Author’s Note

During Shavuot, I unexpectedly encountered not one but two copies of a collection of Gary Rosenblatt’s Jewish Week columns. The volume contains his groundbreaking reporting on the Boruch Lanner scandal, Rabbi Mordechai Willig’s later public apology, and the immense communal trauma that unfolded between those two moments.

I cannot begin to imagine the anguish Rabbi Willig must have felt in realizing the magnitude of that error. Yet that history also reinforces a different principle: justice requires fairness and procedural integrity for every person, including Raphi Stein, who through no fault of his own became the sacrificial casualty of a historic institutional overcorrection—one intertwined with modern pressures surrounding get-refusal activism and New York’s controversial legal framework concerning Jewish divorce.

Introduction: Context Is Everything

To understand how the Beth Din of America (BDA) handled the Raphi Stein divorce case—particularly the speed and procedural shortcuts surrounding the issuance of a seruv (a public contempt and shunning order)—it is not enough to examine the dispute in isolation. The case must instead be viewed through the lens of institutional memory and institutional fear. Raphi Stein became the casualty of an Orthodox Jewish establishment still haunted by its past failures and reacting not only to the facts before it, but to the ghosts behind it.

The Interlocked Orthodox Establishment

Modern American Centrist Orthodoxy is sustained by a deeply interconnected institutional ecosystem:

Yeshiva University functions as the primary academic and rabbinic pipeline.
Orthodox Union serves as the communal umbrella.
NCSY oversees much of the youth movement infrastructure.
Beth Din of America operates as the flagship rabbinic court system.

These institutions overlap extensively in leadership, rabbinic personnel, donor networks, and communal influence. As a result, reputational crises do not remain confined to one organization. A scandal affecting one institution reverberates across the entire ecosystem.

For decades, the Orthodox establishment often responded to internal crises with an instinct toward containment and self-protection. In the name of avoiding chillul Hashem—public desecration of God’s name—allegations were frequently minimized, internalized, or redirected into private rabbinic channels rather than external accountability structures.

No case exposed the catastrophic consequences of that instinct more dramatically than the Boruch Lanner scandal.

(Note: The two sections that follow are based on “Stolen Innocence,” a 2000 report by Gary Rosenblatt published in The Jewish Week. The content that follows is based on updated information.)

The Horror of Boruch Lanner

After decades of violent sexual abuse against children, “Rabbi” Baruch Lanner was ultimately accused by numerous former students publicly. Survivor accounts and later investigations described patterns of manipulation, grooming, intimidation, violence, and predatory sexual conduct directed at vulnerable teenagers.

Victims alleged that Lanner cultivated emotional dependency, isolated teenagers from support systems, demanded demonstrations of loyalty, and used both fear and charisma to maintain control. Accounts included groping, coercive sexual behavior, violent assaults, and physical intimidation. Some survivors described being punched, strangled, or assaulted after resisting him. Male students likewise reported humiliating and violent abuse.

What made the scandal especially devastating was not only the scale of the abuse, but the institutional failure surrounding it.

Circling the Wagons

A defining feature of the Lanner case was the extent to which institutional actors closed ranks, with Rabbi Mordechai Willig—the rabbi who issued the seruv to Raphi Stein—a key defender.

Under Willig’s leadership, the bet din functioned not as an instrument of accountability but rather as a mechanism of containment.

The outcome of the bet din’s 18-hour “marathon session” underscored its limitations. Although it conceded that some of Lanner’s behavior was “inappropriate,” it ruled that most charges were “not proven,” a formulation that enabled institutional inaction. In a stark inversion of accountability, one complainant, Elie Hiller—who allegedly was attacked by Lanner with a kitchen knife—was “told to make a public apology to Rabbi Lanner.” Rather than curbing Lanner’s authority, the process reinforced it.

Rabbi Yosef Blau commented that Lanner was “unfit to work in Jewish education” and condemned what he described as a 25-year “pattern of protecting Baruch rather than his victims,” due to “a broader inability within the Orthodox community to acknowledge improper behavior by rabbis.”

More broadly, the bet din operated within, and reinforced, a culture of institutional self-protection. Its re-emergence at key moments was viewed by some as a “last-minute ploy…to shift the blame,” allowing the Orthodox Union to defer responsibility while continuing to rely on Lanner’s perceived indispensability. This dynamic aligned with what victims described as the “implicit message” they received when reporting: “leave it alone.” As a consequence, “youngsters stopped reporting his actions.”

Rabbi Willig’s Apology

Only after investigative journalism, mounting survivor testimony, public outrage, and criminal proceedings did the depth of the catastrophe become undeniable.

An Orthodox Union (OU) investigating committee, led by then-Hillel President Richard Joel, spent over $1 million conducting more than 140 interviews. Their findings, issued in 2000, comprised a comprehensive 330-page report detailing the abuse.

In 2002, Lanner was convicted of molesting two underage girls. He was freed in 2008 on parole.

In 2003, Willig privately admitted that the 1989 Beis Din found Lanner guilty of abuse.

https://forward.com/news/9231/critics-charge-rabbinic-court-covered-up-lanner-ab/

Willig issued a public apology.

https://forward.com/news/9345/top-rabbi-admits-errors-in-handling-lanner-case/

That apology mattered. It was morally significant and personally courageous. But it also marked a psychological turning point within the Orthodox institutional world. The Lanner scandal permanently embedded a fear within rabbinic leadership: the fear of once again being seen as the authority figures who failed to protect victims while extending patience or credibility to the wrong man.

That trauma never disappeared. It merely changed form.

It should be noted that in 2024 the OU, which enabled Lanner’s abuse, was called upon to do Teshuva (repentance) for that. It never happened.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/and-for-the-sin-of-silence-the-ou-and-baruch-lanner/

The Agunah Crisis and the Pendulum Swing

In subsequent decades, another communal crisis came to dominate Orthodox public discourse: the plight of the agunah, the “chained woman” unable to remarry because her husband refuses to grant a Jewish divorce (get).

Unlike the Lanner scandal, which centered on concealed abuse, the agunah crisis became a highly public and emotionally charged advocacy movement. Social media campaigns, activist organizations, public shaming efforts, and communal pressure increasingly demanded that rabbinic courts act swiftly and aggressively against perceived recalcitrant husbands.

For institutions still burdened by guilt over prior failures to confront abuse decisively, this became a new arena for moral redemption. The communal expectation shifted dramatically. Hesitation itself could now be portrayed as complicity. Procedural caution could be recast as enabling abuse.

The pendulum that had once swung toward institutional paralysis now swung toward institutional hyper-correction.

Raphi Stein and the Machinery of Overcorrection

It is within this atmosphere that the Raphi Stein case unfolded.

According to public reporting and commentary surrounding the dispute, the BDA issued a devastating seruv against Stein without Rabbi Willig personally hearing from him directly. Communication reportedly flowed instead through administrative channels overseen by Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann. The institution defended this approach as standard procedure when a litigant does not appear.

Technically, that explanation may satisfy internal administrative norms. But legality and justice are not always synonymous. The deeper issue is what this procedural distance reveals about the institutional mindset driving the process.

The Stein case reflects an Orthodox establishment operating in defensive mode—determined above all else never again to appear passive in the face of alleged mistreatment of women.

Under such conditions, procedural safeguards can begin to look politically dangerous. Listening too carefully to a husband’s claims risks accusations of insensitivity. Deliberation risks being interpreted as weakness. Nuance risks public backlash.

As a result, Stein appears to have been treated less as an individual litigant with a complicated jurisdictional and halachic dispute, and more as a symbolic stand-in for the broader category of “get refuser” against whom the institution felt compelled to demonstrate moral resolve.

The bureaucratic structure itself reinforced that tendency. By filtering communication through administrative channels and avoiding direct engagement, senior rabbinic leadership insulated itself from the messy factual complexity of the case. The process became mechanical rather than judicial.

Yet the underlying dispute was anything but simple. Critics of the BDA’s handling of the matter pointed to several significant issues:

Allegations that secular court proceedings were initiated before proper arkaos procedures were exhausted.
Claims that the Montreal Beth Din possessed primary jurisdiction.
The fact that the divorce proceedings themselves had been jointly initiated in Canada.

From this perspective, Stein was not a classic “get refuser,” and Adeena Kohn was not a classic agunah. Those distinctions mattered. Or at least they should have.

The Danger of Institutional Driving Through the Rearview Mirror

When institutions fail catastrophically, the temptation to overcorrect is immense. But justice cannot survive as a pendulum swing between negligence and overreaction.

The tragedy of the Raphi Stein case is not merely that procedural shortcuts may have occurred. It is that the shortcuts appear rooted in institutional trauma rather than detached judicial evaluation.

The BDA did not operate here as a calm, independent tribunal narrowly focused on the merits of a localized marital dispute. It operated as an institution haunted by its own history—deeply fearful of again being perceived as protecting the wrong man while failing the vulnerable.

That fear is understandable. But understandable fear does not eliminate the obligation of due process.

In attempting to escape the ghosts of the Boruch Lanner era, the Orthodox institutional establishment risked creating a new injustice of its own: sacrificing individualized rabbinic justice to bureaucratic expediency and public-image management.

Raphi Stein became, in effect, the procedural casualty of an institution still trying to outrun its past.

What is Due to Stein Now

True institutional accountability cannot begin and end with historical apologies; it must express itself in how current cases are adjudicated.

What is due to Raphi Stein now is a rigorous, transparent, and objective review of his position by the BDA—one completely uncoupled from past institutional failures or the pressures of public relations.

Including BDA, there have been three Batei Din involved in his divorce case so far. Surely they can talk to each other and arrive at a halachically united statement, irrespective of the proclamations of the past few years. And that may simply be to send the parties to a new and neutral Beis Din both agree to, as per the recent ruling by Mishpat Tzedek, a second involved court.

If the Orthodox establishment is to genuinely move past the ghosts of its history, it must prove that it can protect the vulnerable without abandoning the fundamental principles of due process.

Written with the help of AI.