Thread by @wordpaley

CW: emotional abuse

This week (1 Sivan) marks the shloshim (30 days since burial) of Zechariah Wallerstein.

In the past month, many have presented him as a selfless Tzadik. Rabbis, Jewish media like @MeaningfulMin and @themishpacha.

Now it’s time to hear the truth.

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Before I begin, I want to apologize to the victims, survivors, and people who have experienced abuse by Wallerstein whose stories I will be sharing here. I meant to post this thread shortly after his death, and though life prevented me from doing so, it wasn’t fair to you.

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R. Yosef Karo (YD 345:1) says that one who gives undeserved praise to the deceased causes harm to themselves and the deceased.

It goes without saying that it harms people who were already harmed by the deceased.

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For having to endure that harm again as people lionized him in eulogies, on social media, and in Jewish media—and without more public knowledge of his abuse that I could have facilitated—I am deeply sorry. I can only hope that this thread brings a small measure of relief to you.

Let me be clear: this thread is not for Wallerstein’s supporters and enablers who have been demanding “evidence”. Nobody owes you anything. You owe it to yourselves to be more compassionate to victims of abuse and stop investing so much undeserved faith in charismatic egotists.

Before I share the testimonies, some background:

Zechariah Wallerstein was born in Borough Park and grew up in Monsey, NY. His father was a traveling salesman who only came back for weekends. By his own admission, he was a “rough teenager”. In other words, he was a “cool kid.”

Around age 20, he married and joined his father’s plastic bag business, but his father convinced him to teach in boys’ yeshivas in the mornings for free. For the next 35 years, he continued working and teaching, eventually inheriting the business, which made him quite wealthy.

In the early 2000s, he and Daphne Hanson founded Ohr Naava, an educational network for young women that eventually came to include a post-HS seminary, a learning center, weekend retreats, a girls HS, and a residential treatment facility for young women known as “The Ranch.”

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According to financial documents, Ohr Naava’s mission is “to provide continuing Torah education for women as well as provide a healthy way to network and grow spiritually.” In practice, however, they tried—and failed—to do much more. Things they had no business doing.

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Take “The Ranch”, for example. Intended for teenage girls and young women who have experienced abuse or other trauma, at one point the facility had ONE licensed mental health professional (the director), and she was a *behavior* therapist, with no formal training in trauma care.

According to one former resident, “every single girl I was with landed in the hospital less than 2 weeks after they got home.” The current director is an *unlicensed* marriage and family therapist. Oh, and it costs $15,000 a month, and they don’t take insurance.

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And despite what @themishpacha and @gordon770 will tell you, Wallerstein was emotionally abusive to girls and young women in several Ohr Naava settings. Many of these young women came from difficult family situations or had experienced trauma and had nowhere else to turn.

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Instead of supporting them and their healing, he made their already difficult lives worse. If they had scars, he opened their wounds. If they needed a warm listening ear, he gave them the cold shoulder. If they needed a roof over their heads, he threw them out on the street.

Though each person’s story is different in its own painful way, here is a common theme:

A young woman would come to Wallerstein with a serious family or mental health issue. Instead of offering sympathy, Wallerstein would tell them to improve their faith or religious observance.

In doing so, he not only invalidated their pain and suffering, but exacerbated it by attributing it to deficiencies in their faith. They were made to feel like their pain, their trauma, whatever they were going through was their fault. That is precisely the opposite of healing.

And he made no secret about it either. In a now private video, Wallerstein told victims of sexual abuse to “get over it” and compared them to Holocaust survivors who lost their faith. This, in response to a candid video from a ex-Hasidic survivor of abuse.
haemtza.blogspot.com/2016/08/belitt…

In 2011, he recorded a robo-call sent to 30,000 Jewish voters’ homes to vote against a Jewish Democrat who voted for same-sex marriage, because “homosexuality causes earthquakes”. This, despite the fact that he certainly knew his own students were LGBTQ.

And perhaps most notoriously, in 2013, he decried kosher Zumba classes because he claimed they would lead Orthodox women to become professional erotic dancers. He also called Latine people animals in that class.

forward.com/life/196355/ra…

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Why did he do all of this? I choose to believe the words of that same former resident of The Ranch: “The rabbi takes pride in the fact that he puts religion above mental health…[The Ranch] is yet another one of Wallerstein’s ego boosters…”

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Even if you don’t choose to believe her, I encourage you to ask yourself this as you read these testimonies:

How can we claim to hear the cries of the oppressed when we continue to give rabbis and rich men unrestricted power over the most vulnerable members of our community?

We can’t. But the longer we do, the longer we maintain the status quo while being satisfied with the tiniest steps forward and calling it “progress”, the longer we allow $ and rabbinic ordination to be the only barriers to leadership, they will suffer.

These are their stories:

Testimony #1

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Testimony #2

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Testimony #3

“He came to speak at a school where I worked and my friend told me I should approach him and speak to him because I wasn’t getting along with my parents at the time and maybe he could help. So I walked over to him. He said the reason u aren’t getting along…”

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“…with your parents is because you have a terrible relationship with hashem and if you had better Emunah in hashem you would get along with them and also if u would work on your tznius that would help too.”

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Testimony #4

“One of my friends who was sick with anorexia for many years had met Rabbi Wallerstein when she was 17. She looked up to him and thought he was someone she could trust to share her problems with.”

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“When she shared that she was struggling with food issues he told her that she had to work on her relationship with Hashem, stop talking to boys, and to work on being more tznius.”

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“He never once encouraged her or helped her find a therapist; instead he pushed her to attend his shiurim and to leave home and go to a seminary in Israel. I completely blame him for not encouraging or getting her help sooner for her eating disorder.”

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“I also at the time took blame for feeling that he could help her— when she was staying with me at the time I arranged for him to come to my apartment in Israel to meet with her thinking he could help her. But he was obnoxious, very tough with her and only made things worse.29/41

“My friend spent years in and out of treatment centers for her eating disorder. Unfortunately she passed away and I do blame Rabbi Wallerstein for not helping her. He was a manipulative, controlling man who abused his power.”

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Testimony #5

Context for this testimony: a personal request to Ohr Naava participants from Ohr Naava and Wallerstein’s family to forgive him for everything so he can heal from his illness. Note that the request never actually acknowledges that he did anything wrong.

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“Knowing that the person who gave you so much good is gone is agonizing.

Knowing that the person who hurt you so much is gone is confusing.

When these two happen simultaneously, the striking ambivalence is almost too much to handle.

Wallerstein was that person.”

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“I knew him personally for nine long years of my life. I’ll be the first to admit that I have a lot to be grateful for from him, yet there were certain things that were, in my opinion, inexcusable. He gave me so much hope; yet sprinkled it with mocking invalidation.”

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“He advised me on some tough intimate life situations; yet did not rely non the laws of yichud. He helped me escape a dangerous life and start fresh, yet I was always left with a slight tad of uncertainty.”

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“Still, at the time, the positive seemed to outweigh the negative- he had shined a warm flame into my cold, dark world.

Until the fateful day that the light was put out.”

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“The man I had trusted left me homeless in an unknown city, no longer welcome in the house I paid him to sleep in. I was needy, he explained, for needing advance notice before being figuratively thrown into the streets.”

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“He told me that he regretted ever helping me and that for all he cares, I could live on those streets because he, Zecharia Wallerstein, does not owe me anything. I was left with nothing- there was no place I could call home and no one I could call family.”

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“Nothing except the echo of you harsh words and my deafening silence.

So, Zechariah Wallerstein, this time I’m going to speak up instead of crumble into a silent heap of tears. I’ll say my piece, now that I no longer live in the shadow of your threats.”

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“You used me, the girl he talked about at every single Avinu Malkeinu, the lift yourself up with my now Torah Anytime famous quotes. Uprooted me from the life I knew only to leave me sitting on a damp curb, wishing for the bare necessities that every human being deserves.”

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“Belittled my nightmares of abuse and terror, encouraged my self destructive behaviors and denied that I could be anything less than fine.”

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“So how dare you ask the world to forgive you, when it’s so damn easy for you to move on after stepping over me?

How dare you expect that your reputation would rise above those that were vulnerable to speak up, who couldn’t dare raise their voices?

How dare you.”

Testimony #6

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