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Just Say ‘No’: O.U. Pushes Abstinence, Pans Condoms
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More in NewsBorrowing a page from Christian conservatives, the country’s largest Orthodox Jewish organization has launched an “abstinence” Web site warning teenagers of the physical and psychological dangers of premarital sexual activity, and challenging the effectiveness of various forms of contraception.
The National Conference of Synagogue Youth, the youth department of the Orthodox Union, recently unveiled what it is dubbing “The First Abstinence Web Site for Jewish Teens.”
“Christian groups have such Web sites that emphasize abstinence, and we wanted to make it a word in the vocabulary of our kids, as well,” said Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, executive vice president of the O.U. It was Weinreb who gave the final nod to go ahead with the project. “I’m convinced that the problem is out there, and it’s enough to justify addressing very directly, and there’s no better way to do it than with the Web site.”
The new Web site — which carries the tag line “NCSY Says kNOw” and is peppered with colloquial asides seemingly aimed at winning over teenage readers — arrives as government-funded abstinence-education programs backed by Christian conservatives are coming under increased scrutiny. According to a recent study commissioned by Congress and conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., students are just as likely to engage in sexual activity whether they participate in abstinence-education programs or not. In 2004, the office of Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, detailed false or misleading information on contraceptives, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion in 11 of the 13 most widely used curricula in abstinence programs.
The NCSY’s abstinence Web site offers “spiritual” reasons for refraining from sexual activity and cites rabbinic restrictions on premarital physical intimacy, while following the lead of similar conservative Christian efforts in attempting to offer nonreligious health-related reasons for refraining from sex.
The O.U.’s decision to address the issue of abstinence was praised by psychiatrist Michelle Friedman, who serves as director as chair of the department of pastoral counseling at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a liberal Orthodox rabbinical school in Manhattan. “Putting something out there like this is such a big start,” she said. “I really want that to be commended.”
At the same time, Friedman raised doubts over whether the health-related warnings would prove effective. She suggested that more emphasis should have been placed on the religious side of the equation. “I think you can promote the Orthodox attitude without a health measure,” Friedman said. “That to me is not healthy, and that’s not what this is about.”
Under the heading “Condoms are not the answer!” the NCSY’s abstinence Web site states: “Condoms might protect people from pregnancy and most forms of [sexually transmitted diseases], but there’s a lot they don’t protect people from.” Lengthy explanations follow about how condoms don’t protect against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, or HPV, a leading cause of cervical cancer, and how one type of spermicide can increase a woman’s risk of contracting HIV. The section of the Web site states that even the pill, one of the safest forms of birth control, may cause “blood clots, heart attacks, and strokes.”
In another section, the site asserts that sexually active teens suffer a disproportionate rate of depression and are more likely than their abstinent counterparts to attempt suicide.
Sammie Moshenberg, director of Washington operations at the National Council of Jewish Women, which is an organization that opposes many of the abstinence programs used in public schools, declined to comment directly on the NCSY’s new Web site.
“I can tell you we will be launching our own campaign early this summer — Plan A: NCJW’s Campaign for Contraceptive Access — which is really stressing the importance of securing and protecting women’s access to contraceptive options, the need for medically accurate and complete information, and education for adults and young people,” Moshenberg said.
“We do believe that a good comprehensive sexuality education program does talk about abstinence,” Moshenberg continued. “We also believe just as strongly that young people do have sex despite what we would hope and teach them.… We believe that schools should be teaching medically and scientifically accurate sexuality education.”
Rabbi Jack Abramowitz, program director of NCSY and author of the Web site, said that his organization is being straight with teenagers.
“Obviously we have an agenda,” he said. But, he added, “we would not like to mislead anyone on anything.”
Rabbi Steven Burg, NCSY’s national director, said that the site represents an attempt to provide information that people would not be able to get from mainstream sources on the Web. He acknowledged that contradictory information existed on many of the topics addressed on the NCSY’s site.
“My hope is that this works as a springboard to do more research,” he said.
Acknowledging the debate over the effectiveness of abstinence-only education in school, Abramowitz said that the new site is only meant to supplement sexual education in the classroom. “Here they’ll get the Jewish aspects,” he said.
Abramowitz and Burg said the program exists exclusively online and no plans will be made to expand beyond cyberspace until they’ve had time to compile feedback.
“I’ve gotten many e-mails from parents, teachers. They love it,” Abramowitz said. “Some people say they didn’t have anywhere to send their kids for this information. Or ‘I wish I had this when I was in school in the ’80s.’ We’re not going to pretend it doesn’t exist in the Jewish community.”
The site offers a criticism of what it describes as American pop culture’s increasing focus on sex.
“In our society, sex is literally everywhere, from magazine covers to billboards and from car ads to beer commercials,” the site states. “‘Back in the day,’ only soap operas might feature sexually active characters. Lucy and Ricky slept in separate beds. All Greg Brady might get after a date was a peck on the cheek. When Natalie lost her virginity to Snake on ‘The Facts of Life,’ that was huge — and it was only 1988! Now, shows like ‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld,’ whose characters routinely jump from bed to bed, are considered ‘quaint.’ The personalities of characters on shows like ‘Will & Grace,’ ‘The O.C.’ and ‘Sex and the City’ are virtually defined by their sex lives! All this makes it seem as if promiscuity is the societal norm. It isn’t, nor should it be.”
Abramowitz said he got the idea for the site a year ago when he learned of a government grant for abstinence-only education. Though the O.U. opted not to apply for the grant, it raised the question of whether sexual abstinence was something the organization should address.
According to Abramowitz, he spent months researching and writing, looking at Christian abstinence Web sites and medical studies.
“There’s huge amounts of material out there,” he said. “I just saw what people were saying and tried to spin it more Jewish.”
With reporting by Ami Eden.
Comments
Every valid study has shown that Abstinence-only programs are not just ineffective, but, in fact dangerous. The rate of oral ("it's not really")sex and heterosexual anal sex has gone sky-high in the study groups of teens that have been denied proper sex education.
Lately, the Orthodox community seems willing to latch onto every stupid idea that the Fundamentalists and Ops Dei Catholics favor, and it is dangerous and myopic.
If this is an attempt to sign on to another Bush Administration policy: Give Up! The faith - based ideology is a fraud, and you are doing a terrible disservice to your kids. Shame on you. Read the data before endorsing any more of this nonsense. People will die from the increased rate of STDs that inevitably results from this.
This is the same organization that knowingly inflicted Rabbi Baruch Lanner, a recalcitrant sex offender, on thousands of innocent Jewish kids for thirty years. [See .] For the OU/NCSY to now presume to lecture kids about the dangers of forbidden sexual conduct, is chutzpah beyond belief.
The site is chock full of exhortations on the necessity of resisting temptation, and of saying "no" to your boyfriend/girlfriend. But -- surprise, surprise -- there is nary a word about what to do when your NCSY advisor/rabbi starts feeling you up, forcing himself on you, and promising that it's OK, because he's a rabbi.
Lanner's ongoing abusive behavior was common knowledge among hundreds of NCSY members (including myself), and it was reported over and over again to the OU/NCSY leadership, over a period of many years. The NCSY leaders, however, chose instead to reward and promote Lanner, allowing him to continue his abuse with impunity. All the victims who complained were disdainfully rebuffed, and sometimes even reprimanded, threatened, and punished. NCSY cared nothing about the irreparable trauma that they were inflicting on countless Jewish children, nor about the grave violations of Jewish law that they were sanctioning. For NCSY to come along today and pontificate to kids about improper sexual behavior is the absolute height of hypocrisy.
This is the same organization that knowingly inflicted Rabbi Baruch Lanner, a recalcitrant sex offender, on thousands of innocent Jewish kids for thirty years. [See http://www.theawarenesscenter.org/Lanner_Baruch.html ] For the OU/NCSY to now presume to lecture kids about the dangers of forbidden sexual conduct, is chutzpah beyond belief.
The site is chock full of exhortations on the necessity of resisting temptation, and of saying "no" to your boyfriend/girlfriend. But -- surprise, surprise -- there is nary a word about what to do when your NCSY advisor/rabbi starts feeling you up, forcing himself on you, and promising that it's OK, because he's a rabbi.
Lanner's ongoing abusive behavior was common knowledge among hundreds of NCSY members (including myself), and it was reported over and over again to the OU/NCSY leadership, over a period of many years. The NCSY leaders, however, chose instead to reward and promote Lanner, allowing him to continue his abuse with impunity. All the victims who complained were disdainfully rebuffed, and sometimes even reprimanded, threatened, and punished. NCSY cared nothing about the irreparable trauma that they were inflicting on countless Jewish children, nor about the grave violations of Jewish law that they were sanctioning. For NCSY to come along today and pontificate to kids about improper sexual behavior is the absolute height of hypocrisy.
Isn't sex wonderful? Even non-sex is wonderful, it seems, because after millennia of religious hatred non-sex has brought the god-men of all stripes together. A grand, non-sex ecumenism.
Just look at Jerusalem where the religious usually are at each others' throats. But the rabbis, the imams, and Christian clergy of all varieties came together as brothers against the gay rights parade. A perfect example of non-sex ecumenism. But in the end the genitals still rule, one way or the other. It's a good thing we have non-sex, I suppose, because an inordinate amount of time is spent non-thinking and non-talking about it ...
NCSY should be commended for promoting the halachic and hashkafic views that the genders are not relaceable pieces of plumbing that are utilized solely in what too many call "hook ups". Instead, it deserves applause for promoting the view thata Jewish man and woman first should establish a relationship based upon emotional intimacy that leads to marriage where physical intimacy is the holiest act of consummation of a loving and caring relationship that is called a " Bayis Neeman BYisrael" and which rejects both the Hedonic and Victorian views of sex.
To Steve Brizel:
Through their actions and inactions over 30 years, NCSY promoted an extremely different attitude towards sexuality from the one that you're describing here. [For details, see http://www.theawarenesscenter.org/Lanner_Baruch.html ]
The abstinence thing is not really new for NCSY. I went to lots of their shabbatons in the early '80s (I doubt Lanner was at any of them) and they always enforced "Negia", or the rule that a boy and girl cannot physically touch unless they're married or closely related. Granted there were reports of "making out" in the remote corridors, and there were some "Don Juan" types at these events whom I personally found intimidating, but for the most part, inappropriate activities were kept at bay -- at least on NCSY's watch.
Now USY, on the other hand, used to have retreats that were spelled O-R-G-Y. In fact, at one of their week-long summer camps from the early 90s, a counselor told me that every one of the 14-year-old girls there had sex. That's right, EVERY one. Apparently, the reason the adult advisers looked the other way was the "they're gonna do it anyway" argument. Even the USY theme song had a line (sung to "Oh Tannenbaum") "You taught us love, and lots of fun. You even taught us how to fool around." Can abstinence education be worse than THAT?
Don't even get me started about BBYO. Their events may have been tame, but oh, the "after-parties"; more beer than I'd ever seen in my life up until that time. ("But Horace, the after-parties were private, and had nothing to do with BBYO." Can you say "weasel word"?)
-- A survivor of "alphabet soup" youth groups.
Hey Lurker. NCSY has had 2 National Directiors and they have a new President. Almost all the regional directors are new. The organization is much different than it was. It seems that NCSY has moved on. You need to get on with your life.
To Bernie Flanner:
Your belief that NCSY has "moved on" is woefully naive. There is no indication that the OU/NCSY has done away with the twisted, corrupt culture that nurtured the Lanner phenomenon for three decades. To the contrary, there is every indication that this misguided culture is still thriving.
If you are suggesting that the OU and NCSY reformed themselves after the Lanner scandal broke, you're quite mistaken. The OU/NCSY has not acknowledged their responsiblity, and in fact brazenly lied about what they knew. Nor have they apologized to the many victims and their families. On the contrary: In anticipation of the possibility that some of the victims might file damage suits, the OU even hired a law firm to prepare a legal argument that would attempt to prove that the OU *bears no responsibility at all* for what happened!
In the wake of the widespread revelations that the OU had covered up and facilitated Lanner's sexual abuse over a period of thirty years, the OU's only regret was the fact that they were caught. Those few leaders who wanted to come clean and institute reforms were quickly marginalized and eliminated. And most of the "old guard" -- both the corrupt "old boys club" running the OU, as well as the die-hard Lanner loyalists running NCSY -- were re-entrenched into their positions of power. A couple of illustrations:
(1) Mendy Ganchrow was president of the OU at the time the Lanner scandal broke in 2000. An "outsider" president with limited power over the "insiders" who actually ran things, he tried courageously to address the problem seriously: He successfully pushed for the appointment of the independent commission of inquiry headed by Richard Joel, and he fought valiantly -- but in the end, futilely -- to reform NCSY and its leadership. For his efforts, he was turned into a pariah within his own organization, and was punished severely for his failure to participate in the cover-up:
"The small cadre of top officers running the show at the OU... were furious at me firstly for forming and supporting the Joel Commission and for Rabbi Butler's subsequent resignation. They quickly moved to make me pay a steep personal price for what many considered my treachery in going public with a call for full disclosure. They did this by cold-shouldering me for the next two years and preventing me from exercising any responsibility at the OU. Even though I had just officially become chairman of the Board of Directors, a prestigious post that is customarily given to OU presidents upon their retirement, I quickly discovered that for two years I had been almost totally cut out of the OU organizational loop. I was never informed of a single committee meeting, nor consulted on any but a few issues in which I happened to have been involved in before.
"Many of my friends who had worked closely with me and supported the work of the Joel Commission during the frenzied final six months of my presidency, such as Marcel Weber, were similarly isolated. This would not have mattered so much if the new leadership had shown vision or leadership. Unfortunately, after witnessing Butler's resignation, the new leaders seemed animated by a desire for revenge against those long time loyal backers of the Union who had supported the Joel Commission and urged leadership change if the organization was to survive. I was number one on that list."
-- "Journey Through the Minefields: From Vietnam to Washington, an Orthodox Surgeon's Odyssey" [ http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=9010 ], by Mendy Ganchrow, M.D. (Eshel Books, 2004), Chapter 18: The Lanner Affair
(2) Baruch Lanner's former position as director of the NCSY Etz Chaim (New Jersey) Region was filled by Lanner's former protoge, Rabbi Matt Tropp. Tropp was and remains a fierce Lanner loyalist, and has been described by many NCSY members as Lanner's "hatchet man". He personally witnessed Lanner's crude, sexually vulgar behavior on countless occassions, and several NCSY members -- according to sworn testimony in Lanner's 2002 trial in Monmouth County [ http://www.theawarenesscenter.org/Lanner_Baruch.html#Surprise%20witness ] -- personally informed Tropp of how Lanner was sexually abusing them. At the time, Tropp had responded by rebuffing and disparaging the victims who came forward. And when Tropp appeared as a defense witness at the trial, he denied -- under oath -- that anyone had ever told him anything. Then, to top it off, he declared that *even if the allegations had been reported to him, he still would not have reported them to the authorities* [ http://www.theawarenesscenter.org/Lanner_Baruch.html#Crititcs%20Call%20for%20Firing ] -- in spite of the NJ state law that requires him to do so. In that same testimony, Tropp also admitted that he continued to maintain close personal contact with Lanner [ http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=6373 ], in brazen defiance of the OU's own written directive that *any NCSY employee in contact with Lanner would be dismissed*. And guess what: The OU didn't fire Tropp. To the contrary, he continued on as director of the NCSY NJ region, until less than a year ago [ http://www.ou.org/ncsy/israel/regions/newjerse.htm ].
I was in NCSY in the 1980's, and I can tell you that the lewd, vulgar behavior publicly exhibited by Lanner on a regular basis permeated the whole organization. And the values implied by the atmosphere that this fostered were internalized by the people he mentored; the "next generation" that continued running NCSY after him. For such people to speak from a position of authority on Jewish sexual ethics is a very bad joke, to say the least. It's like Bill Clinton giving a sermon on the importance of marital fidelity.
The OU and NCSY are run by people who actively decided to ignore the plight of innocent Jewish kids who were being abused by Lanner on an ongoing basis. The fact that these kids' lives were being destroyed meant nothing to them. Neither did the fact that the halachot of sexual behavior were being openly trampled upon and violated by their most prominent youth leader. And many of these very people continue to run NCSY, as we speak. Do you really think that they are in a position to lecture kids on issues such as "negiah", "yichud", and sexual activity?
First-its not pre-martial sex if the people don't get married. Second-Perhaps NCSY should encourage Oral sex-no pregnancy can result and its alot tougher to transmit disease-perhaps they could hire Monica lewinsky as a spokesperson.