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| Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (AKA: Soul Doctor) - Alleged Sexual Predator |
Over the last several years The Awareness Center has exposed ex-rabbi, Shlomo Carlebach as being an “alleged” serial sexual predator. To the best of our knowledge there have been more women sexually victimized by Carlebach then any other individual “alleged” sex offender. Even though Hadassah Magazine (which is geared towards Jewish women) mentions The Awareness Center and the fact there there have been so many allegations of clergy sexual abuse made against Carlebach, it’s shocking to learn that this month’s cover story would honor the memory of a man who has terrorized so many (see article below).
It is also disgusting to learn that a musical has been created as another attempt in making this "alleged" sexual predator (Shlomo Carlebach) into a tzadik (saint).
As a people we have the responsibility to stop the cult like craze of re-writing history of a man should be seen as nothing more then a sexual predator, who still has a cult like following.
CALL TO ACTION:
In Honor of Those Sexually Violated by ex-Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach
In Honor of Those Sexually Violated by ex-Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach
Contact Hadassah Magazine and demand that they stop honoring a man who created so many victims of sex crimes. Demand that in a future issues they focus on the issues and ramifications sex crimes have played in our communities and the stories of the women and families who have been victimized by Shlomo Carlebach.
CONTACT:
Hadassah
The Women's Zionist Organization of America
50 West 58 Street
New York, NY 10019
800-664-5646
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Shlomo Carlebach - The Music Man
by Rahel Musleah
Illustrations by Ken Orvidas
Hadassah Magazine - October 28 (pages 51-56)
On any given Friday evening, the crowd is standing-room only. The long, narrow sanctuary often overflows with up to 300 people: On one side the paneled mehitz, the women gather, some in head coverings and long skirts, others bareheaded and in pants. The men wear suits or jeans and T-shirts-and even a smattering of Hasidic streimels (fur hats) and stringed robes.
Wealthy or homeless, seekers or grounded in tradition, worshipers are drawn to the Carlebach Shul, as Congregation Kehilath Jacob in New York is affectionately known, because of the musical and spiritual legacy of its renowned leader, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.
Fourteen years after Carlebach’s death of a heart attack at age 69-- he died on October 20, 1994 -- his influence borders on a grassroots movement, complete with its own music, legends, minyanim, yeshiva, conferences and legions of disciples who count him as one of the world’s 36 hidden righteous people. From Russia to Singapore, in most synagogues in America and in Israel, Carlebach’s music is everywhere, even when the people sin it don’t know it is his or even who he was, transforming places of prayer into vibrant spiritual happenings with uninhibited dancing and closed-eye inwardness.
“[Carlebach] made it a basic expectation that you go to prayer service to have your heart open and your spirit soar,” says Jay Michaelson, 37, a writer and a teacher of spirituality who attended the shul from 1999 to 2004. “He epitomized Yiddishkeit.”
An Orthodox rabbi who embraced feminist and liberal causes while transmitting Hasidic wisdom, Carlebach’s impact today reverberates across Jewish Prayer, outreach and healing. Some Jewish dating Web sites, such as www.frumster.com, even offer a category of religious observance called “Carlebachian,” implying openness and a spiritual orientation.
“It would be hard to find a Jewish spiritual leader under 60 who hasn’t been influenced by Carlebach,” notes Michaelson. “It would be like finding a civiil rights leader who hasn’t been influenced by Martin Luther King.”
Carlebach’s blend of folk songs and Hasidic nigguim revolutionized Jewish music. His iconic song range from the first he ever wrote, “Od Yishama” (a wedding staple), to “Ve-ha’er Einenu,” popularized by the Israeli Hasidic Song Festival in 1969, to “Am Yisroel Chai,” which became the anthem of the Soviet Jewry movement. Many have been absorbed so totally into the Jewish Musical canon that they are often categorized as “traditional/folk,” with no composer cited.
And now, there is even a show, Shlomo: The New Musical, which premiered in April at the Museum of Jewish Heritage--A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York. “with his meteoric talent, incredible charisma, unbounded love and treasure house of authentic Judaism, [Carlebach] reinvented the Jewish experience,” says Danny Wise, playwright and producer. Wise’s musical brings Carlebach the man to life, from his birth in Berlin, his escape with his family from Nazi-occupied Europe to New York and his ascendancy to rock-star status as a the singing hippie rabbi who exuded love and shepherded trouble souls. In the show’s opening song, lead actor David Rossmer sings: “in the house of love and prayer/May the fixing finally start/Raise your voice up and prepare/. To mend a broken heart.”
In real life, it would be easy to caricature Carlebach, to mimic phrases as “Holy Brother,” by which he addressed many, and to parody his trademark hugs. “He’d ask himself, ‘If I have [only] two words to say to someone, what would I say?” says Wise, who knew Carlebach well. “So he would ask, ‘Do you know where God is?’ [and answer] ‘Wherever you let Him in.’ Or he’d say, ‘You are the highest of the high.’ It was something that would never leave that person.”
Stories abound of people who not only became religiously observant but also turned their lives around because of Carlebach. “he was the Pied Piper of lost souls, a traveling troubadour,” says musician Rabbi Moshe Shur, who accompanied Carlebach on tour.
Carlebach made Judaism accessible to an audience that might have remained disaffected, adds Michaelson, but he “never dumbed down the sincerity of his belief... The lesson we can learn today is not to dilute our own spiritual tradition, but to communicate it authentically.”
Michaelson remembers waiting--and waiting--for Carlebach to lead a weeknight learning session at Jerusalem synagogue in 1994. As was his wont, Carlebach was two hours late. “But when he entered the room, it was...like magic,” Michael recalls. “There was a current of love and energy that seemed to be able to tap into. It was a real encounter with holiness.”
Born into an Orthodox rabbinic family, Carlebach imbibed Torah from childhood. An opening scene in the musical depicts the true story of 5-year-old Shlomo who went missing and was found in the Ark, arms and legs wrapped around a Torah scroll. He was recognized as a talmudic genius as a teenager at Rabbi Aharon Kotler’s ultra-Orthodox Ben Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, New Jersey, but left to follow his twin brother, Eli Chaim, to Chabad-Lubavitch, choosing outreach over scholarship.
In 1949, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzhak Schneersohn, sent him and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who later became the father of the Jewish Renewal movement, to college campuses as emissaries. Both concluded that to bring Jews back to Judaism they had to break with some elements of tradition, especially with regard to women, and ultimately left Chabad, but not before helping to bring it to the mainstream.
Carlebach devoted himself to reinvigorating Jewish spirituality and pioneering a model of rabbinic activism, espousing the cause of blacks in South Africa, for example. Historian Jonathan Sarna writes in American Judaism (Yale University Press) that after the Holocaust, “Judaism appeared desperately unwell, racked by assimilation, emptiness, and an epidemic of tormented souls. The loss of six million...made it especially imperative to nurture every spark and...save every Jewish who survived.” Carlebach defined Judaism as a religion of happiness and love, said Sarna recently in an interview. “Before there was such a word as outreach, he was doing it.”
People still say to me, ‘Your father was my best friend,’” says Carlebach’s daughter Neshama, 33, who has carried on his work through her own musical career. “I ask them, ‘How long did you know him? They answer, I met him once.” A best friend is that person who sees you, sees your pain, your joy, and my father was that person.”
Carlebach and his wife, Neila, had two daughters, Neshama and Nedara, but separated after several years of marriage because of his long absences; they remained on amicable terms. Neshama sees her father in her nearly 2-year-old son, Rafael Lev Shlomo, and she has just recorded her sixth CD, One and One, featuring the Green Pastures Baptist Church Choir; it is based on her father’s teaching. “we think one and one is two, but one and one is one,” she explains. “Until we open our hearts to every person, there won’t be peace.”
Early in the 1950s, Carlebach discovered he could inspire people through music, a living metaphor for the harmony he sought for a fragmented Jewish community. Among the many who influenced him was African-American singer Nina Simone, who became a voice of the civil rights movement. Carlebach recored his first album, Haneshomo Lach, an instant hit, in 1959. After appearing at the Berkeley Folk Festival in California in 1966, he opened the House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, “A combination synagogue, yeshiva, crash pad, and sanctuary,” writes Sarna, where he enticed his “holy hippelach” to get high on Judaism even while “Experimenting with meditation, yoga, vegetarianism, Eastern religions, even drugs and sex.” A Zionist who kept his watch on Israel tim, in 1977, Carlebach settled his followers in Mosha Meor Modi’in (formerly Meve Modi’in) in Israel. He continued traveling the world, eventually returning to his base of Kehilath Jacob, which he took over from his father.
Today, the moshav of 40 families perpetuates Carlebach’s teaching, his musical outreach (Moshav Band, Soulfarm and HaMakor all have their roots in the moshav) and spiritual warmth--welcoming students and singles visiting or living in Israel temporarily.
Leah Sands, a member of the moshav, recalls that as a child growing up in Amsterdam, she loved Carlebach’s music. After she moved to Israel in 1979, she attended one of his concerts in Jerusalem and was daydreaming that he’d sing her favorite song, “Bo’V’Shalom” (the last verse of “Lekha Dodi,” which likens Shabbat to a bride), when suddenly, Carlebach picked her out of the audience, beckoned her closer and sang that very song.
“Why did you call me over?” she asked him later. Carlebach responded, “I saw the bride in you.”
“From that moment, my life changed,” says Sands. “Shlomo showed me a halakhic Judaism that made sense, like a puzzle that fits.” She met her husband Avraham, at another Carlebach concert.
Carlbach’s aura was not wrought purely of peace and love. Because he crossed boundaries--ignoring the Jewish laws proscribing physical contact between the sexes, for instance -- the Orthodox community ostracized him, says Wise. Some women alleged that he also crossed personal boundaries. A 1998 article in Lilith magazine and a Web site run by The Awareness Center (www.theawarenesscenter.org), a project of the Baltimore-based International Jewish Coalition AGainst Sexual Abuse/Assault, describe allegations of sexual misconduct, from suggestive middle-of the night phone calls to sexual molestation, especially with teenagers and young women. Consequently, some rabbis and Jewish leaders have thought carefully about using his melodies and stories.
The musical doesn’t shy away from mentioning this controversy, even though Neshama Carlebach was a conceiver of the play. “He didn’t fit in any box,” she points out. “he went against everyone’s wishes, his rebbe, his family, to do what was right in his heart. He struggled. He used to say, ‘If I had two hearts I could afford to use one for hate, but I only have one heart, so I used it for love.’” Now that he’s gone, she says, his message and the beauty of his music remain.
Part of Reb Shlomo’s ground-breaking approach was his joyous and individual expression of faith, which served to mentor generations after him, according to Judah Cohen, a specialist in Jewish music at Indiana University in Bloomington. “There is a sense of yearning in his music,” says Cohen, “the yearling of a soul to reach the divine. He gave people the impetus... to compose their own music [and] express his or her own voice.”
“The limited texts and purposely repetitive Hasidic-style songs he wrote and sang... were the key to his outreach efforts and enable Jewishly uneducated members of his audience to become a part of the music-making,” writes marsha Bryan Edelman, professor of music and education at Gratz College in Philadelphia and author of “Discovering Jewish Music” (Jewish Publication Society). It conformed with the Hasidic notion that words were secondary to music and that they sometimes get in the way of real communion with God. The catchy new tuns encouraged American Jews to incorporate the songs into their services, she writes: “For many, it was among their most powerful Jewish experiences...”
Carlebach was not a virtuoso musician. “He was a teacher who used music as a vehicle,” explains Shur, executive director of the Queens College Hillel in New York, admitting that Carlebach’s guitar was often missing a string and was tuned by others.
But, says Velvel Pasternak, owner of Tara Publications, a Jewish music publisher distributor who produced two Carleach songbooks, “there is something beyond the notes and the composition that you can’t analyze. His is the music that has lasted.” Indeed, artists who have preserved his tunes include Eitan Katz, who recorded “Unplugged”, a CD of little known niggunim, and Israelis Chaim Dovid, Aaron Razel and Shlomo Katz’s K’Shoshana.
Carlebach’s liturgical niggunim comprise the “nusah Carlebach,” used in 100 minyanim from Passaic, New Jersey, to Safed, Israel. other shuls have integrated heavy dollops of it into Friday night services.
The Carlebach minyan itself, says Rabbi Naftali Citron, Carlebach’s great-nephew and spiritual leader at Kehilath Jacob for the past five years, “is a haymish experience that combines Hasidic strands and touches New Age but retains a lot if its Eastern European roots.” Being nonjudgmental is vital; he adds: “Shlomo’s feeling was about [love of Jews}, not the minutae of halakha (Jewish law).
Citron’s relationship with his great-uncle deepened when his grandfather, Eli Chaim, died and he looked to Shlomo to fill the void. As the two grew closer, the would go for walks in New York. “He was so full of love for the homeless,” Citron recalls. “They’d come and talk to him. Not just because he’d give them money--which he did--but because they were really his friends.”
In the tradition of Hasidism’s charismatic leaders, Carlebach has been idealized, says Michaelson, but in a way that “simplifies and distorts his complex and controversial personality. Yet for all Reb Shlomo’s faults, his is a sect where the doors are wide open. The Carlebach yeshiva, Simchat Shlomo in Nahlaot, Jerusalem, accepts men and women from diverse backgrounds for text and experiential learning. To fulfill its vision of a “spiritual traditional Judaism that is in constant dialogue with the complex modern world in which we live,” its course range from Mishna, Talmud and Kabbala to “Secrets of Joy” and “Torah and Ecology.” Its Web site quotes Carlebach: “The right Yeshiva is a place where there is so much love that it’s awesome. God gave us Torah with so much love, so if I want to give over Torah to my children, it has to be done in the same way....”
Despite the allegations about his womanizing, Carlebach had an enormous impact on large numbers of women and believed in their empowerment, says Sarna. He was the only male rabbi to join the feminist group Women of the Wall at the Kotel in 1989, and he ordained two women, a controversial decision.
“Even though he was an Orthodox rabbi, we women didn’t feel ‘less than,’” says Melinda Ribner, a student of Carlebach’s for over 20 years whom he ordained to serve as spiritual guide and transmitter of Jewish meditation, prayer and Torah. At Kehilath Jacob, she says, Carlebach gave her semikha at a public event on his father’s yortzeit. Ribner’s organization, Beit Miriam and Kabbalah of the Heart, offer spiritual psychotherapy, healing and the “Kabbalah of the feminine: (www.kabbalahoftheheart.com).
Rib tries to live by Carlebach’s teachings. In Safed, she once met some female soldiers outside a synagogue and invited them in. One of the women responded with discomfort, and as they talked, Ribner forged a connection with her, tell her about the prayer for Israeli soldiers recited in American synagogues. “Then I asked myself, ‘What would Shlomo do?’” Ribner recalls. I asked her if I could give her a hug. She accepted, and then all the women soldiers lined up for hugs.”
Carlebach himself recognized he was not a perfect vessel. he taught that the world is a broken place and was always conscious of the need for personal healing and universal repair. Says Wise: “Shlomo’s legacy is that people can still discover an oasis of safe joy wherever they are just by listening to his music.”
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