Courtesy of Towson University.

Just a few days before Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish New Year that opens ten days of repentance—Georgetown’s most disgraced rabbi is saying sorry for spying on women in a religious bath.

Barry Freundel, formerly a prominent leader of the Orthodox synagogue Kesher Israel, was arrested last October after it was discovered that he had hidden cameras in a room where people prepared to enter the mikvah, a ritual bath. Freundel was initially charged with six counts of voyeurism, but that later ballooned to 52 counts, one for each woman, after investigators revealed the extent of his crimes (another 100 women had apparently also been taped since 2009, but they weren’t included in the criminal complaint because of the statute of limitations.) He pleaded guilty, and is currently serving a six-and-a-half year sentence.

“No matter how many times I attempt to apologize, it will not be enough,” Freundel wrote in a personal statement published in Washington Jewish Week. “How could I have been so incredibly blind, so unaware of my own impact on others? I ask myself that question every day. Through therapy, I came to understand the psychological underpinnings of why I acted in this despicable way. But I have not yet fully grasped how I could have been so completely oblivious to the harm I was doing to others.”

Freundel writes that he eschewed apologizing individually to the women because of any further harm that might cause, and he also addressed some of the other, less criminal criticisms that surfaced after the case went public.