BALTIMORE COMMUNITY - UOJ ALERT - ARON TENDLER - SERIAL ADULTERER AND ACCUSED CHILD MOLESTER ---------- is living in Baltimore with Naomi and Jeremy Goldman in the Greenspring area. 6304 Lincoln Av. Tel. # 410-358-1832 *************************************************
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For at the very least - twenty years, YULA and the RCC (Rabbinical Council Of California), have been enabling Shalom Tendler and Aron Tendler to be in a setting that caused great harm to their victims, under the cloak of respectability. There are numerous victims that could have been spared a life of misery if YULA and the RCC would have expelled these two vicious sub-humans when they became aware of their activities in the late 1980's.
The civil liability may extend to the Shaarey Tzedek Congregation, and the Young Israel Of North Beverly Hills as well and their officers.
I urge the victims to consult, anonymously if you wish, with Jeffrey Herman Esq. the world renown sex abuse advocate at: jherman@hermanlaw.com--1800-686-9921. His website is hermanlaw.com for information about his successes.
Please contact as well, Amy Klein at The Jewish Journal - amyk@jewishjournal.com
and the religion editor of the L.A. Times, Mr. Steve Padilla:steve.padilla@latimes.com.
It is long past due that we hold everyone accountable for the damage caused to Judaism and our children.
CLICK ON MAP TO ENLARGE: DIRECTIONS TO ARON TENDLER'S NEW HOME!
359 comments:
1 – 200 of 359 Newer› Newest»VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Sexual abuse of children is not just a Catholic Church problem and other institutions should take steps to acknowledge and deal with such "wickedness" within their own ranks, the Vatican said on Tuesday.
The Vatican's chief spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, also said the record $660 million settlement between the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and victims of sexual abuse was an attempt to "close a painful chapter and look forward."
"The Church is above all clearly pained by the suffering of the victims and their families, by the deep wounds caused by the grave and inexcusable behavior of some of its members," Lombardi said.
"It has decided to commit itself in every way to avoid a repetition of such wickedness," he said, adding that the Church now had a "a policy of prevention and creation of an ever more secure atmosphere for children and young people in all aspects of (its) pastoral programs."
Lombardi reaffirmed a position taken by other Catholic Church leaders in the past -- that other organized religions and institutions should also deal with paedophilia as publicly as the Catholic Church has been forced to by various scandals.
"The problem of the abuse of childhood and its adequate protection certainly does not regard only the (Catholic) Church, but also many other institutions and it is right that these take the necessary decisions as well," he said.
Lombardi said the Church was aware of its educational responsibilities to youth and intended to be "a protagonist in the struggle against paedophilia," which he said was on the rise worldwide.
ABUSE DATING BACK TO THE 1940s
The Los Angeles decision involved 508 plaintiffs in cases dating back to the 1940s. The pre-trial settlement means Cardinal Roger Mahony will not have to testify in court.
The settlement reached on Saturday after 4 1/2 years of negotiations came before the first trial was due to begin on Monday. Victims' attorneys would have called Mahony to testify about the church hierarchy's protection of abusive priests.
The Los Angeles settlement dwarfs other landmark payouts. The Archdiocese of Boston, where the U.S. scandal erupted in 2002, reached a 2003 deal for 550 people worth $85 million.
Boston's archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Law, was forced to resign in disgrace in December 2002.
Leaders of the U.S. Catholic Church were found to have moved priests who abused minors to new parishes instead of defrocking them or reporting them to authorities.
In his interview with Vatican Radio, Lombardi spoke of the "sacrifices" the settlement would impose on the archdiocese.
The settlement funds will come from the archdiocese selling real estate assets, including the archdiocese's headquarters, insurers and various Catholic religious orders.
Before his election as pope, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger went out on a limb to decry the "filth" in the Church.
Benedict, who was elected in 2005, has taken a tougher stand on sexual abuse in the Church than his predecessor. Last year he disciplined Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the 86-year-old founder of the conservative Legionaries of Christ, who had been accused of sexually abusing boys decades ago.
Who is affiliated with the new "yeshiva" in LA started by Shalom Tendler?
Shalom Tendler is still part of the RCC Bais Din and his new yeshiva for misfits is Bircas Yitzchok.
Who is on staff at Bircas Yitzchok and who is the money behind it?
Can we correctly assume that Aron Tendler is also there in some capacity?
Posted: Tuesday, 17 July 2007 3:34PM
Officials: 4-Year-Old Girl Abducted, Sexually Assaulted
NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Residents are on edge in Boro Park, Brooklyn today after local leaders said a 4-year-old girl was abducted and sexually assaulted there Monday night.
The girl was taken into a vehicle by an unknown suspect at 52nd Street between 19th and 20th Avenues. The suspect, who was wearing a black T-shirt and was driving a black car, took the child to an unknown location where he exposed himself and forcibly touched the victim, police said.
She was found nearly two hours later by an area resident and was taken to the hospital.
Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind is calling on witnesses to contact the 66th Precinct with any information regarding the abduction.
"There is great concern in the community," said Hikind. "We are urging parents and caregivers to be especially alert and vigilant. There are sick predators out there who may be watching our children and waiting for the opportunity when they are unattended."
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does anybody know were kolko was last night?
I don't think it was Kolko because
a)I think he's in Regency Estates
b)I think he only goes for boys.
JMHO
woe is to us that we need the church to tell us what to do.
"Los Angeles is unique," Boucher said. "The enormous number of children who were sodomized and raped and victimized by priests is greater than in any other archdiocese anywhere else in the country."
The California plaintiffs enjoy significant legal advantages over the Boston claimants, according to Stockton attorney Larry Drivon, who, with Boucher, represents about 300 clients in Southern California. Unlike their California counterparts, those seeking redress in Boston were faced with expired statutes of limitations in most cases and a $20,000 limit on suits filed against charitable organizations.
Although the figure is hotly contested by insurance company and church lawyers, Boucher estimates that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the largest diocese in the U.S., has more than $10 billion worth of insurance coverage available from several carriers to pay claims for the decades in which the abuse is alleged.
YULA has plenty of money, they own the Simon Weisenthal Holocaust Museum.
LVF, Kolko is down on the farm with all the cute little young animals about to be slaughtered on the alter of rabbinic sexual abuse and "gidolim" (read: fecal matter) cover ups.
its sick out there and getting sicker.
we need some volunteer UOJ deputies to stand outside the old glatt-a-la-fart in full UOJ regalia and monitor that no underage boys even get close to the fressfest goin on there. Wonder how lean dave olefska is managing in the 9 days . a siyum a day keeps the wife away.
Jeffrey Herman Esq. wrote: "Does anyone know when Yudi Kolko received his smicha, from which Rabbi and from which Yeshiva it was?
My office is now investigating the possibility of bringing a lawsuit against this Rav and the Yeshiva for gross and wilfull negligence."
Just as the Roman catholic Church is taking "responsibility" for their "priestly" problem, the Orthodox rabbinical organizations, such as Torah Umesorah, Agudath Israel of America, the abbinical Council of America, the OU - Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, etc. must all be held legally and financially responsible for any and all pedophile and sexually molesting rabbi's within the Jewish community.
Can UOJ clarify his attack on Sholom Tendler. Is the accusation that he was a facilitator/intimidator of witnesses and victims, such as the Catholic Church (which in itself is surely reprehensible if ever proven accurate); or is he intimating direct improper actions by Sholom Tendler as well?
Simply bunching together anyone named Tendler is a dangerous precedent likely to explode in UOJ's face. There remain some excellent Rabbis carrying that family name completely unaffiliated with the actions of Aron and Mordechai Tendler, both in deed and blood line. Be precise in your accusations or risk loss of credibility.
Anyone who is fed up with stonewalling by Charlie Hynes should contact my office.
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/nye/
Roslynn Mauskopf
147 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(718)254-7000
Branch office
610 Federal Plaza
Central Islip, NY 11722-4454
(631)715-7900
Roslynn R. Mauskopf was appointed on September 3, 2002 as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. In that capacity, she is responsible for overseeing all federal criminal and civil cases in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, as well as Nassau and Suffolk Counties. She supervises a staff of approximately 180 attorneys and over 140 support personnel.
From October 6, 1995 to August 30, 2002, Ms. Mauskopf served as New York State Inspector General. Appointed by Governor George E. Pataki, Ms. Mauskopf directed the statewide, independent office responsible for investigating allegations of corruption, fraud, criminal activity, conflicts of interest and abuse in Executive Branch agencies. Under Ms. Mauskopf's leadership, teams of investigators and attorneys worked proactively, often with state, local and federal law enforcement agencies and prosecutors, on thousands of complaints involving bribery, theft, procurement and other types of fraud against the government, narcotics, excessive use of force, ethics violations, and other forms of corruption. Cases have resulted in criminal prosecution, disciplinary action, ethics sanctions, and recommendations for systemic reform that have improved the efficiency and accountability of state agencies.
On January 23, 1999, Governor Pataki appointed Inspector General Mauskopf as Chair of the Governor's Moreland Act Commission on New York City Schools, charged with examining the operations and fiscal affairs of the New York City Board of Education and the New York City School Construction Authority. The Commission uncovered systemic abuses in the manner in which the Board reports student attendance and enrollment by including on active student rosters children that have died, moved out of the city or country, attend private or parochial school, or are chronic truants. With respect to school construction, the Commission focused on mismanagement and violations of law in capital planning and construction, and the causes of significant cost overruns and scheduling delays, dilapidated facilities, hazardous safety violations, and other issues that affect the effective administration of the City's multi-billion-dollar capital construction program.
From 1982 to 1995, Ms. Mauskopf served as an Assistant District Attorney in the New York County District Attorney's Office, first in the Trial Division and then in the Investigation Division. She handled hundreds of violent crimes and white-collar cases, including the investigation of organized crime's control of trucking in the New York City garment industry, and the largest theft of client funds by an attorney in U.S. history. Ms. Mauskopf was named Deputy Chief of the Special Prosecutions Bureau in 1992 where she supervised and trained prosecutors on financial crimes, investigative techniques, grand jury practice and trial skills. In 1993, she became Chief of the Frauds Bureau, leading the investigation and prosecution of complex white-collar offenses including bank, insurance and securities fraud, sophisticated larcenies, political corruption, organized crime, tax fraud, and cybercrime.
A native of Washington, D.C., Ms. Mauskopf graduated from Brandeis University in 1979, and earned her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1982. Ms. Mauskopf is active in various professional organizations, and has lectured on criminal justice topics at law schools and colleges, and to many law enforcement and community groups. The daughter of two holocaust survivors, Ms. Mauskopf is dedicated to maintaining the legacy of holocaust remembrance and has been active in support of survivors and their heritage.
Margo got nailed by the DOB for an elevator violation a month ago at YTT. Since he already stiffed the manufacturer and got sued, it's not likely they are going to service it.
http://a810-bisweb.nyc.gov/bisweb/ActionViolationDisplayServlet?requestid=3&allbin=3127249&allinquirytype=BXS3OCV3&allboroughname=&allstrt=&allnumbhous=&doblowhseno=&dobhighhseno=&allisn=0001213389
Premises: 555 OCEAN PARKWAY BROOKLYN BIN: 3127249 Block: 5400 Lot: 76
Issue Date: 06/08/2007 Violation Category: V - DOB VIOLATION - ACTIVE
Violation Type: E - ELEVATOR
Violation Number: 9011/202167
Speaking of Glatt a la Farte, why did the Goldbergs sell Top of the World?
Margo's not the only bum who stiffs his creditors.
The Nazareth District Court yesterday sentenced the former director of the Prime Minister's Office in the North, Eli Dahan, to 4.5 years in prison. The court found Dahan guilty of fraud, receiving illicit funds and money laundering of some NIS 25 million. According to the indictment against Dahan, he had received loans by pretending that he was acting in official capacity as a government official. Dahan's illegal activity was exposed after his creditors complained over unpaid loans.
Sexual assault victims intend to hold a demonstration tomorrow outside the Knesset to protest the possible nomination of MK Haim Ramon to a ministerial position. Ramon resigned his position as justice minister in the summer of 2006, following his indictment for kissing a soldier working in the Prime Minister's Office against her will. He was found guilty of indecent behavior last January. "Men who see the support Ramon is receiving are taught that sexual assault is condonable, and even rewarded," one of the activists said. If Ramon is appointed a minister, the activists intend to petition High Court of Justice.
Simply bunching together anyone named Tendler is a dangerous precedent likely to explode in UOJ's face. There remain some excellent Rabbis carrying that family name completely unaffiliated with the actions of Aron and Mordechai Tendler, both in deed and blood line. Be precise in your accusations or risk loss of credibility.
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Shalom Tendler has lost his job at YULA and the Young Israel. I did not mention any other Tendler (besides Aron & Mordecai). The parent body at YULA were outraged enough to destroy his career and toss him out of there after twenty five years. He is now shnorring on the street corners of L.A. to raise money for his few students at the ninth grade level. I believe him to be a despicable person not fitting to be a rabbi.
The accusations against him should cause pause to any thinking parent that is considering trusting him with the care of their children.
I choose not to go into any further details "at this time". Let the lawyers sort it out.
If I were Margo, I would take the building code seriously.
Police questioned Ra'anana Deputy Mayor Uzi Cohen yesterday on suspicion of accepting bribes, fraud and breach of trust. The Likud politician apparently built extensions to his home without acquiring permits while a member of the municipal planning committee. He is also suspected of failing to pay property taxes or fees for years and if issuing business permits as favors. Last November, fraud squad officers raided Cohen's offices in Ra'anana and confiscated files.
This is gevaldig!
Gov't trying to delay law protecting minors from sex offenders
By Ruth Sinai, Haaretz Correspondent
Haaretz - July 18, 2007
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/883371.html
The government has asked the Knesset to postpone for a year implementation of a law aimed at protecting minors from sex offenders. As a result, hundreds of people who sexually assaulted minors are liable to be walking around without supervision.
The Knesset is due to vote on the government's proposal in a first reading today, and finish approving the deferral before it recesses next week.
The effort to subject sex offenders to supervision began nine years ago, when Yitzhak Kadman, head of the Council for the Welfare of the Child, first proposed the law. He explained that about 50 percent of sexual assault victims are minors.
The Knesset finally enacted the law in December 2005, and it was slated to be implemented in stages, starting in January 2006. However, the government was not yet ready to apply the law, so implementation of the first phase was postponed to October 1, 2006.
In that phase, some 140 ex-convicts were placed under supervision after being released. Those considered minimally dangerous merely had to provide a supervisor with certain details, such as their address and place of work, and inform him of any changes. More dangerous offenders were required to report to the supervisor periodically, with the most dangerous having to report every day. They were also barred from places likely to tempt them to recidivism, and forbidden to possess pornographic material or consume alcohol.
The next phase - which would expand the supervision program to anyone who assaulted a minor, including people who have been convicted but not yet sentenced - was supposed to begin this coming October 1. But the Ministry of Labor and Social Services, which is supposed to provide assessments of offenders' risk level in pre-sentencing hearings, has been unable to find enough qualified evaluators for the task, given the stringent training and experience requirements laid down in the regulations.
"If we don't have suitable evaluators, we are liable to release dangerous criminals, or to imprison offenders who could be treated in outpatient centers," explained Menachem Vagshel, the ministry's deputy director general.
Because it was unable to find trained evaluators, the ministry decided to train people itself. But that will take time, he said, and many will first need to acquire experience even after they are trained.
Another reason for the move to delay implementation, which is supported by the Health and Public Security ministries as well, is that the target population is larger than the 700 offenders that were forecast when the law was enacted. Therefore, more manpower than originally predicted is needed.
Kadman, who has been feverishly lobbying MKs to oppose the delay, retorted that the relevant ministries had almost two years to prepare for the expanded implementation. "This is a decline to new moral lows," he said. "The government, in its hardheartedness, is abandoning all our children to horrible assaults by sex offenders for another year."
I'm amused at the people trying to play gotcha with UOJ. I'm a victim of the Tendlers and YULA. One phone call to a knowledgable person in L.A. will verify "again" that UOJ gets it right before he goes public.
"UOJ gets it right before he goes public."
Tell us something we don't know.
What motive would the RCC have in protecting the Tendlers? Especially for the more yeshivish RCC members, the Tendlers are not exactly on the A list in the yeshiva world.
Is it because of the chosid-shoyte attitude about "chilul Hashem" or is there something in it for them?
What motive would the RCC have in protecting the Tendlers?
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It's called criminal behavior when you cover for criminals.
According to an FBI press release, this putz also goes by the name "Leo Schwartz". It's not clear which name is the alias. He lives on Coleman St in Marine Park near the shul at Quentin & East 37 St. Does anyone know if he davens there?
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/06/18/ap3832257.html
A New York man was sentenced to two years in prison Monday for his role in an investment scheme that cost 275 victims more than $3.6 million, federal authorities said.
Shawn F. Haber, 34, of Brooklyn also was ordered to pay $200,000 of restitution.
Haber pleaded guilty last year to one count of conspiracy to commit mail and securities fraud.
Authorities say that from 2001 to 2004, Haber and several co-conspirators falsely represented to their victims through "cold calls" that they worked for Blue Square Management, a venture capital firm that sold securities and specialized in underwriting initial public offerings. In reality, Blue Square was a fraudulent entity with no legitimate operations, authorities said.
Haber and the other participants in the conspiracy told the potential investors that they could purchase securities in Cash Money Lending Corp., another fictitious company.
The potential investors were told that CMLC had a lucrative business managing thousands of ATMs nationwide and that an initial public offering for CMLC or a buyout of the company was upcoming in the near future. The defendants allegedly told the investors that they would see significant profits from the IPO or buyout.
"It's called criminal behavior when you cover for criminals."
Farshtayt zich, but most criminals have a motive that police try to determine.
http://www.northcountrygazette.org/news/2007/06/19/prosecutors_aid/
I love my Irish whiskey. That's why I hire drunks who get arrested for DWI.
Farshtayt zich, but most criminals have a motive that police try to determine.
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Call Avraham Union; I understand he was the only one that insisted both Tendlers stay, and he's still covering for Shalom.
There are some respectable rabbonim on the vaad; they obviously had no say on this issue.
http://www.brooklyneagle.com/categories/category.php?category_id=4&id=14118
This is geferlach! The City has put all records of landlord violations and court action by the Housing Dept online.
According to Luke Ford, the following rabbis were also aware of Tendler misbehavior:
Rabbi Gershon Bess, Rabbi Nachum Sauer and Rabbi Fassman.
According to Luke Ford, the following rabbis were also aware of Tendler misbehavior:
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Luke may have information that I'm not aware of.
http://www.rabbis.org/news/article.cfm?id=100889
Rabbi Avrohom Union
Dayan and Menahel, Beth Din of the Rabbinical Council of California
Rabbi Avrohom Union is the Dayan and Menahel of the Beth Din of the Rabbinical Council of California. He grew up in North Miami Beach, Florida, and attended the Hebrew Academy in Miami Beach. Upon graduation, he went to the Mesivta of Greater Miami and then to Telshe Yeshiva of Chicago. This was followed by eight years in Bais Hatalmud in Jerusalem, four of them in Kollel.
He received his semicha from the Israeli Rabbinate and later received the dayanut qualification of Yadin Yadin from HaGaon Rav Dov Schwartzman. He did undergraduate studies at the University of South Africa and completed his Masters in Psychology at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles. Rabbi Union felt that a degree in psychology would provide him with additional expertise and insight in his pastoral and community work.
Rabbi Union was rabbi of the Constantia Hebrew Congregation in Cape Town, South Africa, where he also served as a Dayan for the Cape Beis Bin. In the United States, he was the Rabbi of Young Israel of Beverly Hills. He has given many adult education classes for various organizations over the years, and currently serves on the faculty of the LA branch of Maalot School for Women.
Helping people and helping them live Jewishly is Rabbi Union’s favorite aspect of being a rabbi. He takes pride in raising a family of committed members of Klal Yisrael, promoting unity in the local orthodox Rabbinate, and building a Vaad as a platform for serving the community.
Prior to his first Yom Kippur in Cape Town, he met with the board to review the service and the local customs. He asked them why they blow the shofar after Maariv instead of after Neila, contrary to the established minhag. They told him that as soon as the shofar is blown everybody will run for the doors. “Let’s see” he replied. That Yom Kippur, he turned to his congregants as Neila ended and told them what the board said. “They think you are going to run. They think you will have had enough. But I think that after such an uplifting and meaningful Yom Kippur, you will want to do the right thing and remain for Maariv after the shofar. I believe in you”. With that he gave the signal to blow the shofar, the doors remained as they were, and his president chuckled that the Rabbi had won this round.
His advice to younger rabbis who are at the start of their rabbinic career is; treat your congregants with dignity and genuine ahavas yisrael and they will respect you even if you are demanding.
Rabbi Union is the English editor of Mashiv B’halacha, a publication of the Mechon L’Horaah. He is involved with Nefesh, the organization of Orthodox mental health professionals, and he also works with his wife Tova, in training kallah teachers. He is currently sits on the Halachic Advisory Board of Aleinu Family Resource Center (orthodox wing of the Jewish family services in Los Angeles).
Rabbi Union is married to Tova (nee Reis) who is a seventh grade morah for Hillel Hebrew academy in Beverly Hills. They have 9 beautiful children and seven grandchildren.
http://www.rickross.com/reference/kabbalah/kabbalah57.html
According to this article, Rabbi Union had been criticizing the Bergs and their Kabbalah Center but quickly shut up after a series of mafia style retaliatory acts against people, including himself, when a sheep's head was left at his door.
"Rabbi Avrohom Union is director of the Rabbinical Council of California, where he has been a rabbinic administrator since 1988. He has taught Jewish law and history at Bais Yaakov High School for 15 years. Rabbi Union is the head of Maalot’s Judaic Studies department. (B.A. Psychology, University of South Africa; M.A. Psychology, Pepperdine University, CA. Rabbinic ordination from Chief Rabbinate of Israel)"
http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=15690
2006-04-07
Letters
Bigamist vs. Agunah
It is with horror that I read the article, “The ‘Bigamist’ Versus the ‘Agunah’ (March 24), by Amy Klein. Given Rabbi [Avrohom] Union’s devastating error, which he claims was unintentional, it is clear that this head of the beit din should resign immediately. Imagine if he committed the same error regarding kashrut. There is not a person, rabbi or otherwise, who would tolerate his remaining in so powerful a position. If his creating yet another agunah happened “by accident,” as Rabbi Union claims, what is to prevent it from happening again in the future? A rabbi unable to foresee and take responsibility for his actions should not be the head of a beit din.
Clara F. Zilberstein
Toronto, Ontario
On one of the blogs, a former Touro professor, nicknamed Neandershort, says that some yeshivos will only allow transcripts to be sent to Touro - not any secular school.
Lawrence Reisman chimes in:
"several years ago, Prospect Park Yeshiva was hit with a court injunction ordering them to send transcripts to colleges. Interesting story about what goes around comes around, the RW yeshivas started this transcript shtuss 20-30 years ago. In the 1980s, Maimonides school in Boston copied it in reverse, when they refused to cooperate with "black hat" yeshivas and seminiaries in Israel by sending them transcripts."
"Rabbi Union felt that a degree in psychology would provide him with additional expertise and insight in his pastoral and community work."
Isn't R' Dov Schwartzman from Lakewood East?
The rosh yeshiva there is a gaon in learning but his yeshiva has been a revolving door for losers. They were the butt of most jokes in Lakewood proper.
Rabbi Union's bio seemingly has no indication of being connected with the Tendlers in any way. I find it puzzling that he would go to bat for them.
Does the oylam on the West Coast have bungalow colonies to go to? I can't imagine how anyone could live without them.
Ynet reports:
Justice Ministry uncovers rabbinical ordination fraud
Ministry considering indicting senior member of rabbinate, police, military, prison service officers in wide-ranging ordinations fraud
The Jerusalem district prosecutor's office announced Wednesday that it was ready to issue indictments indict in what has been called the "rabbis' case".
"The Justice Ministry along with the National Fraud Unit (NFU), Military Police and the Police Investigation Unit (PIU), has conducted a comprehensive, complex, four-year investigation into the fraudulent ordination of military and police personnel as rabbis," a statement by the ministry said.
Since 1999, and as part of the Ministry of Education's wage agreement with the Teacher's Association, the ministry has acknowledged "advanced religious studies" accompanied by a rabbi's certificate of ordination as grounds for additional pay benefits.
Various educational facilities aimed at training armed forces personnel as rabbis were soon established. Student at these schools were ordained by the Chief Rabbinate, making them eligible for pay benefits.
"Following a lead given to the ministry, the Department of Financial Crime in the NFU began investigating senior members at the rabbinate as well as those attending the schools providing rabbinical certifications," said the statement.
"The evidence gathered revealed that some of the suspects formed 'colleges' where armed forces personnel attended religious studies classes… with the cooperation of the Chief Rabbinate's director of ordinations, the suspects received false documents stating they graduated a five-year program in a yeshiva licensed to ordain rabbis.
"These documents were presented to their superiors (in the armed forces), making them eligible for benefits reaching hundreds of millions of shekels."
Hundreds of millions in damages
Said benefits range from $500-$1,000 a month, dating back to 2001. The Justice Ministry estimated the monetary damage to the State in millions, adding that "had this continued, the damage could have gone well into the billions."
All payments were ceased and the ministry is looking into demanding the funds be returned retroactively.
The ministry's statement further revealed that several senior member of the Chief Rabbinate were questioned under advisement, including Meir Rosenthal, head of Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger's office, Yitzhak Ohana, head of Rabbi Israel Meir Lau's office and former director of ordinations at the Chief Rabbinate, former chief police Rabbi Yaacob Gross and deputy chief police Rabbi Aharon Gutsinder.
Other suspects include the owners of the three colleges providing false certifications.
Some 1,500 policemen, military officers and Israel Prison Service officers were questioned as well.
The case, said the Justice Ministry, is assumed to yield dozens of indictments and over a 100 disciplinary complaints against those implicated in the case.
The PIU is considering filing criminal charges against 80 police officers and disciplinary complaints against an additional 120.
Recommendations regarding suspects in the rabbinate and the regular army are to be made by the military's Judge Advocate General.
"Rabbi Union is the English editor of Mashiv B’halacha"
No comment, as I might be able to get the contract to publish them or at least get advertising dollars from them in the form of blog ad banners.
Justice Ministry uncovers rabbinical ordination fraud
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Is there anything at all left in Orthodox Judaism that is not tainted with fraud, corruption, thievery, lying, coverups, bogus kashruth? ANYTHING?
http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/plan/land_housing.shtml
UOJ turning YTT into condos is part of the Mayor's "Plan NYC 2030"
The "Rabbanut" was always a bastion of corruption, like "big government" always is. It's the Agudah and others that have been slipping down the slippery slope lately.
UOJ: I too am a victim of YULA and both Tendlers. Do you advise that I contact Mr. Herman or Ray Boucher in Los Angeles?
In a certain neighborhood I won't name for the time being, there is a rabbi who was turfed out of a major organization for covering up for an infamous molester.
This rabbi is the darling of the neighborhood, giving shiurim in shuls and homes.
He is spoken of with tremendous admiration and described as being a very choshuv person at his former organization, as if he was discharged with honors.
It's hard for me to handle how people are so oblivious.
Victim,
I do not know Mr. Boucher; his reputation is excellent and his huge victory against the Archdiocese is unprecedented.
I do know Jeff Herman. Besides being an excellent attorney with vast experience in the area of clergy sexual abuse, he is a wonderful human being and a very caring and proud Jew.
I would call Jeff first. Your identity is protected under the privilege.
Lakewood East is R" Dov Schwartzman's son; R" Yakov E. Schwartzman.
Jeff Herman has said publicly that he looks into the eyes of the victims, feels their pain and is compelled by his obligations as a Jew to do something about it.
I don't believe that is hypey lawyer-speak. I believe he is genuine.
Jeff Herman has said publicly that he looks into the eyes of the victims, feels their pain and is compelled by his obligations as a Jew to do something about it.
I don't believe that is hyped lawyer-speak. I believe he is genuine.
-----
Amen!
PLEASE CALL THE D.A.'S OFFICE (718-250-2000) TO LET OFFICIALS KNOW THAT WE WANT JUSTICE FOR MONDROWITZ'S VICTIMS, AND THAT OUR COMMUNITY WILL NO LONGER TOLERATE COVERUPS OR THE POLITICAL OFFICIALS WHO PARTICIPATE IN THEM. THE HEAD OF THE SEX CRIMES UNIT IS MS. RHONNIE JAUS, ESQ. LET HER KNOW THAT SHE AND HER BOSS WILL BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE IF THEY DO NOT PRESS FOR THE EXTRADITION OF THE INDICTED CRIMINAL AVROHOM MONDROWITZ.
URGE EVERYONE YOU KNOW TO DO THE SAME; URGE RABBIS TO SPEAK OUT PUBLICLY FOR THE NEED TO SEEK JUSTICE IN THIS CASE AND TO ENCOURAGE THE D.A. TO DO HIS JOB. (REMEMBER, IF THEY WILL NOT DO THIS, THEY CANNOT SERIOUSLY CLAIM TO CARE ABOUT THE SAFETY OF OUR CHILDREN.)
IF YOU PREFER TO COMMUNICATE IN WRITING, WRITE TO: KINGS COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY'S OFFICE, SEX ABUSE AND SPECIAL VICTIMS BUREAU, 350 JAY STREET, BROOKLYN, NY 11201. REFER TO THE CASE AS STATE V. MONDROWITZ, INDICTMENT NO. 7693/84. AND YOU SHOULD SEND A COPY TO MICHAEL LESHER, ESQ., 22 LEITCH PLACE, PASSAIC, NJ 07055, WHO REPRESENTS SIX OF MONDROWITZ'S VICTIMS AND IS CLOSELY INVOLVED IN THE COLMER INVESTIGATION AS WELL.
DO IT TODAY, TOMORROW CAN'T WAIT. YOUR CHILD'S LIFE IS HANGING IN THE BALANCE!
Steve---A great friend of the blog, furnished us with these e-mail addresses. Kindly e-mail them as well!
Dov Hikind: hikindd@assembly.state.ny.us
Charles Schumer:
Go to the following website:
http://www.senate.gov/~schumer/SchumerWebsite/contact/webform.cfm
Hillary Clinton:
Go to the following website:
http://www.senate.gov/~clinton/email_form.html
Elliot Spitzer:
Go to the following website:
http://161.11.121.121/govemail
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Please, if everybody reading this blog, made just one phone call, or sent an e-mail, we might get this monster to justice, lets all do the right thing and demand an answer as to why the bum charlie hynes is silent on this matter, he should not be able to have a good nights sleep while his victims of injustice have none.
Does anyone know whats happening with colmors extradition?
Jeff Herman shlita has a smach from R' Moishe Feinstein zl. R' Moishe was actually chozer on his teshuva for Hatzola. He initially said that goyishe drivers should be used on Shabbos. He later took back the psak saying that a Yid will do whatever it takes to save a neshoma, eg. driving on the sidewalk when traffic is stopped dead. That a Yid will always find a way when stam an ambulance driver won't.
We Jews think we know it all. Look at what some wonderful people are doing to protect their children.
childhelp.com
Have Charlie Hynes's people made any comments to anyone calling about Mondrowitz besides just taking down the complaints like a bunch of goylems?
Colmer will be back in the U.S.A. shortly!
"Colmer will be back in the U.S.A. shortly!"
Does the US Marshall's Service have orders to keep UOJ updated every step of the way or did that call come directly from the red phone on Attorney General Alberto's desk?
This is hugely embarrassing for my boss Mr. Hynes that we have to get all of our news on this page.
UOJ and Jeff Herman acted so that the hatzolah would not have to come l'Yehudim mimakom acheir.
I've been trying to contact the Justice Dept. I have a lot of information about trans-Atlantic weather patterns for when they plan on flying Colmer back. I'm just trying to help.
I called the DA several times, and have yet to receive an answer, all they tell me is that they will give it over to the proper authorities.
Everyone keep calling the D.A.'s office...slam away at your e-mails as well. EVERY SINGLE VOICE COUNTS! THEY ARE PAYING ATTENTION!
Actually, the President & VP Dick Cheney had an arm wrestling match to see who got the honors to inform UOJ.
Actually, the President & VP Dick Cheney had an arm wrestling match
----------
Nu...Who won?
uoj
how do you know colmer will be back in the usa shortly?
do you have any inside info?
Rabbi Sholom Tendler a "vicious sub-human"?...... Come now,you know better than that.I've lived in L.A. more than half my life.I've known Rabbi Sholom Tendler for 25 years and my kids include former YULA students. He may have his detractors (any rabbi who doesn't hasn't taken many stands or accomplished much),but "vicious sub-human" is beyond the pale and makes one wonder what else you've said about other communities that should be taken with a grain of salt. Continue to fight the good fight;there are enough of them around.But if you lose credibility,the issues you bring up may be viewed the same way,and we cannot afford to let that happen either.
Fishman, if you're trying to help, you're a little late.
This is one of the e-mails I sent today to our elected officials.
-----------------------------------
Please try to help the jewish community get the justice it deserves.
In 1984 there was an indictment issued in the STATE VS MONDROWITZ no.7693/84, and the brooklyn DA seems to have no interest in pursuing this case for reasons unknown, the israeli autorities say that all they need is a phone call from the DA's office and they will have him extradited from jerusalem.
please help us in this fight against this injustice that this mans victims are suffering for so many years.
Respectfully yours,
So what is really happening on this new PETA video taken at Rubashkin's Gordon, Nebraska plant? I've spent the last few days doing some legwork, including a long interview with the OU's Rabbi Menachem Genack, the OU's head of shechita Rabbi Seth Mandel, Dr. Temple Grandin, the USDA and other insiders, and here's what seems to be the inside scoop.
Rabbi Genack was unable to tell me why the non-Jewish worker probed inside the neck of the animal after shechita. He referred me to Rabbi Seth Mandel, assuring me that Rabbi Mandel "speaks for the OU."
Rabbi Mandel told me the following:
The probing is done to separate the trachea from the esophagus.
It is done at the request of the USDA.
It is not done as part of the kosher slaughter process and is not a second cut.
It is not done at the OU's request.
It is not done at Rubashkin's request.
It is completely humane.
The animals feel no pain.
The animals are not conscious.
When I challenged him about this, he said there are "conflicting" studies. I pointed out that experts are unanimous in agreeing these particular animals are still conscious. He then said, if PETA were "serious" about protecting animals, they would "pay for a study" to show when animals become unconscious. That they have not is a sign that PETA's "agenda" is "anti-shechita."
I pointed out that any such study would involve killing animals, and PETA will not do this.
Rabbi Mandel then said that PETA "goes after" shechita.
I pointed out the dozens of other campaigns PETA has run that have nothing to do with shechita or Judaism.
He then asked why PETA was focusing on Rubashkin. Doesn't this focus prove an anti-shechita bais?
I told him that, after the Postville scandal, what would you expect PETA to do? Stop looking? Close their eyes?
Rabbi Mandel insisted the neck incision is probed with an "instrument." "It is not a meat hook! It is not a meat hook!" Rabbi Mandel said.
The ear tags are most likely cut off by removing the button that holds it on, not by cutting the ear.
Rabbi Mandel spoke extensively about PETA's "agenda."
Rabbi Mandel makes monthly "surprise inspections" of the Gordon plant.
The head of the shochtim (rosh hashochtim) is an employee of Agriprocessors and is paid by Rubashkin, not the OU.
Rabbi Mandel refused to give me his name without first getting permission from Rubashkin.
The USDA's FSIS chief spokesman Steven Cohen, when told that the OU claims this procedure is mandated by the USDA and approved by the USDA, told me that "the USDA does not interfere in ritual slaughter." He was unaware of this particular procedure and believed it to be part of the shechita process.
Dr. Temple Grandin told me that there is no such USDA-mandated procedure and that she has never seen anything like it done at any other kosher plant. She also insists the "instrument" used to probe the neck is a small meat hook. "It should be in the boning room used to move pieces of meat. It should not be on the kill floor."
She tells me the animals would feel pain and that "you should not even put a pencil in there" until the animal is insensate.
Another USDA and kosher slaughter insider told me there is a mandated USDA procedure called Weasand, which is the tying of the esophagus to prevent the stomach contents from coming up. He also said the "instrument" looks like a hook.
So what is happening at Agriprocessors Gordon plant?
In October of 2003 a meeting was held in the USDA between Agudath Israel of America, rabbis from various kosher supervising agencies and senior USDA officials including, according to some reports given me, Ann Veneman, the then-Secretary of Agriculture. The rabbis complained about the wording of a new USDA Humane Slaughter directive that outlawed "sawing." They were afraid USDA inspectors would stop slaughter lines because they would mistakenly view a shechita cut as "sawing."
The outcome of that meeting was a new directive (some say the wording of this new directive came from Nathan Lewin, Rubashkin's attorney and a Agudah operative) that prevented line inspectors from stopping ritual slaughter lines without first gaining approval of a regional USDA office. This was understood by some inspectors to mean, "Keep your hands off the rabbis and let them do whatever they want."
Indeed, one can see a USDA inspector in the new PETA Rubashkin video. He does not stop the line.
Whatever Rubashkin's employees are doing with that meat hook, US law prohibits doing any butchering or preparatory work on an animal until it is dead. The definition of death is the legal definition, not the halakhic definition some use that, once the knife begins to cut the animal is dead.
So what is really going on with that meat hook? Whatever it is, it is illegal and it must be immediately stopped.
Anon 3:45,
Perhaps you missed this! Oh BTW, I'm assuming your kids were not affected.
By Caroline Konrad
THE MALIGNANT PERSONALITY:
These people are mentally ill and extremely dangerous! The following precautions will help to protect you from the destructive acts of which they are capable.
First, to recognize them, keep the following guidelines in mind.
(1) They are habitual liars. They seem incapable of either knowing or telling the truth about anything.
(2) They are egotistical to the point of narcissism. They really believe they are set apart from the rest of humanity by some special grace.
(3) They scapegoat; they are incapable of either having the insight or willingness to accept responsibility for anything they do. Whatever the problem, it is always someone else's fault.
(4) They are remorselessly vindictive when thwarted or exposed.
(5) Genuine religious, moral, or other values play no part in their lives. They have no empathy for others. Under older psychological terminology, they fall into the category of psychopath or sociopath, but unlike the typical psychopath, their behavior is masked by a superficial social facade.
If you have come into conflict with such a person or persons, do the following immediately!
Notify your friends and relatives of what has happened.
Do not be vague. Name names, and specify dates and circumstances. Identify witnesses if possible and provide supporting documentation if any is available.
Instruct friends to take such an incident to the newspapers and other media.
PsychopathyFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Psychopathy is currently defined in psychiatry and clinical psychology as a condition characterized by lack of empathy [1] [2] or conscience, and poor impulse control [3] [4] or manipulative behaviors.[5] It is a term derived from the Greek psyche (soul, breath hence mind) and pathos (to suffer), and was once used to denote any form of mental illness, often being confused with psychosis.
Though in widespread use, psychopathy has no precise equivalent[6] in either the DSM-IV-TR, where it is most strongly correlated with antisocial personality disorder, or the ICD-10, where it is correlated with dissocial personality disorder. Some experts are working toward listing psychopathy as a unique disorder. However, only a minority of diagnosable psychopaths are violent offenders [7] [8].
The manipulative skills of some of the others are valued for providing audacious leadership [9]. Some have argued that psychopathy is adaptive in a highly competitive environment, because it gets results for both the individual and the corporations [10] they represent [11]. However, these individuals will often cause long-term harm, both to their co-workers and the organization as a whole, due their manipulative, deceitful, abusive, and often fraudulent behaviour [12].
In current clinical use, psychopathy is most commonly diagnosed using the checklist devised by Emeritus Professor Robert Hare. He describes psychopaths as "intraspecies predators [13] [14] who use charm, manipulation, intimidation, and violence [15] [16] [17] to control others and to satisfy their own selfish needs. Lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse" [18]. "What is missing, in other words, are the very qualities that allow a human being to live in social harmony."[19
THE PSYCHOPATH - The Mask of Sanity
Special Research Project of the Quantum Future Group
Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.
And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.
Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.
You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.
In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.
You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered.
How will you live your life?
What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)?
The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people - whether they have a conscience or not - favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent people and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites. [...]
Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.
Crazy and frightening - and real, in about 4 percent of the population....
The prevalence rate for anorexic eating disorders is estimated a 3.43 percent, deemed to be nearly epidemic, and yet this figure is a fraction lower than the rate for antisocial personality. The high-profile disorders classed as schizophrenia occur in only about 1 percent of [the population] - a mere quarter of the rate of antisocial personality - and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the rate of colon cancer in the United States, considered "alarmingly high," is about 40 per 100,000 - one hundred times lower than the rate of antisocial personality.
The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.
Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psychopathy - murderers, serial killers, mass murderers - people who have conspicuously broken the law many times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death by our legal system.
We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger number of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system provides little defense.
Most of us would not imagine any correspondence between conceiving an ethnic genocide and, say, guiltlessly lying to one's boss about a coworker. But the psychological correspondence is not only there; it is chilling. Simple and profound, the link is the absence of the inner mechanism that beats up on us, emotionally speaking, when we make a choice we view as immoral, unethical, neglectful, or selfish.
Most of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person.
Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers.
The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender.
What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron - or what makes the difference betwen an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer - is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity.
What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions. [Martha Stout, Ph.D., The Sociopath Next Door] (highly recommended)
For those of you who are seeking understanding of psychopathy, Hervey Cleckley's book The Mask of Sanity, the absolutely essential study of the psychopath who is not necessarily of the criminal type. This book is no longer available. We have it scanned and our team of researchers spent two weeks going over the text carefully to eliminate text conversion errors. You may download the entire book FREE as a PDF from the link at left, top. (Read A Sample Chapter of The Mask of Sanity)
"Likeable," "Charming," "Intelligent," "Alert," "Impressive," "Confidence-inspiring," and "A great success with the ladies": These are the sorts of descriptions repeatedly used by Cleckley in his famous case-studies of psychopaths. They are also, of course, "irresponsible," "self-destructive," and the like. These descriptions highlight the great frustrations and puzzles that surround the study of psychopathy.
Psychopaths seem to have in abundance the very traits most desired by normal persons. The untroubled self-confidence of the psychopath seems almost like an impossible dream and is generally what "normal" people seek to acquire when they attend assertiveness training classes. In many instances, the magnetic attraction of the psychopath for members of the opposite sex seems almost supernatural.
Cleckley's seminal hypothesis concerning the psychopath is that he suffers from a very real mental illness indeed: a profound and incurable affective deficit. If he really feels anything at all, they are emotions of only the shallowest kind. He does bizarre and self-destructive things because consequences that would fill the ordinary man with shame, self-loathing, and embarrassment simply do not affect the psychopath at all. What to others would be a disaster is to him merely a fleeting inconvenience.
Cleckley also gives grounds for the view that psychopathy is quite common in the community at large. He has collected some cases of psychopaths who generally function normally in the community as businessmen, doctors, and even psychiatrists. Some researchers see criminal psychopathy - often referred to as anti-social personality disorder - as an extreme of a "normal" personality dimension (or dimensions).
We would characterize criminal psychopaths as "unsuccessful psychopaths." The implication, of course, is that many psychopaths may exist in society who cope better than do those who come to the attention of the judicial and welfare systems.
Harrington goes so far as to say that the psychopath is the new man being produced by the evolutionary pressures of modern life. Other researchers criticize this view, pointing out the real disabilities that the clinical psychopath also suffers.
The study of "ambulatory" psychopaths - what we call "The Garden Variety Psychopath" - has, however, hardly begun. Very little is known about subcriminal psychopathy. However, some researchers have begun to seriously consider the idea that it is important to study psychopathy not as an artificial clinical category but as a general personality trait in the community at large. In other words, psychopathy is being recognized as a more or less a different type of human.
One very interesting aspect of the psychopath is his "hidden life" that is sometimes not too well hidden. It seems that the psychopath has a regular need to take a "vacation into filth and degradation" the same way normal people may take a vacation to a resort where they enjoy beautiful surroundings and culture. To get a full feeling for this strange "need" of the psychopath - a need that seems to be evidence that "acting human" is very stressful to the psychopath - read more of The Mask of Sanity, chapters 25 and 26.
Also, read Cleckley's speculations on what was "really wrong" with these people. He comes very close to suggesting that they are human in every respect - but that they lack a soul. This lack of "soul quality" makes them very efficient "machines." They can be brilliant, write scholarly works, imitate the words of emotion, but over time, it becomes clear that their words do not match their actions. They are the type of person who can claim that they are devastated by grief who then attend a party "to forget." The problem is: they really DO forget.
Being very efficient machines, like a computer, they are able to execute very complex routines designed to elicit from others support for what they want. In this way, many psychopaths are able to reach very high positions in life. It is only over time that their associates become aware of the fact that their climb up the ladder of success is predicated on violating the rights of others."Even when they are indifferent to the rights of their associates, they are often able to inspire feelings of trust and confidence."
The psychopath recognizes no flaw in his psyche, no need for change.
Psychopaths In the New Age
At the present time, there is a veritable explosion of reports from our readers about their experiences with individuals they have encountered in the "alternative research" fields, as well as in general interactions of their lives. What is so shocking is the number of such individuals that must exist, based on these reports. This is not just an occasional event, it seems to be almost a pandemic!
Our research team and egroup have been engaged for some time in researching and analyzing these interactions and the characteristics and the dynamics and the personalities. Our research has led us to identify them with "Psychopaths." They can also be Narcissists since Narcissism seems to be merely a "facet" of the psychopath or a "milder" manifestation. You could say that the Narcissist is a "garden variety psychopath" who, because of his or her "social programming," has less likelihood of running afoul of the law. In this way, they are very efficient "survival machines," living out their lives doing untold damage to their families, friends and business associates.
It is only when a person takes a long and careful look at the full-blown psychopath - a sort of exaggerated Narcissist - that they are able to see the caricature of the traits that then make it easier for them to identify the "garden variety" psychopath - and/or the Narcissist.
Our world seems to have been invaded by individuals whose approach to life and love is so drastically different from what has been the established norm for a very long time that we are ill- prepared to deal with their tactics of what Robert Canup calls "plausible lie."
As he demonstrates, this philosophy of the "plausible lie" has overtaken the legal and administrative domains of our world, turning them into machines in which human beings with real emotions are destroyed.
The recent movie, "The Matrix," touched a deep chord in society because it exemplified this mechanistic trap in which so many people find their lives enmeshed, and from which they are unable to extricate themselves because they believe that everyone around them who "looks human" is, in fact, just like them - emotionally, spiritually, and otherwise.
Take, for example, the "legal argument" as explicated by Robert Canup in his work on the "Socially Adept Psychopath." The legal argument seems to be at the foundation of our society. This amounts to little more than con-artistry: the one who is the slickest at using the structure for convincing a group of people of something, is the one who is believed. Because this "legal argument" system has been slowly installed as part of our culture, when it invades our personal lives, we normally do not recognize it immediately.
Human beings have been accustomed to assume that other human beings are - at the very least - trying to "do right" and "be good" and fair and honest. And so, very often, we do not take the time to use due diligence in order to determine if a person who has entered our life is, in fact, a "good person." And when a conflict ensues, we automatically fall into the cultural assumption that in any conflict, one side is partly right one way, and the other is partly right the other, and that we can form opinions about which side is mostly right or wrong. Because of our exposure to the "legal argument" norms, when any dispute arises, we automatically think that the truth will lie somewhere between two extremes. In this case, application of a little mathematical logic to the problem of the legal argument might be helpful.
Let us assume that in a dispute, one side is innocent, honest, and tells the truth. It is obvious that lying does an innocent person no good; what lie can he tell? If he is innocent, the only lie he can tell is to falsely confess "I did it." But lying is nothing but good for the liar. He can declare that "I didn't do it," and accuse another of doing it, all the while the innocent person he has accused is saying "I didn't do it," and is actually telling the truth.
The truth - when twisted by good liars, can always make an innocent person look bad - especially if the innocent person is honest and admits his mistakes.
The basic assumption that the truth lies between the testimony of the two sides always shifts the advantage to the lying side and away from the side telling the truth. Under most circumstances, this shift put together with the fact that the truth is going to also be twisted in such a way as to bring detriment to the innocent person, results in the advantage always resting in the hands of liars - psychopaths. Even the simple act of giving testimony under oath is useless. If a person is a liar, swearing an oath means nothing to that person. However, swearing an oath acts strongly on a serious, truthful witness. Again, the advantage is placed on the side of the liar. [Robert Canup]
This highlights one of the unique things about the psychopath: their seeming inability to conceive of the abstract idea of "the future."
It has often been noted that psychopaths have a distinct advantage over human beings with conscience and feelings because the psychopath does not have conscience and feelings. What seems to be so is that conscience and feelings are related to the abstract concepts of "future" and "others." It is "spatio-temporal." We can feel fear, sympathy, empathy, sadness, and so on because we can IMAGINE in an abstract way, the future based on our own experiences in the past, or even just "concepts of experiences" in myriad variations. We can "predict" how others will react because we are able to "see ourselves" in them even though they are "out there" and the situation is somewhat different externally, though similar in dynamic. In other words, we can not only identify with others spatially - so to say - but also temporally - in time.
The psychopath does not seem to have this capacity.
Oh, indeed, they can imitate feelings, but the only real feelings they seem to have - the thing that drives them and causes them to act out different dramas for effect - is a sort of "predatorial hunger" for what they want. That is to say, they "feel" need/want as love, and not having their needs/wants met is described as "not being loved" by them. What is more, this "need/want" perspective posits that only the "hunger" of the psychopath is valid, and anything and everything "out there," outside of the psychopath, is not real except insofar as it has the capability of being assimilated to the psychopath as a sort of "food." "Can it be used or can it provide something?" is the only issue about which the psychopath seems to be concerned. All else - all activity - is subsumed to this drive.
In short, the psychopath - and the narcissist to a lesser extent - is a predator. If we think about the interactions of predators with their prey in the animal kingdom, we can come to some idea of what is behind the "mask of sanity" of the psychopath. Just as an animal predator will adopt all kinds of stealthy functions in order to stalk their prey, cut them out of the herd, get close to them and reduce their resistance, so does the psychopath construct all kinds of elaborate camoflage composed of words and appearances - lies and manipulations - in order to "assimilate" their prey.
Why abuse settlements vary among the victims
By Jessica Garrison, Times Staff Writer
July 18, 2007
It's not something many survivors of priest sexual abuse talk about, even with each other.
But behind the record $660-million settlement announced this week lurks an uncomfortable reality: Some people's pain is worth more than others'.
Divided by the 508 plaintiffs, the largest settlement in the nationwide abuse scandal amounts to an average of $1.3 million per person. But the actual payouts will fluctuate considerably, with some victims receiving more than $3 million and some as little as $100,000. And that's before lawyers take their cut.
Determining who gets what amount was a wrenching process, one that involved hundreds of victims producing videotapes in which they recounted in detail the abuse and how it shadowed their lives. Some videos included footage from the rectories where the abuse took place.
"My life was filleted out," said Mary Ferrell, 59, a nurse who said she was raped by Monsignor George Scott at Mary Star of the Sea in San Pedro. "You told your story, first to the police and the archdiocese, and then once you got into the process for the lawsuit, more visits to different psychiatrists to verify the trauma."
In the end, some of the payouts had little to do with what victims suffered.
Key to determining the value of the cases was a host of legal factors such as how much notice the church had or should have had that the priest in question was an abuser, and whether there were other legal technicalities, like when the victim came forward and whether he or she had filed a previous lawsuit that was dismissed before the scandal exploded across the country.
Mediators, which in most cases were L.A. County Superior Court Judges Charles W. McCoy and Peter Lichtman, came up with awards working with attorneys on both sides. They took into account what kind of effect the priests' actions had on victims' lives. People who could prove they had attempted suicide or struggled with drug and alcohol abuse sometimes had an easier time showing they had been harmed. Claimants signed off on their settlement; no one was forced to accept an amount he or she did not agree to.
The settlement marks the highest payout on average for victims nationwide. But it also points up that not everyone was treated the same, especially people who first brought cases years ago and settled for much less.
"I was forced to take a $25,000 settlement for four years of rape and molestation," said Mary Grant, who said she was abused in Orange County by Father John Lenihan. Grant is now a regional director for a survivors support group.
Because she had received an earlier settlement in the 1990s, Grant was excluded for legal reasons from being part of the $100-million Orange County settlement reached two years ago in which 90 people got $500,000 to $1.6 million each.
Grant recalled sitting with other survivors in the courthouse the night the payout was announced, knowing she was going to get nothing. "Personally, it was difficult," she said.
This time, Grant did receive a settlement — because the L.A. Archdiocese had been warned about her priest and had not protected her, she said. Like many victims, she did not reveal the sum.
Lawyers said they did the best they could under the imperfect rules of the civil justice system.
"All you can do is measure the legal implications of your case," said Raymond P. Boucher, the lead attorney for the victims. "If you are a victim in 1980 and you are the only victim [of that priest] and there are no witnesses and no documents … then your case, no matter how horrendous or hideous the abuse is, your case is going to be valued differently."
For the lawyers, however, the payout is more certain.
Most of the plaintiffs attorneys will get 40% of what their clients receive plus reimbursement for expenses such as deposition costs and fees from expert witnesses such as psychiatrists who evaluate a victim's story. Overall, it will amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. The biggest share will probably go to Boucher's firm, Kiesel Boucher & Larson, which had more than 200 of the plaintiffs.
Lawyers say 40% is on the high end for personal injury lawsuits, in which an attorney's portion usually ranges from one-third to 45% of an individual's award. But lawyers said these cases were tremendously complex and required them to invest years of work and overhead without seeing a penny.
In 2003, when lawyers learned the cases would go to mediation, some attorneys decided to make videos depicting what happened to their clients. Such videos are often used in settlement negotiations, because they can give a visceral sense of what a jury will see should the case get to trial.
Attorney Katherine K. Freberg said videographers gathered childhood photographs, letters written by priests to her clients as children, confirmation certificates and photographs of gifts the priests had given their victims. She also sent cameras to film the locations where the abuse occurred. These images were interspersed with video of the victims as adults, describing the abuse and what it had done to their lives.
UOJ
Why do you explain in great detail all the other people's misdeeds but for Shalom Tendler you remain silent?
Am I missing something?
Try to be consistent.
Why do you explain in great detail all the other people's misdeeds but for Shalom Tendler you remain silent? Am I missing something?
Try to be consistent.
------------
For every makah there's a different refuah - Every illness requires a different medicine. Patience my friend, patience. I know you can't enter your bungalow without the juciest lashon hara in the bungalow colony....When I'm ready. Patience my friend.....
JEWISH SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE SPEAK OUT
THIS BLOG IS FOR AND ABOUT JEWISH SURVIVORS OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE, SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT, RABBINICAL SEXUAL MISCONDUCT AND THOSE WHO CARE ABOUT THEM.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2006
Update on the Case of Aron Tendler of LA
For those of you who are unaware there is a discussion about Rabbi Aron Tendler of California going on here on Steven I. Weiss's Blog "Canonist".
I just read a comment that I wanted to bring to everyone's attention:
RE: Mandated reporters under California law
The following people should be investigated for NOT reporting suspicion of child abuse:
Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean, Simon Wiesenthal Center / YULA
Rabbi Meyer May, Executive Director, Simon Wiesenthal Center / YULA
Rabbi Shalom Tendler, Rosh Yeshiva, YULA and Rabbi of Young Israel of North Beverly Hills
Dr. Bruce Powell, General Studies Principal, YULA
Dr. Michael Held, School Psychologist YULA
p.s. This won’t be the 1st time Wiesenthal will pay to shut a story down. A few years ago they paid off Dr. Gerald Margolis’s secretary over $100,000 - The reason: sexual abuse by her superior…who was shipped off to the ADL.
POSTED BY JEWISH SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE AT TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2006
Don't forget Lukeford. I think he was the first one to write about it.
E-mail:
a_unorthodoxjew@yahoo.com
By ANGUS SHAW, Associated Press Writer
TENDLERS ESCAPE TO ZIMBABWE -CHANGE NAME TO NCUBE AND BECOME CATHOLICS
HARARE, Zimbabwe - President Robert Mugabe said he would pray for Zimbabwean Roman Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube, an outspoken government critic accused of having an affair.
Mugabe, speaking at a funeral for a former guerrilla leader, smiled when he mentioned the Ncube case, which has been a fixture in state media for three days. Ncube's lawyer has called the adultery case an "orchestrated attempt" to embarrass the cleric.
"To take other people's wives, is that a good game?" Mugabe asked mourners during the nationally televised funeral for Brig. Gen. Fakazi Muleya, who died of cancer.
The civil adultery suit was filed Monday by a railroad worker who alleged his wife, a secretary in Ncube's office, had a two-year affair with the archbishop of the city of Bulawayo. State TV crews accompanied court officials when they delivered the documents to the cleric.
Ncube has repeatedly accused Mugabe of human rights violations and called for him to step down. The cleric has also urged Zimbabweans to take to the streets to demonstrate against the government amid the nation's worst economic crisis since independence.
In 2005, Ncube said he prayed for Mugabe to die.
"To pray for people to die is bad. God is for us all. ... I will pray for him so he has some good manners," Mugabe said at Heroes Acre, a shrine for former guerrillas in the war that led to Zimbabwe's 1980 independence from Britain.
"I also know God, I am a Roman Catholic. I am a person who belongs to the church but I didn't have an affair with anyone," he added.
Mugabe, however, fathered two children with his secretary before his first wife died. He married the secretary, Grace Marufu, in 1996, and said later his first wife condoned his relationship because she knew she was barren.
On Tuesday, the official Herald newspaper published photographs allegedly taken by a camera hidden in Ncube's bedroom, claiming they show the archbishop undressing beside the woman he is accused of having an affair with. The photograph depicted Ncube sitting on a bed taking off his shirt, obscuring a woman seated behind him.
The Herald said many explicit pictures were taken by a private investigator hired by the man who filed the adultery case.
Zimbabwe once had one of the most diversified, vibrant economies in southern Africa. Its current decline, marked by inflation of 4,500 percent — unofficially 9,000 percent — had been linked to confiscation of farms from whites that started in 2000.
Mugabe said the rampant inflation was orchestrated by Western countries, including Britain and the United States, and "enemies" within Zimbabwe to bring about "regime change."
Last month, the government ordered price cuts of at least 50 percent in an attempt to curb inflation, leading to acute food shortages and near riots as cheaper goods went on sale.
Mugabe said manufacturers, suppliers and profiteers were "mistreating" consumers with inflated prices and forcing the government to intervene.
"If things are not found on the shelves it's not our fault, it's their fault," Mugabe said.
http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2007/07/ou-lies-meat-ho.html
July 18, 2007
OU Lies, Meat Hook Was Used
Screen shots from the new PETA video of slaughter in Rubashkin's Agriprocessors Local Pride plant in Gordon, Nebraska. The top picture is later in the sequence, the bottom a few frames earlier, showing a clean meat hook just before insertion into the animal's neck. Please click to enlarge.
"It is not a meat hook! It is not a meat hook!"
–Rabbi Seth Mandel, head of shechita for the OU.
"It is a meat hook!"
–Dr. Temple Grandin, noted animal welfare and slaughter expert.
Truth-telling is not one of Rabbi Seth Mandel's strong points.
And another follow up interview with Temple Grandin. Does she realize that she has been exploited by Rubashkin, the OU, etc.? Autistic people can have a tendency to naivete and can have difficulty understanding others motives. When Dr. Grandin went to Postville last year and gave Rubashkin a passing grade, she probably did not realize that she was being used to distract from the worker exploitation and price fixing issues that were then being reported in the Forward and Jewish Week. She needs to understand that the OU and Rubashkin are only using her to their own ends if they were to invite her back again, whether to Gordon, Postville, or Uruguay, to get her seal of approval.
A Web site for Maimonides Medical Center identifies Dr. Shamsian as a staff urologist.
http://www.brooklyneagle.com/categories/category.php?category_id=4&id=13997
Dr. Saeid Shamsian was convicted yesterday for fondling a 59-year-old female patient’s genitals after conducting a medical exam, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office announced.
Shamsian, 54, scheduled the patient late in the day, after his office was closed. After giving the woman a vaginal exam, Shamsian told her to lie on her stomach and began massaging her back. He then fondled her genitals and squeezed her breasts.
In a bench trial, Judge John Calabrese convicted Shamsian of forcible touching, sex abuse in the third degree and harassment in the second degree. When he is sentenced on August 13, Shamsian will face up to one year in jail.
Defense attorney Benjamin Brafman (Leib Pinter's lawyer) could not be reached at press time late yesterday afternoon.
Is Dr Shamsian Jewish? He's an Iranian who lives in Great Neck.
http://w3.health.state.ny.us/opmc/factions.nsf/58220a7f9eeaafab85256b180058c032/e0b44441e5d4527c85256a4a0047ee91?OpenDocument
The New York State Board of Regents sustained the charges finding the physician guilty of willfully abusing a patient, and engaging in conduct which evidences moral unfitness to practice the profession.
R' Yudel Shain calls the OU's Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandell, der Dokter Rabbiner which was a big insult in der heim. He says he's not making fun of Mandell but merely going along with Mandell's own preference whereby Mandell calls himself Dr more often than rabbi.
"moral unfitness to practice the profession."
I wonder if the Board of Regents has any say over yeshivos and could comment on Margo.
Of course that would bring howls of protest from Shafran, Zweibel and Bubba Cohen for interfering with the "religious rights" of the former Torah Vodaas bus driver.
http://www.brooklyneagle.com/categories/category.php?category_id=27&id=13999
We have to look into whether Colmer took any funds from organizations that help people make aliyah to Israel.
asktheda@brooklynda.org
This is a direct email for Charlie Hynes's office.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1184766006589&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
Analysis: The systematic abuse of a venerated title
Anshel Pfeffer
Jerusalem Post
July 19, 2007
The students at the renowned Jerusalem yeshiva were puzzled by their rosh yeshiva's prolonged absences.
He was seldom seen in the study hall and most of his lessons and lectures had been canceled. Those seeking spiritual guidance and advice were told by his secretary that he had no time to see them. It was rumored that he was about to take a leave of absence.
Then the real reason got out: After over a decade at the head of the yeshiva - with hundreds of students, thousands of alumni and many more admirers around the country and abroad - the rabbi was finally taking the time to study for his official ordination exams.
That he was a spiritual leader of a large community and had been regarded as a rabbi for 20 years didn't change the fact that to get the official certificate from the Chief Rabbinate, he still had to take four examinations on main areas of Halacha. Only then would he be eligible for an appointment as a neighborhood rabbi and afterwards perhaps as a city chief rabbi.
Rabbinical ordination, historically the chain of smicha reaching back from pupil to rabbi all the way to Moses, has for many years been one of the most abused of titles. Anyone can call himself a rabbi, and there are many who are inclined to address any black-coated long-bearded gentleman in this way.
Many senior rabbis routinely ordain their prized disciples and the title carries as much weight as the rabbi who bestowed it. In the ultra-Orthodox community, any man who teaches holy studies, or is involved in some way with religious services, is usually called a rabbi, no matter what his qualification. Certainly, if a man is the spiritual leader of a community, then he is worthy of the title. None of this has any connection with the official ordination certificates that the Chief Rabbinate hands out to any high-yeshiva student who successfully passes the examinations; he gets the title, whatever his personality and beliefs.
Occasionally, there is demand from the Rabbinate to discipline a rabbi, even take away his title, usually when criminal charges are brought and embarrassment caused. But the Rabbinate is totally powerless to decide who will be called rabbi.
So why get an official Rabbinate ordination if most rabbis don't even need it? The only real reasons are to be eligible for official government rabbinical appointments, and because teachers and other civil servants get a significant pay raise if they own a rabbinical certificate. It's the equivalent to having a master's degree. This has given a small group of officials in the Rabbinate powers similar to those of the Council of Higher Education, which by law is supposed to be the sole arbiter of academic degrees.
Over the years the Chief Rabbinate's examination department has become a useful outlet for many yeshiva graduates to pad their salaries, and despite needing at least six years in a high yeshiva and passing grades in four examinations, shortcuts abound. One of these shortcuts was the "High Torah Learning" certificate for which anyone with five years of yeshiva study was eligible. For salary purposes, this was equivalent to a bachelor's degree.
And this is the title that, according to the state attorneys investigating the scandal in the Chief Rabbinate's examination process, was given fraudulently to 1,500 Israel Police and Prisons Service personnel. The team, headed by attorney Uri Korb, has allegedly found that a number of officials and rabbis set up a chain of evening-class academies, where after two years of part-time study at most, the "graduates" received the coveted certificates. The investigators have calculated that the state budget has paid out more than NIS 200 million for these false degrees.
But according to sources in the State Attorney's Office, this might be only the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the rabbis whose names are expected to appear on the indictment as having set up the academies and awarded the false degrees, and the rabbis who authorized the higher salaries despite allegedly knowing that the certificates were gained by false means, there are said to be more senior rabbis involved. Apparently the names of a number of prominent religious figures, including a city chief rabbi, appear on some certificates attesting to the fact that the "degree-holders" were personally examined and ordained by them.
Allegations of corruption in the Rabbinate's examinations department have long been an open secret within the religious establishment. The question that has to be asked now is why successive chief rabbis did nothing about it; on the contrary, some of their closest aides were allegedly involved.
Since the chief rabbis, when confronted with rabbis accused of serious crimes, always say they have no power over who gets called a rabbi, one recourse now would be to close the examinations department and stop giving out official ordinations. At the very least, they might be wise to allow the secular Council of Higher Education to monitor the goings on, as is the case with every other academic institute.
http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2007/07/chabad-rabbi-ca.html
They call me the Leib Pinter of Lubavitch.
http://web.israelinsider.com/views/11666.htm
See my op-ed column about Sruly Singer's buddy Avrum Burg and how I argue that he's the "Uncle Tom" of Orthodox Jews suffering from a Freudian Oedipal complex.
http://www2.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/102991.html
Not that "bulldog tactics" are bad. UOJ has actually been pretty successful.
Mrs Koenig's maiden name is Zimbalist.
http://www.northcountrygazette.org/news/2007/06/27/scheme_to_defraud/
Two California women who allegedly stole over $1.6 million from investors largely from the New York area have been indicted for grand larceny and securities fraud while a Brooklyn woman has also been indicted for securities fraud and scheme to defraud for fraudulently inducing her clients and others to invest with the California women.
The indictment charges that between 2005 and 2006, Carla Zimbalist, 62, of Beverly Hills, CA., and Pam Chanla, 33, of Alhambra, CA., sole partners in CPM Holdings Inc., PMC Interests Inc. and Scott Avenue Development Inc., stole money from 23 investors.
Manhattan district attorney Robert M. Morgenthau said Zimbalist and Chanla found these investors through Jennifer Wilkov, 39, of Brooklyn, who at the time was a financial advisor at American Express Financial Advisors. Wilkov allegedly used her position to solicit her clients and others for this investment, Morgenthau said.
Prosecutors say all three defendants told investors that Zimbalist and Chanla would use their investments to purchase and renovate southern California residential properties. The defendants promised investors large profits after the properties were sold. In fact, Zimbalist and Chanla never owned six of the nine advertised properties. Although Zimbalist and Chanla did own two of the properties at some point, they fell into foreclosure after Zimbalist and Chanla failed to make payments on the loans they had used to purchase the properties. A brother of one of the defendants owned the ninth property. This individual sold the home at a profit, but no money was ever returned to any of the investors.
The California women allegedly used a large portion of the stolen investor money to pay for personal expenses and civil judgments that had been entered against them for similar thefts from California victims who had previously invested in different properties. A criminal investigation into those activities is being conducted by Detective Simeon Plyler of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Is this who Ronnie Schreiber sells his Arabic embroidery to, or is he too @#$%ing busy?
http://www.canadiancoalition.com/forum/messages/18952.shtml
By Debbie Schlussel
I've been writing about LIFE for Relief and Development for years, and I think my columns (especially this one, a shorter version of which appeared in the New York Post), have finally made a difference. Ditto for my complaints about LIFE to Assistant U.S. Attorney for counterterrorism, Ken Chadwell.
This morning, the FBI began raiding LIFE and hauling out documents. Well, it's about time. LIFE--the largest Islamic charity still open for business in America--openly admitted on its 1995-'97 taxes to be a major funder of HAMAS. Headquartered in the Orthodox Jewish suburban Detroit subdivision in which I grew up, it gave millions to Human Appeal International, which the FBI identified as HAMAS' Jordanian operation. It has done many vague "Katrina," "Lebanon Relief," and "Afghanistan Wheelchair" fundraisers and believed to have laundered the money to terrorists. Its founding resident agent is tied to Al-Qaeda, and one of its former employees, Abdel-Jabbar Hamdan, is also tied to terrorists. The government has been trying to deport him.
Then, there are its multiple fundraisers over the last couple of years "for more Fallujahs" according to sources at a secret 2004 Los Angeles area fundraiser held by LIFE. LIFE is believed to be a major funder of the insurgent terrorists in Iraq. That's why, in 2004, the U.S. Army raided its Iraqi headquarters, frequently operated by its spokesman and operative Mohammed Alomari (more on him below). The keynote speaker at the fundraiser was Wagdi Mohammed Ghoneim, an Islamic cleric who has since been deported because of his meetings with two of the 9/11 hijackers.
The disturbing thing is that for years, the feds--including Homeland Security civil rights officer Daniel Sutherland, U.S. Attorney Stephen Murphy III, and his predecessor Jeffrey Collins--have feted this charity, all while it was apparently funding Islamic terrorists.
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist Imad Hamad--who also has close ties to LIFE. Senator Carl Levin, Alomari, and LIFE credited Hamad with getting LIFE USAID tax-funded status to administer our tax money in Iraq.
In 2002, LIFE led the Saddam Hussein propaganda trip that U.S. Democratic Congressmen David Bonior, Jim McDermott, and Mike Thompson, which was also funded by Iraqi oil-for-food scam artist Shakir Alkhafaji--who is living, free, in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield, despite $70 million in earnings he obtained
A man who fled to Cuba after being convicted of mail fraud in the United States has been expelled from the island after 42 years.
His expulsion from Cuba is highly unusual. Both the US and Cuba accuse each other of harbouring fugitives from each other's justice systems.
Joseph Adjmi, now 70, has returned to the US after spending more than half his life on the run from US justice.
THE US and CUBA DO NOT HAVE DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS, OR AN EXTRADITION TREATY!
When writing to the DA's office regading Mondrowitz, you must mention that there is no legal basis not to request extradition. Their contention is that at the time the crimes were committed, Israel's extradition agreement with the US did not include male rape. First of all, the crimes were committed in the US and secondly, there is an agreement in place now with Israel that includes male rape(it was amended in 1988). These are the only dates that should count-when the crimes were committed and now. When he fled is totally irrelevnt. If Joseph Adjmi can be extradited from Cuba to the US and face justice for racketeerig, then Mondrowitz can surely be extradited from Israel for his vicious crimes. Israel is not a Third World country and their consulate has stated on several occasions that they will cooperate and comply with an extradition request. There are no more excuses-bring the bum back here to face trial!
I think this putz's office is on East 12th St near Kings Hwy.
http://www.northcountrygazette.org/news/2007/07/12/attorney_charged/
Federal agents have arrested Brooklyn attorney Alexander Kaplan on charges of participating in a multimillion-dollar sub-prime mortgage fraud scheme.
The arrest was made based on a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court. The allegations against Kaplan relate to charges contained in a superseding indictment, unsealed Wednesday in Manhattan federal court, charging 26 othe individuals with participating in a wide-ranging scheme to commit mortgage fraud by submitting to sub-prime lenders loan applications and supporting documents that contained false information and material omissions.
Prosecutors say the applications and documents included false information about the prospective borrower’s employment, income, and intent to reside in the property in question, as well as the fair market value of the property, and were intended to induce the sub-prime lenders to make loans that otherwise would not have been funded.
According to the indictment, Kaplan participated in a scheme to commit mortgage fraud in the purchase of a block of ten rent-regulated condominium apartments at 243 West 98 Street in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. On two separate days in January 2006, Kaplan served as the attorney for the buyers and the lenders in the closings of the apartments. Prosecutors say Kaplan conspired with others to obtain mortgages, based on false statements and material omissions, to finance the purchase of the apartments.
Specifically, with respect to seven of the 10 apartments, certain sub-prime lenders were allegedly falsely told, in mortgage applications and supporting documents, that the buyers intended to live in the apartments as a “primary residence.
With respect to the remaining three apartments, prosecutors say, certain sub-prime lenders were falsely told that the Apartments were to be used as “investment properties” that earned approximately $6500 a month in rent from tenants. None of the documents submitted to the sub-prime lenders disclosed that: (1) certain buyers were seeking loans to purchase more than one Apartment as a “primary residence;” (2) each of the apartments was already occupied by a tenant and, therefore, not suitable for a primary residence; or (3) the apartments were subject to rent regulation laws that precluded the buyer from charging $6500 in rent. In addition, the sellers and the buyers were all related in some respect -either by blood or by marriage — to each other. None of the sub-prime lenders were informed of the fact that the sale was not an “arms-length” transaction.
As attorney for the buyers and the lenders, Kaplan attended the closings, and submitted to the lenders signed and completed documents, including loan application documents, on which the buyers indicated whether the property was to be a “primary residence” or an “investment property,” as well as other documents that reflected whether the buyer intended to occupy the property.
If convicted, Kaplan faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison and the greater of a $250,000 fine or twice the gross gain or loss resulting from the crime.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/nyregion/17fraud.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=1c97c700d22252d7&ex=1184817600&pagewanted=print
July 17, 2007
Without Guns or Raids, a Tiny Squad of Officers Homes in on Visa Fraud
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Ms. Gray, the rookie in the tiny Fraud Detection and National Security unit at federal immigration headquarters in Lower Manhattan, was pursuing the unit’s distinctive kind of law enforcement. No guns. No raids. Just a little New York street smarts and shoe leather to uncover all types of deception, case by case, in the endless stream of visa applications.
Deceivers come in many guises. The “multinational corporation” sponsoring a foreign manager to handle nonexistent millions. The “lawyer” specializing in fleecing desperate immigrants. Bogus newlyweds, would-be citizens hiding criminal records, churches that are really developers’ construction sites
The fledgling fraud detection unit is one of the first in a nationwide operation started three years ago by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the visa-issuing arm of the immigration authority recreated in 2003 under the Department of Homeland Security.
The work of the unit’s investigators — who are not part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the branch identified with raids, detention and deportation of illegal immigrants — is a new approach to detecting trends in fraud among the six million applications made nationally each year. But the investigators are so few, and so far down the bureaucratic chain, that the payoff from their efforts can be hard to see.
On a recent visit behind the unmarked steel doors of the fraud unit’s office at 26 Federal Plaza, one wall was stacked high with suspect files — part of the flow of some 150,000 applications annually in New York alone. The unit supervisor, Joseph T. Knipper, cast a quizzical look from the stacked files to his investigators — all six of them.
This year, rules were changed to require visits by an agent in all petitions for religious workers.
In a city where 60 percent of residents are either foreign-born or the children of immigrants, just showing up as an immigration officer takes nerve, said one of the unit’s charter members, who asked that only his first name, Mel, be used, to spare his teenage daughter possible harassment. Several other team members declined to be interviewed.
“It seems overwhelming sometimes, the size of the work that we’ve got to do,” said Mel, 57, who became an immigration officer in the 1980s and describes himself as Jewish, Brooklyn-educated and a devotee of Nathan’s hot dogs (some of which are made by Rubashkin).
“Hole in the ground” was not just a figure of speech. Mel led Mr. Knipper and a reporter back to the address of a Jewish organization that had petitioned for an immigrant to be trained as a mashgiach, or supervisor of kosher food production. Where the religious building should have been, a vast foundation was being dug for condos. “You pull up and see this. Hey, maybe this ain’t right. It ain’t here!” Mr. Knipper exclaimed, surveying the scene, in Borough Park, Brooklyn.
http://blogs.jewishtimes.com/index.php/jewishtimes/philjacobs/
My office telephone has become like a molestation hotline.
There’s the woman molested at a bar mitzvah at age 14 by the rabbi who officiated at the bar mitzvah. He wanted to show her his Judaica in his office.
That woman is now married to a Christian and has disconnected from Judaism.
Thank you rabbi.
There’s the young man who is so disgustingly bitter at his Jewish “leaders” because they wouldn’t protect him from his molester only 10 years ago. He complains that he can still taste the rabbi’s breath in his mouth.
Thank you rabbis.
There’s the area teacher, who himself was molested and offers the names of nine of his friends who were also molested by their Hebrew school teacher.
What I get now are calls like these. No, not every day, but almost every day.
What I get are criticisms also. Comments such as the molester you wrote about hasn’t touched anyone in 15 years, why write anything?
My answer is “how do you know?”
My second answer is that besides moral justice this is also about legal justice. If we knew of a person who used a gun to shoot people fifteen years ago, but then put the gun down forever and even went to therapy for his actions, should not this person still be brought to justice for the pain he caused?
I think so.
Getting back to the woman who was molested at age 14. She is pretty certain she wasn’t the only one molested by this particular pulpit rabbi.
I think she’s probably correct.
We’ll find out.
Does anyone know if Belsky and Margo have been buying home heating oil futures?
http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzoil0720,0,7697309.story?coll=ny-business-leadheadlines
Feds make busts in $75 million oil scheme
Home heating trucks firms shorted customers
By Robert Kessler
By rigging the meters on heating-oil trucks, two oil companies shorted their customers on Long Island and in New York City out of millions of gallons and resold the oil on the illegal black market to heating-oil retailers for $75 million in cash, according to officials and sources.
Federal agents this morning seized dozens of heating-oil delivery trucks, raided oil terminals on Long Island and in the metropolitan area, and charged four top executives of two oil-transport companie -- one of the firms a major player in the business -- in the alleged massive fraud. The raids were part of an investigation of what may be a wider-spread practice in the industry commonly known as "shorting" or "skimming, according to court documents and sources.
I thought Ben Brafman had SOME kind of standard, like sticking to rotzchim and ganovim.
This is a whole new frontier for him, taking on a client who can't resist squeezing women's breasts. I guess he beat out Leo Kimmel for representation.
I thought Ben Brafman had SOME kind of standard, like sticking to rotzchim and ganovim.
What about me?
I'm rather busy in the heat of the bungalow season, but seeing as this is very relevant to the inyana deyuma, I wish to stress that I am against squeezing women's breasts of any kind. My associate Gil Student is considering posting a pshettel on this topic on "Hirhurim" (no pun intended).
Perhaps we can get input from UOJ as well as any mental health professionals and any informed organizational officials that may be reading this.
I understand that (ironically) it was Rabbi Moses Tendler who gave the psak that anyone at the OU / NCSY who even remotely allowed a cover up of Lanner's abuses had to go. This led to the departure of several officials.
I am also told that that some of the officials that were terminated or allowed to resign are sincere people who were duped by Lanner's very manipulative / psychopathic personality.
Can anyone with intimate knowledge of that sordid affair separate the officials into 2 groups by name?
Don't forget that even Rabbis Blau and Willig, no slouches by any stretch, were initially duped by Lanner. I am not aware if any other rabbis / officials have publicly apologized for making the same mistake as the 2 aforementioned rabbis noblely have.
I understand that (ironically) it was Rabbi Moses Tendler who gave the psak that anyone at the OU / NCSY who even remotely allowed a cover up of Lanner's abuses had to go. This led to the departure of several officials.
----------
Sad but true. I can speak to this above statement, perhaps others can participate in the conversation with knowledge of the Lanner fiasco.
My outrage stems in part that Moshe Tendler was aware of both his sons' and his brother's affairs, yet remained deathly silent for some 20 years.
In the blink of an eye he has lost all n'emanus...besides the fact that he is attempting vigorously to have Mordecai replace him when he retires.
The Tendler name has turned into mud...nothing to do with me..like the rest of rabbinic criminals, they all brought this on themselves.
I welcome comments from knowledgable people on the other part of your statement.
Don't ask me. I don't remember. I was already old back then.
It's interesting to say the least that Margo, who is an enabler, played the manipulative role that the actual abuser usually takes on.
Rabbi Yudin from Fair Lawn NJ, who I don't think has a bad bone in his body, was very badly taken in by Lanner. Lanner hosted several events in that shul and Rabbi Yudin felt very bad about it I'm told.
Phew! UOJ found someone besides the Agudah to dissect for a change.
If Vicky Polin comes out of hibernation, she must know many details about the OU-NCSY cover up.
On the lighter side, around the time that the Lanner scandal broke, Dr. Mandell Ganchrow was cornered by 2 characters at a Pesach hotel. They started giving him hell and asked how anyone can run the Orthodox Union when his wife doesn't cover her hair. It was Heshy Friedman from "Heshy's House / Tea Room" on East 3rd St and some eccentric rabbi who hangs out there and claims he has semicha from the Kezmarker rov.
We have to figure out if Ohel and Jacobson were involved with Lanner.
"Moshe Tendler...besides the fact that he is attempting vigorously to have Mordecai replace him when he retires."
According to Monsey residents posting on the various blogs, Mordy was hanging out and giving shiurim in his father's shul but the board there would never allow him to take over in a million years and have cut back on his access to the building. They argue over how clear it was if he had his father's sanction or if he just showed up to take advantage.
The rebbitzen (R' Moishe Feinstein's dauhgter) is said to have taken the episode very badly and very much needs a refuah.
Unlike UOJ, he does not stand for those with different opinions. He will keep splitting hairs and try getting in the last word, while ignoring questions and criticisms that defeat his argument, so that he will NEVER admit he could be wrong.
He then blocks posters from Failed Messiah because they disagree with him. He usually does it pretty quickly but I figured out a way that makes it technologically difficult for him to do so and it took him several attempts to get it right.
I took him on because of his recent attempts to rehabilitate Conservative JTS kofrim as Torah Jews.
It's really sad how Shmarya keeps sliding and how he's become so full of bitterness against everyone and everything.
He's also now trying to spin the Touro College scandal as proof the "Haredim" are demons, even though the criminals are non-Jews and secular Jews who were caught because Touro's frum administration reported them to the police when they discovered illegal activity.
To the group I was to address via teleconference on Aug. 22nd:
I have a conflict on my calender for that day, and I misplaced the contact person's e-mail...please contact me if you wish to reschedule.
The turning point for Shmarya coincided with the day of Rav Blumenkrantz's levaya, when the putz could do nothing else but crap on and stick it to a dead man, who not only couldn't answer back, but hadn't even been put in the ground yet.
I'm curious about Rabbi Butler who left the OU at that time. Does anyone know if he had anything to do with Lanner or if he was just a fringe casaulty?
Shmarya is the pioneer of intelligent dissent. I believe he goes out of his way to allow dissenting opinions, and have great respect for his intellect and style. Not that he needs my approval, but he certainly is entitled to his opinion and if he feels the need to moderate his blog like I do, that's his right.
Speaking for myself, the amount of hate mail and threats I receive, require my moderation.
I do not want to broadcast to the world how much scum there are among the Jews besides the fraudulent clergy, and the lengths they'll go to to try to silence me.
Will never happen! I'm here to stay!
http://jewishsurvivors.blogspot.com/2007/07/rabbi-aron-bourch-tendler-moving-to.html
Can anyone confirm the following message?
I can confirm that he (Rabbi Aron Boruch Tendler) IS moving to Baltimore in the coming weeks. He will be living with his daugher and son-in-law in the Shellydale area of Greenspring. I encourage everyone to spread the word. It is critical that he not be employed in any position that will allow for him to be with children and teenagers.
posted by Jewish Survivors at Thursday, July 19, 2007
Shmarya has really taken a turn. I don't know how closely you've been observing him lately. People (except for his Chabad enemies) did not start having much problem with him until this past winter. He has also changed much just in the last 6 months.
Speaking of Leo Kimmel, I think he was in court this week again with the Mutterperl freak. I've actually seen that poor little Mexican girl on Ave J. It seems she doesn't go anywhere alone anymore. She must be traumatized.
When you all finish writing to the politicians regarding Mondrowitz, I would like everyone to write to the US Attorney General's office regarding the abuses at Rubashkin. You must mention that their cruelty to animals is not indicative of other kosher slaughterhouses and that we feel that they are jeopardizing the future of ritual slaughter in the US. Also, mention the abuse of workers, the hiring of illegals and mass consumer fraud. If they don't permanently shut them down, they will at least levy a hefty fine that they won't soon recover from. We surely cannot rely on the kashrus agencies to do this, so we must turn to the authorities. Sound familiar?
steve said...
When you all finish writing to the politicians regarding Mondrowitz,
-----------------------------------
My friend steve,
aint no such thing as finished, untill this monster peice of scum is extradited we have to send one e-mail after another and then another, there is no finish till we see mondrowitz in cuffs behind his back facing his victims in a brooklyn criminal court.
all the best,
Wasserman on Main St in Queens seems to be suffering from the same kvad lev as Paroy and Margulies.
If he's not fazed by UOJ & Rav Yudel Shain being mefarsem that he's improperly taking people's money by charging "tax" on non-taxable items, he's going to learn what kind of pressure can be brought on him.
The pirsum will spread to more internet venues that target his customer base like Luach.com and Kehillah.com.
This is nothing though compared to what will happen when various State & City agencies start turning his store upside down to look for violations.
I noticed Steve comment on another blog that OU rabbis are hypocrites for not eating at Le Marais. Steve has the right idea but the wrong set of circumstances. They do eat at Le Marais, AFTER the place gets a going over to make sure Mark Hennessey and the Frenchies don't get in the way of that particular meal. You can kasher any treif hotel in the city, so why not Le Marais?
Is this site for real, or science fiction?
Interesting Article, guess many are intimidated by the work of The Awareness Center
Background Information and The History of Rabbinical Ordinations
http://jewishsurvivors.blogspot.com/2007/07/rabbi-aron-bourch-tendler-moving-to.html#258015333485444299
If my sources are correct he's already lined up a job working with Yaakov Menken at Torah.org
http://jewishsurvivors.blogspot.com/2007/07/becoming-rabbi-in-israel.html#5304393176563800515
Years ago a student at an orthodox yeshiva in ________ was asked to leave. He asked for a letter in Hebrew expelling him from the institution.
On the basis of that letter he got a pulpit in the South and then on the west coast. The congregation leaders couldn't read and understand what the letter said.
This week, the official 2006-2007/5767 Ner Israel Wall Calendar informed us that "IT IS A PRIVILEGE TO BE A MEMBER OF THE YESHIVA." Not a birthright, as "old-fashioned" Maimonides pointed out, but a "privilege" like a teenager's driver's license. This is a type of neo-yeshivish approach to the Torah now emerging from the Ner Israel Rabbinical College of Baltimore, Maryland (a "Catholic Yeshiva" as holy Steipler called it).
The books written by the NIRC's pedophile Rabbi Moshe M. Eisemann are part of that approach. Ready to hear the latest news from the Ner Israel? Rabbi Eisemann cheerfully celebrates his full victory over his enemies! He WILL stay on campus, and he WILL continue to disseminate his teachings, and he WILL enjoy a company of young innocent students. Rabbi Eisemann was beaming during the annual 17th of Tammuz celebrations (NIRC's Rosh HaYeshiva Rabbi Jacob Weinberg died on the fast day of the 17th of Tammuz, 5759 /July of 1999/). The following poster was pompously displayed for hundreds of students and guests to be seen:
THE
DOVID HAMELECH
BOOK IS JUST OFF THE PRESS
THE
TEAR DRENCHED NIGHTS
[FOR TISH'AH BE'AV]
IS A FEW YEARS OLD
THESE BOOKS SELL FOR APPROX.
$15 IN THE STORES
FOR YESHIVA BACHURIM THE
PRICE IS $8
ALL INCOME GOES TO
RUSSIAN KIRUV
THANK YOU!
Next to the poster, large boxes overstuffed with books were getting empty fairly fast, a steady cash-stream flowing into Eisemann's sack. I picked up the "Dovid HaMelech" book - "Music Made in Heaven." So many people on the Internet (some even disguised as "Truth"s) yelled that Rabbi Moshe Eisemann and Rabbi Joseph Tendler (his learning partner and friend back in Lakewood) do not live next to each other - 401 Yeshiva Lane for Rabbi Eisemann, 403 Yeshiva Lane for Rabbi Tendler, yet lo and behold, on the very second page, the author boldly wrote:
Rabbi Moshe M. Eisemann
403 Yeshiva Lane, Apt. 1B
Baltimore, MD 21208
(410) 484-7396
Rabbi Eisemann was not a tiny bit uncomfortable with printing his full address in the book. Moreover, you can even call him. Would you like to fax him? No problem: 410-486-8810. Would you like to give Rabbi Eisemann a generous donation for the "Russian Kiruv," a.k.a. his personal 401(K) plan? By all means: go to http://www.yeshivakishiniev.org. Maybe you would like to e-mail him? Try this address: eisemann@erols.com (but keep in mind Rabbi Eisemann's caveat: "In order to be received, all e-mails must contain the word "Kosher" within the Subject line." Kosher SEX, perhaps?).
The bottom line - NIRC and Rabbi Moshe Eisemann are the WINNERS. (Rabbi Yaakov Hopfer who "officially" told Rabbi Eisemann last year to leave NIRC, now "unofficially" drives a car given to him by Rabbi Eisemann's daughter whose husband runs a big car sale & rent business in Baltimore.) It is extremely unlikely that "THE BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES" will bust Rabbi Eisemann or his relative Rabbi Eisgrau (accused of sexually assaulting his daughter) in the foreseeable future, given that the Ner Israel's henchmen threatened its editor Phil Jacobs.
YET, THERE IS SOMETHING WE ALL CAN AND ULTIMATELY MUST DO. As the citizens and as the Jews. YIDDEN, IT IS A MATTER OF PIKUACH NEFESH! THE PURE NESHAMOS OF THE YIDDISHE KINDERLACH ARE BEING DESTROYED! WHAT KIND OF NEW HOLOCAUST DO WE NEED TO WAKE US UP? Call and write! Not to you senator or congressmen, but to the people on the Ner Israel campus. The contact information below is from the NIRC's NOT-FOR-GENERAL-CIRCULATION address and telephone directory. (NIRC ADMINISTRATION REALISTICALLY FEARS FOR THIS INFORMATION TO GO PUBLIC AND ENDANGER THE FOUNDATIONS OF THEIR TYRANNY.) Let these people make a decision for themselves and in the long run for the welfare of their kids: SHALL THEY BECOME SODOM AND GOMORRAH OR SHALL THEY BECOME NINEVEH? ARE THEY WITH GOD OR ARE THEY WITH EISEMANN? ...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: In the apartment numbers, the digits indicate floors. Accordingly, "Eisemann 1-B" means that Rabbi Moshe Eisemann lives on the first floor of 403 Yeshiva Lane, Baltimore, Maryland 21208. First names of the heads of the households were inserted if they shared the same last name.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
401 YESHIVA LANE
EINSTADTER
APT. 2-C TEL.: 410-602-3154
FULLER
APT. 3-D TEL.: 410-602-2596
GROSS
APT. 3-A TEL.: 410-764-2217 (They live in the old Eisemann's apartment.)
HAUPTMAN
APT. 2-B TEL.: 410-415-6034
KULEFSKY
APT. 2-A TEL.: 410-486-1462
MARKOWITZ
APT. 1-C TEL.: 410-484-2879
MERZEL
APT. 3-B TEL.: 410-484-3699
MINTZ, MOSHE
APT. 3-C TEL.: 410-484-9026
NEUBERGER, SHRAGA
APT. 1-B TEL.: 410-653-2488, 410-484-8536
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
403 YESHIVA LANE
EISEMANN
APT. 1-B TEL.: 410-484-7396 (Yep, this is Rabbi Moshe M. Eisemann!)
EISENBERG
APT. 2-C TEL.: 410-484-5790
FEIGENBAUM
APT. 3-D TEL.: 410-484-3011
GLAZER, MICHAEL
APT. 3-C TEL.: 410-484-5293
GOLD
APT. 2-A TEL.: 410-602-8388
LEVIN
APT. 3-B TEL.: 410-484-8332
SCHNEIDER
APT. 1-A TEL.: 410-602-1671
SKULNICK
APT. 3-A TEL.: 410-602-2044
SLOTCHIVER
APT. 2-B TEL.: 410-653-8636
TENDLER, JOSEPH
APT. 1-C TEL.: 410-484-9438 (Rabbis Joseph Tendler and Moshe Eisemann DO LIVE in the same building and DO LIVE across the hall from each other!)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
405 YESHIVA LANE
BRODY
APT. 1-D TEL.: 410-486-4998
FRIEDMAN, YAIR
APT. 2-A TEL.: 410-653-0568
HINBERG
APT. 2-B TEL.: 410-484-0733
KINZER
APT. 3-A TEL.: 410-653-8690
LAPIDUS
APT. 1-B TEL.: 410-653-0405
SADWIN
APT. 2-D TEL.: 410-602-3208
SCHECHTER, AZARYAH
APT. 3-C TEL.: 410-484-7511
SHNIDMAN
APT. 3-B TEL.: 410-580-0652
STERN
APT. 3-D TEL.: 410-484-0700
WEISBORD
APT. 1-C & 2-C TEL.: 410-484-1918 (This is the NIRC's Mashgiach /Dean of Students/ Rabbi Beryl Weisbord.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
407 YESHIVA LANE
BENYOWITZ
APT. 2-A TEL.: 410-484-2058
BERNSTEIN
APT. 1-D TEL.: 410-484-2374
EZRA
APT. 2-D TEL.: 410-486-8041
GOLDMAN
APT. 3-B TEL.: 410-486-2763
HAMAOUI
APT. 2-C TEL.: 410-580-9272
KRASNER
APT. 1-B TEL.: 410-653-2463
SAX
APT. 2-B TEL.: 410-602-2059
SCHACHTER, JOSEPH
APT. 3-A TEL.: 410-484-9562
SHOOB
APT. 3-D TEL.: 410-486-8183
SHTEIERMAN
APT. 3-C TEL.: 410-358-1579
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
409 YESHIVA LANE
BENJAMIN
APT. 2-D TEL.: 410-484-6235
FELDMAN
APT. 3-D TEL.: 410-653-9433 (This is the NIRC's Rosh HaYeshiva Rabbi Aharon Feldman.)
GOLDBERG, SHLOMO
APT. 2-C TEL.: 410-484-2254
HAKKAKIAN
APT. 2-A TEL.: 410-486-6508
HEXTER, DANIEL
APT. 1-B TEL.: 410-484-6250
LACHMAN
APT. 1-C TEL.: 410-602-5282
MINTZ, ZALMAN
APT. 3-A TEL.: 410-602-5264
NAIMAN
APT. 1-D TEL.: 410-484-6037
NEUBERGER, BARUCH
APT. 3-B TEL.: 410-602-5160
STEINHARDT
APT. 3-C TEL.: 410-486-7163
WOLF
APT. 1-A TEL.: 410-486-4200
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
437 YESHIVA LANE
GERSTEN
APT. 3-A TEL.: 410-580-0112
HEXTER, HILLEL
APT. 3-B TEL.: 410-602-7775
JAKOBOVITS
APT. 1-C TEL.: 410-653-3873 (OFFICE: 410-580-0900)
(This is Dr. Julian Jakobovits. For his outstanding service to the Yeshiva /three Rosh HaYeshivas dead/ he got this new spacious apartment.)
KOSMAN
APT. 2-C TEL.: 410-486-6803
KROLL
APT. 3-D TEL.: 410-580-0603
NEUBERGER, EZRA
APT. 1-A TEL.: 410-486-7681
TENDLER, AHARON
APT. 2-A TEL.: 410-653-5213
TRENK
APT. 3-C TEL.: 410-484-9422
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
441 YESHIVA LANE
BERKOWITZ
APT. 1-A (the entire first floor) TEL.: 410-484-6209
FRANKEL
APT. 3-C TEL.: 410-602-9972
HEXTER, SIMCHA
APT. 2-B TEL.: 410-486-1593
HOFFMAN, DAVID
APT. 3-B TEL.: 410-653-5283
HOFFMAN, LEIB
APT. 1-C TEL.: 410-653-2468
ISRAEL
APT. 3-D TEL.: 410-318-6694
NEUBERGER, JOSEPH
APT. 2-A TEL.: 410-484-9776
NUSBAUM
APT. 2-D TEL.: 410-484-8622
ROTTENBERG
APT. 2-C TEL.: 410-415-5339
WENGER
APT. 3-A TEL.: 410-486-2854
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
410-424 YESHIVA LANE - TOWNHOUSES I
EISGRAU (420)
TEL.: 410-484-7267
GLAZER, MH (414)
TEL.: 410-486-7727
KRAKAUER (424)
TEL.: 410-484-7876
NEUBERGER, SHEFTEL (418)
TEL.: 410-484-2847 (Yep, this is Rabbi Sheftel Neuberger, NIRC's President.)
SALB (410)
TEL.: 410-484-0784
SHAFRAN (422)
TEL.: 410-484-5987
WEINREB (416)
TEL.: 410-484-8263
WILLNER (412)
TEL.: 410-484-9028
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
411-431 YESHIVA LANE - TOWNHOUSES II
ADLER (423)
TEL.: 410-484-4172 / 410-484-4137
COOK (425)
TEL.: 410-653-9311
FRAND (417)
TEL.: 410-484-1605 (This is the NIRC's well-known lecturer Rabbi Issachar Frand.)
FRIEDMAN, DAVID (415)
TEL.: 410-653-5481
GLAZER, SHMUEL (427)
TEL.: 410-653-0650
GOLDBERG, WILLIAM (431)
TEL.: 410-484-2291
JURKOWITZ (411)
TEL.: 410-484-4239
LANSKY (413)
TEL.: 410-484-2997 (This is a local Ner Israel cabalist Rabbi Nachum Lansky.)
MELLMAN (419)
TEL.: 410-653-3106
ROSEBAUM (429)
TEL.: 410-486-0548
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Additionally, the phone directory adds two important individuals who, while not on campus, live in close proximity to the Ner Israel Rabbinical College:
FEUREISEN
8904 GREYLOCK ROAD, TEL.: 410-998-9167 (This is an all-time undercover Yeshiva informer Yitzchak Feureisen.)
NEUBERGER, YITZCHAK
500 MOUNT WILSON LANE, TEL.: 410-486-0053 (This is the infamous Yeshiva lawyer, the brother of NIRC's President Sheftel Neuberger.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is even more important to contact the potential victims directly and tell them what the NIRC administration is hiding from them.
PHONE BOOTHS OF THE NER ISRAEL RABBINICAL COLLEGE DORMITORY BUILDINGS:
HIGH SCHOOL:
9TH GRADE (KOLKER BUILDING, 2ND FLOOR): 410-486-9708
10TH GRADE (SCHOTTENSTEIN, 2ND FLOOR): 410-486-9623
11TH GRADE (SCHOTTENSTEIN, 1ST FLOOR): 410-486-9710 / 410-484-2806
12TH GRADE (KOLKER BUILDING, 1ST FLOOR): 410-486-9711 / 410-484-2149
YESHIVA:
GUDELSKY BUILDING, 1ST FLOOR: 410-484-9730 / 410-484-9817
GUDELSKY BUILDING, 2ND FLOOR: 410-484-9830 / 410-484-9829
KATZ-FOSTER BUILDING, 1ST FLOOR: 410-486-9716 / 410-486-9824
KATZ-FOSTER BUILDING, 2ND FLOOR: 410-486-9715
SINDLER DINING HALL: 410-486-9644
BAIS HAMEDRASH: 410-486-9855 / 410-486-9856 / 410-486-9857
STUDENT FAX: 410-580-1896
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE ADMINISTRATION BUILDING (I took out the girls who at any rate have no influence, and left only tough die-hard Brooklyn-Baltimore boys). TO BYPASS SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR DIAL 410-484-7204 INSTEAD OF 410-484-7200.
RABBI SHMUEL GLAZER, EXT. 231
RABBI ELI GEENGART, EXT. 219
RABBI LOUIS HOFFMAN, EXT. 217
JEROME H. KADDEN, EXT. 233 (HOME: 410-484-7531)
CHAIM-DAVID LAPIDUS, EXT. 234
ABRAHAM J. LEVIN, EXT. 213
YITZCHAK MARKOWITZ, EXT. 238 (Computer whiz who installs spying equipment at the Ner Israel Rabbinical College.)
RABBI BARUCH NEUBERGER, EXT. 224
RABBI SHEFTEL NEUBERGER, EXT. 222
RABBI ELCHANAN OBERNSTEIN, EXT. 218 (HOME: 410-358-0431)
MOSHE PELBERG, EXT. 233 (HOME: 410-358-2845)
LARRY RIBAKOW, EXT. 220 (410-358-1672)
RABBI JOSEPH SCHECTER, EXT. 219 (HOME: 410-358-9978)
RABBI JONATHAN SEIDEMANN, EXT. 216 (HOME: 410-764-6335)
OFFICE FAX: 410-484-3060
OFFICE E-MAIL: nirc@nirc.edu
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE NER ISRAEL RABBINICAL COLLEGE V.I.P. LIST:
ROSH HAYESHIVA RABBI AHARON FELDMAN
409 YESHIVA LANE, APT. 3-D
TEL.: 410-653-9433, FAX: 410-653-4694
REBBETZIN CHANA WEINBERG (The powerful wife of the late Rosh HaYeshiva Rabbi Jacob Weinberg.)
398 MOUNT WILSON LANE, TEL.: 410-486-0322, FAX: 410-484-8812
RABBI JOSEPH TENDLER (NIRC High School Headmaster.)
THE BEREN HIGH SCHOOL BUILDING, TEL.: 410-484-7329
RABBI ABRAHAM PELBERG (Topmost Fund-raiser of NIRC)
TEL.: 410-358-1182
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I edited out parts of the "OTHER USEFUL NUMBERS" section, like B.G.E. Power Outage Reporting, Weather Line, and Poison Control (well, the last one would be an excellent idea to keep, uh?).
SEVEN MILE MARKET: 410-653-2000 (Provides Eisemann with nourishing kosher food.)
CENTRAL HEBREW BOOK STORE: 410-653-0550
KINAT SOFRIM BOOK STORE: 410-358-4748
PERNS HEBREW BOOK STORE: 410-653-2450
SHABSI'S JUDAICA CENTER: 410-358-2200
(Tell them to stop selling Rabbi Moshe M. Eisemann's books.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Do it today. For God. For Torah. For Jewish survival. And for yourself too. If not, what will you say this Yom Kippur? That you did not KNOW, that you did not CARE? ...
Which relative of Agudah spinmeister Avi Shafran lives on the NIRC campus?
What age is Shalom Tendler? The Awareness Center has reports of unspecified perps molesting boys in the Ner Yisroel dorm in the 1950s.
I heard that after the Steipler zl criticized Ner Yisroel, that some official(s) there lashed back at him with some nasty words.
Does anyone know who had the azuss to do that?
The menahel in Toronto who was throwing boys down the stairs is also a proud alumnus of Ner Israel Baltimore. The rebbeim didn't like him either because he was "pushing" his admiration of a university education to the bochurim, in addition to pushing them down the stairs. They would tell the boys not to be meyaetz with him about their future.
I never understood a very old rov, now in his 80s or 90s who learned by Rav Ruderman in the early days of NIRC Baltimore.
While he is a tremendous talmid chochom, his behavior is very strange to say the least.
He alienated much of his following who either left the shul or started ignoring him. He even angered other rabbonim in his city by utilizing obscure daas yechidim in controversial areas like allowing bris mila for a child of a Jewish father and shiksa mother. Sometimes it was not clear if there was any heter at all like when he allowed alcoholic drinks with known treif ingredients by kiddush.
Worst of all, he was prone to publicly insult people in terrible ways. The most horrible example I remember was when a bochur who was nebich born with extremely unattractive looks became engaged. The rov commented during his speech at the seudas aufruf that he was surprised that such a pretty girl would go for such an ugly guy. People were infuriated and my mother almost slapped him even though we don't have much connection to the baalei simcha.
Is there something in the Baltimore water that makes people ill?
Is the ad hoc Vaadster implying that I am a gilgul of Paroy, melech Mitzrayim?
How does he know? Does UOJ have sources in the oylam shel maalah too?
Let the games begin. Wasserman will now be facing government investigations of Olympic proportions.
http://www.agmkt.state.ny.us/FS/pdfs/complaints.pdf
Otherwise, if anyone becomes ill after eating someone's food or witnesses unsanitary conditions in any store, please refer to this.
We are beginning to wonder if the chassidish rabbi who heads the kosher division of NYS Agriculture was pressured by our community "leaders" to drop the whole Moish Finkel affair.
http://www.agmkt.state.ny.us/FS/industry/04circs/Art17foodprodCIR911.htm
According to the State code, Finkel's transgressions appear to be a class E felony.
The story just died down and no action was brought against him.
For your heimish bakeries and grocery stores that don't care about the health code:
http://www.agmkt.state.ny.us/FS/industry/04circs/rulesandregsretailCIR962.htm
Section 271-2.26 Bulk Foods.
Bulk foods and product modules shall be protected from contamination during display, customer self-service, refilling and storage. Loaves of bread which are displayed where they may be handled by customers shall be packaged to prevent contamination.
Take out stores and bakeries are required to place shields around food on top of the counter to prevent someone with hepatitis or SAARS from sneezing / coughing on it. There are almost NO kosher stores that are in compliance. They are too stingy to buy the plexiglass shields.
Harass the baal habos where you shop to get in compliance and protect people's health or the Vaad will report them.
http://www.agmkt.state.ny.us/FS/industry/04circs/rulesandregsretailCIR962.htm
Section 271-2.19 Food display---general.
Food on display, other than whole, unprocessed raw fruits and unprocessed raw vegetables, shall be protected from contamination by being packaged by display cases, by covered containers for self-service or by similar protective equipment except as provided in Subpart 271-8 of this Part. All food shall be displayed above the floor in a manner that will protect the food from contamination.
Section 271-8.2 Display equipment.
Food on display shall be protected from consumer contamination by the use of packaging or by the use of easily cleanable counter, serving line or salad bar protector devices, display cases or by other effective means. Enough hot or cold food facilities shall be available to maintain the required temperature of potentially hazardous food on display.
Food shields or sneeze guards must be of the canopy type and must completely cover the display/dispensing unit from above. Such shields shall be mounted so as to intercept a direct line between the customer's mouth and the food display area at the customer use position.
To anon @ 9:38.
The Chevy that Rabbi Hopfer drives was **purchased** from the Sher family business of car sales (they do not rent cars).
Mrs. Sher is not Rabbi Eisemann's daughter last I checked, her maiden name starts with the letter H.
Bios provided to NY State by rabbanei machshirim:
http://www.agmkt.state.ny.us/kosherqual.html?q=670&certifier=Triangle%20K,%20Inc.+Rabbi%20J%20H%20Ralbag
Rabbi J.H.Ralbag: Education -Yesh. Etz Chaim (Jerusalem)& Yesh. Merkaz Harav (Jerusalem). Ordained by; Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer, Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Charlop & Rabbi Hersh Pesach Frank.Has been givng kosher certification for 50 years. Rabbi Aryeh Ralbag: Education -Chevron Yeshiva (Jerusalem). Ordained by; Rabbi Moshe Chevroni, Rabbi Eliezer Platchunsky, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Rabbi Avrohom Rosental, & Rabbi Aron Yehuda Arak.
http://www.agmkt.state.ny.us/kosherqual.html?q=339&certifier=+Kehilla%20Kosher%20Supervision%20of%20L%20A
Rabbi Avrohom Teichman-Director.Education and Ordination: Mesifta Torah Vodaath, 1968 Ordination signed by Rabbis M.D. Rivkin, and G. Shorr. Rabbinic Practicum: Rabbi Moshe Bick. Affiliation: Member, Association of Kashrus Oginizations since 1986
http://www.agmkt.state.ny.us/kosherqual.html?q=96&certifier=Organized%20Kashruth%20Labs+Rabbi%20Dov%20Hillel%20Klein
OK Kosher Certification (hereafer referred to as OK), is an orthodox certification agency, and one of the best known and most trusted names in Kashrus. The OK has provided premium kosher supervision to companies around the world since 1935. In 1968, the late Rabbi Berel Levy obm acquired the agency and emerged as the acknowledged trailblazer for the entire kosher food industry, establishing standards for kashrus supervision that are universally accepted. Since 1987, the OK is under the leadership of his son, Rabbi Don Yoel Levy, who received Smicha (Rabbinic ordination) from the leading rabbinical scholars at that time, including Rabbi Moshe Feinstein and Rabbi Meir Bransdorfer. Rabbi Levy is known as a leading international authority on kosher food. The staff of the OK includes some of the world's most professional and knowledgeable kosher experts - every one of them an orthodox ordained Rabbi - individuals with an extensive knowledge of food technology, based on first-hand experience and training, supported by a state-of-the-art computer system. Rabbi Levy and his team supervise and manage a global network of well over 300 orthodox, experienced supervising rabbis. The OK is synonymous with integrity, quality, responsibility and service to millions of kosher consumers worldwide.
http://www.agmkt.state.ny.us/kosherqual.html?q=148&certifier=+Star-K%20Kosher%20Supervision
STAR-K CERTIFICATION, INC., a non-profit kosher certifying agency first incorporated in 1947, operates under the auspices of a Rabbinical Court (Bais-Din) and Rabbi Moshe Heinemann, Rabbinic Administrator. Rabbi Heinemann who is well known throughout the Orthodox Jewish Community as a Posek (decisor of Jewish Law) was ordained in 1964. At the STAR-K Rabbi Heinemann leads a Rabbinical staff of over 100 where he guides STAR-K Rabbinic coordinators and Mashgichim (Rabbinic Supervisors) in implementing the laws of Kashruth (Jewish Dietary Laws) at food and food ingredient manufacturers all over the world. Rabbi Heinemann also serves as Rabbi at one of Baltimore’s largest Orthodox synagogues, Agudath Israel of Baltimore.
Disney productions presents:
Another Mickey-Mouse Rabbi...
Rabbi Name: Gabriel Elias
Congregation Mogen David
Location: 9717 W. Pico Blvd. - Los Angeles, CA 90035
Phone: 310-556-5609
Fax: 310-556-8475
Email: rabbielias@mogen-david.org
Check out the "Smicha" of "Rabbi"
Gabe Elias of Mogen David Cong. of Los Angeles... He should add to his name the title G.M. (Ganav Mus'mach) This former Sh'mate business handler is a piece of work. You could write a book about him.
UOJ's Vaad should stay out of this. Who cares about some coughs, sneezes and people salivating and putting their grubba hands all over? Us gluttons love to rummage through the food on display in stores and we don't appreciate any efforts to curtail our pleasure in life.
What's your problem with me?
http://www.mogen-david.org/ourRabbi.htm
Rabbi Elias was born in Budapest, Hungary and is a child of survivors from the Holocaust. He was raised in an Orthodox home from a Chasidic and Ashkenazic background. His formal Jewish education began in a Vienna cheder and then at Rabbi Wasserman’s Yeshiva in Burbank, California. Rabbi Elias and his family have been active members and participants at Beth Jacob Congregation in Beverly Hills for the past 42 years.
At the age of 13, Rabbi Elias left Los Angeles to attend Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied there for the next four years and returned to Los Angeles to continue his education at Yeshiva University and UCLA. He graduated from UCLA with a Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in Psychology and received a law degree from the University of San Fernando. Ordained at Yeshiva Beth Midrash Lerabonim, be has worked as Executive Director and Assistant Rabbi for Congregation Mogen David for the last 16 years.
After graduating from law school, Rabbi Elias organized a sports league for basketball and baseball for Orthodox children. The league, Elias/Elitzur Sports, has given Orthodox children the opportunity to participate in organized sports while still excelling in Judaic studies. The league at one time had over 1,000 children and 500 adults playing ball. The children wear kipot and tzizits as part of their uniform. The league is still running and is coordinated by Rabbi Elias.
Since taking over as Rabbi of Congregation Mogen David in 2002, there has been an increase in membership with the addition of 105 young families (including over 100 children). Three new minyanim have been introduced, including the Sephardic minyan which meets in the social hall.
Rabbi Elias is married to Helen Sara Schamroth Elias of Baltimore, Maryland and they have two children, Daniel and Rachel Elias.
I'm program director at the same shul as well as rabbi of Young Israel of Venice, CA.
You want to know what's really odd? Even though I'm an Agudah hack, my hashgocho called Half Moon K was unreliable for years and years. There are currently some rabbonim who are working to bring me up to speed.
http://www.mogen-david.org/ourRabbi.htm
Rabbi Zvi Boruch Hollander, currently Program Director for Mogen David, has been a Los Angeles resident since 1994. After receiving his BA cum laude from Yale University (1980) and Rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Mordecai Gifter at Telshe Yeshiva, Cleveland (1987), Rabbi Hollander served as Associate Rabbi of Chevra Tikva Chadosho in Cincinnati and Rabbinic Administrator of its Vaad Hair. He returned to Chicago to continue in Torah programming as Director of Outreach for Kollel Toras Chesed in 1992. Then, at the request of Rabbi Moshe Sherer, zt"l, in 1994 Rabbi Hollander and family came to the West Coast to be the Executive Director of Agudath Israel's regional office. Since 1995, Rabbi Hollander has been Rav of Young Israel of Venice, spent 8 years as a rebbe at Yeshiva Ahron Yaakov Ohr Eliyahu (most recently as its kindergarten rebbe), and currently is the Kashrus Administrator of KOAOA, the Half Moon K.
Rabbi Hollander is ably assisted by his wife of 25 years, Kaila. They have 5 children (4 grown boys, and a princess, Aidel), and reside in Venice, with regular monthly visits to the Pico area.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/oem/html/news/07_18_07_steam_pipe_explosion.shtml
Margulies was terrified about the steam pipe explosion in Manhattan. He called 311 and asked if UOJ had anything to do with it.
That's a very interesting website from Albany about kashrus.
I noticed one jokester rav hamachshir who says he has a haskoma from Rabbi Belsky. I wonder if he just took the liberty to say it or if he has protekzia.
I also saw the OU says that the kashrus division is a shutfus with the RCA. That means people should start pressuring the RCA beis din about all the shenanigans with Rubashkin, Le Marais and the cholov stam.
Haskama from Belsky for anything is as reliable as Yudi Kolko's reference for a baby sitter.
Re: The Mickey Mouse S'micha...
Rabeynu Gabe, Thanks for the prompt responds... Always quick on your feet... to cover yourself. I wonder if this Rabbi Hollander
knows that you are using him as an alibi.
- Assistant Rabbi at Mogen David for the last 16 years? Untrue. You davened all those years at Young Israel of Century City.
- You became involved at Elitzur sport association and later claimed it is yours..bla bla bla.
THIS IS THE WAY HE OPERATES: continue to read.
Backgrownd:
Every one in town knew him as a G.M. and wouldn't have anything to do with him (Including in Israel...)
So, he decides to switch horses and work in a Conservative Temple; Mogen David as Hebrew School principal (Afternoon school)
twice a week. While working in the sh'mate business Downtown.
The Year is 1995 and here is how it goes:
- The first thing he did was, get rid of the Exc. Director (by becoming chummy with the elderly Baley
Batim and the president.)
- He becames, literally overnight the new Exc. Director of the synagogue.
- Now he gets rid of the Director of the newly established Day School and... puts his brother in that position.
(The school shuts down that year.)
- His "best" accomplishment was, when he got Rabbi Yisroel Kelemer the shull's Rabbi fired...! A real nice man
and Big Lam'dan. A humble guy, who went through lot's of Tzures in his life and ended up there. He worked there
for 17 years and was loved by all--- till you-know-who pushed him out...
- Gabe declares himself Assistant and took his place as Interim Rabbi..
- The members wanted a REAL rabbi, they hired Rabbi X from YU. (Turning the Shull Orthodox to increase membership)
- Within a year the guy is out (He sues...)
- And that's is how Gabe became a RABBI with such a nice CV, even his own mother wouldn't recognize! P.S. The Holocaust
adddition gives it a nice touch... You Mam'zer, you!
- WHERE IS YOUR S'MICHA?
- CAN WE SEE IT?
Not the little sh'mate hanging behind you... The large desk in the long office prevents anyone from reading it. Did the IRS get
a copy of it for all the tax deductions you claim as an official Rabbi...?
Clarification: What you ALL have to keep in mind is the fact that this Shull has a sizable endownment worth of many
millions of dollars...and so is the building. This is the TRUE motivations behind all his nasty deeds.
By the way,
- Where did you get a license to practice law?
- and were did you ever practice?
So when will Colmer be back in the US? Will he be held in Prison or let ou bail to molest more children?
I say we all get together and start a protest to convince the Rabbi's to encourage the rest of the victims to come forward to the DA.
Listen All, at the leasr, Colmer deserves to sit in Jail for a very long time. The more victims that come forward, the longer he will serve.
A 'window' for victims of abuse
Historic legislation from Sacramento allowed abuse victims to take legal
action against the Los Angeles Archdiocese.
By Marci A. Hamilton
July 19, 2007
WITHOUT question, the bravest souls involved in Los Angeles' $660-million clergy abuse settlement are the victims who came forward to sue the archdiocese.
By now they have traversed more levels of Dante's inferno than anyone should have to experience.
But another heroic group has gone largely unrecognized — the Legislature. It is only because that body passed historic childhood sexual abuse legislation
in 2002 that these lawsuits and settlement happened. That law created a one-year "window" into the legal system for claims that had been shut down by overly
short statutes of limitations ” as little as three years for some victims.
Indeed, in 2003, any California childhood sexual abuse victim could go to the courthouse and find that the statute-of-limitati ons lock had been taken off
the courtroom door. And in they went ” about 850 Catholic clergy abuse victims and 150 others who sued churches, the Boy Scouts and other institutions for employing known molesters. Even as the U.S. Supreme Court struck down
California's window for criminal prosecutions, the window has been held open for civil lawsuits.
In the Boston Archdiocese scandal, victims faced "charitable immunity" laws that limited the amount of financial damages they could recover. Expired
statutes of limitations also weakened their cases, and as a result, they received much less compensation per victim. With the statute of limitations set aside,
California plaintiffs came to the justice system with much more powerful claims.
The window law is the sole reason California dioceses and members of the church hierarchy, such as L.A.'s Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, were forced to face the
prospect of truth-revealing trials and substantial damages
Once other California diocese settlements came in ” and showed that plaintiffs had increased
legal bargaining power victims were able to demand release of church personnel files. The church has resisted releasing such files, but lawsuits filed under
the window law revealed the identities of many perpetrators and their institutional enablers.
California's window legislation has a beneficial ripple effect across the country as well. Last week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in John Doe vs. Archdiocese of Milwaukee, for the first time permitted a clergy abuse case to go forward, and it is highly likely that facts from a California case involving Father
Siegfried Widera made a big difference. Widera had been transferred back and
forth between Wisconsin and Southern California, and his California victims had laid out their horrific stories in court. The church hierarchy knew Widera
was a convicted serial child molester and hid that fact from parishioners in both states.
California may be starting a trend toward unlocking courthouse doors for childhood sexual abuse victims. Just last week, Delaware became the first state to
follow suit with a window law of its own. Its Child Victims Act creates a two-year window to file suits and abolishes the civil statutes of limitations on
sexual abuse cases going forward.
The New York Assembly has passed similar legislation, hearings have been held by the District of Columbia City Council,
and the introduction of window bills is likely in a number of states this fall.
The beneficiaries of such bills extend well beyond clergy abuse victims, and the statistics are sobering. Multiple studies have concluded that at least 20%
of boys and 25% of girls have been sexually abused ” the majority by family or family acquaintances. There is a crying need to give these victims a shot at
justice. One incest victim told me that she didn't come to terms with her abuse until her 40s, and when she did, she told her father she was going to sue him. His response? Don't be silly, I have the benefit of the statute of
limitations. This is a woman who deserves the California-type window, and there are
millions like her across the country.
It is shameful that most states have had such short statutes of limitations on childhood sexual abuse. Even though states, including California, have been
lengthening those limits, that doesn't help past victims whose claims have expired. These victims have been foreclosed from justice while predators enjoy a
system that protects their interests first and foremost. California has shown the rest of the country a more heroic and noble path to follow.
MARCI A. HAMILTON is a law professor at Yeshiva University and author of the
forthcoming book "How to Deliver Us From Evil: What America Must Do to Protect
Its Children."
A must read....Then break down and cry.
----------------
Religion beat became a test of faith
A reporter looks at how the stories he covered affected him and his spiritual journey.
By William Lobdell, Times Staff Writer
July 21, 2007
WHEN Times editors assigned me to the religion beat, I believed God had answered my prayers.
As a serious Christian, I had cringed at some of the coverage in the mainstream media. Faith frequently was treated like a circus, even a freak show.
I wanted to report objectively and respectfully about how belief shapes people's lives. Along the way, I believed, my own faith would grow deeper and sturdier.
But during the eight years I covered religion, something very different happened.
In 1989, a friend took me to Mariners Church, then in Newport Beach, after saying: "You need God. That's what's missing in your life." At the time, I was 28 and my first son was less than a year old. I had managed to nearly ruin my marriage (the second one) and didn't think I'd do much better as a father. I was profoundly lost.
The mega-church's pastor, Kenton Beshore, had a knack for making Scripture accessible and relevant. For someone who hadn't studied the Bible much, these talks fed a hunger in my soul. The secrets to living well had been there all along — in "Life's Instruction Manual," as some Christians nicknamed the Bible.
Some friends in a Bible study class encouraged me to attend a men's religious weekend in the San Bernardino Mountains. The three-day retreats are designed to grind down your defenses and leave you emotionally raw — an easier state in which to connect with God. After 36 hours of prayer, singing, Bible study, intimate sharing and little sleep, I felt filled with the Holy Spirit.
At the climactic service Sunday, Mike Barris, a pastor-to-be, delivered an old-fashioned altar call. He said we needed to let Jesus into our hearts.
With my eyes closed in prayer, I saw my heart slowly opening in two and then being infused with a warm, glowing light. A tingle spread across my chest. This, I thought, was what it was to be born again.
The pastor asked those who wanted to accept Jesus to raise their hands. My hand pretty much levitated on its own. My new friends in Christ, many of whom I had first met Friday, gave me hugs and slaps on the back.
I began praying each morning and night. During those quiet times, I mostly listened for God's voice. And I thought I sensed a plan he had for me: To write about religion for The Times and bring light into the newsroom, if only by my stories and example.
My desire to be a religion reporter grew as I read stories about faith in the mainstream media. Spiritual people often appeared as nuts or simpletons.
In one of the most famous examples, the Washington Post ran a news story in 1993 that referred to evangelical Christians as "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command."
Another maddening trend was that homosexuality and abortion debates dominated media coverage, as if those where the only topics that mattered to Christians.
I didn't just pray for a religion writing job; I lobbied hard. In one meeting with editors, my pitch went something like this:
"What if I told you that you have an institution in Orange County that draws more than 15,000 people a weekend and that you haven't written much about?"
They said they couldn't imagine such a thing.
"Saddleback Church in Lake Forest draws that type of crowd."
It took several years and numerous memos and e-mails, but editors finally agreed in 1998 to let me write "Getting Religion," a weekly column about faith in Orange County.
I felt like all the tumblers of my life had clicked. I had a strong marriage, great kids and a new column. I attributed it all to God's grace.
First as a columnist and then as a reporter, I never had a shortage of topics. I wrote about an elderly church organist who became a spiritual mentor to the man who tried to rape, rob and kill her. About the Orthodox Jewish mother who developed a line of modest clothing for Barbie dolls. About the hardy group of Mormons who rode covered wagons 800 miles from Salt Lake City to San Bernardino, replicating their ancestors' journey to Southern California.
Meanwhile, Roman Catholicism, with its low-key evangelism and deep ritual, increasingly appealed to me. I loved its long history and loving embrace of liberals and conservatives, immigrants and the established, the rich and poor.
My wife was raised in the Catholic Church and had wanted me to join for years. I signed up for yearlong conversion classes at a Newport Beach parish that would end with an Easter eve ceremony ushering newcomers into the church.
By then I had been on the religion beat for three years. I couldn't wait to get to work each day or, on Sunday, to church.
IN 2001, about six months before the Catholic clergy sex scandal broke nationwide, the dioceses of Orange and Los Angeles paid a record $5.2 million to a law student who said he had been molested, as a student at Santa Margarita High School in Rancho Santa Margarita, by his principal, Msgr. Michael Harris.
Without admitting guilt, Harris agreed to leave the priesthood. As part of the settlement, the dioceses also were forced to radically change how they handled sexual abuse allegations, including a promise to kick out any priest with a credible molestation allegation in his past. It emerged that both dioceses had many known molesters on duty. Los Angeles had two convicted pedophiles still working as priests.
While reporting the Harris story, I learned — from court records and interviews — the lengths to which the church went to protect the priest. When Harris took an abrupt leave of absence as principal at Santa Margarita in January 1994, he issued a statement saying it was because of "stress." He resigned a month later.
His superiors didn't tell parents or students the real reason for his absence: Harris had been accused of molesting a student while he was principal at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana from 1977 to 1979; church officials possessed a note from Harris that appeared to be a confession; and they were sending him to a treatment center.
In September 1994, a second former student stepped forward, this time publicly, and filed a lawsuit. In response, parents and students held a rally for Harris at the school, singing, "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." An airplane towed a banner overhead that read "We Love Father Harris."
By this time, church leaders possessed a psychological report in which Catholic psychiatrists diagnosed Harris as having an attraction to adolescents and concluded that he likely had molested multiple boys. (Harris, who has denied the allegations, now stands accused of molesting 12 boys, according to church records.) But they didn't step forward to set the record straight. Instead, a diocesan spokesman called Harris an "icon of the priesthood."
Harris' top defense attorney, John Barnett, lashed out at the priest's accusers in the media, calling them "sick individuals." Again, church leaders remained silent as the alleged victims were savaged. Some of the diocese's top priests — including the cleric in charge of investigating the accusations — threw a going-away party for Harris.
At the time, I never imagined Catholic leaders would engage in a widespread practice that protected alleged child molesters and belittled the victims. I latched onto the explanation that was least damaging to my belief in the Catholic Church — that this was an isolated case of a morally corrupt administration.
And I was comforted by the advice of a Catholic friend: "Keep your eyes on the person nailed to the cross, not the priests behind the altar."
IN late 2001, I traveled to Salt Lake City to attend a conference of former Mormons. These people lived mostly in the Mormon Jell-O belt — Utah, Idaho, Arizona — so-named because of the plates of Jell-O that inevitably appear at Mormon gatherings.
They found themselves ostracized in their neighborhoods, schools and careers. Often, they were dead to their own families.
"If Mormons associate with you, they think they will somehow become contaminated and lose their faith too," Suzy Colver told me. "It's almost as if people who leave the church don't exist."
The people at the conference were an eclectic bunch: novelists and stay-at-home moms, entrepreneurs and cartoonists, sex addicts and alcoholics. Some were depressed, others angry, and a few had successfully moved on. But they shared a common thread: They wanted to be honest about their lack of faith and still be loved.
In most pockets of Mormon culture, that wasn't going to happen.
Part of what drew me to Christianity were the radical teachings of Jesus — to love your enemy, to protect the vulnerable and to lovingly bring lost sheep back into the fold.
As I reported the story, I wondered how faithful Mormons — many of whom rigorously follow other biblical commands such as giving 10% of their income to the church — could miss so badly on one of Jesus' primary lessons?
As part of the Christian family, I felt shame for my religion. But I still compartmentalized it as an aberration — the result of sinful behavior that infects even the church.
IN early 2002, I was assigned to work on the Catholic sex scandal story as it erupted across the nation. I also continued to attend Sunday Mass and conversion classes on Sunday mornings and Tuesday nights.
Father Vincent Gilmore — the young, intellectually sharp priest teaching the class — spoke about the sex scandal and warned us Catholics-to-be not to be poisoned by a relatively few bad clerics. Otherwise, we'd be committing "spiritual suicide."
As I began my reporting, I kept that in mind. I also thought that the victims — people usually in their 30s, 40s and up — should have just gotten over what had happened to them decades before. To me, many of them were needlessly stuck in the past.
But then I began going over the documents. And interviewing the victims, scores of them. I discovered that the term "sexual abuse" is a euphemism. Most of these children were raped and sodomized by someone they and their family believed was Christ's representative on Earth. That's not something an 8-year-old's mind can process; it forever warps a person's sexuality and spirituality.
Many of these victims were molested by priests with a history of abusing children. But the bishops routinely sent these clerics to another parish, and bullied or conned the victims and their families into silence. The police were almost never called. In at least a few instances, bishops encouraged molesting priests to flee the country to escape prosecution.
I couldn't get the victims' stories or the bishops' lies — many of them right there on their own stationery — out of my head. I had been in journalism more than two decades and had dealt with murders, rapes, other violent crimes and tragedies. But this was different — the children were so innocent, their parents so faithful, the priests so sick and bishops so corrupt.
The lifeline Father Vincent had tried to give me began to slip from my hands.
I sought solace in another belief: that a church's heart is in the pews, not the pulpits. Certainly the people who were reading my stories would recoil and, in the end, recapture God's house. Instead, I saw parishioners reflexively support priests who had molested children by writing glowing letters to bishops and judges, offering them jobs or even raising their bail while cursing the victims, often to their faces.
On a Sunday morning at a parish in Rancho Santa Margarita, I watched congregants lobby to name their new parish hall after their longtime pastor, who had admitted to molesting a boy and who had been barred that day from the ministry. I felt sick to my stomach that the people of God wanted to honor an admitted child molester. Only one person in the crowd, an Orange County sheriff's deputy, spoke out for the victim.
On Good Friday 2002, I decided I couldn't belong to the Catholic Church. Though I had spent a year preparing for it, I didn't go through with the rite of conversion.
I understood that I was witnessing the failure of humans, not God. But in a way, that was the point. I didn't see these institutions drenched in God's spirit. Shouldn't religious organizations, if they were God-inspired and -driven, reflect higher standards than government, corporations and other groups in society?
I found an excuse to skip services that Easter. For the next few months, I attended church only sporadically. Then I stopped going altogether.
SOME of the nation's most powerful pastors — including Billy Graham, Robert H. Schuller and Greg Laurie — appear on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, benefiting from TBN's worldwide reach while looking past the network's reliance on the "prosperity gospel" to fuel its growth.
TBN's creed is that if viewers send money to the network, God will repay them with great riches and good health. Even people deeply in debt are encouraged to put donations on credit cards.
"If you have been healed or saved or blessed through TBN and have not contributed … you are robbing God and will lose your reward in heaven," Paul Crouch, co-founder of the Orange County-based network, once told viewers. Meanwhile, Crouch and his wife, Jan, live like tycoons.
I began looking into TBN after receiving some e-mails from former devotees of the network. Those people had given money to the network in hopes of getting a financial windfall from God. That didn't work.
By then, I started to believe that God was calling me, as he did St. Francis of Assisi, to "rebuild his church" — not in some grand way that would lead to sainthood but by simply reporting on corruption within the church body.
I spent several years investigating TBN and pored through stacks of documents — some made available by appalled employees — showing the Crouches eating $180-per-person meals; flying in a $21-million corporate jet; having access to 30 TBN-owned homes across the country, among them a pair of Newport Beach mansions and a ranch in Texas. All paid for with tax-free donor money.
One of the stars of TBN and a major fundraiser is the self-proclaimed faith healer Benny Hinn. I attended one of his two-day "Miracle Crusades" at what was then the Pond of Anaheim. The arena was packed with sick people looking for a cure.
My heart broke for the hundreds of people around me in wheelchairs or in the final stages of terminal diseases, believing that if God deemed their faith strong enough, they would be healed that night.
Hinn tells his audiences that a generous cash gift to his ministry will be seen by God as a sign of true faith. This has worked well for the televangelist, who lives in an oceanfront mansion in Dana Point, drives luxury cars, flies in private jets and stays in the best hotels.
At the crusade, I met Jordie Gibson, 21, who had flown from Calgary, Canada, to Anaheim because he believed that God, through Hinn, could get his kidneys to work again.
He was thrilled to tell me that he had stopped getting dialysis because Hinn had said people are cured only when they "step out in faith." The decision enraged his doctors, but made perfect sense to Gibson. Despite risking his life as a show of faith, he wasn't cured in Anaheim. He returned to Canada and went back on dialysis. The crowd was filled with desperate believers like Gibson.
I tried unsuccessfully to get several prominent mainstream pastors who appeared on TBN to comment on the prosperity gospel, Hinn's "faith healing" or the Crouches' lifestyle.
Like the Catholic bishops, I assumed, they didn't want to risk what they had.
AS the stories piled up, I began to pray with renewed vigor, but it felt like I wasn't connecting to God. I started to feel silly even trying.
I read accounts of St. John of the Cross and his "dark night of the soul," a time he believed God was testing him by seemingly withdrawing from his life. Maybe this was my test.
I met with my former Presbyterian pastor, John Huffman, and told him what I was feeling. I asked him if I could e-mail him some tough questions about Christianity and faith and get his answers. He agreed without hesitation.
The questions that I thought I had come to peace with started to bubble up again. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God get credit for answered prayers but no blame for unanswered ones? Why do we believe in the miraculous healing power of God when he's never been able to regenerate a limb or heal a severed spinal chord?
In one e-mail, I asked John, who had lost a daughter to cancer, why an atheist businessman prospers and the child of devout Christian parents dies. Why would a loving God make this impossible for us to understand?
He sent back a long reply that concluded:
"My ultimate affirmation is let God be God and acknowledge that He is in charge. He knows what I don't know. And frankly, if I'm totally honest with you, a life of gratitude is one that bows before the Sovereign God arguing with Him on those things that trouble me, lamenting the losses of life, but ultimately saying, 'You, God, are infinite; I'm human and finite.' "
John is an excellent pastor, but he couldn't reach me. For some time, I had tried to push away doubts and reconcile an all-powerful and infinitely loving God with what I saw, but I was losing ground. I wondered if my born-again experience at the mountain retreat was more about fatigue, spiritual longing and emotional vulnerability than being touched by Jesus.
And I considered another possibility: Maybe God didn't exist.
TOWARD the end of my tenure as a religion reporter, I traveled to Nome, Alaska. Sitting in a tiny visitor's room, I studied the sad, round face of the Eskimo in front of me and tried to imagine how much he hated being confined to jail.
Peter "Packy" Kobuk was from a remote village on St. Michael Island in western Alaska. There natives lived, in many ways, just as their ancestors did 10,000 years ago. Smells of the outdoor life hung heavy in his village: the salt air, the strips of salmon drying on racks, the seaweed washed up on the beach.
But for now, Packy could smell only the disinfectants used to scrub the concrete floors at the Anvil Mountain Correction Center. Unfortunately, alcohol and a violent temper had put Packy there many times in his 46 years. For his latest assault, he was serving three months.
The short, powerfully built man folded his calloused hands on the table. I was surprised to see a homemade rosary hanging from his neck, the blue beads held together by string from a fishing net.
I had come from Southern California to report on a generation of Eskimo boys who had been molested by a Catholic missionary. All of the now-grown Eskimos I had interviewed over the past week had lost their faith. In fact, several of them confessed that they fantasized daily about burning down the village church, where the unspeakable acts took place.
But there was Packy with his rosary.
"Why do you still believe?" I asked.
"It's not God's work what happened to me," he said softly, running his fingers along the beads. "They were breaking God's commandments — even the people who didn't help. They weren't loving their neighbors as themselves."
He said he regularly got down on his knees in his jail cell to pray.
"A lot of people make fun of me, asking if the Virgin Mary is going to rescue me," Packy said. "Well, I've gotten helped more times from the Virgin Mary through intercession than from anyone else. I won't stop. My children need my prayers."
Tears spilled from his eyes. Packy's faith, though severely tested, had survived.
I looked at him with envy. Where he found comfort, I was finding emptiness.
IN the summer of 2005, I reported from a Multnomah County, Ore., courtroom on the story of an unemployed mother — impregnated by a seminary student 13 years earlier — who was trying to get increased child support for her sickly 12-year-old son.
The boy's father, Father Arturo Uribe, took the witness stand. The priest had never seen or talked with his son. He even had trouble properly pronouncing the kid's name. Uribe confidently offered the court a simple reason as to why he couldn't pay more than $323 a month in child support.
"The only thing I own are my clothes," he told the judge.
His defense — orchestrated by a razor-sharp attorney paid for by his religious order — boiled down to this: I'm a Roman Catholic priest, I've taken a vow of poverty, and child-support laws can't touch me.
The boy's mother, Stephanie Collopy, couldn't afford a lawyer. She stumbled badly acting as her own attorney. It went on for three hours.
"It didn't look that great," Stephanie said afterward, wiping tears from her eyes. "It didn't sound that great … but at least I stood up for myself."
The judge ruled in the favor of Uribe, then pastor of a large parish in Whittier. After the hearing, when the priest's attorney discovered I had been there, she ran back into the courtroom and unsuccessfully tried to get the judge to seal the case. I could see why the priest's lawyer would try to cover it up. People would be shocked at how callously the church dealt with a priest's illegitimate son who needed money for food and medicine.
My problem was that none of that surprised me anymore.
As I walked into the long twilight of a Portland summer evening, I felt used up and numb.
My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.
Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don't. It's not a choice. It can't be willed into existence. And there's no faking it if you're honest about the state of your soul.
Sitting in a park across the street from the courthouse, I called my wife on a cellphone. I told her I was putting in for a new beat at the paper.
william.lobdell@latimes.com
Every rabbi or other criminal that is responsible for the torturing of our children, and the degradation of Judaism, beware; I'm aligning myself with any group that will see to it that you will be prosecuted. I will chase you to the grave! Ask Ephraim Shapiro when you get there.
----------------
By RACHEL ZOLL, AP Religion Writer
Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony approved a record clergy abuse payout, opened the files of the Roman Catholic priests involved and looked into the cameras and apologized last week for the victims' treatment. And it still might not be enough to satisfy some.
To fund the archdiocese's share of the $660 million settlement, the cardinal will have to sell property, liquidate investments and cut spending, dismantling part of what he built in more than two decades as the city's archbishop.
Even so, critics question whether the cardinal should have done more to rein in predatory priests in the nation's largest archdiocese. Bishops answer only to the Vatican, which had to sign off on some funding of the settlement, but every church leader needs the trust of the parishioners.
"He acknowledged he made some mistakes, he apologized," said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. "Now the people of Los Angeles are going to have to weigh the good that he's done over the last 22 years versus the bad things he did and decide whether they can continue to accept him as their bishop."
Last week's deal was made on the eve of a civil trial in which Mahony would have been grilled about why he left some abusive priests in churches without telling parents or police.
As part of the settlement, the archdiocese agreed to release the personnel files of accused clergymen, which could reveal any direct links between Mahony and the guilty priests he supervised. But each priest tied to the 508 Los Angeles cases can challenge his records' release — another potential obstacle to full disclosure.
Mahony, 71, has acknowledged the suffering of victims. He was among only a handful of bishops who revealed the names of suspected clergy so the public could be protected from them.
At the same time, his lawyers fought disclosure of priests' files to prosecutors all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. They also challenged California's one-year window that allowed abuse claims to be filed no matter how far back they dated. None of the maneuvers succeeded, but they contributed to delays in reaching a settlement, which took four years to negotiate.
Leon Panetta, a member of the original National Review Board, the lay watchdog panel bishops created to monitor their child protection reforms, said Mahony appeared to be "captured by his lawyers." Panetta recalled a board meeting with Mahony a few years ago where the cardinal was accompanied by his lawyers.
"There were more lawyers in the room than I'd ever seen," said Panetta, who served as chief of staff to President Clinton. "They were basically digging in, and as lawyers tend to do, basically saying, `We're not going to cooperate. We're going to fight this out, we're not going to admit to anything and we're going to exhaust the legal process to the fullest.'"
Mahony was sincerely concerned about victims, but went on to let his lawyers "drag it out," Panetta said. "I think that is the mistake the cardinal made. They played for time. In the end they arrived at a settlement, but I think it's done tremendous damage to his reputation and the archdiocese."
However, attorney Pamela Hayes, a New York litigator who served on the board with Panetta, said Mahony had a dual role as pastoral leader of the archdiocese and as its chief executive, with financial obligations that go beyond the victims.
"This should have happened sooner rather than later, but they were doing what most defendants do. They fought back," Hayes said. "It might not sound nice, but do you know any multibillion-dollar organization that is going to fork out millions of dollars to people who say they were molested without any proof?"
After a California judge approved the settlement Monday, Mahony received support from an unlikely source — a lead lawyer for the victims. Attorney Raymond Boucher praised Mahony for meeting with victims and for working to convince religious orders to sign onto the deal.
"We particularly appreciate the sensitivity and personal efforts of Cardinal Mahony in bringing important parts of this settlement together," Boucher said in a news release.
But some Catholic commentators, advocates for victims and editorial writers said the payout protected Mahony at the church's expense.
Phil Lawler, editor of the conservative Catholic World News, said Mahony should resign. Lawler called the cardinal's legal strategy "self-serving" and argued it was meant "to prevent the disclosure of embarrassing information."
The Boston Globe, whose 2002 investigation revealed the depth of the abuse problem in the church, also urged Mahony to step down, while newspapers throughout California said doubts remain about how Mahony responded when his priests were accused of wrongdoing.
Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org, a Massachusetts group that has amassed thousands of documents on abusive priests and their bishops, questioned how much would be accomplished if Mahony resigned as archbishop. She noted that Cardinal Bernard Law, the only church leader to resign as archbishop over how he responded to the abuse problem, was appointed by the Vatican as leader of a basilica in Rome.
"The only real way to hold Mahony accountable," Doyle said, "is to prosecute him through the courts."
Conversion To Judaism: The Need for a Uniform Standard
by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jewish Press
July 17, 2007
Three weeks ago, Rabbi Marc Angel, the retiring spiritual leader of Manhattan’s Congregation Shearith Israel argued in the Jewish Press ("Conversion to Judaism: A Discussion of Standards") that: (1) there is a multiplicity of standards for conversion within halacha; and (2) the determination of what standards to apply is best left to the discretion of every individual rabbi. Both claims are dubious.
The most widely revered contemporary poskim – Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, and yblch"aú Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv have all written explicitly that a full acceptance of the yoke of mitzvos is the fundamental requirement of geirut (conversion). Without the acceptance of mitzvot, the various technical requirements of conversion -- milah (circumcision) for men; tevilah (immersion in a mikveh) for men and women in front of a qualified beit din -- are meaningless.
A convert need not know every mitzvah, but he or she must accept the entirety of the halachic system as binding upon him or her. As the Gemara in Bechorot (30b) makes clear, the rejection of even one mitzvah at the time of conversion renders the would-be convert unfit.
The view of the poskim cited above is not, as Rabbi Angel suggests, a modern day chareidi invention, but one held by the greatest halachic authorities across the Orthodox spectrum. Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine, and Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, the towering figure of Modern Orthodoxy and long-time head of the American Mizrachi Movement, viewed the requirement of kabalat ol mitzvot as axiomatic. (See Rabbi Soloveitchik's Kol Dodi Dofeik fn. 22.)
Rabbi Soloveitchik was not expressing his own opinion but offering his understanding of the Rambam. The Rambam explicitly likens conversion to the process by which the Jewish people accepted the yoke of mitzvot and entered under the wings of the Shechinah at Sinai.
Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Herzog, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, was also of the opinion that acceptance of the yoke of mitzvot is required. When the overwhelming majority of Jews were shomrei mitzvot and Jews were a downtrodden people, it could be safely assumed that anyone who came forward to convert did so with the intention of being shomer mitzvot, he writes. Today, however, when neither of those factors pertain, no such assumption can be made and we must be much stricter about the acceptance of converts.
Rabbi Angel apparently rejects the halachic conclusions of all the great talmidei chachamim mentioned above. While we should do our utmost "to inspire converts to be faithful to the Jewish people, Torah and mitzvot," he writes, "we do not live in a perfect world, and we often have to deal with real people in less than ideal situations." Sometimes, that is, we have to accept those who have no intention of becoming shomer Torah u'mitzvot.
Apart from a smattering of teshuvot within the last hundred years, Rabbi Angel cannot point to any source in halacha for the idea that conversion standards can be lowered as a cure to prevent either individual tragedies (e.g., intermarriage) or a national tragedy (e.g., the hundreds of thousands of non-Jews living in Israel).
RABBI ANGEL IS an ardent proponent of rabbinic autonomy: Let every congregational rav do what is straight in his eyes. But that system has proven a disaster. Nearly twenty years ago, even before Rabbi Angel's term as president of the Rabbinical Council of America, the RCA undertook to establish a series of regional batei din to deal with conversion – an effort that is only now beginning to be seriously implemented.
Congregational rabbis who perform conversions are vulnerable to unbearable pressure from powerful congregants who want their child's non-Jewish boyfriend or girlfriend converted – no questions asked. Savvy communal rabbis – Rabbi Emanuel Feldman when he was a rav in Atlanta comes to mind – avoid the problem by announcing a blanket rule against performing conversions.
A second problem is the danger of conversion mills – rabbis whose primary livelihood comes from performing hundreds of conversions a year. Such conversion mills have also been operated by those possessing semichah from Orthodox institutions. The RCA does not allow its members to offer their private kashrut supervision. There is no reason to follow a different rule with respect to conversion.
But the strongest argument in favor of establishing fixed regional batei din commanding wide respect across a communal spectrum is that only such a structure can offer the degree of the finality that all agree is a crucial desideratum in the conversion process. Once converted, the convert should be like any born Jew: No matter what he subsequently does, his status as a Jew remains. (The only exception would be where the "convert" ignored very basic mitzvot from the very beginning, and thereby demonstrated a lack of sincere acceptance of the yoke of mitzvot at the time of conversion.)
An infinite variety of standards is a recipe for tragedy. Even the most sincere convert may face a situation ten or twenty years down the line where she or her child is rejected by a potential spouse, even though they have been fully observant for decades. Why? Because the rabbi who oversaw her conversion is known to follow questionable standards for conversion, thus raising an issue as to whether any beit din on which that rabbi sat is a valid beit din for overseeing a conversion.
Without a system of fixed batei dinim, it is possible to multiply such tragic scenarios almost ad infinitum. Every single convert would go through life with a constant cloud over his/her geirut.
Nearly a decade ago, Uri Regev, today the head of the international Reform movement, urged the necessity of two types of conversion: one for those who are interested in accepting the yoke of mitzvot and one for those who are not. It would be a great tragedy if an Orthodox rabbi of Rabbi Angel's distinction and long record of communal service were to appear to offer support for such a proposal.
by Julian Rademeyer
The Times (South Africa)
July 15, 2007
http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=515994
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RESIGNED: Rabbi Lewis Furman
‘Incriminating SMS put cheated husband in a rage’
Secrecy surrounds the sacking of a prominent South African rabbi who
was allegedly caught having an affair with a married woman.
Amid a growing scandal, Rabbi Lewis Furman of Johannesburg, who was
also a family counsellor and international speaker , is believed to have
left South Africa for Israel where he is undergoing
“rehabilitation”.
Furman — who is alleged by congregants to have been a “serial
philanderer” — was forced to resign his position in South Africa and
will not practise as a rabbi in this country again.
South African Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein said: “These events have
caused much pain and anguish, which has been exacerbated by much
unfounded speculation.
“Allegations of improper conduct concerning Rabbi Furman were
recently, and for the first time, brought to the attention of the office of
the chief rabbi.
“The matter received swift and urgent attention, and after due
hearing, and in consultation with senior members of the ... Rabbinate,
including his employers, he was requested to immediately resign from his
congregational position, which he did.
“It was also agreed that he will not hold any further position in the
South African Rabbinate.”
A source close to the chief rabbi said Furman’s behaviour was “not
criminal” and the Rabbinate’s comments were constrained by the
Jewish prohibition on gossip, loshan hara. Literally translated, it means
“evil tongue” .
But outraged members of the Jewish community, speaking on condition of
anonymity, have accused the Rabbinate of “sweeping the matter under
the carpet” and failing to be “transparent” about it.
They say Furman had a reputation as a “serial philanderer” who was
caught out when he mistakenly sent an incriminating SMS to the wrong
person.
Furman was apparently then confronted and assaulted by a cuckolded
husband.
Furman, who served as a chaplain in the then South African Defence
Force, has held rabbinical positions in large Jewish congregations in
Pretoria and Johannesburg.
Fourteen years ago, in Johannesburg, he established a “very
successful” branch of Ohr Somayach, an influential teaching academy and
international outreach organisation with campuses in Israel, the US, Canada,
the UK and Australia.
Furman lectured extensively in all five countries and was a frequent
guest on radio and television.
Tapes of his lectures are still on sale on the Ohr Somayach website.
A brief biography published on a website during one of his speaking
tours in Melbourne, Australia, states that Furman’s “profound insights
into how Jewish law and thoughts affect our day-to-day lives, as well
as his warmth and sense of humour, means that he is a popular lecturer
and scholar in residence”.
Rabbi Larry Shain of Ohr Somayach declined to comment on the scandal
this week, referring all queries to the chief rabbi, as did the Jewish
Board of Deputies.
Attempts to obtain comment from Furman proved fruitless.
TELL US: Is the chief rabbi being sufficiently transparent about the
case or should he make public the allegations against Furman?
--
http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2007/07/the-perfidy-tha.html
Just to prove what a fraud Shmarya is, he's leading the bandwagon to rehabilitate Kasztner.
It should be noted that South Africa's chief rabbi, the man who apparently brokered the deal allowing Rabbi Lewis Furman to flee, is Warren Goldstein, a 34 year old kiruv rabbi who formerly worked for Ohr Somayach.
How dare you call my old friend Rudolph Kasztner a mass murderer. So what if he cut a deal with Eichler & Himmler to save his own neck by telling Yidden to get on the trains to Auschwicz?
The first one to be mefarsem against him in Eretz Yisruel was Greenwald. I bet he's related to that troublemaker Eli Greenwald.
Shmarya has become so blinded recently by his hatred of "haredim" and the Torah itself that he will spin ANYTHING into an anti-frum conspiracy, no matter how ridiculous it is.
Nelson Mandela, it's pretty hypocritical for you or me to say anything about cover ups when we knew for years that your wife Winnie was hiring thugs to kill children.
Is someone being motzee shem ra on Harav Hagaon R' Rudolph Kasztner again?
Hey Bungalow Putz, get my hazmona pad ready.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Hecht#Jewish_and_anti-Holocaust_activism
The putz who claimed this week to have "reviewed" the Kasztner papers is Lapid, one of the old school Tzionim who won't give up on the lies.
Is Mr. Greenwald still alive in Israel? Margulies wants to shout at him.
If Kasztner is innocent then Margulies has every right to shout at Mr. Greenwald who would be about 100 years old today.
I am taking the liberty of saying this on behalf of the YTT Vaad Hahorim. I decide with Margulies and Applegrad if an issue even goes to them.
I received letters from those encouraged to go the crematoria by Kasztner. Shafran didn't want them in the Agudah archives so I gave them to Margulies. He said they were all a bunch of rejects and misfits anyway.
Bentzion Schiffenbauer said...
If Kasztner is innocent then Margulies has every right to shout at Mr. Greenwald who would be about 100 years old today.
I am taking the liberty of saying this on behalf of the YTT Vaad Hahorim. I decide with Margulies and Applegrad if an issue even goes to them.
---
What's his story?
"What's his story?"
Mr. Greenwald survived the Nazis. He couldn't believe his eyes that Kasztner, who was the only Jew running around a free man in Europe with blessing from Nazis because of his backstabbing collaboration, became a member of Israeli Parliament after the war.
Greenwald starting printing pamphlets that he dropped off in cafes, exposing Kasztner for the murderer that he was. This was like an early version of UOJ vs Margo. The Tzioni goons sent police to charge Greenwald with "libel". The charges were thrown out, leading to Kasztner himself being arrested.
Kasztner was no run of the mill rotzayach mind you. The putz showed up at Nuremburg to help get some top Nazis off the hook.
According to the malicious liar Shmarya, Kasztner is some poor guy who was demonized by "Haredim" on a witch hunt. While the old Satmar Rov was very vocal against Kasztner's trail of Yiddishe blood, most critics like Ben Hecht were secular themselves.
Even though I was there, I was too busy stuffing my face with food to have realized. I heard about it afterwards from someone else.
That little tidbit above from Shea Fishman must explain why Margulies is given the kibud of leading Tehillim lezecher the 6 million kedoshim at Agudah events.
Since what Margo did for 30 years was nothing less than a Holocaust against Yiddishe kinder, this blog is one of the only things you are allowed to read this afternoon and tomorrow.
Kasztner was no run of the mill rotzayach mind you. The putz showed up at Nuremburg to help get some top Nazis off the hook.
----------------------
He was a vicious, conniving, and unimaginable murderer. The deals he made for himself and his friends on Jewish blood, makes me question his Jewish heritage. Nobody can change the facts. May his name be erased!
Hilchos cherem is one of miktzo'os that is mutter to learn on Tisha B'Av.
Since anyone who is mesarev a beis din like Kolko and Margo are put in cherem, I encourage everyone to learn the halochos to see how you are supposed to act towards lowlives like that.
Ein zach vos shteit is that you are supposed to yell at them to stop being mevazeh the Torah.
"The deals he made for himself and his friends on Jewish blood, makes me question his Jewish heritage."
This is the same story with the rest of the Hungarian sickos like Margo and YTT parents who don't give a hoot about their children's classmates lives being destroyed.
Of course Hungarians absolutely hate it when it's brought up that most of them descend from the Khazars.
"Ein zach vos shteit is that you are supposed to yell at them to stop being mevazeh the Torah."
I have the BEST yeshiva ... Oh sorry, wrong speech. Let me try again.
[Throat clearing]
The best defense is a good offense. That's why I yelled at Eli Greenwald.
'Hat bandit' may have been nabbed in N.J.
MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. (AP) — FBI agents said Monday they've bagged a serial "IDIOT" dubbed the "Mad Hatter" —
If this is true, call Baltimore city authorities, for surely that is an illegal conversion of a garage.
http://jewishsurvivors.blogspot.com/2007/07/rabbi-aron-bourch-tendler-moving-to.html
Rabbi Aron Boruch Tendler Moving To Baltimore?
Anonymous said...
It is definitely true. His daughter is turning her garage into a bedroom for him to live in. How strage is that? She says he is moving here because of "politics." The address is 6304 Lincoln Ave. in Baltimore.
July 21, 2007 9:54 PM
I have an alibi. A bunch of witnesses can place me at Agudah Fresser events.
Besides, that ganav wasn't wearing a dunce cap or a dusty Borsalino.
http://www.vosizneias.com/Images/SuspectSketch.gif
Click on the link for the monster's picture.
The 84th Precinct of the New York Police Department has released a sketch of the suspect in the assault on the female hitchhiker in Williamsburg, Brooklyn two weeks ago. Please study the picture carefully and show it around to family or friends. If anyone possesses any information that may be of interest about this individual please contact:
The 84th precinct - 718-875-6687
The Shomrim Patrol - 718-237-0202
VIN News. We will immediately redirect your information to the appropriate sources.
The reward for tips leading up to the capture of the suspect has now been upped to $5,000 by VIN News.
Shmarya must be off his rocker. I remember something about the US Army Advocate General's Office looking into why Kastner y's was buddy buddy with Gestapo officials. The minutes of the trial are also available to see his testimony.
Try posting that on Failed Messiah and Shmarya will probably start calling you names before editing your post and blocking you from the comments sections.
Rabbi Shafran, in his laudatory remarks about the state of Orthodox Jewry today, makes no mention of a matter in which he and his organization are nog'im badavar (interested parties), namely a festering sex abuse scandal in a yeshiva a stone's throw from my home and in a summer camp run by Agudat Yisrael. He can be forgiven for his silence because the matter is the subject of pending litigation, but we will not remain silent. Several years ago a similar scandal involving Baruch Lanner rocked the Orthodox Union and its youth group NCSY. Victims were encouraged to complain to the police, investigations were carried out and, needless to say, Baruch Lanner does not work for NCSY any more. In contrast, Yehuda Kolko was protected by his principal, Lipa Margulies, and given access to children for 40 years. Victims and their families were intimidated into not contacting the police, "gedolim" (Rabbi Shafran's outfit calls them gedolim; I call them resha'im) were recruited into the cover-up and, but for exposure by the blogosphere, Kolko would still be molesting children in Torah Temima. This occurs because the haredi camp maintains an attitude to secular authority carried over from the benighted tyrannies of Eastern Europe where Jews were singled out for persecution, and that is a touchstone of the debate between our two camps: do we consider ourselves full-blooded Americans?
N'echama writes:
Re: L'shon Ha-Ra about Failed Messiah and Shmarya.
It's erev Tish'ah B'Av for G-d's sake can you stop spilling his blood and bad mouthing him. What is this Sin'ah? He is providing a service to the community like this one. It is inappropriate and unethical. If you have any thing to say- SAY TO HIM! I don't any part in this. I bet tomorrow you'll find somebody else to turn on. This is a Shan'ddah and needs to STOP!
and the "MOST STUPID" award goes to...the T'chniyon of Israel:
I promise it's true...no one could this up...!
They invited by Email their students to a lunch reception in honor of senator. BOSCHWITZ,RUDY (Eli), What's the problem you say? The date Watson my friend, the date:Tish'ah B'Av. The senator is Shomer Kashrut. I bet he'll be superised... you think?
ראשי > יהדות nrg
שברו את הצום
מחר בטכניון: סעודה חגיגית לאורח מחו"ל בעיצומו של צום ט' באב
What Nechama wrote to defend Shmarya is nonsense.
First off, Shmarya is the biggest baal loshon hora & motzee shem ra around, even when it serves no purpose except to further his hatred. It's despicable jerks like him that prolong the golus.
People would tell Shmarya himself, except he blocks readers he doesn't like from posting on his blog.
Now go to Shmarya's post on Kasztner yemach shmoy. He won't back down after complaints and keeps trying to hold to his devious position like the argumentative weasel that he is. A former supporter lambasted him last night with obscenities. Shmarya seems to have blocked him because he appears to have come back a 2nd time from a different computer without using his screen name.
http://yudelstake.blogspot.com/2007/07/hebrew-national-v-rubashkin.html#comment-6015876835879031530
There's a popular catering hall at Aryeh Ralbag's shul. If you get married there, he makes you pay him $250 for siddur kiddushin, even if you get your rosh yeshiva to do it. He won't come to the chassuna but he says he is owed the money because HE IS THE ROV.
http://yudelstake.blogspot.com/2007/07/can-we-trust-kosher-certifiers-in.html
R' Yudel Shain points out that Rabbi Heinemann and Chairman Tse-Tung have a lot in common.
http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2007/07/the-law-of-unin.html
Wow, has he ever become unhinged in just the last week.
Now he claims that spina bifida in the frum community is Rabbi Blumenkrantz's fault. There is an unproven theory that lack of folic acid causes the deformation. Lettuce is rich in folic acid. This is really absurd. Besides Bodek lettuce, the 5 Towns Vaad in Rav Blumenkrantz's area is the most machmir on bugs in lettuce of any hashgocho, which means that the lettuce sold in any restaurant is safe to eat because it has been thoroughly checked. This is not just iceberg, but even the romaine that almost no one else does a proper job checking. Gourmet Glatt supermarket in the 5 Towns also sells their own label of lettuce.
Shmarya's neanderthal chassidim are piling on and calling frum Jews "yemach shmam".
http://babyboiiluvu.blogspot.com/2007/07/o-k-labs-approves-luxury-and-hiddur-in.html
July 20, 2007
OK Kosher and The Crown Heights Child Molester Suicide Mikva
Leah Kleim writes on SevenFatCow:
When his body was found in the garage of the Chabad center,Don Yoel Levy, his brother and the CEO of OK Kashrut blamed the wife of his late brother, the mother of his children, for his suicide. They placed the blame on her with accusations that she was mean to him and that is what drove him to end his own life.Chana Levi was mentally abused and neglected by her in laws while she was living a nightmare with her 5 children who were mourning the loss of there father.Don Yoel Levy not only placed the blame on an innocent victim and caused immense emotional distress for Chana Levy he also refused to help his deceased brothers wife and five young children financially.Chana Levy (maiden name Prus) was blamed for her husbands decision to end his dark double life, because she was mean. The fact that Eliezer Levy was molesting hundreds of kids and teenagers for years, sometimes in the presence of his mother and his brother could not possibly be the reason why he couldn’t stand himself anymore and ended his worthless life. Chabad and OK Labs could not have a pedophile who died in a garage with nothing but a dirty ash tray listed as a Shliachon there resume, it would have a harsh negative effect on the future fundraising and financial situation of Lubavitch and OK Kashrut. The unwritten Chabad rule of placing the blame on the victim and covering up the damage and pain caused by the child molester was immediately put in to action.
The second floor of the building houses a magnificent and truly inspiring shul built by the Levy family in memory of Rabbi Levy’s brother, Reb Eliezer Yitzchok Levy.
It will be known as “Beis Eliezer Yitzchok.”
(Shmarya adds: I heard this story about a month ago from a former Crown Heights resident who was abused as a boy in Crown Heights. I'd give him a hat tip but this shaliach does not want to be named.)
http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=17944
When former Israeli President Moshe Katsav pleaded guilty to charges of sexual harassment and resigned his post late last month, no one was more surprised and saddened than his strongest supporters in Southern California, the Iranian Jewish community.
While many local Iranian Jewish leaders remained tight-lipped on Katsav's resignation, his close allies in the community said they refuse to believe Katsav is guilty of any wrongdoing.
"I've known him for many years, and I've never seen any of [the] things they've accused him of," said Shimon Magen, a Los Angeles resident and close friend of Katsav. "He loves his family, is a decent human being, good hearted, and a God-fearing man."
In April, Iranian Jewish leaders in Los Angeles said that a nonprofit group was set up on behalf of Katsav's legal defense fund. Community leaders declined to comment on how much money was raised for Katsav's attorney fees, but Magen said that he was frustrated with the lack of financial support for Katsav during the scandal.
"I was surprised that after members of our community were once fighting to be photographed with Moshe Katsav and shake hands with him -- but now that he had fallen, no one was willing to come to his aid," Magen said. "I haven't spoken to him since his resignation, but he told me he was very upset that no one from our community stepped up to help him."
Many of Katsav's friends and supporters in the Iranian Jewish community said despite Katsav's embarrassing exit from politics, they believe the majority of local Iranian Jews would still welcome the ex-president within their ranks.
"President Katsav is and will be held in the highest esteem in our community," said Ebrahim Yahid, a West Los Angeles resident and 40-year close friend of Katsav.
"He is an outstanding individual who from a young age has been in public service in Israel and rose to the ranks of president; this is a great achievement for someone from our community," Yahid said.
Leaders from the L.A.-based Iranian American Jewish Federation declined to comment on Katsav's resignation.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1184766017634&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
A vast case of fraud relating to rabbinical ordinations, which has cost the state millions of shekels and allegedly involves senior officials in the Chief Rabbinate, has also led investigators to Jewish seminars run by senior Israeli rabbis, officials said Thursday.
The Justice Ministry announced Wednesday that senior officials in the Chief Rabbinate are facing indictment following a four-year joint Justice Ministry and police investigation, dubbed "The Rabbis' Case," into the fraudulent ordination of military and police personnel.
The Jewish seminaries where these security personnel studied, the officials said, included the flagship Shas seminary run by Rabbi David Yosef, the son of Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef; the study hall of Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu's son Shmuel Eliahu, and a seminary run by Haifa Chief Rabbi She'ar Yashuv Hacohen.
Hacohen said Thursday that the sole purpose in creating these evening classes, which were set up with the authorization of the Chief Rabbinate, was to help security personnel and to promote Torah study.
He noted that he did not notice any fraud or wrongdoing at his seminary, and voiced regret that some people may have exploited the opportunity for non-religious purposes.
"It appears that some people disguised themselves as religious observers," he said. Hacohen has given testimony to investigators.
According to a decade-old wage agreement, "advanced religious studies," accompanied by a rabbi's ordination certificate, earn the security personnel additional pay of up to NIS 4,000 a month.
After the accord was reached, various educational facilities aimed at training security personnel as rabbis were established, and students at these schools were ordained by the Chief Rabbinate, making them eligible for the salary benefits.
In return, the seminaries in question would receive registration fees for the classes from the security personnel. The security personnel, who studied for five to 10 hours a week for a period of one to two-and-a-half years at most, received certification that they had taken a five-year yeshiva program, enabling them to receive the pay bonus. In all, 1,500 security personnel received these salary increases as a result of the program.
The investigation, which was triggered by a tip-off, involved senior members at the Rabbinate, as well as those attending the schools providing rabbinical certifications, the Justice Ministry said.
The ministry said that had the fraud gone unchecked, the damage to state coffers could have reached billions of shekels.
Several senior members of the Chief Rabbinate were questioned under caution, including Meir Rosenthal, head of Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger's office; Yitzhak Ohana, a former director of ordinations at the Chief Rabbinate who was head of Tel Aviv Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau's office when he was Israel's chief rabbi; and former chief rabbi of the Israel Police, Ya'acov Gross.
A Justice Ministry spokesman said Thursday that officials were still checking the involvement of other rabbis in the affair, and that a final decision on the indictments would be made only next month.
The case is expected to lead to scores of indictments and more than 100 disciplinary complaints.
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/103119.html
A U.S.-born rabbi is under investigation for fraud in Australia.
Yossi Engel, a Chabad rabbi who was dismissed last year by the board of the only Orthodox synagogue in Adelaide, a community in Southern Australia with about a thousand Jews, allegedly received tens of thousands of dollars in government funding for a Hebrew school that did not exist.
The Australian Jewish News published what allegedly was a student report card signed by Engel for the Spirit of David Adelaide Hebrew School, but the boy’s mother said she had no knowledge of the school, let alone her son’s attending it.
Engel attorney Ron Bellman reportedly tried to dissuade the newspaper from publishing the report. Engel claims he was wrongfully dismissed by the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation, but a judge threw out his case in March and an appeal of that decision was turned down.
The two parties have agreed to have their grievances heard before the London Beth Din, but the judges of the Jewish court have yet to say whether they will hear the case.
Chabad in the United States already had severed its ties from Engel, according to a Lubavitch source.
These guys are from Tenafly NJ. Do they daven in the Orthodox shul there?
http://www.nynews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070721/BUSINESS01/707210330/1066
A former executive at Taro Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd. in Hawthorne got hit with a five-year prison sentence yesterday for leaking company information to his son as part of a lucrative insider trading scheme.
Zvi Rosenthal, 62, Taro's vice president of materials management and logistics from 1997 through January 2006, was so distraught he had to let his lawyer, Peter J. Driscoll, read a statement he had planned to make to U.S. District Court Judge John Gleeson.
"I want you to know I am heartbroken for the harm I have done," the statement said.
The patriarch, who was also ordered to pay a $100,000 fine, had reason to be sorrowful. Minutes before facing Gleeson, he watched his son, Amir Rosenthal, 29, who was a corporate lawyer in New York, receive a prison sentence of two years and nine months and a $75,000 fine.
Amir Rosenthal will leave behind a wife and infant son when he reports to prison. Several family members and friends who filled the spectators section of the courtroom wept during the sentencings.
Another son of Zvi Rosenthal, Ayal Rosenthal, 27, a former accountant with PricewaterhouseCoopers, was sentenced in May to two months in prison for his involvement in the scheme.
The Rosenthals pleaded guilty in February to running a scam in which Zvi Rosenthal stole nonpublic information about at least 13 Taro announcements and fed it to Amir Rosenthal, who tipped Ayal, another brother, Oren Rosenthal, and three others.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which says the improper behavior netted at least $3.7 million, alleges the defendants traded Taro options, instead of company stock, to maximize their gains from the insider information.
Prosecutors described in court documents how Zvi Rosenthal got information in May 2001 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was about to approve Taro's application to market a generic antibiotic cream. They said he passed the information to Amir Rosenthal, who made trades in Taro options.
When the company made a public announcement about the approval, the share price rose from $57.01 to $66.01 in one day and the defendants made more than $100,000.
Zvi Rosenthal, who raised his family in northern New Jersey, also leaked out information about Taro's quarterly earnings reports before the company made the official announcements.
Amir Rosenthal created a hedge fund and investment adviser called Aragon Partners LP and Aragon Capital Advisors LLC in 2003 to try and conceal the family's role in the trades, prosecutors said.
Gleeson, in sentencing Zvi Rosenthal, said he could not think of a more powerful "aggravating factor" than the anguish Zvi Rosenthal's wife had to feel over seeing her husband and two sons imprisoned. An aggravating factor is a reason a person deserves a harsh prison sentence.
Zvi Rosenthal feels "tortured" knowing the harm his actions caused his family, Driscoll said.
Oren Rosenthal, 30, who was a litigation associate with a large law firm, has not been charged criminally, but faces civil charges lodged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
David Heyman, 30, a certified public accountant who was an Ernst & Young LLP auditor and senior manager, also got caught up in the scheme and will pay the price with his freedom and career. Gleeson sentenced Heyman, who prosecutors said paid kickbacks to Zvi Rosenthal for the inside information, to serve 15 months in prison.
Heyman was a friend of Amir Rosenthal. They attended high school and college together, according to records.
Taro, which is based in Israel but has offices on Skyline Drive in Hawthorne, has not been accused. The company provided no comment yesterday on Zvi Rosenthal's sentence.
Zvi Rosenthal held a high-ranking position with the company even though he had a prior fraud conviction. Court records show he was sentenced in 2000 to three years of probation and fined $20,000 for crimes he committed while working as a production manager at Isratex, a Brooklyn company that made clothing for the military.
He defrauded the U.S. Department of Defense by using defective cloth in uniforms.
That's horrific if the "OK" Kashrus Levys are doing that to the almanna. She is a very special neshoma from what I can tell and I think anyone who has met her would agree.
Normally I would agree that Shmarya got it wrong but this time I know he is right. Our great modern day sages make a name for themselves by making things non-kosher that were always kosher. Suddenly strawberries are non-kosher surely blackberries and raspberries. I WATCHED WITH MY OWN EYES ERLICHER FRUM YIDDEN PICK BERRIES AND LOOK AT THEM WITH THE UNAIDED EYE AND EAT THEM. These people were survivors or European immigrants. I grew up on stories of the shtetl and living off the land. Mushrooms were checked but certain species were not. They did not have magnifying glasses or electric back then. They ate berries knowing there were bugs but if they were not visible yum, yum.
My daughters attend a frum school and the diets of our future mothers is unhealthy and unbalanced. Taking supplements is never as good as eating the food.
Insect infestation is not new!
What is new is the business of kashruth and processed food.
It is painless to asser fruits, vegetables, etc. but to condemn child molesters or incompetent administrators is lashon hara.
Kosher Consumers beware!
Editorial -New York Times
Is It Safe to Eat?
July 24, 2007
President Bush took a potentially useful step last week, appointing a cabinet-level committee to find ways to ensure the safety of imported food and other products. But his actions would be a lot more credible if the administration had not been cutting the staff and budget of food safety programs at the Food and Drug Administration while also planning to eliminate half of the agency’s laboratories.
Hearings before a House oversight subcommittee raised serious questions about the F.D.A.’s ability to protect the public against contaminated or adulterated foods. William Hubbard, a former top agency official who consults for a coalition of industry and consumer groups, told the committee that the F.D.A. has lost some 200 food scientists and 700 field inspectors over five years, exactly the wrong direction when food imports are skyrocketing. He also noted that the small budget increase the White House has proposed for food safety next year would be a decrease after accounting for inflation.
As if that weren’t discouraging enough, the committee’s chief investigator described how porous the current safety shield is. Agency personnel, he said, inspect less than 1 percent of all imported foods and conduct laboratory analyses on only a tiny fraction of those. Overwhelmed entry reviewers at one field office have so many items to screen that they typically have less than 30 seconds to decide whether an import needs closer scrutiny. Importers also learn to game the system by sending goods to lax entry points or mislabeling them. And they are allowed to take possession of suspect goods and arrange testing by private laboratories whose work is often shoddy or driven by financial concerns.
The F.D.A. insists that its plan to close 7 of the agency’s 13 laboratories will actually improve its capabilities, by allowing greater investment in modern equipment and training at the six remaining laboratories. That could conceivably be true, but the House investigator worries that there could be a tremendous loss of talent when laboratory analysts resign rather than be relocated. Congress and its research arm, the Government Accountability Office, will need to determine if this is a genuine move toward modernizing some aging laboratories, or a step that could further weaken the F.D.A.
Whoever is upset about the berries, has a right to be upset, but most of you are not aware of all the facts.
R' Yaakov zl was upset at the Yungerleit from Lakewood who started all this 20 years ago. He said there is no inyan to go looking for problems, but once they stuck their noses where they shouldn't have and discovered the problems, we have no choice but to asser.
Strawberries recently became a problem due to a certain pesticide being banned. Insects called thrips are now thriving. They are as small as a half a millimeter, hide on the sides of the seeds and pierce into the berry with a mini-harpoon-like mandible that makes it almost impossible to remove the bug from the fruit.
Shmarya has another agenda, which recently has degenerated into attacking all rabbonim and the Torah itself r'l. He has also attacked the Kadmonim for "inventing" the issur of berya.
http://www.beatricedailysun.com/articles/2007/07/24/ap-state-ne/d8qj4djg0.txt
OMAHA, Neb. - A special prosecutor has been appointed to look into allegations of animal mistreatment at a Gordon meatpacking plant.
In a complaint filed July 9 with the Sheridan County attorney, the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said Local Pride LLC allows cows to remain conscious for up to two minutes after their throats are cut during the kosher slaughtering process, among other things.
PETA's senior counsel Lori Kettler said County Attorney Jamian Simmons notified PETA last week that she was petitioning the court to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the claims.
According to Kettler, Simmons cited a conflict of interest within her office.
Simmons did not immediately return a message left Tuesday at her office.
Sheridan County District Court clerk Eloise Kampbell confirmed Simmons' request and said Dawes County Attorney Vance Haug has been named special prosecutor.
A message left Tuesday at Haug's office was not immediately returned.
Local Pride opened in June 2006 under an agreement between the Sholom Rubashkin family of New York and the Oglala of South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
The Rubashkins also own the world's largest kosher plant, Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, which was scrutinized last year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for cruelty to animals. The investigation came after Agriprocessor's slaughtering methods were criticized by PETA as cruel and inhumane.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Cedar Rapids did not file charges in that case.
PETA said in its latest complaint that an undercover investigation of Local Pride was carried out in May as follow-up to its claims against Agriprocessor.
The alleged violations of state, federal and kosher laws cited in the complaint include: the animals are allowed to writhe in pain for up to two minutes after their throats are cut; and staff tear the animals' necks with a meat hook and cut tags from their ears while they are still conscious.
"The intentional infliction of cruelty at Agriprocessor's Gordon, Nebraska, facility is ... part of a continued pattern of disregard for the welfare of animals _ and the cruelty-to-animal statutes _ in the locales where Agriprocessors operates," PETA said in the complaint.
A woman who answered the phone Tuesday at Rubashkin's Iowa office said he was out of the building. She would not take a message.
According to PETA, a similar complaint filed June 29 with the USDA has prompted a federal probe of Local Pride.
A USDA spokeswoman said earlier this month that a specialist was sent to the plant to observe the slaughtering process, but no violations of the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act were found.
PETA has also said that the Orthodox Union, the primary certifier of kosher slaughterhouses, has launched an investigation of Local Pride.
A message left Tuesday for the Orthodox Union's kosher division was not returned. The office was closed for the Jewish holiday of Tisha B'Av.
Under Nebraska law, cruel mistreatment of animals is a Class I misdemeanor for the first offense and a Class IV felony for subsequent offenses.
Agriprocessors: http://www.agriprocessor.com/
USDA Office of Inspector General: http://www.usda.gov/oig/
Cousin Avi taught me well.
http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/articles/2007/07/12/news/local/helping0713.txt
Helping save the life of a Palestinian terrorist
BY: DAVID SHAFRAN
http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/story?section=local&id=5476859
By Cathy Shafran
FLINT (WJRT) - (07/12/07)--A battle over a pile of smelly manure-like compost has turned into a police matter in Flint.
Police are saying the man who dumped it on a Flint driveway could face time behind bars.
The incident came to a head this weekend when a huge pile of manure-smelling material was dumped in front of Corday Hawkins' house on Alma Street.
Hawkins says he was so irate about the dumping, he called his council person, who, in turn, brought in Flint's mayor and a police officer.
"Here is a whole load of cow manure sitting in our driveway," Hawkins said. "I mean, while flies ... my heart just dropped. I didn't know what to do."
Heart patient Hawkins says the first thing they did was have his family clean up the smelly, fly-infested pile.
As an average jew living in Brooklyn and davening at one of the local shtiblach I have seen the progression of the yeshiva world rightward over the last two decades. Other than the annoying chumra du jour, it doesn't really affect my life. However, I find the axiomatic rejection of secular education problematic as a long term strategy for a sustainable and healthy community.
When I was in high school in the 80's, the Rabbeim and yeshiva did not emphasize the importance of basic competency in secular subjects. This has progressed to the extent that a secular education is viewed as undesirable in some circles. The emphasis on learning to the exclusion of all other endeavors has resulted in a financial reliance on parents well into young adulthood without providing the basic tools for self reliance.
While the emphasis on Torah learning is understandable and has resulted in more sophisticated halachic knowledge and observance it has resulted in a community with an impending financial crisis that will not be resolved by bitachon alone. There is currently an astounding amount of poverty within the Frum community. This is sure to get worse in the near future as the Baby Boomer parents age and are unable to support their children's families. The children will then be unable to support themselves adequately, resulting in decreased shalom bayis and the attendant risks of divorce and traumatized grandchildren. It will also result in less support for torah institutions, more financial strain on the community at large to support the unemployed and in the end, a backlash against the leaders of our community who encouraged the philosophy of learning without a long term plan.
It is likely that the next generation will not have the luxury of learning rather than working. They may even reject the notion due to the trauma they endured as children which they will associate with a learning lifestyle. Even mature children who recognize the underlying ideals will feel uncomfortable with a learning lifestyle if they associate it with a lack of security at a young age.
It is difficult to advocate decreasing the emphasis on learning when it is the ultimate goal of every jew. It is even more difficult for our leaders to do so in a public setting given the importance of learning in our lives. However, it is their responsibility to do so. An attempt was made approximately 10 years ago. A major Brooklyn institution was prepared to offer two tracks, one that was exclusively learning and one that allowed one day a week for vocational training. The details had been arranged. Unfortunately, the individual spearheading the program was threatened by a major torah personality. If he put the program into effect, the torah personality would ensure that his children never got married. The reasoning was that one of these children who would have become a Rosh Yeshiva would become an auto mechanic instead.
I find this attitude counterproductive in several ways. You seldom find Roshei Yeshiva who could have been auto mechanics. People tend to be one or the other. There are relatively few Roshei Yeshiva. More than brilliance is required. Wisdom, maturity, devotion, are only influenced in part by how much you learn. The greatest gedolim were not known exclusively for their learning ability or the number of hours they sat in the Bais HaMedrash. Their personalities and intellect worked synergistically to produce superior human beings. It would be logical to expect, that while the overall level of jewish scholarship is enhanced by a philosophy mandating exclusively Torah as education and employment, there is a law of diminishing returns. Beyond this point, more people in Bais Medrash comes at high cost to the kehilla at large and those that do not excel in particular. To turn a blind eye to the fact that they will be left without means and will have to rely on others' support, to intentionally set out on a path that will consume vast resources that would otherwise be used for a myriad of important issues, undermines the very education you advocate. A large amount of people will be set up to fail. Looking back, they may regret the course they chose. The people who support them will not view the cost/benefit ratio with the same enthusiasm as those who benefit from their support. When the torah leadership fails to recognize the cost they are incurring and demanding of their supporters by their policies, when they don't pay the least bit of attention to the issue, it does not sit well with those paying the bill. It does not instill respect. It smacks of entitlement. I suspect that struggling families and organizations appreciate it even less. At the end of the day it appears Bain adam l'makom trumps Bain adam l'chavero, and that is not a good point to drive home.
It is the responsibility of the torah leadership to look out for all jews in every aspect of their lives. The number of hours spent learning is just part of the picture. The fact that this is not the pre-eminent issue among the Gedolei Hatorah and the community at large is a condemnation of our concern for our fellow jew. We are not concerned enough about people,families, children, to address this issue seriously and to solve it before it becomes an unmitigated disaster. And time is running out.
I started this blog in an effort to discuss this issue in a socially acceptable manner, and to organize a grass-roots effort to have it addressed formally and publicly by our leaders,to force them to formulate a workable strategy for sustainable growth in learning and fulfillment in yiddishkeit for the next fifty years.
responding to july 25 856 am.
~~It is difficult to advocate decreasing the emphasis on learning when it is the ultimate goal of every jew. It is even more difficult for our leaders to do so in a public setting given the importance of learning in our lives. However, it is their responsibility to do so. An attempt was made approximately 10 years ago. A major Brooklyn institution was prepared to offer two tracks, one that was exclusively learning and one that allowed one day a week for vocational training. The details had been arranged. Unfortunately, the individual spearheading the program was threatened by a major torah personality. If he put the program into effect, the torah personality would ensure that his children never got married. The reasoning was that one of these children who would have become a Rosh Yeshiva would become an auto mechanic instead. ~~
If this is true fact that a `ROSH YESHIVA~ as u put it threatened this individual that its mitvah lefarsem who this bullvan is . Secondly, since when are shidduchim controlled but human beings. we need two track yeshivas deparately more then ever in todays day and age.
What We Must Do ... To Protect Our Children
A CALL TO ACTION BY ANDREW VACHSS
The Difference Between "Sick" and "Evil"
By Andrew Vachss
Originally published in Parade, July 14, 2002
The shock waves caused by the recent exposures of so-called "pedophile
priests" have reverberated throughout America. But beneath our anger
and revulsion, a fundamental question pulsates: Are those who abuse their
positions of trust to prey upon children—a category certainly not
limited to those in religious orders—sick ... or are they evil?
We need the answer to that fundamental question.
Because, without the truth, we cannot act. And until we act, nothing will change.
My job is protecting children. It has taken me from big cities to rural
outposts, from ghettos to penthouses, and from courtrooms to genocidal
battlefields. But whatever the venue, the truth remains constant: Some
humans intentionally hurt children. They commit unspeakable acts—for
their pleasure, their profit, or both.
Many people who hear of my cases against humans who rape, torture, and
package children for sale or rent immediately respond with, "That's
sick!" Crimes against children seem so grotesquely abnormal that the most
obvious explanation is that the perpetrator must be mentally
ill—helpless in the grip of a force beyond his or her control.
But that very natural reaction has, inadvertently, created a special
category of "blameless predator." That confusion of "sick" with
"sickening" is the single greatest barrier to our primary
biological and ethicalmandate: the protection of our children.
The difference between sick and evil cannot be dismissed with facile
eye-of-the-beholder rhetoric. There are specific criteria we can employ
to give us the answers in every case, every time.
Some of those answers are self-evident and beyond dispute: A mother who
puts her baby in the oven because she hears voices commanding her to
bake the devil out of the child's spirit is sick; and a mother who sells
or rents her baby to child pornographers is evil. But most cases of
child sexual abuse—especially those whose "nonviolent" perpetrators
come from within the child's circle of trust—seem, on their surface, to
be far more complex.
That complexity is an illusion. The truth is as simple as it is
terrifying:
Sickness is a condition.
Evil is a behavior.
Evil is always a matter of choice. Evil is not thought; it is conduct.
And that conduct is always volitional.
And just as evil is always a choice, sickness is always the absence of
choice. Sickness happens. Evil is inflicted.
Until we perceive the difference clearly, we will continue to give aid
and comfort to our most pernicious enemies. We, as a society, decide
whether something is sick or evil. Either decision confers an obligation
upon us. Sickness should be treated. Evil must be fought.
If a person has desires or fantasies about sexually exploiting
children, that individual may be sick.
(Indeed, if such desires are disturbing,as opposed to gratifying,
to the individual, there may even be a"cure.") But if the individual chooses to act upon those feelings, that conduct is evil.
People are not what they think; they are what they do.
Our society distrusts the term "evil." It has an almost biblical ring
to it—something we believe in (or not), but never actually understand.
We prefer scientific-sounding terms, such as "sociopath." But
sociopathy is not a mental condition; it is a specific cluster of behaviors.
The diagnosis is only made from actual criminal conduct.
No reputable psychiatrist claims to be able to cure a sociopath—or,
for that matter, a predatory pedophile. Even the most optimistic
professionals do not aim to change such a person's thoughts and feelings. What
they hope is that the predator can learn self-control, leading to a
change in behavior.
Such hopes ignore the inescapable fact that the overwhelming majority
of those who prey upon children don't want to change their
behavior—they want only to minimize the consequences of being caught at it.
In the animal kingdom, there is a food chain—predators and prey. But
among humans, there is no such natural order. Among our species,
predators select themselves for that role.
Psychology has given us many insights of great value. But it has also
clouded our vision with euphemisms. To say a person suffers from the
"disease" of pedophilia is to absolve the predator of responsibility for
his behavior.
Imagine if an attorney, defending someone accused of committing a dozen
holdups, told the jury his poor client was suffering from
"armed-robberia." That jury would decide that the only crazy person in the
courtroom was the lawyer.
When a perpetrator claims to be sick, the timing of that claim is
critical to discovering the truth. Predatory pedophiles carefully insinuate
themselves into positions of trust. They select their prey and approach
cautiously. Gradually, sometimes over a period of years, they gain
greater control over their victims. Eventually, they leave dozens of
permanently damaged children in their wake.
But only when they are caught do predatory pedophiles declare
themselves to be sick. And the higher the victim count, the sicker (and,
therefore less responsible), they claim to be.
In too many cases, a veil of secrecy and protection then descends. The
predator's own organization appoints itself judge and jury. The
perpetrator is deemed sick, and sent off for in-house "treatment." The truth
is never made public. And when some secret tribunal decides a cure has
been achieved, the perpetrator's rights and privileges are restored, and
he or she is given a new assignment.
In fact, such privileged predators actually are assisted. They enter
new communities with the blessing of their own organization, their
history and propensities kept secret. As a direct result, unsuspecting
parents entrust their children to them. Inevitably, the predator eventually
resumes his or her conduct and preys upon children again. And when that
conduct comes to light, the claim of "sickness" re-emerges as well.
Too often, our society contorts itself to excuse such predators. We are
so eager to call those who sexually abuse children "sick," so quick to
understand their demons. Why? Because sickness not only offers the
possibility of finding a cure but also assures us that the predator didn't
really mean it. After all, it is human nature to try to understand
inhuman conduct.
Conversely, the concept of evil terrifies us. The idea that some humans
choose to prey upon our children is frightening, and their
demonstrated skill at camouflage only heightens this fear.
For some, the question, "Does evil exist?" is philosophical. But for
those who have confronted or been victimized by predatory pedophiles,
there is no question at all. We are what we do.
Just as conduct is a choice, so is our present helplessness. We may be
powerless to change the arrogance of those who believe they alone
should have the power to decide whether predatory pedophiles are "sick," or
when they are "cured." But, as with the perpetrators themselves, we do
have the power to change their behavior.
In every state, laws designate certain professions that regularly come
into contact with children—such as teachers, doctors, social workers,
and day-care employees—as "mandated reporters." Such personnel are
required to report reasonable suspicion of child abuse when it comes to
their attention. Failure to do so is a crime.
Until now, we have exempted religious organizations from
mandated-reporter laws. Recent events have proven the catastrophic
consequences of this exemption. We must demand—now—that our legislators
close this pathway to evil.
A predatory pedophile who is recycled into an unsuspecting community
enters it cloaked with a protection no other sex offender enjoys. If
members of religious orders were mandated reporters, we would not have to
rely on their good-faith belief that a predator is cured. We could make
our own informed decisions on this most vital issue.
Modifying the law in this way would not interfere with priest-penitent
privileges: When child victims or their parents disclose abuse, they
are not confessing, they are crying for help. Neither confidentiality nor
religious freedom would in any way be compromised by mandatoryreporting.
Changing the laws so that religious orders join the ranks of mandated
reporters is the right thing to do. And the time is right now.
If this article has made you angry and you want to do something about
it, visit: http://www.vachss.com/av_dispatches/parade_071402.html.
Thank you from The Zero
The Official Website of Andrew Vachss
www.vachss.com
What was the `Kastner Affair'?
Hungarian-born Yisrael (Rudolph) Kastner (1906-1957) was a senior official in Israel's Trade and Industry Ministry (as it was known at the time), and a candidate of the ruling Mapai party (precursor of the Labor Party) for the Second Knesset. In 1953 he was accused by Holocaust survivor Malchiel Greenwald of having collaborated with the Nazis in the annihilation of Hungarian Jewry; of concealing the danger of the annihilation from Hungary's Jews in order to rescue 1,700 "privileged" Jews, among them his relatives and friends, who were allowed to leave Budapest for Switzerland; and of helping to save the Nazi war criminal Kurt Bachar by testifying on his behalf at the Nuremberg Trials.
Kastner sued Greenwald for defamation of character. Greenwald's lawyer was Shmuel Tamir, later minister of justice. In June 1955 District Court Judge Binyamin Halevy found that Greenwald's accusations against Kastner about collaborating with the Nazis had been proved and that "Kastner sold his soul to the devil." Halevy also found that Kastner had perjured himself at Nuremberg. Kastner's supporters retorted that he was in fact a hero who, despite all the objective risks and emotional difficulties that were involved in holding contacts with Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann, had done his best to rescue as amny Jews as possible.
As the judgment cast aspersions on Mapai as well, the government decided to appeal to the Supreme Court. In January 1958, the Supreme Court, in a majority decision (3-2) found that Kastner did not collaborate with the Nazis and that under certain circumstances, a leader has to hide certain things from the public. However, all five justices found that Kastner had committed perjury in 1947 and had thus spared a senior S.S. officer from getting his due punishment.
By this time, though, Kastner was no longer alive. On March 4, 1957, he was assassinated by a squad from the ultranationalist right. This is considered the first political assassination in Israel. (Source: The Knesset Web site)
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