Behind the Headlines:brooklyn Neighborhood All Abuzz over Mom Charged with Child’s Death

It is a neighborhood of neat, red-brick multi-family homes, a place where young boys with dangling earlocks chat in Yiddish, where women dressed modestly in long skirts and blouses push baby carriages as they buy fresh bread, smoked fish and fruit on 16th Avenue in the heart of Brooklyn’s Borough Park section.

Here, in the largest Orthodox Jewish community in the United States, secular interests are pushed aside in favor of religious matters, and dozens of yeshivas and small synagogues sprout the names of East European Hasidic dynasties, remnants of pre-Holocaust Jewish life.

This quiet, unobtrusive neighborhood, home to almost 100,000 people, at least 90 percent of whom are devoutly religious, rarely makes it into the news, partly because life rarely deviates from a pattern set through centuries of religious and social tradition.

So when 33-year-old Shulamis Riegler, six months pregnant, was arraigned last week on charges of second-degree murder in the death of her 8-year-old son, allegedly from child abuse, the shock was great, the grief widespread and, among some, the questions asked were many.

“The problem is that you don’t know what the degree of the problems are, “said Egon Mayer, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College who grew up in Borough Park and has studied the community extensively.

“I’m willing to believe there are not many instances of parents killing their children, but I’m not willing to believe there aren’t more cases of severe physical abuse of children and spouses,” he said.

UTTER UNIQUENESS OF EVENT

On the quiet streets of Borough Park, most people refused to discuss the case with a reporter, and those who did spoke of the utter uniqueness of the event.

“It’s a terrible tragedy, one that hurts everyone, and whomever I discuss this with feels the same way I do — shocked,” said a Borough Park businessman who asked that his name not be used. “But it makes you wonder, what’s going on underneath?”

Yaakov Riegler died Oct. 14 after falling into an irreversible coma on Yom Kippur. He and his two older brothers had spent three years under foster care, after his mother was put on probation for assaulting the oldest child, 13-year-old Israel.

Last year, the three children were returned to their parents for reasons that have not been made public. During the past year, according to local news reports, teachers at Yaakov’s public school had contacted the city’s Human Resources Administration after seeing suspicious bruises on the boy.

But the information was ignored by the overburdened HRA, reports were perhaps falsified by disinterested staff members, and a boy died, said City Councilman Noach Dear, whose district includes Borough Park.

“Such abuse is not rampant,” he said emphatically. “To say we don’t have the problem of child abuse, well, it’s not the magnitude it’s being made out to be.”

The close-knit community, where shopkeepers greet their customers by name, prides itself on being self-sufficient. Privately organized services include a Jewish youth library, a substance abuse help group, organizations that feed and clothe the poor and an ambulance service.

Families tend to be big. It is not uncommon for a young mother of 30 to already have five or more children. Median income in the neighborhood was estimated at $13,000 in one study, partly a function of the emphasis on education and religious subservience over material pursuits.

But people tend to be suspicious of outside agencies, both for religious reasons and because a large percentage of the population are Holocaust survivors, said community workers.

FEW USE MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES

Community workers estimate there are about 25 human services organizations, some partly administered with city funding but all oriented toward providing services to meet the special needs, interests and beliefs of the Orthodox.

Still, few people avail themselves of mental health services, according to a 1982-1983 study of Borough Park’s human service needs, sponsored by the local Council of Jewish Organizations.

About 40 percent of respondents said they would not seek help from a counseling or mental health agency for a personal or family problem, and 20 percent of respondents said this was because they feared what others might think, according to the study, conducted by Mayer.

“It’s very difficult for people to seek help, No. 1. And No. 2, potential help-givers are reluctant to acknowledge problems because there’s a tremendous desire to pretend there are no problems,” Mayer said.

“In a community where religion is paramount, the desire not to confront imperfection is very strong, because it may reflect on how effective the religious system is,” said Mayer. “I lived there and I know people in that community avoid seeking help as much as possible.”

The Riegler family went through the Ohel Children’s Home and Family Services, which was founded in 1969 to offer foster and family care in an Orthodox Jewish environment. Ohel often works with the city and, in the Riegler’s case, helped in the original placement of the boys with Borough Park families.

ENCOURAGES PSYCHOLOGICAL TREATMENT

The director, Lester Kaufman, said he was prohibited by law from discussing specifics of the case, But he explained that when previously abused children are reunited with their families, Ohel encourages the families to continue psychological treatment.

“It is our standard procedure that if a family does not respond to the voluntary offer for help and it is especially in a high-risk case, we would inform the authorities that this family is not following through on a voluntary basis with counseling services,” said Kaufman, who has served as director for 20 years.

Kaufman and other mental health professionals said the stigma of being seen as unable to live up to the community’s standard for a strong family might hinder some people from reaching out for help, be it in a case of child abuse or other family problems.

“Amidst this tragedy, perhaps it will heighten people’s awareness this child abuse is something that does occur and that help is available and they should seek that help,” Kaufman said.