Even at 16, she said, "No one is that stupid not to understand what he was saying," but her parents, devout Orthodox Jews, did not believe her. In light of that, Troutman's devotion to the faith vanished, she said.
Later, when she was 29 and her mother died, Troutman stopped by Max's synagogue to make funeral arrangements. "He wanted me to go to his office to talk about the service, but I said to him, 'I'm not going into that room with you. You're out of your mind.' "
Lynn Keyser, a photographer born and raised in Baltimore and now living in Sebastopol, Calif., was 15 when her father died in 1965. Max, the family's rabbi, was at their house sitting shiva, the period of mourning.
"I was out of my brain because of my father dying, and Max got inappropriately close," she said. "I tried to pull away and he'd hold on."
As he pressed his pelvis against her, Keyser said, it was plain that the rabbi was aroused. "Who was I going to tell?" she asked. "My 40-year-old mother, who had just lost her husband? Who should I tell - my rabbi?"
Five years later, Keyser, engaged to be married, was dispatched by her mother to talk to the rabbi about the impending wedding. Max asked her fiance to wait outside his office. "He said he wanted to talk to me alone," Keyser recalled. "And then he did it again - a hug that was too long and too close, and he had an erection."
Another woman, a 57-year-old Baltimore native who lives in a Washington suburb and agreed to be identified only by her middle name, Lynn, said she was studying for her bat mitzvah at age 13 when Max summoned her to his office, told her she had grown into "quite a lovely young woman" and then fondled her.
"I almost felt I was in a doctor's office, being examined to see that I'd developed breasts," Lynn said. "How can I say anything to anyone about a person who's so revered? He was like God in our community, but to me he was an old man, even then."
Lynn told no one about the incident until she mentioned it to her mother seven years later.
"She brushed it off," Lynn recalled. "It didn't matter that I was underage and that he was much too old and should have known better. He had a reputation, but in the Jewish community in Baltimore, people don't say anything. They don't want the community to look bad to outsiders."
Michael Meyerstein, executive director of the 55-member Baltimore Board of Rabbis, said Max, who had sat on the panel for at least 40 years, resigned this summer just before a vote that would "probably have suspended him."
