since 2002, Kay said he was quoted out of context. "Nobody [calmed] my worries for children," he wrote back. "There are trained authorities that deal with abuse. All necessary systems are in place ..."
Letter: Tranquility Bay in Jamaica
Camyan Net News - March 4, 2008
Dear Sir,
I am completely horrified to learn that your country is sending children for "treatment" at Tranquility Bay in Jamaica. The programme is owned and operated by a former gas station worker who has admitted on video to using pepper spray on children and in print to having forced children to lie "on their faces" in isolation rooms for months. He has absolutely no medical or psychological qualifications-- nor does anyone else employed there to "treat" the children each day.
During my work on my book, Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids (Riverhead Books, 2006), I spoke to dozens of parents and teens who report horrifying abuses at Tranquility Bay.
Further, as a science reporter who covers child psychiatry, I know from the research data that the humiliating, confrontational and bullying "care" provided by this organisation is linked not with successful treatment of juveniles, but with post-traumatic stress disorder and increased risk of ongoing problems like addiction.
To put it bluntly, there is absolutely no peer-reviewed research to suggest this method works-- and there are lots of papers showing that the individual techniques utilised there have done harm to some.
I would be happy to send a copy of the book to anyone covering this issue and to talk with your reporter or editors. I can put you in touch with teens who have attended Tranquility Bay and testified in court to hideous treatment and with parents who are suing the organisation for permanently harming their children.
I can also provide information on testimony from the owners of the organisation with which Tranquility Bay is affiliated that admits to their own lack of qualifications for working with children.
Maia Szalavitz
Tranquility Bay: helping or harming Cayman's youth?
Camyane Net News - March 6, 2008
 |
Boys lying on their faces in "observation placement" at Tranquility Bay. The Reform school is on the island of Jamaica and has been referred to as a concentration camp.
|
Concerns are once again being voiced about the use of Tranquility Bay, in Jamaica, as a rehabilitation centre for young Caymanians.
The issue came to the public's attention following reports of a juvenile who was allegedly swiftly moved from the Frances Bodden Girls Home in Grand Cayman to the facility without the family's approval.
Described as a `specialty boarding school', Tranquility Bay is a privately run educational facility for troubled youth. The institution operates under the guidelines of the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), located in St George, Utah.
According to the institution's website, the mission statement is "To challenge and motivate the student in a structured, individualized learning environment, which provides exposure to development of skills and attitudes necessary for academic and social success so they become mature, responsible and contributing members of society."
In the absence of a secure, educational facility in the Cayman Islands, young people who are not part of the criminal justice system and cannot go to Eagle House, but who need a more secure facility than can be provided by the Frances Bodden Girls Home and Bonaventure Boys Home, are sent to Tranquility Bay.
In a letter to this publication, Maia Szalavitz expressed shock at learning that young people are sent to Tranquility Bay from the Cayman Islands. Ms Szalavitz is author of the book `Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids' (Riverhead Books, 2006).
The author said that whilst researching for her book she "spoke to dozens of parents and teens who report horrifying abuses at Tranquility Bay". She also said that the care provided by the institution was not linked with the successful treatment of children but, "with post-traumatic stress disorder and increased risk of ongoing problems like addiction".
The Final Report of Cayman Islands Human Rights Committee's (HRC) observations on a series of hearings involving females facing criminal allegations in the Youth Court during 2007 raised a `significant' number of human rights concerns.
The Report recognises the difficulties faced by agencies in reaching an appropriate resolution in complex cases that have competing and conflicting priorities.
However, it points to various legal instruments that highlight the need to take account of the interest of juveniles, particularly the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice (otherwise known as The Beijing Rules) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
"What is clear from both the Beijing Rules and the CRC is that the interests of the child should be the main concern," reads the Report. It also refers to Article 3 of the CRC which states:
"In all actions involving children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interest of the child shall be a primary consideration."
The issue of whether sending young people to the Jamaican facility is in `the best interest' of Caymanian youth was questioned by the judge in the case of one of the aforementioned young females.
The Report quotes the judge as stating, "In the absence of formal ruling from ministers, young defendants go to Tranquility Bay. In our experience it is uniformly bad."
"It is high time that we have a facility here or explore alternatives," the judge is reported as saying.
"We need a secure facility with an education facility... We need a secure remand facility where (young people) can receive education and therapy... Eagle House does not begin to meet needs of boys and for girls there is nothing at all... Frances Bodden is a home, it does not offer counselling and is not properly built for re-training or re-education... We need some facility between home and prison."
The HRC's Report on the Convention of the Rights of the Child dated Wednesday, 13 September 2006 refers to the Children Law 2003, which was drawn up to protect children and to ensure their rights contained in the CRC. However at the time of the Report the Law had not been enforced and to date, still remains un-enforced.
One of the concerns raised by Latchmin `Charlene' Scott, the mother of the young person recently sent to Tranquility Bay, is the apparent secrecy surrounding the centre and the inability for her child to make contact with family members by telephone.
When asked to comment on this practice Deanna Look Loy, Director of the Children and Family Services Department said, "The restrictions regarding parental contact via telephone is in accordance with the rules of Tranquility Bay."
An email was sent to the Academic Administrator at Tranquility Bay, seeking comments on the institution's educational provision. A response was not received prior to going to print.
Tranquility Bay is 'private jail', author says
Caymane Net News - March 12, 2008
Reports on the use of Tranquility Bay in Jamaica, as a rehabilitation facility for troubled youth in the Cayman Islands has come under fierce criticism from American journalist and author Maia Szalavitz.
Speaking to Cayman Net News in a telephone interview on Monday, 10 March, she said: "No other government has ever sent a child there."
Ms Szalavitz, who contacted Net News after reading a previous article with family members raising concerns about a young Caymanian at the facility, is author of the book "Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids" (Riverhead Books, 2006). She said that whilst researching for her book she "spoke to dozens of parents and teens who report horrifying abuses at Tranquility Bay."
According to Ms Szalavitz, she spent three years "looking at troubled teen programmes" when researching her book, and estimates that about 20 per cent of that time was spent on Tranquility Bay.
Her research took her to Jamaica in an attempt to get inside the facility, but she was refused entry. "It looks like a South American prison," Ms Szalavitz said of what she observed from the outside.
She related seeing bars on windows which were blacked out, preventing anyone from looking in and keeping those inside from looking out.
"Basically, it is an unregulated, private jail," she said. "They are complete amateurs; I don't understand why any government agency would send children there."
The privately run facility for troubled youth operates under the guidelines of the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), located in St George, Utah.
According to their website, "The structured learning environment at our school allows students to acquire the skills necessary to succeed academically and socially at Tranquility Bay and throughout their life."
However, a Google search for the facility produces a plethora of articles challenging this assertion and highlighting the questionable techniques used at the centre that is reportedly run by a former gas station attendant, Jay Kay.
The centre, which is reportedly reluctant to open its doors to the scrutiny of the press, is believed to have given access only to two reporters since its establishment in 1997; an American Time Magazine journalist in 1998 and Decca Aitkenhead, of the UK's Observer newspaper, who visited the facility in 2003.
According to Mr Aitkenhead, "The first impression once inside Tranquility Bay's perimeter walls is of disconcerting quiet. Students are moved around the property in silence by guards in single file, 3ft apart - a complicated operation, because girls and boys must be kept segregated at all times, forbidden to look at one another."
Describing the close scrutiny that each young person is subject to at the facility he reports, "The only moment a student is alone is in a toilet cubicle; but a chaperone is standing right outside the door, and knows what he or she went in to do, because when students raise their hand for permission to go, they must hold up one finger for `a number one', and two for `a number two'."
In the article, Mr Kay's disregard for proper qualifications to run the centre is startling. "Experience in this job is better than any degree" he is quoted as saying. "Am I an educational expert? No. But I know how to hire people to get the job done."
In perhaps one of the most chilling observations made by Mr Aikenhead, he said, "Tranquility is basically a private detention camp. But it differs in one important respect. When courts jail a juvenile, he has a fixed sentence and may think what he likes while serving it, whereas no child arrives at Tranquility with a release date."
According to Ms Szalavitz, the unregulated nature of the industry that has grown up around the treatment of troubled youth allows parents to be deceived into thinking that such centres are good for their children.
"The people who run these programmes are very slick and run a good game. The kids are not convicted of crimes," she added. "Parents are drawn into it because it seems good" for their children.
Efforts to get comments from the Ministry of Health and Human Services proved unsuccessful before going to print.
Editorial: Taking care of our troubled youth
Caymen Net News - March 13, 2008
Since Cayman Net News has been running a short series of articles highlighting the questionable merits of sending one of our troubled juveniles to the self-described `specialty boarding school' Tranquility Bay in Jamaica, we have been contacted by authors and former "students" – inmates is perhaps a more accurate description – and obtained hundreds of pages of court documents that give rise to enormous cause for concern.
 |
| Boys at Tranquility Bay |
It's not that we don't have the money – it's just that those in charge in successive governments have chosen to spend it on other things, whether worthwhile or not.
HMP Northward has long been used by the authorities as a convenient holding facility for local individuals with long-term mental issues and it seems as though Tranquility Bay in Jamaica may now be viewed as the equivalent for our troubled youth.
According to court documents filed in Circuit Court in Tazewell County, Virginia, Tranquility Bay is referred to as "a dangerous facility" and the court heard testimony as to "the maltreatment of the students, of the unsanitary conditions that these children are forced to live in."
Two young people that completed the programme at Tranquility Bay, in telling the court in Virginia of their experiences, used words like "emotional torture, filthy, maggots, parasites, lack of medical treatment, abuse and physical restraint."
The judge in that case ordered the immediate return of the child in question to the United States.
In the case of the mentally ill, the fact is that such people very often cannot help themselves in terms of their own actions and thus have only a minimal responsibility at best for the things they do.
It is therefore wholly ineffective to lock them up as if they were capable of completely rational thought and action, when they need a different kind of remedy – one that has never been available in the Cayman Islands.
And this results in the ongoing problem here that such people, who are in need of ongoing care and treatment, are just let loose on the streets until they do something that puts them right back where they started – behind bars. And so the cycle repeats itself endlessly until something really serious happens and the person concerned has to be incarcerated for the rest of his life.
This is fundamentally wrong for all concerned: the members of the public that are unknowingly at risk, the prison staff that have to cope with mentally ill inmates and the individual himself, who is not getting the care and treatment he needs and which surely this country is able to afford.
Ever since HMP Northward was commissioned in 1981, it has been serving as a holding facility for the mentally ill; some because they are deemed by the Courts to be medically unfit to stand trial, while others because they are considered potentially dangerous and therefore a threat to the community at large.
The minister responsible, Hon. Anthony Eden, has admitted that HMP Northward is not the appropriate place to detain and care for the mentally ill but, so far as we are aware, this was the last official word on the subject.
Apparently, the ubiquitous consultant has prepared a draft document, which addresses possible amendments to the mental health legislation, but any further progress will require some action in the face of the traditional reluctance to do anything at all, which has been the hallmark of successive governments over the years.
Similarly, when preparing the several recent articles on Tranquility Bay, it has been difficult and sometimes impossible to get meaningful comments from the relevant government agencies, let alone any indication that the problem is acknowledged and is being addressed.
As in the case of the adult mentally ill, the children sent to Tranquility Bay may not be fully responsible for their own inappropriate behaviour and it does no one any good just to ship them off to a facility that has such a dreadful reputation.
This is really not good enough for this country and our young people, and we trust that those responsible in government and the judiciary will now take a long, hard look at the situation.
Jamaica rehab worse than prison
Cayman Net News - March 18, 2008
 |
| 'Therapy' at Tranquility Bay |
The 16-year-old girl who was forcibly sent to Tranquility Bay in Jamaica for rehabilitation earlier this year has revealed more details of her experience at the facility in a recent letter to her elderly grandmother.
The minor's plight first came to light after her mother, Latchmin `Charlene' Scott, passed a letter she had received from her daughter to Cayman Net News in an effort to highlight her daughter's anguish.
Since that article of Friday, 29 February, more information has been received raising concerns about human rights violations at the facility that appear to put the health and safety of its occupants at risk.
In her letter adated Sunday, 10 February, the minor states, "Here is worst than prison. At least in prison you can make phone calls, but here is like a boot camp. Trust me, I be up before six in the morning and can barely sleep."
In a reference to the Frances Bodden Girls Home, where she lived before being transferred to Jamaica, the minor now appears to have changed her perspective of that institution.
"I would rather be in girls home until I'm 18 than to be here. But believe me I will and I'm going to prove to everybody who degrades and underestimates me who I am and what I can do because they don't want to see me come out on top, but I will show them."
The girl expresses her love for her grandmother, sister and other family members and asks her grandmother to "be strong until I see you again."
"I pray for you every night and day while wiping my tears away," she writes. "I just wish I could be by your side again so I can live my life with you until the very end."
The website lists the accounts of young people who have stayed at the centre. Whilst it is possible to find a couple of positive comments, there are an overwhelming number of experiences that are very disturbing.
In a posting dated 15 August 2007, Mike Huffman, who stated that he had been at the facility for two and a half years, said, "I've seen staff break people's jaws, I've seen kids get restrained into submission, I've seen kids get beat with wood boards and hit with radio, a staff (member) even had a baseball bat during the last riot at TB (Tranquility Bay) in February. I've even been restrained so many times that I cannot feel my ankles anymore for not laying down on my face."
Press Release: Federal Law Suit Filed To Rescue Child From Modern Day Concentration Camp
By Joshua M. Ambush, JD, LCC
March 20, 2008
Law Offices
Joshua M. Ambush, LLC
Hilton Plaza
1726 Reisterstown Rd., Suite 206
Baltimore, Maryland 21208
PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Washington Center for Peace and Justice, Inc. filed a federal lawsuit today on behalf of a 16 year old Brooklyn boy seeking injunctive relief to stop his abuse and to gain his release from a notorious behavior modification facility in Jamaica, West Indies, where he was sent after being brutally seized at the behest of his parents, Michael and Miriam Hersh. Michael Hersh is a former student of Yeshiva Chaim Berlin in Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, and a disciple of Rabbi Aaron M. Schecter, dean of the Yeshiva.
The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, details the long history of abuse of the boy by his father that culminated in his being forcibly removed from his mouse in the early morning hours on June 13, 2007. The boy was sadistically handcuffed and dragged to a waiting van by two men hired by his parents while shocked witnesses helplessly watched him plead with his abductors.
It was not until several months later that worried family members learned that the boy had been sent by his parents to Tranquility Bay, an affiliate of World Wide Association of Specialty Schools and Programs, WWASPS. The complaint details documented cases of abuse at Tranquility Bay which includes beatings, sexual assault, food deprivation and excessive use of isolation.
Joshua Ambush, the lead counsel in the case, announced the filing of the action against the parents. Michael Hersh, father of the boy is the CEO of Chevra Hatzalah Volunteer Ambulance Corps, Inc., the largest all-volunteer ambulance service in the United States. The complaint also names the State Department for constitutional and civil rights violations.
Ambush emphasized that the lawsuit is not about tort damages, but rather is an effort to save the boy's life and rescue him from a modern day concentration camp. "Child abuse by a parent should not be tolerated in civilized society, and should not be tolerated when the parents hires surrogates to perpetrate the abuse. It is unconscionable that perpetrators of abuse are able to evade prosecution by virtue of the fact that the abuse is taking place outside the jurisdiction of the Untied States. In addition to rescuing this child, this suit seeks to demonstrate that federal courts, in such cases, retain jurisdiction over the abusers and those that aid and protect them."
Joshua Ambush will be available for interviews by phone appointment at 410-484-2070
CALL TO ACTION
The Awareness Center - March 23, 2008
Please Call Your Local Newspapers and Television Station - Encourage Them To Do A Story To Save Isaac Hersh's Life and ALL of the other Children in Tranquility Bay!!
US Department of State
Office of Children's Issues
2201 C. Street NW, Washington DC
1-888-407-4747
Michael and Miriam Hersh, Parents
1014 W. 10th St.
Chevra Hatzalah Volulnteer Abmulance Corp, Inc.
1340 East 9th Street
Brooklyn , NY 11230
Rabbi Aaron M. Schecter, Dean (Aharon Moshe Schechter)
Mesivta Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin (Flatbush)
1593 Coney Island Ave.
Brooklyn, New York, 11230
(718) 377-0777
Jewish family sues Jamaican reform school for troubled teens
By Kirsten Danis, Daily News City Hall Bureau Chief
New York Daily News - Tuesday, March 25th 2008, 4:00 AM
A battle has erupted in the Orthodox Jewish community over a Brooklyn teenager sent by his prominent family to a behavior boot camp accused of terrifying abuse.
 |
Isaac Hersh
|
Isaac Hersh, 16, has been trapped since last summer at Tranquility Bay, a reform school on the island of Jamaica with a soothing name - and harsh discipline, according to the lawyer hired to try to get him out.
Isaac's estranged parents sent him to the boot camp last year after luring him back to Brooklyn from his new home in Texas, court papers claim.
"He's very worried about his brother. He's very worried about himself, too," said a friend of the family who asked to remain anonymous.
Tranquility Bay offers the promise of turning bad boys into focused achievers, but the walled-off camp with barred windows has been called a nightmare.
Children have been beaten, forced to eat their vomit and made to stand in painful contortions for hours, according to a separate suit filed in Utah by former students against private boot camps, including Tranquility Bay.
The case has so riled up members of the normally insular Orthodox community that several are taking the rare step of publicizing Isaac's situation.
One one side is Isaac's informal Texas foster family, who are also Orthodox, and their supporters, who prompted a nonprofit to file suit in Washington last week on Isaac's behalf.
They claim he was lured to Brooklyn with the promise of a job, handcuffed and thrown into a van that took him to the boot camp as he cried and begged to be released, the suit says.
On the other side are the teen's father, Michael Hersh - CEO of Brooklyn's huge Orthodox volunteer ambulance service, Hatzalah - and his wife, Miriam.
"Hatzalah will carefully monitor these proceedings, taking into account the seriousness of the allegations," the organization said in a statement.
The couple has a prominent supporter in Rabbi Aaron Schecter, head of Brooklyn's tight-knit Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin, according to the suit.
It is unclear what prompted the parents to send Isaac to another country. Michael Hersh did not return a call for comment.
Isaac, one of eight children, was sent to schools in Virginia and Long Island before the family moved to Israel in 2002, where the parents were accused of abusing Isaac, the suit says.
"They're healthy, good, normal teenage boys," said the family friend.
City Room - Metro
New York Times - March 25, 2008
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/fear-and-31-bullets-from-account-of-detective-who-shot-sean-bell/
A battle has erupted in an Orthodox Jewish community over a Brooklyn teenager, Isaac Hersh, 16, who was sent by his family to a behavioral "boot camp" in Jamaica that his lawyer says has abused him. The boy's father, Michael Hersh, is chief executive of a large Orthodox volunteer ambulance service, Hatzalah; the boy, one of eight children, had been living with another Orthodox family in Texas. [Daily News]
Cayman Minister orders Tranquility Bay probe
Radio Jamaica - Wednesday, 26 March 2008
A high level delegation from the Cayman Islands, including representatives from the Health Ministry and the judiciary, will be visiting Tranquility Bay in Jamaica to investigate the suitability of the facility.
There have been allegations of inhumane tactics being used to detain and punish children sent privately, or by government departments to the centre.
Cayman's Health and Social Services Minister Anthony Eden said the probe would be undertaken despite not receiving official complaints from Caymanian youngsters detained there or their families.
Numerous complaints have been voiced and posted on dedicated web sites alleging ill treatment, inadequacy of academic offerings, unqualified staff and inhumane treatment of minors.
The Cayman Islands currently have three young people at Tranquility Bay.
Government to probe Tranquility Bay
Cayman Net News - Wednesday, March 26, 2008
A high level delegation from the Cayman Islands, including representatives from the Ministry of Health, the judiciary and the Department of Children and Family Services, will visit Tranquility Bay in Jamaica to investigate the suitability of the facility.
The investigation has resulted from recent news stories in Cayman Net News in which a Caymanian girl and an expert alleged that inhumane tactics are being used to detain and punish children sent privately, or in the case of the Cayman Islands, sent by government departments.
Health and Social Services Minister Hon Anthony Eden told the post-Cabinet press briefing at the Government Information Services (GIS) on Thursday, 20 March that Government would investigate the matter involving the rehabilitation facility.
"First and foremost it is our responsibility as a Government to provide the best care for our juvenile offenders," he said.
The Minister said the probe would be undertaken despite not receiving official complaints from Caymanian youngsters detained there or their families. There is an existing arrangement with the Department of Children Services in Jamaica to make periodic visits to Tranquility Bay.
"This process involves speaking privately with our resident youth, and then reporting on their welfare to the Department of Children and Family Services (Cayman)," Mr Eden said.
Mr Eden told the media that sending Caymanian youth to another country is not ideal. The government has budgeted for a purpose built facility in East End, Grand Cayman, to house 18 young people.
In a passionate plea, Mr Eden said, "We can only help our youth by remaining diligent and committed to working together for their wellbeing, no matter if they are in Cayman or Jamaica."
The Minister also targeted parents and urged them to take their responsibilities seriously and termed parenting as a "God-given responsibility". He pleaded with them to make the necessary sacrifices for their children so that they will yield rewards in the future.
Tranquility Bay is a privately owned and operated youth rehabilitation centre in Jamaica, which is about 45 minutes away from Grand Cayman by plane. Numerous complaints have been voiced and posted on dedicated websites alleging ill treatment, inadequacy of academic offerings, unqualified staff and inhumane treatment of minors.
The Cayman Islands currently have three young people at Tranquility Bay. The country is also currently debating a new constitution and the likely inclusion of a Bill of Rights that would include children's rights.
CALL TO ACTION:
Save Isaac Hersh - Standoff Between the US Embassy and the Jamaican Government
© (2008) The Awareness Center
According to a reliable source a great deal has been happening over the last 24 hours in the case of Isaac Hersh, a sixteen-year-old boy being held at dangerous reform school/torture chamber, called Tranquility Bay, which located in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica.
Last night a private jet carrying a delegation of three individuals arrived in Montego Bay. The delegation included a mental health professional who is an expert in child abuse, and both a medical and legal professional. Upon landing they were immediately escorted by United States Embassy officials who to Tranquility Bay. The goal of this excursion was to communicate directly with the Isaac Hersh to determine if he was OK.
The first time they went to the gates, the delegation and the US embassy officials were turned away.
After the second attempt they were granted a visit. Isaac was immediately taken to the US Embassy where he confirmed on the record that he had been physically abused by his father, Michael Hersh while living at home. He also stated that he was currently being tortured and deprived of basic necessities in Tranquility Bay.
At some point the delegation from New York was arrested and is currently being held on attempted kidnapping charges. Jamaican authorities took delegation member's passports they are currently being detained. I've been told that at this time several politicians are involved along with the federal court.
At this time US Embassy officials are staying at the gates of Tranquility Bay in hopes of gaining the release of this child.
Michael Hersh maintains legal custody (parental rights) of his son Isaac. Affidavits, along with testimony is being presented to a federal judge in New York. The goal is to temporarily remove parental rights from Isaac's parents so that the child can receive proper help.
Here's what you can do to help:
Call Rabbi Aaron Schechter who is Michael Hersh's spiritual advisor (Dean, Yeshiva Chaim Berlin) and the families attorney, Steve (Shlomo) Mostofsky, President of the National Council of Young Israel (which is a national synagogue organization representing 150 synagogues throughout the United States).
- Demand that they drop the charges of kidnapping of delegation members.
- They allow delegation members to bring Isaac back to the United States so that he can receive proper medical and psychological attention.
Contact Information:
 |
| Steve Mostofsky (AKA: Shlomo Mostofsky) |
Steve (Shlomo) Mostofsky, President
National Council of Young Israel
212-929-1525
Rabbi Aaron M. Schecter, Dean (Aharon Moshe Schechter)
Mesivta Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin (Flatbush)
1593 Coney Island Ave.
Brooklyn, New York, 11230
(718) 377-0777
Isaac Hersh is Free and Back in the USA. . .
But Let's Not Forget The Rest of the Children at Tranquility Bay!!!
© (2008) The Awareness Center, Inc.
Isaac Hersh was being held at Tranquility Bay, a boot camp in Jamaica, which was known for using severe corporal punishment on the children. Allegations have been made that Isaac's parents (Miriam and Michael Hersh) and Rabbi Aharon Schechter were aware of the schools reputation prior to sending him there.
At around 7:00 AM Isaac Hersh arrived in New York City on a private plane. He will return to the custody of his foster family.
Another boy was released from Tranquility Bay a few weeks ago and stated he witnessed Isaac Hersh being abused. Yesterday during a meeting with US Embassy officials Isaac confirmed the abuse. At the time the other boy was released he begged rabbinical figures to help free Isaac because he is being beaten in the camp and his mental health was deteriorating quickly.
Those involved with freeing Isaac Hersh include, Joshua Ambush, Attorney; Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe, executive director of the Torah Outreach Research Center of Houston and who is also one of the foster parents for Isaac twin brother; Rabbi Avraham Wolbe, Monsey, NY, David Pelcovitz, Phd of Yeshiva University, Mr. Zvi Gluck, Hatzalah, New York, NY; Isaac Klein, Far Rockaway NY and Senator Hillary Clinton.
A huge thank you goes to Rabbi Yosef Shereshevsky from Norfolk Virginia, COO of Wextrust Capital, for financing this operation and providing his private Jet. Also Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski, Rabbi Dovid Feinstein, Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky were involved in the rescue.
As of today Michael Hersh who was the president of Hatzaloh Ambulance Service in New York, is on a leave of absence from his position.
Given this great news about Isaac, we cannot forget about all the other children who are still incarcerated at Tranquility Bay. Please keep them in your prayers over shabbos. As a people we need to make sure all of the children are freed from this torture chamber they call a school.
I was beaten & bound in boot camp, claims Brooklyn ultra-Orthodox teen
BY KIRSTEN DANIS
DAILY NEWS CITY HALL BUREAU CHIEF
New York Daily News - Saturday, March 29th 2008, 4:00 AM
A Brooklyn teen banished to a behavior boot camp in Jamaica by his family - sparking an internal battle among ultra-Orthodox Jews - is back in the United States after a showdown on the island nation.
Isaac Hersh, 16, landed at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey Friday after his father was persuaded to let him leave Tranquility Bay, a private reform school.
"Relieved is not the word," said Zvi Gluck, a Queens financial worker. "The entire way home he was describing the atrocities that were happening there."
Gluck was one of a handful of Orthodox men who jetted to Jamaica on Wednesday to try to fetch the teen and was briefly detained until Isaac's father agreed to his release.
The ending capped a dramatic week when some members of Isaac's tight-knit community took the unusual step of publicizing his case.
The teen, who had been living with an Orthodox Texas family in an informal foster situation, had been brought back to Brooklyn by his parents last June and then shipped off to Tranquility Bay.
The family that had been caring for Isaac had no idea where he was until about three weeks ago - and became worried that he was living in a facility that has been accused of abuse.
Isaac told Gluck and others that he was beaten and forced to lie on a mat with his hands and feet tied as punishment for minor infractions.
The story so divided the religious community that Isaac's father, Michael Hersh, was forced to take a leave of absence from his job as CEO of Hatzalah, the large, Brooklyn-based volunteer ambulance corps. Hersh's lawyer did not respond to requests for comment yesterday.
Friends of the Hersh family described Isaac as a troubled son who had clashed with his parents for years. Others described him as a normal teen. He is living in an undisclosed location while custody arrangements are worked out.
Breaking: Brooklyn Teen Released from Jamaica
by Stewart Ain
New York Jewish Week - March 30, 2008
Isaac Hersh, the 16-year-old Orthodox Brooklyn boy who was allegedly being "abused by the staff" of a school for troubled youths in Jamaica, is back in the U.S.
He arrived at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey early Friday morning after his parents agreed to have him released to the custody of a New York psychologist.
The psychologist, David Pelcovitz, a professor at Yeshiva University, examined Hersh for 90 minutes yesterday in Jamaica and concluded that he had been physically and mentally abused, according to Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe of Houston, TX, with whose family the teen had stayed for nine months before his parents spirited him away to the boarding school in June.
Rabbi Wolpe said he and Pelcovitz and two other men flew to Jamaica in a private plane during the early morning hours Thursday. They had to rush, the rabbi said, because they had learned that American officials were going to interview Hersh at the American Embassy in Kingston at 9 a.m. Thursday in response to a federal lawsuit against the U.S. State Department alleging the boy was being abused at the school.
"We were waiting at the gate of the Embassy so he could see us and request to meet with us," Rabbi Wolbe said. "It was a miracle that we got there five minutes before he arrived."
The rabbi said U.S. consular officials were present when he asked Hersh to describe the treatment he received at the school, Tranquility Bay.
"He said he was thrown on his face by the staff and that both hands were twisted up behind him while five people were on top of him, putting their fingernails into his ears," Rabbi Wolbe said. "And he said he was punched in the stomach when he asked to borrow a pen from a counselor. ... The vice consul with us was crying. She could not believe it."
After Pelcovitz interviewed the teen and made his assessment, Hersh was then returned to Tranquility Bay until his father, Michael Hersh, CEO of the Chevra Hatzalah Volunteer Ambulance Corps, agreed by phone to have his son released into Pelcovitz' s custody. The boy was then flown back to New York where he is in an "undisclosed safe location," according to Rabbi Wolbe.
He noted that young Hersh is not with his father, who, according to the federal suit, had been charged by authorities in Israel with child abuse for giving his son medicine without a prescription. The suit said the medicine was to calm the boy down.
Ken Kay, who said he was formerly associated with Tranquility Bay and that his son was its former director, asserts that the school is for troubled youths who need behavior modification. He denied that any abuse took place there.
Editorial: Smoke and fire at Tranquility Bay
Cayman Net News - Monday, March 31, 2008
The recent announcement that the government is to send a high level delegation to investigate the suitability of Tranquility Bay in Jamaica is a welcome development in the ongoing debate over the treatment received by young people at that facility, including three children from the Cayman Islands.
Shortly after the announcement of the visit came news of yet another lawsuit filed in the United States over the conditions at Tranquility Bay.
Predictably, this included a restatement of many of the allegations made previously in relation to Tranquility Bay in court testimony and in the media.
Although Tranquility Bay offers the promise of turning troubled youth into focused achievers, the walled-off camp with barred windows has been called a nightmare.
Children have been beaten, forced to eat their vomit and made to stand in painful contortions for hours, according to an earlier law suit filed by former students against private boot camps, including Tranquility Bay.
As we reported in an earlier editorial on this topic, according to court documents filed in Virginia, Tranquility Bay is referred to as "a dangerous facility" and the court heard testimony as to "the maltreatment of the students, of the unsanitary conditions that these children are forced to live in."
Two young people that completed the programme at Tranquility Bay, in telling the court in Virginia of their experiences, used words like "emotional torture, filthy, maggots, parasites, lack of medical treatment, abuse and physical restraint."
The judge in that case ordered the immediate return of the child in question to the United States.
Since Cayman Net News has been running a short series of articles highlighting the questionable merits of sending one of our troubled juveniles to Tranquility Bay in Jamaica, we have been contacted by authors and former "students" and obtained hundreds of pages of court documents.
Numerous complaints have been voiced and posted online alleging ill treatment, inadequacy of academic offerings, unqualified staff and inhumane treatment of minors.
Tranquility Bay is typically referred to in all of this as a prison in all but name and, in fact, its soothing but misleading name belies the harsh reality behind its doors.
Given the fact that it is more than likely a place of detention rather than the "specialty boarding school" it claims to be, surely the issue of basic human rights and, especially, the rights of children are very relevant in this context, especially in the light of the current discussion on this topic as part of the constitutional review process.
Each of us has a fundamental right not to be imprisoned or otherwise detained except after conviction of a criminal offence in a fair trial, although this simple concept has sometimes proven to be elusive to the Cayman Islands judiciary.
We therefore wonder (a) whether there is a legal basis for the effective imprisonment of young people in this manner and (b) if there is claimed to be such a legal basis, whether the laws of the Cayman Islands that permit this do in fact conform to the internationally accepted standards of human rights.
The Minister for Health and Social Services Hon Anthony Eden has acknowledged that "first and foremost it is our responsibility as a Government to provide the best care for our juvenile offenders," and we hope that this guiding principle will be uppermost in the minds of the officials that travel to Jamaica.
We also hope that they will not be deceived by outward appearances and self-serving promotional efforts, which is reportedly another specialty of the organisation that runs Tranquility Bay.
We are hesitant to conclude that there is in fact a fire at Tranquility Bay based only on the observable smoke but, in this case, there is an awful lot of smoke.
The children sent to Tranquility Bay may not be fully responsible for their own inappropriate behaviour and it does no one any good just to ship them off to a facility that has such a dreadful reputation. Out of sight, out of mind is just not an acceptable solution for this country.
The government says it has already budgeted for a purpose built facility in East End to house 18 young people, and we therefore urge all concerned to make the construction and commissioning of this new facility a matter of the utmost priority.
Our children deserve nothing less.
Does Anyone Know How Isaac Hersh is doing?
By Blogger, Jewish Survivors
It's been several days since any one reported on how Isaac Hersh is doing. Does anyone know know where he is or who's taking care of him? It's shocking that this case is not making headline news in internationally.
There are many of us who are very concerned about Isaac's siblings who are still living in the home of alleged "child beater", Michael Hersh. Does anyone know if child protection has taken custody of the children -- or has Michael Hersh been able to manipulate them into thinking he's a safe parent?
I personally believe the safest place for Isaac Hersh is back in Texas with his twin brother. I also think the rest of the Hersh children should be sent down there too. They all need to be reunited with each other in a safe environment away from the insanity of Brooklyn. They need to be in a place in which healing is a possibility and where they can receive unconditional love and not be used in some sort of pawn in a rabbinical war.
Does anyone know what's happening with the rest of the children who are being held as prisoners at Tranquility Bay? Where is the public outrage? Why isn't everyone demanding that the national news media do a story about this?
I think Isaac Hersh is still in danger as I think all the children stuck at that "reform school".
US teen rescued from local juvenile facility
Radio Jamaica - Tuesday, 01 April 2008
http://www.radiojamaica.com/content/view/6857/26/
A local facility for troubled teens is again in the news overseas.
This follows allegations of the abuse of the son of a high-ranking member of the Jewish Community in New York, by staff at the school.
Isaac Hersh, 16, a Brooklyn boy and a former guest at the facility is back in the U.S. a week after allegations surfaced that he was being abused by staff.
A New York Newspaper said he arrived in New Jersey early Friday morning on a private jet.
According to family members, a New York psychologist, examined Hersh for 90 minutes in Jamaica and concluded that he had been physically and mentally abused.
The "Jewish Week" newspaper reported that the psychologist, a Rabbi and two other men flew here last Thursday after they learned that American officials were going to interview Hersh at the American Embassy in Kingston.
The embassy interview was allegedly in response to a federal lawsuit against the U.S. State Department alleging the boy was being abused at the Jamaican school.
The boy reportedly told consular staff and his escorts that he had been thrown on his face and that both hands were twisted behind him while five people sat on top of him, putting their fingers in his ears.
The 16-year-old also said he was punched in the stomach when he asked to borrow a pen from a counselor.
His father, Michael Hersh CEO of the Chevra Hatzalah Volunteer Ambulance Corps in New York later agreed by phone to have his son released and flown out of the country.
Isaac Hersh Is Not Safe and NEEDS to be in Houston
© (2008) Vicki Polin, MA, NCC, LCPC, Executive Director
The Awareness Center, Inc.- April 2, 2008
It saddens me to say that Isaac Hersh continues to be used as a pawn. It appears that his father (Michael Hersh), has difficulties seeing Isaac as anything other then an object. He is not looking at what's in the best interest of his child.
It has already been established that Isaac Hersh made allegations of being physically abused by his father while he was living in Israel. Because of the abuse and various other issues his father allegedly agreed to allow Isaac and his brother live in Houston, TX -- with a family friend, Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe.
The Wolbe is a home in which Isaac was provided unconditional love and stability. It is also the home in which his twin brother resides.
According to mental health professionals who are familiar with this case, it is in Isaac Hersh's best interest to return to the Wolbe home immediately. Unfortunately, Child Protective Services and the courts in New York are not looking at Isaac's desperate need to be in a stress free environment, one in which he is familiar and which is away from the insanity, while the legal matters are being addressed.
Currently, Isaac Hersh is staying in the home of Steve (Shlomo Zackheim). The home is smack in the middle of the war zone. It's been reported that Zackheim is a friend of Michael Hersh, and is someone who Rabbi Ahron Schechter has control over.
What is needed is an emergency court order granting Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe temporary legal guardianship, so that Issac can return to his normal routine and begin his healing process. A traumatized child cannot heal while he is in the middle of a psychological war zone. Isaac Hersh NEEDS to be in Houston, under the care of the Wolbe's. Isaac Hersh to be in a safe place, with individuals he knows, trusts and loves.
Two Lawsuits Draw Attention to the Abuse Suffered by Troubled U.S. Teenagers Sent to Boot Camps Abroad: Why the State Department Should Push for an International Prohibition
By Marci Hamilton
FindLaw: Legal News and Commentary - April 3, 2008
Teenagers, even the ones who are stars at school and elsewhere, can be a challenge. Those who take a wrong turn toward drugs or gangs, to cite just two examples, can be very difficult to handle. Thus, it has not been uncommon in the United States for parents in such desperate straits to send their children to military schools or to wilderness camps.
There is also a third choice, however, which was in the news last week: teen boot camps. This choice, as I will explain, should be made illegal around the globe -- with the U.S. State Department taking a leading role in protecting U.S.-based (and, if possible, foreign) teens who suffer abuse abroad.
The Tranquility Bay Lawsuit and the State Department's Response
Recently, attorney Joshua Ambush filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of a public interest organization in Washington, DC, against the Department of State. The suit alleged that State Department regulations establish an obligation on the part of the U.S. government to prevent the abuse of American children abroad.
In particular, the suit urged that the State Department needed to immediately investigate the abuse that American teenager Isaac Hersh had allegedly suffered at a boot camp in Jamaica called Tranquility Bay.
It is to the State Department's credit that it took the lawsuit very seriously, and quickly aided in Isaac's release from what appear to have been torturous conditions. At first, Isaac's parents, who reside in New York, tried to block his release. However, eventually they were persuaded to permit Yeshiva University professor and psychologist David Pelcovitz to accompany Isaac back to New York. Pelcovitz interviewed Isaac in Jamaica, in the presence of a United States embassy official; determined that Isaac had been abused; and brought him back to the United States for treatment and for his safety.
The good news is that Isaac was rescued; the sad truth is that many children still reside at Tranquility Bay and in other boot camps around the world.
Another Suit Alleges Abuse At the Behest of the World Wide Association of Specialty Camps and Schools
Fortunately, a pending lawsuit filed in federal court in Utah aims to make some headway against these institutions. The defendant is the World Wide Association of Specialty Camps and Schools, based in George, Utah. The plaintiffs are 140 victims of teen boot camps (including Tranquility Bay). The suit alleges that they suffered severe physical and emotional abuse at the hands of the camps -- including being forced to eat their own vomit, having their hands and feet bound, being locked in dog cages, being forced to reside in isolation, being placed in painful postures for long periods of time, being deprived of food, and being deprived of any education.
From even this sketchy description, it seems obvious that these so-called "boot camps" are nothing more than modern-day torture chambers.
Once again, just as in the arena of childhood sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and outside it, it has taken a number of adults, working in tandem, to create the conditions for such horrible treatment of children. Once again, terrible crimes have been committed against children by the very adults who were supposed to protect them. It is up to the national and international legal community to now ensure their safety by shutting down these camps and making their practices illegal.
It Is High Time for the Federal and State Governments to Aggressively Target Teen Boot Camps and Those Who Patronize and Enable Them
When parents send a child to such a boot camp, and support it with their payments, they are creating the opportunity for such abuse. Accordingly, those parents who were aware of the camps' nature, yet still sent their children there, should be held fully accountable under the law: They essentially have paid third parties to abuse their children on their behalf. Moreover, the camps, their owners, their employees, and the government agencies that look the other way should also face serious legal repercussions.
With Isaac Hersh's story still fresh in everyone's mind, it is the right time for the State Department, Congress, and the state legislatures to initiate all the action needed to shut down the camps operating in the states, exert great pressures to shut down the ones operating abroad, and exact heavy penalties on those operating abroad when U.S. minors are abused there. As I have argued in past columns such as this one, the platforms of the national political parties should have a plank that speaks to protecting children from harm. This is a nonpartisan issue; thus, each of the three remaining viable candidates for President should include the protection of children as one of his or her highest priorities.
Like the international trafficking of children for sex, the ugly international subuniverse of boot camps causes massive suffering, and thus demands that fast, decisive, and harsh action be taken.
Marci A. Hamilton is a Visiting Professor of Public Affairs and the Kathleen and Martin Crane Senior Research Fellow at the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. An archive of her columns on church/state issues - as well as other topics -- can be found on this site. Professor Hamilton's most recent work is God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press 2005), now available in paperback. Professor Hamilton's forthcoming book, which will be published this spring is entitled Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children(Cambridge 2008).
"Does my teen need help?"
The McGill Daily's Nadja Popovich looks at abuse in "tough love" rehabilitation facilities for teens.
By Nadja Popovich
The McGill Daily - April 7, 2008
In 2006, Martin Anderson, a 14-year-old Florida teenager, died at a "boot camp" for troubled teens. When a video surfaced showing a group of guards repeatedly attacking the teen while a nurse appeared to look on, public outcry against this type of correctional facility came to a boiling point. Amid controversy over whether Anderson's sickle-cell blood trait was the cause of death, the verdict was finally rendered that he had, in fact, died of suffocation from the guards' abuse.
While Anderson's boot camp was a state-run facility, privately-owned versions abound. "Tough-love" rehabilitation camps for teens are prevalent throughout the United States, with a disturbing lack of formal regulation.
"No one knows how many of these programs there are out there. They aren't very regulated," says Maia Szalavitz, author of several articles and books on abuse in tough- love programs and senior fellow for Stats.org, a media watchdog web site. "Many programs work outside the States too: in Mexico, Samoa, Jamaica, all over really. And they have these incredibly ironic names. like `Tranquility Bay.'"
Though not always manifesting themselves as a "boot camp," all of these so-called tough-love programs seem to be based on the same approach: with enough confrontation, kids may undergo a sort of "reality check" that will allow them to put their past behaviour behind them when reintegrated into society. But according to many recent studies, including a National Institute of Heath State-of-the-Science conference statement on Violence and Related Health-Risking Social Behaviour, this is simply not the case.
"No matter what these places may call themselves – boot camp, `tough-love' drug rehab, or emotional-growth boarding schools, or wilderness programs – the basic concept is always the same: break the kids down in order to fix them," says Szalavitz.
Though much more prevalent south of the border, it would be naïve to think that Canada was devoid of boot camp rehab centres.
"I was shocked this place existed in Canada!" attests Rebecca Smith, a former "client" of a Canadian tough-love drug rehabilitation facility. "My Canada, which I know has a great human rights record. I could not fathom that this place was allowed to exist. While there, more than once I said, `You can't do this! I have rights!'... and they said, `Druggies don't have rights.'"
The breakdown
Szalavitz has traced the proliferation of most modern teen rehabilitation programs from Synanon, the first "tough-love" rehabilitation prototype, in Santa Monica, California. Initially a drug rehabilitation centre in the late fifties, Syanon gained cult status by the seventies, before it closed its doors in the 1990s. Its legacy still casts a large shadow on the drug rehabilitation field.
Founded in 1958, it was the first program of its kind, and it promised "lifetime rehabilitation." The basic therapeutic idea behind Synanon was a "game" in which youths were encouraged to use humiliation and insults to break each other down. The organization, by then named the Church of Synanon, was raking in millions each year. It gained public infamy after a report was issued by a Grand Jury accusing the facility of child abuse – stunningly, no steps were taken to shut down the organization at the time.
Synanon closed in 1991, however, facing financial problems and a multitude of allegations.
Synanon closed in 1991, however, facing financial problems and a multitude of allegations.
Since the closure of Syanon, a host of other tough-love teen rehab programs have come and gone. Even with crusaders like Szalavitz making their cases against these programs, the moment one centre closes, another one opens.
The latest in a line of controversies came from a rehabilitation chain named Kids Inc., a successor to Synanon's breakdown model. Though no Canadian Kids programs were ever officially opened, so many Canadian youths were sent to Kids of Bergen County in northern New Jersey that a Kids of the Canadian West program, based in Alberta, was in the works in the early 1990s. But following several allegations of abuse against various Kids facilities, centres all over the United States were shut down.
Plans for such a Canadian Kids facility were scrapped. Instead, the man set to head the Kids camp in Alberta, Dr. Dean Vause, went on to found his own facility: the Alberta Adolescent Recovery Centre (AARC), in Calgary. While there have never been any formal charges laid, and the AARC firmly denies any allegations, a preliminary report done in 2003 by the nonprofit International Survivors Action Committee (ISAC) concluded that the AARC bore an all-too-striking resemblance to its Kids predecessors.
"With respect to allegations of abuse, I have yet to encounter one," an AARC representative wrote to The Daily in an email: "If this did occur, however, it would be considered a critical and urgent clinical issue to be addressed by our clinical committee."
Confined to recovery
One of the biggest problems with many of these programs is that they promise a quick-fix solution to deep-seated psychological problems. Usually these tough-love facilities are not staffed with psychological professionals.
The AARC, for one, touts its "teen-on-teen" care as integral to the rehabilitation process. "Addicts are adept at manipulating and conning others. But they can't con a con," reads the AARC web site. In fact, many peer counsellors are graduates of the program itself. "They know all the lines and have heard all the excuses – they've used them. Many counsellors have degrees, giving them a powerful blend of real life experience and clinical expertise."
This model, however, cannot provide kids with adequate psychological help if they really do need it, asserts Szalavitz. Helpatanycost.com, Szalavitz's accompaniment to her book of the same name, notes that one of the major questions parents should ask when considering sending their wayward children to one of these programs is: "What are the qualifications of the line staff who work directly with the teens?" According to Szalavitz, anything less than a Masters-level psychology degree for all group leaders should be considered a red flag.
Meanwhile, what Rebecca Smith and many other clients of tough-love programs find most unsettling about these facilities is the basic and uncompromising confinement that is integral to the rehabilitation models. As minors, teens have no control over their placement or stay at rehabilitation programs. As long as they are deemed "in need," their parents can send them to any private rehabilitation facility, separated from friends, family, and the greater world, for an indefinite period of time.
This unconditional confinement is frustrating for those enrolled in these programs, but it can also be dangerous. Though she has grouped a wide range of programs into the tough-love category, Szalavitz argues that categorizing a program as specifically for "troubled" teens leaves youth stigmatized and vulnerable. When combined with a lack of control over their own circumstances, this labelling can prove deadly.
Szalavitz recounts a story from her book about a teen named Aaron Bacon who died of internal bleeding after a treatable ulcer ate through his stomach lining in 1994, during a "wilderness therapy" excursion.
"The ulcer could have been treated with over-the-counter medication," she says, "but, instead, it ate through his abdomen over the course of several weeks. The program insisted he was faking."
"An `outward bound' trip with so-called normal kids can be very good and nurturing," she continues. "But that's with normal kids, so, [if you complain of something being wrong] you'll be believed."
Troubling labels
Tough-love programs' remarkably low requirements for admittance is another troubling element, according to Szalavitz.
"I would call [what really drives admittance] a wallet biopsy," she says. "If the parent can afford it, the child needs the program...[and] if you fill out any of the forms you can make a normal teenager seem troubled. These are not legitimate mental health evaluations."
One web site, bootcampsforteens.com, offers a "Does My Teen Need Help?" section to guide parents through the process of evaluating their child's "need" for these camps, concluding with: "When it comes to seeking help for a child in danger it is better to have sought help a little too early than a little too late."
Not according to Szalavitz, however.
"Some [parents] have been terrorized by the drug war into thinking, `Oh my God, my kid is smoking pot, they'll become a heroin addict.' This won't happen; the vast majority of marijuana users never even try heroin. People think, `It's better to be safe than sorry,' but these programs aren't safe," Szalavitz says.
She argues that most teens do not need medical attention for being "troubled," arguing that developing better communication with teens and family therapy sessions with schooled psychiatrists, social workers, or psychologists as one route, and post secondary education as another.
"If you actually want to prevent long-term addiction, get your kids through college!... Finding meaning and purpose in their life is the key to overcoming addiction, and you can't force people to find meaning and purpose."
Some names have been changed in this article to protect the privacy of those involved.
Tragedy Then Triumph
By: Zev Eleff
YU Commentator - April 7, 2008
A month ago, Tzvi Gluck got word of a troubled Jewish teen being treated in Jamaica Estates, New York. A busy investment banker from Brooklyn who doubles as a professional askan, Gluck gave the matter very little thought, if any. After all, Gluck said to himself, there are many frum Jews in Jamaica Estates.
After hearing about 16 year-old Isaac Hersh a few more times in the ensuing weeks, Gluck received confirmation that the boy was being held against his will at Tranquility Bay, a behavior modification center located in Jamaica - the country.
There are very few frum Jews in Jamaica.
What has happened since is both supernatural and highly political.
Despite its name, Tranquility Bay has been likened to a concentration camp. Touted by some as a facility proven to straighten out severely disturbed youngsters, Tranquility Bay's staff practices severe disciplinary measures to accomplish its goals. Just for glancing the wrong way, detainees of the boot camp are forced to lie down on mats for 30-hour periods.
And that is the most lenient punishment doled out by the disciplinary academy's correctional officers.
What's more, aside from housing about 300 American teens, reports indicate that local authorities use the tightly guarded compound as a jail. At least one of Isaac's roommates was convicted of murder.
Never short of contacts and resources, Gluck researched the camp for weeks.
Gluck's informants also uncovered critical details about exactly who was this young teen so many people were now planning to save. Isaac Hersh is the son of Michael Hersh, the now former CEO of Hatzolah. Reports printed previously in newspapers and on blogs indicate that Hersh had trouble handling his two twin sons and used prescription medication to "control" them when the family lived in Israel for a time. Now back in America, Michael Hersh - who was making somewhere in the vicinity of a quarter-million dollars a year without any major medical or business experience - could afford to send his "Yitzy" to board out-of-town and attend school away from his parents.
Never given much of a chance before, Isaac finally found something like a home in Houston. There, Isaac lived with Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe, director of the Torah Outreach Center of Houston, and his family. Isaac attended Robert M. Beren Academy, an Orthodox day school affiliated with Yeshiva University. Although nobody contended that Isaac did not struggle academically in Houston, contrary to his father's allegations, all agreed that his behavior was stellar at Beren Academy.
"Isaac was a fine and upstanding citizen of the school community," wrote Head of School Rabbi Ari Sigel in a letter. "He was warm and friendly to everyone he encountered and we did not, at any time, have discipline issues with him."
Rabbi Segal added that "for anyone to suggest that he was a behavioral problem during his time in Houston, would constitute an outright lie."
The only one who saw a flaw in Isaac's behavior was his father.
At the end of the school last year, the Wolbes thought Isaac could use a break. In addition, the Wolbes were expecting a child that summer and suggested to Isaac that he look for a summer job in Toronto, where he had spent some time during his travels and still maintained a very good reputation.
To do this, however, Isaac would need to have his estranged father, still the boy's legal guardian, sign various government forms to obtain a worker's visa. After some discussion, both sides agreed that Isaac would briefly return to New York where his father would sign the documents.
Nothing was ever signed. Instead, Michael Hersh, with a flight ticket in hand, forced his son to LaGuardia Airport. Evidently, Hersh was told that one or two Jewish families with troubled boys had sent their sons to Tranquility Bay for successful "correctional therapy."
While being pushed in the direction of the terminal, Isaac screamed, "Help! I'm being kidnapped." Nobody helped and Isaac was on his way to Tranquility Bay where he would stay for the next ten months.
At last, a camp detainee who had befriended Isaac somehow reached a computer and, as instructed by Isaac, emailed Rabbi Wolbe. In the email, the already distressed Rabbi Wolbe was told that Isaac was being tortured and forced to lie down on mats for months. Something had to be done quickly.
On March 19, the eve of Purim, a group that included Gluck and with the financial support of Gluck's employer, Joseph Sharashefsky, readied themselves for a private flight to Jamaica. Once there, a small delegation would plead with the American Embassy to release Isaac.
The question was then raised: who would be boarding the plane for the Jamaica rescue mission?
After dozens of consultations, it was decided that Gluck would be joined by Rabbi Wolbe and his father, Rabbi Avorhom Wolbe of Monsey, and Yeshiva University's Straus Professor of Psychology and Education Dr. David Pelcovitz.
The jet touched down on Jamaican soil at 6:30 a.m., on Thursday, March 27. Although the group was received by the American Embassy, there was little any official could do.
Dr. Pelcovitz explained to the Embassy's officials that as an expert on trauma, and based on the email Rabbi Wolbe received, it was imperative that the psychologist see Isaac immediately.
But their hands were tied. The Embassy would bring Isaac to their headquarters, but the only two conditions whereby Dr. Pelcovitz could be permitted to assess the psychological fitness of the teen were either by obtaining consent of the boy's father - not happening - or from Isaac, himself.
"When are you bringing him to the Embassy," the rescuers asked.
"We're not allowed to say," the US officials answered.
"Where are you bringing him from?"
"Not going to tell you."
Luckily, the group's Jamaican driver, Garfield, not only knew where the unmarked facility was located, but was familiar with the building's entrances and exits, as well. Leaving the younger Rabbi Wolbe at the main entrance, the others stationed themselves at a back entrance. Not too long after, Isaac, escorted by a team of Tranquility Bay guards, exited the building's back entrance, recognized the elder Rabbi Wolbe and made a break for it.
After a few moments of tearful hugs, Isaac readily agreed to discuss all details of his dreadful experience at the camp. According to one account, members of the New York team and the Embassy cried uncontrollably as Isaac recounted the events of his stay at Tranquility Bay. In one of the easier diagnoses of his career, Dr. Pelcovitz confirmed that Isaac had been physically and mentally abused at the camp.
In the meantime, Tzvi Gluck became acutely aware of two obstacles preventing the final pieces of Isaac's rescue mission. First, the passports of all four members of the rescue team were suspended. Both Michael Hersh and his lawyer, Shlomo Mostofsky have since claimed that they knew nothing of the suspended passports.
When contacted for this story, Mostavsky, who also serves as President for the National Council of Young Israel, declined comment.
Aside from being temporarily stuck in Central America, the second problem incurred by the team was that Isaac, according to US regulations, could not be released from Tranquility Bay unless authorized by his father.
The first issue proved not to be a much of a problem. After a few phone calls to higher-ups that included the likes of Sen. Hillary Clinton, holds on all passports were quickly removed.
The second hurdle was trickier. Members of the Embassy urged the group to continue their fight in the courtroom. After all, now that Dr. Pelcovitz had thoroughly analyzed the teen, relieving Isaac from his parents' custody seemed merely a formality. Yet, with the boy's testimony reverberating in his mind, Dr. Pelcovitz believed he could not remain in Jamaica one minute longer.
With considerable help, Dr. Pelcovitz made contact with Mr. Hersh, his lawyer, and local renowned rabbinic authority, to plead on the boy's behalf. Finally, after deliberation with his gedolim and lawyers, Michael Hersh relented. All parties agreed that there would be ample time to fight a custody battle after Isaac returned to American soil at an undisclosed location.
The rescue team prepared to depart Jamaica with one extra passenger the same day they had arrived, at 11:30 p.m.
As they fastened their seatbelts, the Rabbis Wolbe gazed at the child whom they were starting to believe they would never see again. Seated nearby, knowing that his line of work provides few opportunities for joyful tears, the trauma expert tried his best to take in the moment while the investment banker who doubles as a professional askan planned his next adventure.
And with a cell phone attached to his ear, sixteen year-old Isaac Hersh spoke to his grandparents, themselves survivors of a Holocaust over 60 years ago, for the first time in almost a year.
"Zayde, now we're all survivors." Isaac cried.
And some of us are superheroes.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
--Margaret Mead
No comments:
Post a Comment