I have already gone over in other articles on this site the total absurdity of the claims made by the children of Nachlaot. So the question remains, how is it that Zalman Cohen and Binyamin Satz were convicted with these claims that any thinking person would see as total nonsense fabricated in the minds of young children? Why would the honorable judges overlook common sense and use the testimonies of these children to convict two most likely innocent men?
In both these cases, the judges decided that the children's testimonies were not significantly
"contaminated" by outside factors (such as neighborhood gossip, inquisitions by parents, etc.). In contrast, in the case of Ben Tzion Pre Mishlano, the judges determined that Ben Tzion had been gossiped about before his arrest, and therefore they could not believe that the children's testimonies were true beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt. The judges used their own minds to analyze those testimonies -- and saw that the testimonies contained impossibilities and inconsistencies. Therefore, they could not in good conscience convict Ben Tzion Pre Mishlano beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt.
Why didn't they make the same reasonable conclusion in the cases of Binyamin Satz and Zalman Cohen?
In the case of Binyamin Satz, since the accusations against him were the first to become part of the public gossip in Nachlaot, the judges incorrectly assumed that there had not been much gossip about Binyamin Satz when he was first accused, and that the majority of gossip occurred way after that. Therefore, they concluded (incorrectly) that accusations against Binyamin Satz must have been uninfluenced by gossip, parental pressure, or any other external factors. And therefore, the accusations must be true, because how or why would any child make up such ridiculous stories?
But let's analyze the Binyamin Satz case to see if it's really true that gossip did not play any role in it.
The first accusation against Binyamin Satz came from a child who insisted that he was NOT molested by Binyamin Satz, but rather, by a stranger without a Kippah who was passing through the neighborhood. (Eventually that accusation was thrown out by the judges in his initial trial because there was no reason to assume that Binyamin Satz had done anything to that child.) Whether or not there was gossip about Binyamin Satz prior to the time of the first accusation can be debated, but there is no doubt that immediately after the initial accusation, some ladies went around the neighborhood looking for other children to accuse him of acts of molestation. ALL THE SUBSEQUENT ACCUSATIONS AGAINS BINYAMIN SATZ WERE A RESULT OF THIS PARENTAL ACTIVISM AND PRESSURE. The judges in both the first trial and the appeal are correct that gossip continued to escalate much more so as time went on, but discount the reality that after the very first accusation EVERYTHING was contaminated by gossip in the whole "Parshat Nachlaot" -- including all the accusations against Binyamin Satz which were made after the first, initial accusation (which had been thrown out).
The trial and appeal of Zalman Cohen were somewhat different. No one can deny that by the time that Zalman Cohen was arrested, considerable gossip and contamination of testimony had already occurred throughout the neighborhood. The prosecution acknowledged that there was considerable gossip and contamination of the neighborhood children's testimony. What the prosecution tried to claim was that the particular children that were chosen to testify against Zalman Cohen in his trial, were for one reason or another not influenced by this contamination. The "proof" that their testimony must be real and not contaminated was that they relied on an expert analysis of testimony know as "C.B.C.A.", which stands for "Criterion Based Content Analysis". By means of the C.B.C.A., the child investigators decided that all the children's testimony must be true, and therefore the judges accepted that the children's testimony was true as well. But what exactly is C.B.C.A., and is a decision based on C.B.C.A. valid? C.B.C.A. is a discipline which has changed and developed over time. The basic idea is that testimony is analyzed for a number of criteria, such as richness of detail, length of the testimony, consistency of the testimony, etc. In a nutshell, according to C.B.C.A, the more details the testimony contains, the more likely it is to be true, provided that the details are consistent. There have been many scholarly articles written about this technique, and the extent to which it can be considered valid. (It does not appear that the judges in Zalman Cohen's case have read any of those articles. Nor does it appear that any of the lawyers for either the defense or prosecution have read them either.) C.B.C.A. is a fairly good (though not perfect) technique for distinguishing between adult testimony which is truthful and adult testimony which is intentionally fabricated. However, it is NOT that effective for ascertaining the validity of children's testimony, and the younger the children are, the less effective it is. Furthermore, it is not effective for distinguishing between testimony of events that a person actually experienced versus events that a person only imagines they must have experienced (such as when an adult has been treated with suggestive therapeutic techniques). This can be problematic at any age, but especially in young children who are very suggestible. Yet, the judges seemed to be unaware of the fallibility of C.B.C.A., and therefore they relied on what the child investigators said about the children's testimony. They also did not question the prosecution's assertion that these particular children had somehow not been exposed to the neighborhood gossip or parental pressure. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, in spite of all that, the judges in Zalman's appeal decided to throw out one of the children's testimonies. That particular child's testimony was amazingly repetitive and ridiculous. But according to the child investigators, the C.B.C.A. for that child's testimony showed that it was just as valid as any of the other children's testimonials. So why did the judges have the good sense to dismiss that one child's testimony, but not dismiss the other children's testimonies? I think there was an overall bias to "believe the children", just as there was back in the U.S. in the 1980s when the ritual child abuse accusations became an epidemic in daycare centers such as "McMartin".
It seems that the judges (as well as the lawyers) in Israel are totally unknowledgeable about the McMartin case and others like it. If they had known anything about the ritual child abuse accusations in the U.S. during the 1980s, they would have realized that the Nachlaot accusations (and the subsequent spreading of similar accusations to other locations such as Sanhedria) are just the Israeli version of the same thing.
It's a shame that men who are likely to be innocent are now serving long jail sentences. Those in power in the legal system of Israel should be knowledgeable enough to: 1) learn from the history of similar events in other countries (such as the McMartin trial), and 2) read the literature about "expert techniques" (such as C.B.C.A.) which are presented in court and become truly knowledgeable about whatever is relevant to making a well-informed, just, and correct decision.
