In 1998, LILITH ran the article about Shlomo Carlebach. Reading it was both shocking and enlightening. You see, I was one of those girls. At 14, I had a much-too-close encounter with him where, in an empty staging area, he came up from behind me, hugged me, touched my breasts, and ground himself into my backside, all the while telling me how beautiful I was, how I was a schoene maidel. Me, a gawky, awkward, not-pretty girl, was flattered beyond belief. He told me I was beautiful! That I was special. I excitedly told my mother about it. Turned out, I wasn’t so special. I was one of hundreds he touched inappropriately.

That was 60 years ago.

I talk about those events in the new documentary, The Darkest Light. How my mom had to explain what he did was wrong, that I had actually been molested, and, ultimately, that his handlers knew he did this sort of thing routinely. Honestly, I never thought much of it until the LILITH article came out, and in the years since, I have written about what happened in a few places, including my own blog, The Wifely Person Speaks.

But he was oh-so-popular, and his music........

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