In a lengthy article in the ‘Jerusalem Post’ in December 2016 Jeremy Sharon wrote about yet another jewish child molestation case that involved a rabbi and the details of which are pretty darned horrific by any standard.
He wrote how:
‘In an indictment sheet of horrifying allegations, Rabbi David Harrison, who taught at the Beit Shulamit religious girls high school in Jerusalem, was charged with dozens of counts of rape, sodomy, sexual assault, assault and intimidation through threats against a former pupil, who was a minor at the time.
The complainant, a woman now aged 21, filed a charge of rape and other allegations against the rabbi at the beginning of the month claiming that they took place over a period of several months when she was 14.
Harrison has spent his career as a teacher and educator, and has also worked extensively performing wedding ceremonies for couples without a personal connection to a rabbi. Harrison began work at Beit Shulamit, in the Ramot neighborhood, as a part-time teacher in September 2007 but was fired in June 2010.
According to the indictment, Harrison, now 58, initiated direct contact with the complainant in December 2009, after he was her substitute teacher at Beit Shulamit.
A few days later, he met the pupil close to her classroom and asked her to accompany him to a staff room where he gave her worksheets to hand out to another class.
On this and several other occasions, Harrison allegedly touched the student on her hand, arm, stomach and chest, but apologized immediately for having touched her.
At a later stage, Harrison allegedly called the pupil to the same staff room used specifically by the rabbis of the school and which could be locked from the inside.
When she entered, Harrison allegedly locked the door behind her and told her to sit down, whereupon he took off his pants and underwear, and forced her to perform oral sex, while telling her that it was all right because he was a rabbi, that it was a secret between them and threatening to harm her if she told anyone.
In the next incident after this assault, Harrison allegedly met the girl at the entrance to the school and told her to come with him to a bomb shelter in the building, divided into two rooms. According to the indictment he pushed her into the inner room of the shelter, and told her to undress, slapping her in the face when he told her she was undressing too slowly.
He then hit her again, forced her to lie on a table in the room and then raped her. Afterwards he told her that she’d had fun, and that so had he, and that she had been a good girl. He again threatened to harm her and that he would tell everyone she was a prostitute if she spoke with anyone about what he had done.
According to the charge sheet, Harrison raped the girl between two and four times a week, including sodomy. On one occasion the day after he raped her, he forced her to swallow an emergency contraception or “morning after” pill.
During May 2010, the complainant was ill and was away from school. When she returned, Harrison allegedly ordered her to meet him in the shelter and scolded her for having been away without informing him.
He then allegedly ordered her to strip and beat her for several minutes, and then raped her once again.
The beatings occurred on other occasions as well, in which Harrison would kick the pupil, beat her with his belt, and in one incident threw a chair at her, bruising and scratching her.
Harrison would allegedly repeatedly threaten to harm her if she did not do as he instructed, and threatened to tell her parents and others that she had initiated sex with him and that they would believe him and not her because he was a rabbi.
He also threatened that he would have her expelled from school, that no other schools would accept her, and threatened to send other people to harm her and even kill her.
The state has requested that Harrison be incarcerated until the end of the legal proceedings against him.
The director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, Orit Sulitzeanu, described the allegations as “outrageous and terrifying” and said that such crimes required a severe punishment.
“This criminal exploitation by an educator and religious figure is unforgivable,” said Sulitzeanu.
“This incident demonstrates the urgent need to ensure that advisers are placed in all educational frameworks who will be able to identify and deal with sexual violence, and for pupils to attend workshops for the prevention of sexual violence.”
Harrison denies the allegations against him and says he does not even know the woman.’ (1)
Now obviously this is a ‘he said, she said’ case but the amount of very specific detail in the charges – and it isn’t just the usual non-specific ‘he took me in the back and forced me to give him a blow job’ stuff – gives the assertion a lot of credibility and this is directly reflected in the Israeli police requesting that Harrison not be bailed because he was so dangerous and had made multiple credible threats against the victim.
However, the problem was always that in order to meet the legal bar of the burden of proof; more evidence was needed beyond the victim’s testimony and clearly this was not forthcoming in this instance.
Since in November 2017 according to the ‘Times of Israel’:
‘A Jerusalem court on Sunday freed a rabbi accused of raping a 14-year-old at the religious girls’ school where he worked, after prosecutors withdrew the charges against him, saying the case was now unlikely to result in a conviction.
In a letter Thursday to the Jerusalem District Court, prosecutors said as a result of an “evidential development” in the plaintiff’s testimony, there was no longer a “reasonable chance” of convicting David Harrison, who was indicted last December.
While praising the decision to drop the charges, a lawyer for Harrison criticized prosecutors for charging him in the first place and Israel Radio reported on Sunday that Harrison would sue for damages.
Harrison, who protested his innocence throughout, told Army Radio that the process that led to his indictment was flawed and “deeply troubling.”
Prosecutors said they were unable to divulge the exact reason for dropping the case out of a need to protect the privacy of his accuser.
“After another interview with the complainant conducted in recent weeks, we reached the conclusion that we could not meet the level of proof we would have needed for a conviction,” prosecutor Orit Litman told Israel Radio.
“Think of it as a case that is closed for lack of evidence, that does not indicate that nothing happened, just that we cannot prove it in court,” Litman said. “She does not recant her testimony, but we can’t elaborate due to the need to protect her privacy. It’s not simple; it is very complicated.”’ (2)
Now typically here Harrison is trying to claim that ‘he has been cleared and thus he was innocent all along’ but Israeli police are again quite specific in that they stated that they don’t believe he is innocent and that did what is alleged, but that they simply don’t have enough evidence to get beyond the realm of ‘he said, she said’ legally.
So thus, I think it is valid to classify Harrison as yet another jewish child molester and rapist – his victim was 14 so it kind of sits in that odd borderline between rape of an actual child and the rape of a teenager/young adult – who once again got away with their crimes.
References
(1) https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/rabbi-charged-with-rape-sexual-assault-sodomy-against-a-minor-475756
(2) https://www.timesofisrael.com/charges-dropped-against-rabbi-accused-of-raping-14-year-old/
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