Was Machon Shlomo in the 1980s a cult?

Was Machon Shlomo in the 1980s a cult? Let's look at the primary features of a cult. The four stages are deceptive recruiting, isolation, personality breakdown, and reprogramming.

Deceptive recruiting: That's Moodus. Sports and barbeques on a 22 acre resort in the hills of Connecticut. Lots of people coming and going, including rabbis and yeshiva students who are on their best behavior as they get a free vacation for the family. The atmosphere is light. Rosenberg is a distant figure on the premises. Waiters serve your meals in a spacious dining room. At the head table was Rav Schwab, the venerable leader of the Breuer's community, an elderly Jew with a distinguish bearing from Germany. Promises are made of an Ivy League yeshivah experience in the Holy City. I don't recall if this was promised then, but Machon Shlomo now claims falsely that it's graduates occupy the highest positions in finance, law, etc. and that it has a close knit community. I remember then feeling as if I had entered a highly affluent inner sanctum of some kind. It was intoxicating. Let's examine all this falsehood as we look at the next stages of a cult.

Isolation: Machon Shlomo was situated in a few small apartments located in one four story apartment building on the outskirts of Jerusalem. There were no basketball or shuffleboard courts and volleyball nets as there were in Moodus. There was no view of the forest, but rather of a Har Menuchos cemetery. There weren't rabbis and yeshiva students coming and going. The tiny staff of six was mostly off limits. 4 of them were Gemara teachers, one for the handful of second year students only as he never spoke to first year students, and three for each of the levels. You only dealt with one of them, and even then just for the shiur. Before that he prepared. After lunch (at which time the rabbis sat at a separate table) he left. Other than the one Gemara rebbe were Rosenberg and Gershenfeld. That was the staff. It was quite a contrast from Moodus. 

It's also a contrast from Ivy League schools as they have large staff  of distinguish faculty, reams of class offerings, and lovely campuses. 

Neither Rosenberg nor Gershenfeld were around very much. Rosenberg had an apartment in Jerusalem. Gershenfeld came in only in the afternoon for his Chumash shiur. Before the shiur he prepared. After the shiur, he left. For most of the day, there were no rabbis around. Even today, if you visit Machon Shlomo, as I have done numerous times, you won't find rabbis on premises.

Worse still, Rosenberg and Gershenfeld did not qualify as rabbis. Rosenberg had been an insurance salesman and before that had a one year stint as a teacher, and a two year stint as a principal of a tiny out of town yeshiva day school in the 1960s. The job no doubt was secured by his father, who was a well-known rabbi, not necessarily a scholar but one who set up institutions in America. Rosenberg was not learned. He was not articulate. He was even anti-intellectual. He once told me that there's no such thing as intellectual depth, only emotional depth. Gershenfeld was a 29 year old baal teshuvah (when the place started) who came from a highly assimilated background. When I got there, he was 35. Neither of these two who ran a so-called Litvish yeshiva were capable of giving a Gemara shiur. They had hired hands for that. Their job was to control the message, to be the only ones to introduce the students to hashkafa and halacha.  The rest of the staff had been instructed not to talk to us. One of the promises made to me was that a student gets lots of personal attention at Machon Shlomo. This was utterly false. I spoke to Gershenfeld on four brief occasions in 2 years. Brief means under a minute, and I'm not shy. I'm a person who goes right on up to teachers and talks to them. 

Also there was no Rabbi Schwab. We had nothing to do with him and never talked about him. They didn't encourage our contacting him even when we were back in America. He had been used as a lure. 

The isolation was manifested also in the location on a development site. MS was the first resident in an area that was accessible by dirt road. There was no Jewish community there. Rosenberg told me that he chose this isolated spot intentionally so that he could have full control over the students. Thus, we never went to bar mitzvahs, weddings, brisim, shalom zachars. None of that. We never met anyone who could present a perspective different than that of R and G.

The isolation occurred also in the absence of a library. There was only a small shelf of books, maybe a dozen of them. Even today there are no books in the MS beis midrash, just bare white walls. No other yeshiva is like this. Remember also that this is before the Internet. There was no going on line for a different perspective. 

We were isolated also via the persistent condemnation of all other schools for BTs. We were told again and again that they all did things the wrong way. They were bad. We had nothing to do with any of them. Students referred to those schools as the enemies. The conditioning against them to them made it harder to leave. Gershenfeld once told a student, "Anybody who leaves here fails in life."

We also didn't see visitors in the beis midrash other than a neighbor or two who came for Maariv.

We also never met other rabbis. Guest speakers were not allowed. We were never taken to see gadolim. 

We never went on any trips to see Israel, not even Jerusalem. We also didn't have warm get togethers, just a small party before Chanukah and before Purim. The latter was preceded with a depressing speech against bochurim getting drunk, nothing about the meaning of Purim. 

Personality breakdown: This occurred in numerous ways. Rosenberg and Gershenfeld were hell point on putting the students in their place, crushing the arrogance from them. This was not done by example of course because those two were quite far from humble. Putdowns were regular. You don't know anything. Your accomplishments don't impress me - that sort of thing. On each of the four occasions where I spoke to Gershenfeld, he insulted me. 

Personality breakdown also occurred through control, through treating us like children. We weren't allowed to lead davening, to choose our own seat, study partner, or dorm room, to wear black hats, or to date. We might be ready in a few years. They'd tell us  when, which of course they never did. The subtext there was that we'd need to earn their approval by adopting their view on life.

We also couldn't choose what shiurim to attend because there were no choices. There were only 2 classes: Gemara pilpul and Chumash. There was no Mishnah, Gemara bikiyus, halacha, Hebrew, Nach, Machshava, or history. There was no class in mitzvos or the calendar. Let me clarify there was a twice weekly 1/2 hour long slow moving halacha shiur given by Rosenberg who knew nothing about halacha. Question: What's the bracha on pizza? His answer: I don't know I don't eat pizza. His main activity was to rant about baalei teshuvah who were audacious enough to think they knew halacha or could poskin. Everything with him was a polemic. I don't count this as a halacha shiur. 

Moreover, the Gemara and Chumash classes had the function of breaking people. Gemara was not introduced. We heard nothing about its background, language, or strange style. We just opened up to page 2 and started. I was cast into the highest shiur when I didn't even know the alphabet. We studied a few pages of Gemara from morning till night. We used all kinds of commentators even though we were beginners. And it was all done in a competitive atmosphere with the snobs in the highest shiur not talking to those in the lower ones. All of this overwhelms the mind. Gemara can break you if you care about your intellect and you are overdosed with pilpul.

Chumash consisted of Gershenfeld reading the text to us. Machon Shlomo cares about the text they said even though they didn't study the language of the text which is Hebrew. His idea of adhering to the text was to read every word. It was a like a laning from a guy who didn't pronounce Hebrew very well. Most of the shiur was him reading.

This is not the way to study Chumash. It's the way to terrify people, because Chumash is terrifying with its stories of betrayal, murder, infanticide, kidnapping, rape, war, genocide, slavery, and punishment, punishment, punishment. The nation is always failing, and that's how R and G made us feel about ourselves, that we were always failing. Chumash needs commentary. You need a rebbe to study Chumash, need a guide. Without that, you learn to be terrified of God, Judaism, the world, and yourself. Even the Ramchal says that you will not learn emunah from the plain meaning of the Chumash. So essentially everything about Machon Shlomo was designed to break you, even the little Torah that they offered. 

Questions were mocked. Why do you need to know that, was a common response. You are trying to show off with that question. That's very arrogant of you to ask that.

Reprogramming:

Machon Shlomo is not only the best yeshiva for BTs but the only one. Over and over again we heard that even though the place was brand new. They acted as if they had a long-standing reputation. I can only think that R and G thought so highly of themselves that their little school with 15 students automatically achieved value through their value. 

Your task is to go out and be a high earning corporate professional while being some kind of Litvack. You cannot get smicha. You cannot become a rabbi. You cannot become Chassidic or Modern Orthodox. Yet strangely, one guy there who was a big masmid was criticized for his plans to go to medical school after MS. 

The Machon Shlomo derech, as it was contrived, was to be a non-questioning, non-spiritual, corporate worker who looked down on everything, and saw his identity as being a Machon Shlomo guy, which means mostly to shut down the mind and hate the world. It is quite a trick making your identity a school when that school has no alumni communication or gatherings. They never contacted us after we left even if we contacted them. They taught you to fear the world and yourself and then sent you on your way back to America alone. So, yes, another lie (and cults are in the habit of lying) was that there's a tight alumni network. There was none. Another lie was that nobody who ever went to Machon Shlomo left the religion. Firstly, they have no way of knowing that because they didn't keep in touch with anybody. Secondly, it simply isn't true. Guys from my year left the religion. I have met many since then.

So there it is. All four stages of cult indoctrination. No other school for BTs operates this way. Others deceive in their recruiting, but not like this, not black and white. They might isolate you to the yeshiva world, but not within it, not to two crazy and unlearned guys and nobody else. Other schools have guest speakers and meet gadolim. Other schools were located in frum neighborhoods not on a barren hill. Other schools offer a variety of types of classes and have libraries. Other schools can do some yeshivish type control of the students, but they don't assign your seat and ban you from dating. Machon Shlomo in the 1980s was a cult. I can say much more. But I've leave it at that. Write me for more if you suffered there and are still recovering.

The place has changed some since then. Rosenberg is dead. Har Nof is now a real neighborhood. There's a tiny library, still not much. It's in a storage room, and it's a mess. But it's more than we had. There's more staff now, and from what I hear students can speak to them. However, they still have the same schedule of six pages of Gemara and Gershenfeld and his Chumash shiur. When you have the secret sauce why change? That's the attitude over there. I suppose they think that they have never made mistakes. There's nothing to change. They are in the same set of apartments, which now look old and cruddy. They still have the same no dating rule, even for Cohanim. I don't know if it qualifies as a full fledge cult anymore but it's still a very unhealthy place, in my opinion.