Last week, the Simon Rockower Awards for Jewish Journalism, presented by the American Jewish Press Association (AJPA), were announced. One of the winning articles in the investigative reporting category was Hella Winston’s article for the Jewish Week entitled “Tragedy in Borough Park Puts Shomrim Under Scrutiny,” which was published last year while the Jewish world was still in shock and mourning for Leiby Kletzky, a”h. Her article claimed, based on “anonymous sources,” that Shomrim had delayed the search for Leiby Kletzky, implying that his death may have been due to the Shomrim’s acts. (Perhaps even more horrible is that her article tries to lay blame for this delay, and his subsequent death, on the Kletzky family, as well.)
In this week’s Ami, Rabbi Yitzchok Frankfurter uses his editorial to demolish the lies of the Jewish Week. He describes his meeting last year with Deputy Inspector Sprague of the NYPD immediately following Leiby’s tragic death. Deputy Inspector Sprague was at the time the highest-ranking officer at the 66th Precinct, which was in charge of the case. What Inspector Sprague told him directly contradicts Winston’s defamatory article. He said that the acts of the Shomrim were to be highly commended and that the Shomrim’s wide-ranging search team was much larger than anything the NYPD would have been able to provide.
Rabbi Frankfurter points out that the AJPA, which instead of being horrified by Winston’s attacks decided to reward her, includes on its board an employee of the Jewish Week, and that the paper has in effect awarded itself for its assaults on the Orthodox community. He points to articles by Marvin Schick and Rabbi Avi Shafran in the aftermath of the Jewish Week’s article, which showed up the flaws and failures of the reporting, but he says that his meeting with Inspector Sprague showed even more. As he puts it, “From that vantage point, I could testify firsthand to the accuracy of their conclusions, and that Hella Winston’s assertions were nothing short of baseless allegations.”
Submitted by: Ami News Desk, NYC
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6 Responses
nice job!!
As usual, the JW is an anti-frum schmatte. There is little that we can do about this. I do have one suggestion though I cannot predict the outcome. How about identifying some of the advertisers in the JW, and boycott them until they pull their ads from JW. This might shake up the schmatte. And if it leads to the demise of the JW, that will benefit the entire Jewish community.
Unfortunately, once the “author/fiction-writer” was named, it is not surprising. When did Hella Winston EVER have something UNBIASED to say about the orthodox community. She is the Jewish Week’s star reporter who ALWAYS takes aim at frum people.
Shomrim are great people who do and should work together with the NYPD.
Rabbi Frankfurter AIM is to sell his magazine by making it as sensational as possible.
I once tried erasing the Jewish Week’s allegations from the Leibby Kletzky article on wikipedia, being that they were from an anti-orthodox outlet and only quoted mysterious anonymous sources, while every other news source quoted police (by name) saying that the Shomrim were only great help.
Unfortunately, they believe that the JW’s press credentials are worthy enough to keep the nonsense posted there.
Unfortunately Ami magazine is just as guilty as the Jewish Week of slander.
In March of this year Ami Magazine ran a revolting headline entitled “Leftist Jews Caused Toulouse Massacre”. The same month they ran an article accused the State of Israel of “repression of Orthodox Jews”
Rabbi Franfurter would do well to fix his own house before attacking others. “K’shot atzmecha vacher kach k’shot acheirim”