http://watchtowerdocuments.org/brooklyn-girl/
“Brooklyn Girl”

In
May of 2001, I attended a small conference in Soap Lake, Washington, where some
thirty former Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs) were gathered. The conference was
sponsored by the late Richard Rawe. Richard was part of a group of former JWs
who met once a year since the early 1980s to discuss Bible doctrines and other
subjects related to their former religion.
In
March of 2001, I had been interviewed for a TV documentary to be shown on
NBC’s Dateline program which would reveal a cover-up by
JWs leaders of child sexual abuse carried out by Witness molesters.
I
first learned about this problem in 1992 when I was a staff member of the
Writing Department working inside the Watchtower’s world headquarters in
Brooklyn, NY.
The
Dateline TV documentary was thought to air a few months after
the interview but it was not broadcast until over a year later on May 28, 2002.
Because of not knowing when the documentary would be shown, those in attendance
at the conference agreed to keep my name confidential until I came out
publicly with my accusations on Dateline.
While at the Soap Lake conference, I spoke to
the audience a number of times. One of my talks was about the “Brooklyn Girl”
which was recorded on audio tape (11:00 minutes). You can now listen to it on
the audio link provided on my website, http://watchtowerdocuments.org/brooklyn-girl/
During the
introduction you will hear me discuss Rabbi Baruch Lanner who was a Jewish
educator and an official of the National Conference of Synagogue Youth (NCSY).
NCSY was a youth group run by the Orthodox Union, the central communal
organization of Orthodox Judaism.
Rabbi
Lanner had physically, sexually and emotionally abused kids in the group for
over three decades. Throughout his tenure at NCSY, the organization had
received numerous complaints about the rabbi but did little to investigate
the accusations. Nor did they do anything to control Lanner’s behavior – let
alone take action to bar him from working with children.
“But
why didn’t they?” you ask. Because the goal was recruitment of non-orthodox
young Jews to bring them to Jewish orthodoxy and Lanner was immensely
successful in his mission.
This
is exactly what the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society was guilty of doing.
Over six decades or more, Watchtower leaders around the world had received
thousands and thousands of reports and complaints of abuse of
children; yet, little or nothing was done to put kids’ interests
first. READ MORE:
http://watchtowerdocuments.org/brooklyn-girl/