Hasidic Sex Abuse Victims Advocate Hit With Bleach
A Hasidic rabbi who advocates for victims of sexual abuse in the ultra-Orthodox community was injured when a chemical was thrown in his face.
Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg on Tuesday was walking down the street in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he lives, when a man approached him from behind, tapped him on his shoulder and then threw a chemical believed to be bleach in his face, according to reports.
Rosenberg, 62, was treated for burns on his face, around his eyes and in his left eye. He is expected to make a full recovery.
“He taps on my shoulder, he says ‘whoops’ and throws it in my face,” Rosenberg told the New York Daily News.
Rosenberg identified the attacker as the son of an accused child sex abuser. He blamed the attack on unrest in the Satmar community over the conviction of Nechemya Weberman on sex charges a day earlier.
“Because of the Weberman case, everything is upside down,” he told the News. “Everybody is crazy.”
The rabbi runs a website and blog for sex-abuse victims, as well as a telephone hot line.
He told New York media that he believes the attack was in retaliation for his support and assistance of the now 18-year-old female victim of Satmar Hasidic leader Weberman, who was convicted on Monday of 59 counts of sexual abuse of the woman when she was between the ages of 12 and 15 and went to him for counseling.
Police have not yet caught the attacker, though they reportedly have identified a suspect.
On Monday, Rosenberg accused another rabbi of abusing young boys in a blog post on his website, according to the New York Post.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
