For the last month, the Israeli media have been awash with cases of horrific child abuse, mostly among ultra-Orthodox, or “haredi,” families. I will spare readers most of the awful, awful details, which can be found by following the links.

First there was the 52-year-old mother of 12 from Beit Shemesh, who had been the head of a group of women who clothed themselves in black and wore a Muslim-style veil (these women were known as the “Taliban of Beit Shemesh”), who was just arrested for severely abusing her children and encouraging incest among them. In Netivot, a 38-year-old mother of eight was charged with raping two of her sons, age 8 and 11, to get back at her husband for leaving her. In Ramla, a 45-year-old man was charged, together with his wife, of with horribly beating his 8 children from a former marriage. And in Jerusalem, a 38-year-old American immigrant who “comes from a prominent family in the New York Jewish community” was charged with repeatedly abusing her three- and four-year-old boys, using means we normally associate with the interrogation of terrorists.

One of the most debilitating aspects of ultra-Orthodox Judaism today, both in Israel and the U.S., is the widespread belief that child abuse should be covered up in order to protect the public image of the community. In many cases, parental abuse goes unreported, whereas educators who molest their students are either ignored or transferred to other educational institutions, and the sense of shame and the alienation from the authorities prevents anyone from stepping in or taking decisive action. As Ynet columnist Tali Farkash put it in a column today:

The famous conspiracy of silence among the haredi population, which the welfare services and police are dealing with, is a mark of disgrace to the entire sector. Wanting to maintain an image of morality at any cost, they fall into the hole dug by negative elements in the name of Torah, in the name of righteousness. An intensive brainwash has turned psychologists into “religion’s enemies”, social workers into those “causing people to leave religion” and the police into the messenger of the foreign regime. In this glass house, monsters grow and thrive among us.

This is a community that is slow to change, and prides itself in following the rulings of its rabbis. If rabbinic leaders do not take aggressive, public action to discourage abuse, to encourage its reporting, and to find a way to make sure predators are separated from their prey, then the awful consequences–borne by thousands of innocent children every day and carried with them for the rest of their lives–will be on their heads.