Falsely accused of spying for Israel, the saga of David Tenenbaum, an Orthodox Jew from Detroit, began more then a decade ago, but justice is just beginning to be done.
David Tenenbaum is waiting for an apology.
He hopes it won’t be as long in coming as the multiyear ordeal he has gone through to clear his name, ever since he was falsely accused of having spied for Israel.
Partial vindication arrived in mid-July when the Inspector General of the United States Department of Defense issued a report saying that not only was Mr. Tenenbaum “the subject of inappropriate treatment by Department of the Army and Defense Investigative Service officials,” but that “we believe that Mr. Tenenbaum was subjected to unusual and unwelcome scrutiny because of his faith and ethnic background, a practice that would undoubtedly fit a definition of discrimination, whether actionable or not.”
The trauma that he and his family have endured, professionally and personally, since the false charges were first leveled in the 1990s both “ruined my career and put my family in danger,” said Mr. Tenenbaum, an Orthodox Jew, in a telephone interview from his home in Southfield, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit.
While the Inspector General’s report explicitly states that had Mr. Tenenbaum not been Orthodox, he would not have been subjected to such intense and protracted scrutiny, it is that very Orthodoxy and his deep emunah that enabled him to survive the ordeal and remain strong.
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