Panic in Jerusalem: Parents in a Tight-Knit Neighborhood Believe a Pedophile Ring Is Terrorizing Children. Maybe.
It is every parent’s worst nightmare.
Their child may be victim to something so violent, so ugly or so cruel that in instant the definition of what is means to be a parent or child is rewritten, never to be understood in the same way again.
What happens when an insular community faces the darkness? What happens when the perpetrator may be one of their own? What happens when there are accusations of mass molestation? Who can we believe? Who should we believe. In 1994 and 1995 the Wenatchee child abuse prosecutions highlighted the hysteria and tragic consequences of a sexual abuse case investigation gone terribly wrong.
Wenatchee Washington is a long way from Jerusalem.
The residents of Wenatchee had to reconcile with their city officials and law enforcement.
Left unsaid and unspoken, the devout residents of a Jerusalem neighborhood will have to reconcile with the God.
The neighborhood of Nahlaot in Jerusalem is less a single neighborhood than a cluster of smaller semi-distinct neighborhoods that, beginning in the 1870s, grew incrementally as the city’s population expanded beyond the Old City. Batei Rand and Batei Broydes are two of these clusters, each with a few hundred residents. Both arrabne overwhelmingly Haredi and built around semi-enclosed courtyards. The apartments are continuous and are stacked on two levels, the upper one accessible via a shared, wrap-around balcony. Most of the apartments are single-entrance and open into the courtyard, so there is little privacy, and the residents are, for the most part, very poor. Most families don’t own their home, but instead lease it on extremely favorable terms from a charitable organization. Many of the families have been in the neighborhood for generations, and the area, marked by labyrinthine cobblestone alleyways, Jerusalem stone, and gardens, has long been beloved by those that live there.
“It was the most quaint, amazing, incredible, peaceful, loving community,” a former resident recently told me. “A place where religious and secular got along with each other. It was like an example of what Israel could be.”
All of this changed in October 2010, when a 44-year-old man named Binyamin Satz was arrested. Satz is mentally handicapped, and court documents note that he is on state disability, has schizophrenia, Tourette’s syndrome, and “a non-specific eating disorder.” According to his lawyer, Roy Politi, he eats “only bread and cheese, but not when they are touching.” Politi told me that Satz weighs less than 90 lbs. A neighbor described Satz as “very strange, very slight,” with an “extremely pronounced twitch from his shoulder to head.” Politi described Satz as “functioning like a 12-year-old kid.”
When Satz, who had been living with his parents in another section of Jerusalem, moved into his second-floor apartment in Nahlaot in the early 2000s, his father visited his son’s new neighbors. “His father came, he sat down in our living room,” said Malka Lerner, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym. “And he told us, ‘Please accept my son, he is a special boy. He loves kids, he’s very nice to kids. He has no sexual yediah [knowledge]. He’s like a 7-year-old.’ “
For as long as people can remember, Satz was socially involved with children, who, with their parents’ knowledge, would visit his apartment. How pervasive this was is hard to determine. Politi says, “the whole neighborhood, 30 to 40 kids,” but one parent told me, “no more than five children.” In any case, Politi says his client played chess or balance games with the local kids. Lerner would occasionally find one or both of her sons in Satz’s apartment. “Every once in a while, I would find them in the house, and I would call them out,” she said.
