http://www.ajff.org/film/standing-silent
EVERY SIGNATURE MATTERS - THIS BILL MUST PASS!
CLICK - GOAL - 100,000 NEW SIGNATURES! 75,000 SIGNATURES HAVE ALREADY BEEN SUBMITTED TO GOVERNOR CUOMO!
EFF Urges Court to Block Dragnet Subpoenas Targeting Online Commenters
CLICK! For the full motion to quash: http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/hersh_v_cohen/UOJ-motiontoquashmemo.pdf
46 comments:
http://www.thejewishweek.com/images/marvin_schick_day_schools_may_not_yet_have_weathered_economic_storm
What would you all do without me?
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/joke_on_jimmy_3GB9HrOhBGM9oOcH9ILLBM
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new_york/speaking_volumes_about_hush_sexual_abuse
Mandel said that there are situations when someone is known to be an offender but cannot be dealt with by law enforcement.
That could be because of circumstances on which he did not elaborate, and in such cases, Mandel advocates the implementation of a community “safety plan,” whereby the offender is “monitored” within the community and prevented from being in places or engaging in activities where children are present.
This is an approach that some critics find naïve at best, and particularly troubling coming from the CEO of Ohel. The organization has a history of treating known molesters who have not been through the criminal justice system but are instead pressured into treatment by rabbis under the threat of being reported. In a number of cases — one of which involved a man named Stefan Colmer, about which The Jewish Week wrote extensively — such people either dropped out or were discharged from treatment and then went on to molest again.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new_york/speaking_volumes_about_hush_sexual_abuse
The issue of reporting is also a central focus of Eidensohn’s work, which covers similar ground as Mandel and Pelcovitz’s collection but from a decidedly more haredi perspective. Eidensohn claims his book “was written to understand the halachic parameters of when and if the police or psychologists should be involved and when and if rabbis should be involved.
“Instead of finding that there were narrow specific circumstances that permitted [reporting to police], it became clear that the wrong framework was being utilized,” Eidensohn told The Jewish Week. “Instead of focusing on the judicial model of the rules of evidence and the threshold of seriousness to overcome the prohibition of informing, the important issue in halacha is whether there is danger to the child. This is the concept of rodef. Rodef is an extrajudicial concept.
“Similarly, the Torah obligation of ‘Not standing idly by the blood of your fellow man’ requires action which is not necessarily requiring consulting with rabbinic authority,” Eidensohn continued.
The book at times uses explicit language, which, Eidensohn claims, cost him an early supporter [Eidensohn wouldn’t name him] and forced him to distribute his book online, as various distributors informed him “that this topic, and especially the language, was not appropriate to a Jewish bookstore.”
The language was important, however, according to Eidenshon, because “it is impossible to adequately explain how to protect children without explaining what the danger is. Euphemisms are appropriate when the reality is known but someone wants to allude to it rather then use lurid details.”
Nu, shoyn gekoyft?
http://www.jewishledger.com/articles/2010/12/01/news/news10.txt
Book review:Fire Ice Air. A Polish Jew's Memoir of Yeshiva, Siberia, America
by Rabbi Simcha Shafran with Avi Shafran. (Hashgacha press., Staten Island, N.Y.)
Published: Wednesday, December 1, 2010
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth,_Wind_%26_Fire
Hey, we didn't know Avi Shafran is into Funk music!
The tale of Gershon Kranczer, the Krancer aka Kranc-iz-er, 7
The stench of Kranczer's Sodomite deeds spreads and rises. Now it is the ultra-liberal New York Jewish Week that is basing its latest barrage against the frum world relying on the hot-off-the-press Kranczer scandal. They are starting to ask questions and so far are limiting it to the "yeshiva" Kranczer founded and ran for years, but it will not be too long before the press hounds will go snooping on the tracks of those rabbis who launched Kranczer's career in the first place, then gave him cover when he was under investigation for many long months, and are obviously even now giving him very effective shelter somewhere, so much so that he has still not been sighted and flushed out from his Obama ich bin a Krancer Laden cave probably in the catacombs of Meah Shearim that resemble in some ways the mountain caves of Pakistan:
"The New York Jewish Week,
Speaking Volumes About ‘Hush’ Of Sexual Abuse
Novel, three nonfiction books on problem in Orthodox community point to growing awareness as cases persist.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Hella Winston
Special To The Jewish Week
...It is, in part, this ignorance and lack of practical advice for parents that is being addressed by three new nonfiction books on the topic: “Breaking the Silence: Sexual Abuse and the Jewish Community”(Ktav) edited by David Mandel, the CEO of Ohel Family and Children’s Services, and David Pelcovitz, who teaches psychology and education at Yeshiva University; “Child Abuse and Domestic Abuse, Volume I and II,” edited and self-published by Daniel Eidensohn, a haredi rabbi and author who writes a blog on issues of Jewish identity; and “Abuse: The Communal and Religious Factors that Undermine the Apprehension of Offenders and the Treatment of Victims” (Urim Publishing, Jerusalem) by Michael J. Salamon, a prominent psychologist in the Orthodox world.
Almost as if timed to illustrate the familiar dictum that truth is stranger — and in this case, even more horrifying — than fiction, Rabbi Gershon Kranczer, who recently stepped down as the principal of Yeshiva Tehila L’Dovid, a Flatbush school for disabled children, and three of his sons were accused two weeks ago of sexually abusing four of Kranczer’s other children. While two of the four sons turned themselves in to police in Brooklyn, Rabbi Kranczer and his oldest son are believed to have fled to Israel.
The case is one of the most troubling of its kind, since it involves multiple generations and the alleged abuse spans more than 15 years. The latest in a long string of cases that have come to light in recent years, this one further demonstrates the depth of the problem, which the new rash of books is facing head-on..."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20025376-71.html
Navy's Mach 7 gun can kill from 100 miles away
They must have thought it was the meat carving station at the Agudah Fresser Convention
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/26/thefts-stampedes-make-black-friday-blue-for-some/?iref=obnetwork
Several eager shoppers were trampled Friday morning as they surged through Target store doors in North Buffalo, New York.
CNN affiliate WIVB had a camera inside the Target and captured the drama. People at the front of the line were pushed to the floor when doors opened. The commotion and screams drew additional store staff to sort the crowd out.
"It went from controlled to a mob in less than five minutes," shopper Rich Mathewson told WIVB. "And then it just got nasty."
Several people had cut into the line, angering the crowd, Mathewson said.
Unruly Wal-Mart shoppers in Sacramento, California, prompted an evacuation of the store, affiliate KTXL reported.
Just after the store opened its doors at 5 a.m., customers became pushy and unruly.
Sacramento Sheriff's officers were called in to help clear the store and everyone was ordered to leave their carts in the store and exit.
The tale of Gershon Kranczer, the Krancer aka Kranc-iz-er, 8
In case anyone has any doubts about the severity of Gershon der Krancer's foul sex crimes against his own daughters, and by the way, corrupting your own sons or anyone is ALSO a sex crime, perhaps even worse than raping of captive daughters and women who are presumably helpless passive victims while the sons and father were conniving predatory pro-active perpetrators and practitioners of incestuous rapes, and the Torah accuses such a person of being a "meisis umeidiach" one who lures others away from serving Hashem in the correct way. The hypocrisy in this case is multiplied to the nth degree because the leader of the literal family-run gang rape is none other than a "rabbi" who headed a "yeshiva" purportedly for the weakest and most defenseless students who were rejected by "mainsream" yeshivas.
So this is how REUTERS, one of the world's most prestigious news agencies broke the horrific news:
"Brooklyn rabbi, sons charged with sexual abuse
By Chris Michaud
NEW YORK | Fri Dec 3, 2010 6:55pm EST
(Reuters) - A Brooklyn rabbi and former Yeshiva school principal and three of his sons, including one aged 15, were accused of sexually molesting the family's daughters over a period of several years, including one girl as young as eight, police said on Friday.
Gershon Kranczer, 58, fled to Israel with a 21-year-old son earlier this week and was being sought there. New York City police said they are working with Israeli officials on the case.
Authorities said that four sisters, ages 20, 19, 17 and eight, were all sexually abused numerous times over several years variously by their three brothers or father.
The case came to light when one of the victims, the 20-year-old, told a Yeshiva co-worker about the abuse which allegedly went on for many years. The co-worker then went to police.
Kranczer's 24-year-old son, Yechezkel Kranczer, and his 15-year-old brother have both been arrested and were being held pending multiple charges of sexual abuse or molestation, police said on Friday.
The teen-ager's name was not released because he is a minor.
Kranczer was founder and until recently principal of the Yeshiva Tehila L'Dovid in Brooklyn but has resigned.
The family had 14 children and the minors were removed from the home by officials from child protective services, according to local media. But police could not immediately confirm that.
(Editing by Peter Bohan)"
http://www.cnn.com/2010/SPORT/football/12/14/football.fifa.blatter.amaechi.gay.qatar/index.html
Gay basketball star John Amaechi has criticized the head of soccer's ruling body for his comments about homosexuals planning to attend the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
FIFA president Sepp Blatter was unable to keep a straight face when asked at a press conference in South Africa what to advise gay people who hope to go to the Arab emirate.
The mainly Muslim country, which will host the tournament for the first time, forbids same-sex relationships by law.
"I would say that they should refrain from sexual activities," Blatter answered on Monday, after a long pause.
"We are living in a world of freedom and when the World Cup will be in Qatar, this will be in 2022. And you can see in the Middle East the opening of this culture. It is another culture because it is another religion, but in football we have no boundaries."
However, Amaechi -- who became the first NBA basketballer to reveal he is gay after retiring in 2007 -- accused the 74-year-old Blatter of showing "archaic, Neanderthal ignorance" towards the world's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=199475
'Stuxnet virus set back Iran’s nuclear program by 2 years'
The Stuxnet virus, which has attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities and which Israel is suspected of creating, has set back the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program by 2 years, a top German computer consultant who was one of the first experts to analyze the program’s code told The Jerusalem Post.
“It will take 2 years for Iran to get back on track,” Langer said in a telephone interview from Hamburg, Germany. “This was nearly as effective as a military strike, but even better since there are no fatalities and no full-blown war. From a military perspective, this was a huge success.”
Langer spoke to the Post amid news reports that the virus was still infecting Iran’s computer systems at its main uranium enrichment facility at Natanz & reactor at Bushehr.
Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency nuclear watchdog said Iran had suspended work at its nuclear facilities, likely a result of Stuxnet.
According to Langer, Iran’s best move would be to throw out all of the computers that have been infected by the worm, which he said was the most “advanced & aggressive malware in history.” But, he said, even once all of the computers were thrown out, Iran would have to ensure that computers used by outside contractors were also clean of Stuxnet.
“It is extremely difficult to clean up Stuxnet, and we know that Iran is no good in IT security, and they are just beginning to learn what this all means,” he said. “Just to get their systems running again they have to get rid of the virus, replace the equipment, and rebuild the centrifuges at Natanz & buy a new turbine for Bushehr.”
Margo's best move would be to shut down YTT before he is further humiliated by UOJ, the most advanced & aggressive blogger in history.
http://www.kavodhatora.com/
Leib Tropper's blog in November is the typical b.s. where he fawns all over Chaim Berlin and the Agudah in multiple entries.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/16/earlyshow/main7155616.shtml
(CBS) In New York, a prominent TV weather reporter who told police she escaped from an attempted rape is now accused of making it all up.
Heidi Jones was arrested over the weekend. She's been taken off the by her station, WABC-TV, pending the authorities' investigation.
CBS News correspondent Betty Nguyen reported the TV meteorologist was arrested last week by New York City detectives for filing a false report of attempted rape in September while jogging in Central Park.
Police say Jones fabricated the story after experiencing personal relationship problems. She was charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in prison
Another free lunch when there's no money
Filed at 10:03 a.m. EST
WASHINGTON (AP) — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says the government is trying to keep as many struggling borrowers as possible in their homes in several programs.
Geithner told a congressional oversight panel Thursday that although the Treasury Department's ability to spend new bailout funds for the central foreclosure-prevention effort expired in October, it is running other programs for borrowers in certain situations such as being unemployed.
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/
A Brooklyn rabbi thought he could swindle hedge-fund king Steven Cohen by playing on his Judaism. It was a bad bet.
Balkany wanted something in return—$2 million in cash for his struggling school, Bais Yaakov of Midwood, and a $2 million loan for his former yeshiva, Mesivta Torah Vodaath
And one more thing: He wanted a 20-minute meeting with Cohen for his son-in-law, an aspiring financier who dreamed of pitching his idol on an investment idea.
The conversation with Nussbaum set off a chain of events that ultimately led to Balkany, a onetime power broker known as “the Brooklyn Bundler,” being found guilty in federal court last month of extortion, blackmail, fraud, and making false statements to a government agent. His trial, in a wood-paneled courtroom in lower Manhattan, played out as a kind of Jewish commedia dell’arte. Balkany, the bearded rabbi, was dressed in customary dark suits accessorized with a black velvet yarmulke. He shared the defense table with a Brooklyn boy made good: the lawyer Benjamin Brafman, a Modern Orthodox Jew who is famous for representing high-profile celebrities like Jay-Z, Sean Combs, and Plaxico Burress. The government’s case was argued by Marc Berger and Jesse Furman, both Jewish and Ivy League-educated assistant U.S. attorneys. In the public gallery, Balkany’s wife and a rotating cast of his 13 sons and daughters made up a kind of Greek chorus, sighing and clucking as the damaging testimony added up.
In his various phone calls and meetings with SAC’s lawyers, Balkany had repeated one phrase as if it would insulate him from suspicion: “I’m not a hold-up man.” He would then invariably assert the value of the work his school was doing in the community, or his good character as a Jew. “I’m not here to threaten some—God forbid, I’m on the other side of the fence,” Balkany told Nussbaum in one taped conversation. “You know, my heart goes out, that a man like Cohen, who obviously has made it, he’s probably even a kohane because his name is Cohen.”
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/
On November 1, 2010, the first day of the trial, Brafman, Balkany’s lawyer, urged the jury—three men and nine women, all but two of them black or Latino—not to judge his client as a Jew. “I represent the man with the white beard and black yarmulke,” Brafman said, by way of introduction. “Look at yourselves,” he went on. “Nobody on the jury looks like Rabbi Balkany. That’s not a jury of one’s peers.” It was an effective rhetorical gesture, but it sounded almost absurd in the context of a case that turned on Balkany’s effort to trade on his and Cohen’s shared Jewish heritage. “Frankly, I, I really, I’m doing this as a Jew to a Jew,” Balkany had insisted in a taped conversation with Klotz, SAC’s outside counsel. “I’m just stepping in, really, to be of help to him.”
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/
The plan to extort Steve Cohen appears to have originated at the federal prison camp in Otisville, N.Y., an hour or so north of Manhattan, which the Bureau of Prisons has tailored to suit the special dietary and other needs of Hasidic inmates. “It’s like a bungalow colony up there in the Catskills,” joked Gary Friedman, the executive director of Jewish Prisoner Services International, an organization that provides services to Jewish inmates. Balkany was a regular visitor to the camp and, in his recorded conversations with SAC’s lawyers, said it was an inmate named David Schick who provided the connection to Hayim Regensberg, the man Balkany claimed was being pressured to give information on SAC. Schick, the scion of a famous bakery dynasty in Brooklyn, is an Orthodox Jew who defrauded his investors of as much as $200 million in the late 1990s.
Regensberg is serving a 100-month sentence for running a Ponzi scheme, and his lawyer, Robert Baum, told me he believes his client has information that may be of interest to the government. Indeed, some of the details that Balkany dangled in his conversations with SAC have proven to connect to real investigations—particularly concerning a healthcare fund called FrontPoint, which is embroiled in its own insider-trading scandal. But prison officials testified during Balkany’s trial that the rabbi never visited Regensberg during the months he spent negotiating with SAC, and federal investigators testified that no one from the government ever spoke to him about the insider-trading investigations, let alone approached him with an offer to cut a deal in exchange for information. “They haven’t tried to follow up,” Baum told me, in late November.
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/
In Jewish terms, Cohen made a strange target. He and his wife, Alexandra—who grew up in a Puerto Rican Catholic family in Washington Heights—do not, according to tax records filed by their family foundation, give to Jewish communal organizations or to synagogues, but choose instead to shower millions on hospitals, urban-youth programs, and the schools where their children are enrolled—including Brown University, from which Cohen’s son, Robert, graduated in 2009. Cohen also sits on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a group devoted to fighting poverty in New York. Of the millions his foundation has given away since it was set up in 2001, the only significant donation to a Jewish cause was $25,000 to a religious-outreach group called Gateways, which is based in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Monsey, to buy a table at a gala fundraising dinner in 2004. (The group’s director, Mordechai Suchard, told me he couldn’t remember who was being honored.)
Is that a kemaiah Balkany takes to trial or what's this thing with a mezuzah?
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/2/
Balkany attempted to establish a Jewish rapport with his interlocutors—even where there wasn’t any to be made. A few days after his first phone call, Balkany met with Klotz, SAC’s outside counsel, at his gracious red-brick home in Brooklyn. The first thing Balkany asked Klotz, as they sat down over some snacks, was whether he was a Jew. “He said, ‘Are you Jewish, or Polish, or’—and it was sort of like, ‘What?’ ” Klotz, a graying, square-faced man whose family is German but not Jewish, testified with a bemused grin. A concealed camera captured a similar conversation between Nussbaum, SAC’s in-house lawyer, and the rabbi when they met in Stamford, in early January of this year. “What is your Hebrew name, Peter?” Balkany asked. Nussbaum, whose decidedly un-Hebraic middle name is Addison, told the rabbi that his German-born Jewish grandparents in Queens had been religious, but his father had insisted on a completely secular home. “So, we have to have you have a bar mitzvah!” Balkany responded, delighted. In court, months later, when one of the prosecutors asked Nussbaum—a tall, thin-faced, WASPy-looking man with a receding cap of sandy, straight hair—whether he considered himself ethnically Jewish, he answered with a curt “Yes.”
It’s impossible to know what the rabbi was thinking as he sat at the defense table listening to his own charade. He did not take the stand, and his lawyer, Brafman, declined interviews on the rabbi’s behalf. (“Talking too much and using poor judgment got him into this mess,” Brafman told me.) At 64, Balkany looks a little like a bearded Donald Sutherland, with the same bright white hair and bulbous features, always in a black or gray suit and a crisp white shirt with a black tie and a black velvet yarmulke, sometimes clutching a simple white ceramic mezuzah. As the trial progressed, he sometimes followed along with transcripts that were stacked in a three-ring binder. Other times, he stared off into space, or read from a bound copy of the Torah.
But a guy with the chutzpah to try and swindle Steve Cohen, a man legendary for his business acumen, is also the kind of person who would insist on going for broke with a jury trial rather than take a government plea offer. “Rabbi Balkany would not plead guilty because he insisted that he did not intentionally violate the law,” Brafman told me
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/2/
Balkany was born in Detroit, where his father was a stock manager for General Motors. According to Balkany’s older brother, Louis, now a vascular surgeon in Toledo, Ohio, the family kept kosher but wasn’t Sabbath observant, until one day his brother — known by his Hebrew name, Yehoshua — announced he wanted to leave public school & go to a local yeshiva, Beth Yehuda.
Balkany won a scholarship to attend Torah Vodaath & he stayed in New York after he was ordained a rabbi in the 1960s, eventually taking over as principal at Bais Yaakov. On a plane to Florida, he met Sarah Rubashkin, a daughter of Aaron Rubashkin, founder of Agriprocessors kosher meat, who occupies a position of royalty in Lubavitch. They married & their first child was born in 1969. (Balkany’s brother-in-law, Sholom Rubashkin, was sentenced last summer to 27 years in prison on charges of fraud.) “The Rubashkins thought it was intermarriage,” Louis Balkany recalled. Balkany never became a Lubavitcher.
By the late 1980s, he had established himself as a successful fundraiser, mainly for Republicans. He had a seat on the Republican Senatorial Committee & once gave invocation during a reception thrown by Dan Quayle. “He was quirky, in that he went to minyan first thing in the morning but he wore John Lobb shoes,” said a former Bush staffer, referring to the bespoke brand popular with Republican heavyweights.
Over the years, he developed a reputation as someone who had access not just to elected officials but to various govt agencies, particularly the Bureau of Prisons, where attorneys found Balkany invaluable in getting client requests addressed. “There was one case with a client who was in prison in the Midwest & I was at wit’s end & people said, ‘Call Balkany,” Brafman told me. “People who were not taking my calls took his & he was able to convince the BOP to make the transfer.”
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/3/
One of the people who came to support Balkany in court every day was Chesed Halberstam, a long-bearded, bespectacled man who spent 17 years as a personal aide to the wife of Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He wore a yellow pin he proudly explained indicates he is awaiting the Messiah. Every morning, he took a bound copy of the Torah that had once belonged to the rebbe out of a black leather carrying case, handed it to Balkany, and then parked himself in the front row, just behind the defense table. I asked him why he took it from Balkany every time court recessed, instead of lending it to the rabbi for the duration of the trial. “It’s worth a great deal, so I don’t let it out of my sight,” explained Halberstam. He added that he hoped that the book might bring Balkany luck, even if he only held on to it a few hours each day. “He was just trying to help people, and they bring these ludicrous charges,” Halberstam said.
On the second day of the trial, Sarah Balkany, a short, plump woman who sat through much of the trial studying her own small prayer book, spotted it, smiled, and leaned over to point it out to one of her daughters, Rosie, who smiled too and patted her mother’s hand.
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/3/
I sat with Tom Robbins, a chipper, white-haired former Daily News reporter, now a columnist for the Village Voice, who was drawn to the case for personal reasons: He was sued by Balkany in 2004 for defamation. (The case was later dismissed.) Robbins, no stranger to the myriad stripes of Orthodox Jewry in Brooklyn, was nonetheless puzzled by the variations he had seen on display in the gallery. “Are they all Orthodox?” he asked, gesturing at two of Balkany’s younger daughters, who paraded in wearing short skirts paired with designer shoes: suede Prada peep-toes and racy black patent-leather Yves Saint Laurent platforms. Their youngest brother, Shmuel—who had his own turn in the news a couple of years ago, after being badly beaten in Crown Heights—wore loafers emblazoned with the Prada logo. But even those who were less outwardly flashy are, it turns out, prone to secular adventures: The rabbi’s son Levi and his wife, Perel, had an Orthodox wedding in 2004, but, according to public records, celebrated their first anniversary by getting married again in Las Vegas, at the infamous Little White Wedding Chapel, where Rev. Iann Schonken—who in 2004 performed the brief wedding of Britney Spears to her childhood friend Jason Alexander—officiated.
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/3/
Their expensive clothes and jewelry would have been a passing curiosity had it not been for the heartbreaking testimony of one witness, called by the government: Chana Rivka Flaum, a tiny, girlish woman in flat shoes, bobbed sheitel, and heavy stockings. As the administrator at Bais Yaakov, she could explain exactly what drove Balkany to try and push his luck with Cohen: He was broke. According to state records, Balkany is carrying more than $200,000 in unpaid tax liens against his home in Borough Park. The school, which declared bankruptcy in 2005, vacated its original property—a 1960s-style building whose exterior wall still bears the ghostly outline of the name “Bais Yaakov”—and downsized into a much smaller facility a few miles east in Midwood.
Flaum was visibly anxious and overwhelmed on the witness stand. When Marc Berger, one of the prosecutors, asked her about whether the school had an endowment, she responded, “I don’t know what that means.” She described how she made payroll, or covered utilities, by cashing tuition checks from parents at a local check-cashing service; she said that in December of 2009, many of the teachers at the school had not been paid since the beginning of the school year. “How do you know that teachers had not been paid in December of 2009?” asked Berger. “Partly because I deal with payroll and partly because I had teachers asking me for money every day,” Flaum said, looking directly at Balkany, who looked down at his lap.
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/3/
Brafman is famous for his courtroom prowess — a performer so worth seeing that other lawyers stopped in to watch him. At 5' 6", he barely reaches Berger’s shoulder, but as he took the podium, his barrel chest puffed out & he seemed to fill the room. He adjusted his French cuffs & began. “Just so we’re clear, lying on those tapes, everybody lied,” he said. “There should be no question in your mind that everybody lied. Klotz lied to Balkany. Balkany lied to Klotz.” Brafman backed away from his notes, speaking in increasingly outraged tones. “Are we nuts? We’re not nuts. None of us are nuts. I don’t think we’re nuts. But we’re listening to conversations that are nuts,” Brafman argued. “You can’t just convict Rabbi Balkany because he had stupid conversations the government has suggested show that he’s guilty of a crime,” he went on. “He did not act with the requisite criminal knowledge or intent that these crimes will require you to find beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Brafman paused, reaching into a repertoire that stretches back to his days working for Robert Morgenthau in the Manhattan D.A. office. “Now, you have an argument with somebody, even somebody you love, whoever gets the last word, man, that’s a powerful moment, and that’s the advantage the government gets, because they have the disadvantage of having to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” Brafman said. “But here is my thought, and I think I’m right, and I hope you agree. They don’t have the last word. You do.” Let’s fight the man, was what he meant — you, me, and the rabbi against Steve Cohen & the government.
When he finished, after an astonishing hour & a half of high-volume exposition, Brafman collapsed into his seat, exhausted. Balkany turned to his family, his pale cheeks suddenly ruddy, a smile stretching beneath his beard as he surveyed them. “That was wonderful, wasn’t it?” Balkany asked me, on his way out.
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/3/
The next morning, Jesse Furman got up to give the government response. Furman, a mild 38-year-old, is Brafman’s antithesis in almost every way: rumpled where Brafman is immaculately tailored, precisely spoken where Brafman releases Brooklyn-inflected torrents, an Upper West Sider who attends the egalitarian Ansche Chesed synagogue while Brafman is a trustee of Beth Sholom in Lawrence, Long Island. Furman’s father, Jay, is a successful real estate developer active in prominent charities, while his mother, Gail, is a well-known Democratic fundraiser. His brother, Jason, is deputy director of Obama’s Economic Council. Jesse Furman went from Harvard to Yale & clerked for Supreme Court Justice David Souter.
Furman, too, could make a credible common-man plea to the jury: “We live in a beautiful country where no person can be accused of a crime without entitlement to a trial, where any person charged with a serious crime is entitled to a trial before a jury just like you.” We all came from somewhere, we all worked hard to get from there to where we are. “The Red Cross doesn’t use these kinds of lines to raise money,” Furman said, citing Balkany’s repeated reassurances to SAC that if they handed over cash he wanted, they wouldn’t sweat a government investigation. “This isn’t how the March of Dimes gets money for charity,” he added. “This is corruption, pure & simple.”
The jury was dispatched at just before 11 a.m.. By 3:45, the jury had returned its verdict. It was a simple and definitive guilty on all 4 counts.
http://www.johnlobb.com/store-locator/
Balkany's favorite shoes must cost like $1000 a pair? They are made by hand and besides Madison Ave, there is only one other place in the United States you can buy them.
According to the 1994 edition of The College Board Guide to High Schools published by the College Entrance Examination Board, Leib Tropper's brother in law, Rabbi Yoel Adelman, was the guidance director working under Ephraim Bryks at Bryks's yeshiva in Queens.
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Ephraim Bryks's father Lejzor who hung himself when his fraud scheme started unravelling
http://www.ceclass.com/CE-173%20AGENTS%20ON%20TRIAL.pdf
Lejzor Bryks was and agent with Constitution who eventually met Gilmore offered to assist Gilmore in connection with his insurance needs. Specifically, Bryks at their first advised Gilmore that if he paid his annual premium payment on the old Sterling policy at that time, instead of waiting, he would be able to obtain the full maturity cash value of the policy a year earlier.
This was admittedly a false representation by Bryks. Gilmore, however, relied on Bryks' statement, and thereupon made out his personal check in favor of Constitution for the annual premium, which he gave to Bryks. Bryks later endorsed this check on behalf of Constitution & deposited it in an account that years earlier was authorized by Constitution. Bryks had the authority to deposit in that account checks made payable to Constitution, and also having
the authority to draw on the account, both on his sole signature.
Bryks, however, did not deliver the check to Gilmore, but forged Gilmore's endorsement and deposited it
On October 29, 1971, Bryks wrote Gilmore and enclosed one certificate for $20,000, requesting that Gilmore return the three outstanding certificates, which totaled $20,000. This Gilmore did. Soon after, Bryks was terminated by Constitution and committed suicide.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/nyregion/17king.html?hp
WASHINGTON — The Republican who will head the House committee that oversees domestic security is planning to open a Congressional inquiry into what he calls “the radicalization” of the Muslim community when his party takes over the House next year.
Representative Peter T. King of New York, who will become the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he is responding to what he has described as frequent concerns raised by law enforcement officials that Muslim leaders have been uncooperative in terror investigations.
Give me a break. Suchard keeps track of every penny coming his way and he doesn't remember who he honored at his dinner 6 years ago? What are you embarrassed of Motti? Does anyone know who the honoree was?
http://nochemrosenberg.blogspot.com/2010/12/appeal-to-public.html
Rabosay! The rapist and molester Meir Dascalowitz, admitted to the arresting detective, of more than 50 children that he remembers molesting. Please don't let yourself being fooled by these goody-goody's who cry mesirah. If your child is a victim of this beast, please come forward and go to the police
http://nochemrosenberg.blogspot.com/2010/12/blog-post_07.html
What does UOJ know about Nuchem calling this guy a molester and where is he a rosh yeshiva?
I remember different Schulgasser cousins from way back when but can't place them now.
Nuchem Rosenberg is reporting that Pupa Williamsburg is pressuring Charlie Hynes to let Dascalowitz off the hook.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EQT6WCf63k&feature=player_embedded
The father of a Burich Lebovits victim who testified against the lowlife was attacked at his shul during davening by a mob who beat him and ripped off his talis.
Joe DiAngelo (A former chassidishe abuse victim who changed his name when he went off the derech) also tells the reporter in this segment that 5 of his abused friends have committed suicide in the last year.
Please direct questions to R' Nuchem for further information about the names he puts on his blog.
http://www.thelakewoodscoop.com/news/2009/09/bris-of-einekel-of-harav-schulgasser-shlita.html
Schulgasser is the rosh yeshiva of Beis Aron. I'm going to look into that allegation.
http://thebrooklynink.com/2010/12/16/21883-paying-up-why-landlords-get-away-with-mounds-of-housing-violations/
Bistricer’s over 8,000 building code violations suggests a flaw in the system: How can a slumlord get away with so many violations for so long?
http://pubadvocate.nyc.gov/landlord-watchlist?order=title&sort=asc
Look at all the heimishe on the Public Advocate's list
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/40707574/ns/today-entertainment/
NEW YORK — Marking the occasion with bright red suspenders, Larry King pulled the curtain down on his CNN talk show on Thursday after 25 years.
The director of the Nassau County Police lab has been relieved of his duties following revelations the lab had been cited for improper procedures by a national accrediting agency.
Det. Lt. James Granelle was reassigned because he failed to tell his superiors in November about the poor review, according to Newsday.
Earlier this week, the lab was placed on probation by the accrediting agency. It is the only one in the country currently on probation.
Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch, who has helped engineer historic rescues of governments in crisis, said Thursday that states are headed toward “the cliff.”
That will be next summer, when temporary federal stimulus money spent on education and other programs ends and states are left with unaffordable but politically protected levels of spending.
It’s one of the critical issues New York and other states will face in the coming year, long after economists declared the recession over.
Ravitch, 77, said that for states including New York to save themselves they need to recognize the overspending in past years can no longer be pushed down the road through more borrowing. He said politicians need to make tough, maybe career-stopping fiscal choices that he likened to the choice between “strychnine and arsenic.”
Wall Street needs to end its “cockamamie” borrowing schemes for states that have continued a supply of cash, masking the structural problems of debt in states, he said.
But his plans for a five-year restructuring of New York’s finances were rejected by Gov. David Paterson, Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature.
Attn Vicky Polin
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/Local%20News/Beit-Tikva-president-defends-Rabbi-Levy
Paul Grace, president of Congregation Beit Tikva, doesn't see the point in prying into Rabbi Martin Levy's past.
Recently, a copy of a letter officially suspending him from the (Reform) Central Conference of American Rabbis, was sent to The New Mexican & other media. The letter stated Levy was suspended from practicing as a rabbi for 5 years for violating CCAR's Code of Ethics.
Levy, also a private figure skating coach at Genoveva Chavez Center, didn't return calls seeking comment.
According to the letter, Levy was to not practice as a rabbi in any capacity & instructed to "undergo psychiatric evaluation in clergy boundary issues."
Grace said Beit Tikva's board knew about Levy's suspension, which Grace said included a history with a woman before he was married.
The woman & Levy have filed lawsuits against one another in Idaho.
"It's outrageous he has to defend himself against these attacks," Grace said. He suggested anyone who has doubts about Levy to "Come to Friday night service & see him instead of assuming the worst. He's a kind, decent man."
Stephen Einstein of CCAR said Levy was punished for violating "sexual boundaries."
Levy resigned from CCAR, but Einstein wants people to "take pause" when dealing with a rabbi who's been suspended.
Grace, who called CCAR a "union shop" which the congregation isn't a member, said the situation is not anyone's business.
"This is a private matter," Grace said.
The situation has been hard on the rabbi, Grace said.
"It's very distressing to him," Grace said. "It's very unfair to him to have to live through this again."
When you read the Martin Levy story just remember that Shmarya shamelessly spins that only the Orthodox cover up - Reform & Conservative don't cover up. Whenever I would call his attention to various cover ups, sometimes even by the supreme Conservative body, he would find an excuse to kick me off Failed Messiah so that I would get in the way of his lying agenda.
girl in lakewood purposely exposed to chicken pox so as to avoid need for vaccine has just died plz expose
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