Shedding Light on Abuse : Domestic violence: A national workshop at the University of Judaism, the first of its kind, focuses on Jewish families.

When Richard Gelles got the phone call asking him to take part in a conference on violence in the Jewish family, he thought it was a joke.

“There was a brief moment when I thought it was one of my tennis partners playing a prank,” said Gelles, who is a professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Rhode Island. But the call was no joke--Gelles told this story Sunday at the University of Judaism during the opening session of the first national conference on the topic of domestic violence in the Jewish family.

“Over the last 20 years, I have been invited to speak all over the world,” Gelles told the gathering of about 100 mental-health workers and religious officials at the conference, “Responding to Child Abuse and Domestic Violence in the Jewish Family,” which was co-sponsored by the university and the Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles. “I have even been invited to speak at synagogues two or three times. But the reason those congregations invited me was so that I could talk about the violence that went on in the Gentile community.”

In 1976, Gelles did what is believed to be the first formal study comparing domestic violence rates among different religious groups. Although that study and a follow-up he did a decade later showed that the rate of violence was lower in Jewish families, the rate was still significant. The problem for Gelles, who is Jewish, was to get the Jewish community to believe it.

“The stereotype that there is no domestic violence in Jewish families dies hard,” said the conference’s chief organizer, Ian Russ, a visiting professor of psychology at the university and a marriage, family and child counselor with a private practice in Encino. “The fact that it is more than just a very rare occurrence is a shock to many people, Jews and non-Jews, alike.”

“This is the conference you don’t want to attend about the issues you don’t want to hear about,” joked Sally Weber, a regional director of Jewish Family Service, in greeting the conference-goers.

Gelles presented data from his 1986 telephone poll of 6,000 families that indicated that there had been incidents of severe violence against children in almost 7% of Jewish homes. That is compared to 12% of Catholic homes, 11% in Protestant homes and the high of 15% of households identified as atheist or agnostic.

Incidents of “very severe violence” with a potential of serious physical harm ranged from 5% in atheist-agnostic homes to 1.5% among Protestants. Jewish homes were in the middle with 3.4%.

“That is a small number, but that means that if you look at an average size classroom of Jewish children, the chances are one has been abused badly,” Gelles said.

Russ said that Jewish beliefs about their community have hindered acceptance of these unpleasant facts. “We view ourselves as a people who have a great commitment to our families, to children and to education,” he said.

“It violates our view of ourselves to think that it could be happening in Jewish homes. It’s one of the reasons that battered Jewish women have a difficult time getting people in the community to believe them.”

Another problem, Gelles said, is that Jews are overprotective of their image. He told about his grandmother’s reaction when, as a teen-ager in 1963, he told her that someone had shot the President. “Without a bit of hesitation,” Gelles said, “she asked, ‘He wasn’t Jewish, was he?’

“My grandmother had seen enough anti-Semitism in her life that she didn’t need for there to be Jewish presidential assassins.”

If there were any lingering doubts about Jewish family violence, they were probably dispelled by another speaker. Cherie Kirschbaum, 43, spoke with great clarity about her years as a battered wife. When she told her rabbi about her marital problems, she said, he assumed that she was doing something wrong. “He encouraged me to see what else I could do to make things better,” said Kirschbaum, who traveled to the conference from Denver. “So I lit the candles on Friday nights, dressed the children right, observed the holidays. We led the good life.”

To the outside world, they were financially and personally successful. But, she said, her husband once slugged her so hard on the chin that she required stitches. He later attacked her in a hallway of an office building and beat her until a security guard came to her rescue. “I didn’t call the police, because nice Jewish girls don’t call the police,” she said.

She eventually found a more sympathetic rabbi who led her to a therapist with experience in the field. She later divorced her husband.

After her talk, she was approached by several women at the conference who spoke to her quietly. “That always happens when I speak in public,” said Kirschbaum, who now counsels battered Jewish woman in Denver. “They come up and quietly say, ‘It happened to me, too.’ ”

Jae Levine Weiss, 39, fared better in finding help in the Jewish community. “I finally left after the day that my husband had dragged me up the stairs because he wanted me to witness the beating of my son for walking our dog on the wrong side of the street,” Weiss said. She took her son from their home in Orange County to her parents’ home in the San Fernando Valley. Then she went to the crisis center at Temple Beth Hillel in North Hollywood.

“A woman there listened to my story and identified me as a battered wife,” Weiss said. “It’s the nature of the condition that I didn’t realize it until she said it.”

Even after Weiss checked into the Haven Hills battered women shelter in Canoga Park, she could not let go of some misconceptions. “I didn’t think I belonged there,” she said. “I thought it was a place for poor women. This doesn’t happen to nice Jewish girls.

“But then I met my roommate. Not only was she Jewish, she was a girl I had gone to high school with.”

Weiss, who won sole custody of her son in a subsequent divorce proceeding, now teaches classes at Haven Hills and has remarried.

In conference workshops, several speakers said the Jewish clergy need to take a more active role in identifying and caring for abuse victims. “We have to let rabbis know that they are accountable for their actions in these situations,” Kirschbaum said. “They are the gatekeepers. They are often the first person a woman comes to for help.”

Russ expressed anger that only about half a dozen rabbis attended the conference, although information about the event had been made widely available in the community.

One rabbi who did come, Steven Schatz of the Adat Ari Congregation in Anaheim Hills, admitted that he was attending more in his capacity as a lawyer than as a rabbi. “I have been a rabbi for 15 years and only twice have women come to me to say that their husbands were beating them,” he said. “With the incidence level that low, rabbis have to pay attention to other priorities. There are tremendous pressures on rabbis for their time.”

A young rabbinical student, Camille Angel, suggested that rabbis would hear about abuse more often if women felt that they would be more accepting. “I spoke on abuse at a synagogue in Northern California on Rosh Hashanah,” said Angel, a student at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. “By the time I went back 10 days later for Yom Kippur services, there were several notes waiting for me from women who wanted to talk.”

Schatz good-naturedly said he was convinced, and that he would soon talk about abuse with his congregation. “Wait for the High Holidays, when you have a big audience,” Kirschbaum said with a laugh.

The conference also dealt with other issues, including the establishment of foster homes and other centers for abuse victims within the Jewish community. But for now, the conference organizers and speakers seemed happy that people in the field were at least talking about the problem.

“We are just now getting to the point where the rest of the nation was in 1962,” said Gelles. That year, a pediatrician wrote a landmark paper on child abuse that sparked a nationwide debate on the topic. “We are just now admitting that it is all right to talk about violence in the Jewish community, and that’s a start.

“But until the community is willing to do something and take the next steps, it will be just an academic exercise.”