https://forward.com/news/national/409067/how-a-respected-jewish-educator-preyed-on-children-for-a-half-century/ Archive: https://archive.fo/3yqzU

Excerpts from the article:

“By his own admission, Stanley S. Rosenfeld, a Jewish educator who worked primarily in New York City and Rhode Island, sexually abused “hundreds” of children — nearly all middle school-aged boys — during his five-decade career. From a beloved summer camp in New Jersey, to elite Orthodox schools in New York, to a small Conservative synagogue in Rhode Island, Rosenfeld assaulted and molested children with near impunity, charged with a crime exactly once.”

…

“I asked Rosenfeld if he was sorry.

“It’s that feeling, of knowing what you’re doing is wrong, but it gives you pleasure,” he replied.”

…

“Rosenfeld began a habit of inviting middle-school students over to his home for “Shabbatons,” or Friday night sleepovers, and using the opportunity to grope them as they slept. On at least one occasion, he brought a student to his childhood home in Boro Park. He would continue this predatory practice for over a decade.”

…

“Rosenfeld acknowledged that he rationalized his molestation of children over and over to himself — that he “put a shine on it.” He considered the molestations a kind of transaction. He served the boys foods they liked at sleepovers. He took them bowling, swimming and to baseball games. He taught them about religious observance and the warmth of the Sabbath.

He also believed that sexual experience was something he offered the boys kindly.

“I was thinking of myself as doing good for them,” he said. “Of giving them a sexual experience from somebody who was not gonna hurt them, because I was going to leave them as children.”

In exchange, he tried to take control over their bodies. In 2001, his probation officer noted that “power and control over children excites him.” “I wanted to feel that they were mine, and I could do with them what I wanted, and all I wanted to with them was to touch them.”

…

“ “I can’t imagine that they knew, and continued to employ me, and make all my victims available to me,” he said. “Of course, my head was always making excuses for what I was doing. Finding positive reasons for it. But I always knew that it was wrong. I always did.” “

Why would any parent think it's a good idea to send their children to sleepovers with adult men? The approval signal it sends to their kids is devastating and is no doubt a large part of the reason so many of them stay silent in the face of abuse. It amounts to child endangerment.