Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Brooklyn DA is talking the talk on enablers of child abuse in ultra-Orthodox community...


But Charles Hynes must walk the walk as well!



Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes must prosecute sex-abuse cases more vigorously.

To hear District Attorney Charles Hynes now tell it, members of Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community have criminally protected child sex abusers by bullying victims and their families into silence.

“I haven’t seen this kind of intimidation in organized-crime cases or police corruption,” Hynes declared in an interview with the Daily News.

So whom among these obstructors of justice did Hynes prosecute? Virtually no one. And whom among the predators did he send to prison? Far, far fewer than he should have across the first 19 of his more than 22 years in office.

As Hynes stunningly admitted to the Jewish Daily Forward, for almost two decades he was “completely unsuccessful” in prosecuting sex abuse by ultra-Orthodox Brooklynites, a group that was politically important to him and whose leaders discourage, as a matter of religion, involvement with civil authorities.

Hynes disputes that he was passive in the face of victimization — which is no more prevalent in this constituency than in any other — but the evidence is overwhelming that he took a destructively accommodating approach to sex crime prosecutions involving the ultra-Orthodox.

In 1998, Hynes let David Zimmer, accused of groping a 9-year-old girl and raping a 10-year-old, plead guilty to a single count and a sentence of probation. Zimmer was represented by the husband of Hynes’ Jewish community liaison. Zimmer has since been charged in a series of molestations.

The 9-year-old’s father told The New York Times: “If they don’t want to prosecute, what are you going to do?”

In 2008, Hynes entered a plea bargain with Rabbi Yehuda Kolko, a teacher with a 30-year history of abuse complaints. Charged with two felony counts, he pleaded to a misdemeanor, over the objection of a victim’s father, and escaped jail time.

“I believe they were looking for angles out,” the father told the Jewish Week newspaper.

In 2009, Hynes launched a program called Voice of Justice that was billed as a “culturally sensitive” approach to community resistance to reporting child abuse.

A few months later, the Forward reported the organizing body of Modern Orthodox rabbis had affirmed that rabbinic courts should decide whether to bring sexual abuse allegations against Jews to law enforcement.

In May 2011, The Forward reported that Agudath Israel of America, a leading ultra-Orthodox advocacy group, had also told followers that they could go to law enforcement only after consulting a rabbi, even if they were in professions mandated by state law to report abuse.

Rather than protest that religious authorities have no place interfering in criminal justice, let alone counseling to violation of law, a Hynes spokesman said: “If anyone asks us, we tell them to call police or the DA’s office.”

Last summer, Agudath Israel executive director Rabbi David Zwiebel told Hynes his organization was directing followers that they could report sex abuse only after a rabbi weighed the credibility of allegations.  
Zwiebel told the Times that Hynes “expressed no oppostion or objection.” That came to light in a report that also described how the community cowed victims from testifying by expulsion from religious schools and synagogues and even eviction from apartments. The report became a tipping point for Hynes.

First, he wrote in a Daily News Op-Ed: “Although I would not interfere with anyone’s decision to speak to their religious leader, I also expect allegations of criminal conduct to be reported to the appropriate law enforcement authorities.”

Under severe criticism, he then escalated to warning that rabbis could be obstructing justice when they insist on talking to victims first.

He also defended his record over the past three years with statistics showing prosecutions by his Voice of Justice program, but he held to the misguided policy of refusing to disclose names of accused ultra-Orthodox offenders.

Hynes has also called for state legislation to mandate abuse reporting by clerics and formed a task force to address the witness intimidation that he compares to the tactics of organized crime.

He need only do the one thing he should have done since he was first elected in 1989: Prosecute.

SOURCE:
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/brooklyn-da-talking-talk-enablers-child-abuse-ultra-orthodox-community-article-1.1088575

7 comments:

  1. Thanks to Hynes, this practitioner of child incest is on the loose, WHY???

    From the New York Post:

    "Brooklyn 'perv' rabbi Gershon Kranczer and son on the lam in Israel

    By SUSAN EDELMAN
    June 3, 2012

    They may run, and it seems they can hide.

    Brooklyn rabbi Gershon Kranczer, 58, hopped a JFK flight to Tel Aviv on Nov. 29, 2010, running away just days before cops went to his Midwood house of horrors to arrest him on charges of repeatedly raping several female relatives. One of his sons, Asher, 21, facing similar charges, joined his dad on the plane.

    More than 18 months later, their Brooklyn indictments are sealed from public view and authorities won’t discuss any efforts to bring them to justice.

    A spokesman for Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes said he asked the US Justice Department to extradite the Kranczers in early 2011, a move purportedly in the works.

    The feds refused to comment.

    “We don’t confirm or deny extradition requests,” said Laura Seal, a State Department spokeswoman.

    The NYPD opened the sickening case when a 20-year-old woman confided in a co-worker that the respected rabbi, who ran Yeshiva Tehila L’Dovid, had sexually assaulted her for years. Cops later learned that three of her female relatives, ages 8, 17 and 19, were also allegedly abused.

    “If there was a real desire to get these guys back, DA Hynes would be pushing for it, and he would be successful,” said Ben Hirsch, president of Survivors For Justice.
    "

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  2. Thanks to Hynes this sexual monster ran away, WHY???

    From the New York Post:

    "Brooklyn child-molest monster 'got away with it' after fleeing to Israel

    Brooklyn child-molest monster 'got away with it' after fleeing to Israel

    By ORON DAN in Jerusalem and SUSAN EDELMAN in NY

    June 3, 2012

    Brooklyn child-molest monster 'got away with it' after fleeing to Israel

    By ORON DAN in Jerusalem and SUSAN EDELMAN in NY

    Last Updated: 9:59 AM, June 3, 2012

    Posted: 1:00 AM, June 3, 2012

    Here is Avrohom Mondrowitz, New York’s most notorious child molester — living scot-free in Israel.

    Called the “Bin Laden of pedophiles” by one victim, the bogus rabbi and self-proclaimed psychologist fled the United States in 1984 just before cops broke into his Borough Park, Brooklyn, home with a search warrant. They found a cache of kiddie porn and lists of hundreds of names of local boys, most referred to Mondrowitz by Jewish families and child-service agencies for counseling and his yeshiva-style program.

    “He was known in the insular community as the go-to therapist, child mentor,” said an outspoken victim, Mark Weiss, whose parents sent him to Mondrowitz at age 13. “He had a certain knack with kids.”

    BROOKLYN 'PERV' RABBI AND SON ON THE LAM IN ISRAEL

    Weiss says Mondrowitz treated him to restaurants and amusement parks, then took him into bed during a week’s stay in his home. When Weiss, at age 18, finally told his parents and a rabbi about the sexual abuse, “They let it die. Any such story was quashed and buried.”

    But years later the NYPD finally caught up with Mondrowitz after getting anonymous complaints. He was indicted in 1985 on charges of sexual abuse and sodomy against four Italian-American boys, ages 11 to 16, who lived in the Brooklyn neighborhood.

    Detectives also found many Orthodox Jewish boys who sobbed as they told of horrific sexual assaults by a man they trusted, but their families wouldn’t let them press charges. Community pressure to keep shameful allegations secret continues to shield child molesters today, advocates and law-enforcement authorities say.

    “He got away with it,” said a spokesman for Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes.

    The Post last week spotted Mondrowitz, 64, cloaked in religious garb, in Nachlaot, a hip, Greenwich Village-type neighborhood in central Jerusalem near his apartment on Yizreel Street. He wears a façade of piety and respectability, even leading prayer services at a local synagogue. But documents show he has indulged his penchant for child porn and continued to seek contact with troubled kids.
    "

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  3. Hynes can't resist letting criminals run wild, WHY???:

    From the New York Post:

    "Brooklyn child-molest monster 'got away with it' after fleeing to Israel

    Mondrowitz has paraded his fake degrees and credentials in Israel, seeking work as an educator and shrink.. In a 2006 document, first exposed by Jewish Week, Mondrowitz -- who puts a Ph.D after his name -- evaluated a 15-year-old boy, noting the "hormonal and physical changes in his body." He discussed the boy's sexual experimentation, including "pleasurable self-stimulation."

    “If you meet him, he sounds very knowledgeable, helpful and friendly," said a neighbor who learned about Mondrowitz from an American friend. "Some people know about his past. I think some people brush it off , like he’s done his repentance.”

    Mondrowitz “davens,” or prays, at the Munkatch synagogue. “He’s a regular there,” the neighbor said. “The rabbi was approached by one of my friends, but they weren’t going to do anything about him. He’s welcome to come."

    Another resident yelled, “All the allegations are lies! I know the person and his family very well. He is a good Jew. He is clean.”

    Multiple e-mails copied from his computer and turned over to the FBI show that Mondrowitz trolled child-porn Web sites, buying access to titles such as ErectXboys, SchoolBoys, Boy Heaven and Boys Lagoon.

    The United States sought his extradition from Israel in 1985. but the treaty between the countries did not cover his alleged crimes. In 1993, Hynes’ office dropped the deportation effort. In 2007, the treaty was changed, and Mondrowitz became extraditable. A search of his home in Israel found four child-porn films. He was arrested and jailed.

    But in 2010, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled Mondrowitz was grandfathered and exempt from the revised treaty. He was freed for good.

    Weiss, now 45, a married father of three in Highland Park, N.J, is one of dozens of Mondrowitz's known Jewish victims, advocates say. He and others came forward too late to press charges because of the statute of limitations on sex-abuse claims. Some abused drugs and committed suicide to escape the pain, he said..

    “It totally stinks to know that this guy has escaped justice and is entitled to live a stable life smack in the middle of a Jewish community that ought to know better. It’s a failure of an entire society that is paralyzed to take action action, Weiss said.

    “I believe he will one day answer to his maker -- and that time is coming.”

    susan.edelman@nypost.com

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  4. WHY does someone "sworn to uphold the law" like DA Hynes let pervert law-breakers escape the law??? And why does Israel need perverts like Mondrowitz, Kranczer and Helbrans etc and send its own perverts to the USA in a macabre "exchange program of perverts"???

    From the New York Times:

    "June 4, 2012

    Police vs. Prosecutor in ’94 Brooklyn Kidnapping Case Against a Rabbi

    By MICHAEL POWELL

    Charles J. Hynes, having once embraced silence on the question of his vigor in prosecuting sex abuse in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, cannot stop talking now.

    In columns, in interviews, and even in an exchange with former Mayor Edward I. Koch, Mr. Hynes, the veteran district attorney in Brooklyn, has insisted that he is one tough prosecutor. He will handcuff and arrest anyone who tries to intimidate an ultra-Orthodox family into silence.

    “I will not put victims at risk,” he told The Forward.

    If he allows ultra-Orthodox rabbis to act as gatekeepers, determining which child was and was not molested before turning to prosecutors, and if he agrees to keep secret the names of the molesters, who could argue with the results? Since 2009, he says, his office has prosecuted 99 sex abuse cases in the ultra-Orthodox community. (When my colleagues Sharon Otterman and Ray Rivera diced Mr. Hynes’s numbers in a series of articles, they found at least one quarter of his prosecutions had little to do with child sex abuse.)

    But let’s forget the numbers.

    Mr. Hynes contrasts his prosecutorial vigor with the bad old days, when his prosecutors could not persuade the insular community to speak up.

    The problem, though, is that sometimes, in dealing with the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, it was Mr. Hynes himself who seemed to want these cases to go away.

    In 1994, William Plackenmeyer was a New York Police Department division commander in Borough Park, home to one of the city’s fastest growing ultra-Orthodox communities, and a key voting bloc for Mr. Hynes.

    A few years earlier, a charismatic ultra-Orthodox rabbi, Shlomo Helbrans, had agreed to tutor an Israeli couple’s 13-year-old boy, Shai Fhima Reuven, in preparation for his bar mitzvah.

    Instead, the rabbi kidnapped the boy and persuaded him to reject his family and embrace a zealous form of Hasidism. The police had the rabbi cornered. But the Brooklyn district attorney’s office did not want a confrontation; they argued that Shai was just a runaway.

    “I listened to my detective’s account and I said, ‘No, no, this is a kidnapping,’ ” Mr. Plackenmeyer recalled. “Of course, this was Borough Park, so I’m talking lose-lose.”

    By which Mr. Plackenmeyer meant that the local rabbis made splendid political bosses. Republican, Democrat, they can direct the votes of their adherents with striking ease.

    Mr. Plackenmeyer ordered his men to make the arrest.

    Two former law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed key aspects of Mr. Plackenmeyer’s account.
    "

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  5. Hynes plays with the HELBRANS DEVIL to curry favor with corrupt Brooklyn Mafioso-type Haredim and stay in office, WHY is is he allowed to do that??? Does he work for the Haredim or for the USA???

    "Police vs. Prosecutor in ’94 Brooklyn Kidnapping Case Against a Rabbi

    Within 24 hours of the arrest, the captain said, two assistant district attorneys paid him a visit. They were apologetically emphatic: Your case might be strong, they told him, but our boss, Mr. Hynes, wants you to void the arrest.

    Are you saying, Mr. Plackenmeyer asked, that I don’t have probable cause?

    We’re not saying that, they replied.

    The prosecutors soon released the rabbi. Mr. Plackenmeyer and the boy’s mother, Hana Fhima, drove down to the district attorney’s office, seeking a meeting. They sat there for hours but never got past reception.

    “I was a division commander,” he recalled. “I’m there with a woman willing to testify about this rabbi who kidnapped her son, and no one wants to speak to me.”

    Soon enough, the F.B.I. took a look at it, along with federal prosecutors. They had a meeting, there was a fair amount of yelling, and, with help from federal officials, the district attorney felt the urge to prosecute.

    That was not the end of it. In March 1994, Mr. Hynes’s office agreed to let Rabbi Helbrans plead guilty to kidnapping in exchange for five years of community service. Mrs. Fhima was furious, and complained bitterly to the judge of swinging-door justice.

    A State Supreme Court justice, in an unusual move, agreed with her. He overturned the plea bargain. The family, he said, had given him the sense “that this is a political ploy, because Joe Hynes is running for” state attorney general, according to newspaper accounts.

    Michael Vecchione, the prosecutor on that case, got on the phone on Monday, for an interview at high volume. To suggest Mr. Hynes’s office was less than vigorous is a calumny, he suggested. “There’s no way,” he says, “based on how I practice law, that I’d agree” to probation.

    Told that contemporaneous accounts in The New York Times state otherwise (“The plea was part of an intricate arrangement with the Brooklyn district attorney,” the newspaper’s March 8, 1994, account states), Mr. Vecchione amended his statement.

    “I don’t recall, honestly,” he said.

    In the end, Mr. Helbrans was convicted of kidnapping and shipped off to prison. He was eventually deported to Israel, and made his way to a hamlet in Quebec, where his black-clad female followers are known by some other Hasidim as the Jewish Taliban.

    Mr. Plackenmeyer is content to have seen justice done. “None of the rest makes sense unless you take politics into account,” he says.

    “Then it all makes sense.”

    E-mail: powellm@nytimes.com

    Twitter: @powellnyt
    "

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  6. Matisyahu Pickwick Salomon12:27 PM, June 05, 2012

    From the UOJ archives:

    "The Life and Times of Matisyahu Pickwick Salomon 7 said...(November 06, 2011)

    Rabbi Matisyahu Salomon is most happy when he gets to get out of the confines of his miserable job of do-nothing-"guidance" at the Lakewood yeshiva.

    He gets especially giddy when he travels to the far off remnants of the former Soviet Union to places like Baku in Azerbaijan or Tbilisi in Georgia or some such junket where he is hailed like a "conquering hero" as he becomes a bushy bearded rabbi "candy-man" handing out free sweeties (candies) to the bewildered urchins and patting boys and girls on the cheeks and heads like a kindly grand-daddy from Mars.

    This all brings to mind another German-named Yiddisher, Einglisher, Brittisher, Yekkisher, Frummisher, Haredisher Mashgiach: Rabbi Moshe Eisemann from another Haredi Yeshiva, NIRC, the Baltimore yeshiva, who also loves to travel to the former USSR and fondle its young Jews literally.

    Moshe Eisemann has been repeatedly accused and named as practicing pedophilia such as playing with the genitals and masturbating boys who come under his spell, under the guise of "counseling" them in Judaism. This has been an "open" secret for years and widely criticized on this blog and others over the years, as well as reported in mainstream Jewish papers such as in the Baltimore Jewish Times: "Special Report: Sexual Molestation August 31, 2007 Ner Israel Rabbi Alleged Abuser."

    They like to travel around these Brittishers do. They are very worldly you know. They speak English with a tainted Germanic twist. Very Aryan they are. Going to the far off former barbaric Soviet Union holds no fears for the likes of Übermenschen and bosom-buddy Mashgiach Ruchanies Moshe Eisemann and Matisyahu Salomon. After all, as that old English saying goes, "only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun" and dear old Eisemann and Salomon are keeping up the good old antics of fellow Brittishers like Lawrence of Arabia (a presumed homosexual) and "Dr. Livingstone I presume" (who loved to hand out with the natives) by hanging out with the lost tribes of far flung Jews.

    But hey, hang on there, why is it that Matisyahu is always criticizing "technology" while you'll never hear him utter any strong criticisms of the likes of pedophiles like Eisemann who was forced to quit in disgrace because of the allegations against him. Seems Matisyahu has a selective memory when it suits him. He should know and act better than that if he wants to be taken seriously.

    8:21 PM, November 06, 2011"

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  7. Half blind motormouth Chometz LePesach Krohn wants to put the bloggers and commentators in "cherem" but he is such a hypocritical mean-spirited conniving manipulator, all the while he spews out his verbal diarrhea of far-fetched bubba-meises that FartScroll is all too happy to sell to its feeble-minded "readership" incapable of reading some real books.

    Half blind motormouth Chometz LePesach Krohn will NEVER tell you in any of his "maggid vomits" books that he has pedophiles and perverts in his own family, like his brother in law Ephraim Bryks, that he not only brazenly covers up for but shamelessly promotes (he has "rachmonus" on the perverts, so no wonder he is is cruel to those who want to stop perversions in the frum world!):

    Read for yourself about "rabbi" Ephraim Bryks, the brother in law of half blind motormouth Chometz LePesach Krohn:

    http://www.lukeford.net/profiles/profiles/ephraim_bryks.htm

    "Born around 1954, Ephraim Boruk Bryks grew up in Denver, Colorado.

    His father Lejzor, an Orthodox rabbi, committed suicide in 1971 following a financial scandal. That same year, Ephraim, after eight years at Ner Israel in Baltimore, moved to Israel to study at Beth HaTalmud Rabbinical Seminary. He says he was ordained by the Beth Din of Jerusalem a year later.

    He married Yochevad, the daughter of convicted sex offender rabbi Lewis Brenner. They had two children.

    In 1978, Bryks moved to Winnipeg, Canada, where he ran the Herzlia-Adas Yeshuran synagogue. Bringing in new members, he established an NCSY chapter called Ohr Hagolah, the Herzlia Academy night school, a preschool, a nursery, a kindergarten, a Girl Guide troop, a Brownie troop and his own rabbinical court.

    While working as a teacher in the community-run Jewish highschool, Joseph Wolinsky Collegiate, he applied for the position of Vice-Principal. When he didn't get it, he left and started his own Orthodox day school. It expanded to over 150 students.

    After rabbi Bryks criticized other Winnipeg rabbis over kosher food and the city's eruv (a structure that allows observant Jews to carry on the Sabbath), questions were raised about rabbi Bryks' credentials.

    He had boasted of a law degree from the state of Israel even though the state doesn't give out law degrees. He claimed he sat as a member of a religious court in Israel when he was only a rabbinical student in Israel, not a judge.

    The Winnipeg Council of Rabbis in 1987 sent a letter to the editor of the Winnipeg Jewish Post & News noting that rabbi Bryks plagiarized several articles in his weekly Torah commentary from the book Torah Therapy by rabbi Reuven Bulka. After the lawyer for rabbi Bryks threatened a lawsuit, the newspaper decided to not publish the letter.

    From the early 1980s, there have been a steady stream of accusations that rabbi Bryks acted inappropriately with women and children.

    Contrary to Jewish law (which forbids a man from being alone with females not his wife or immediate relatives), rabbi Bryks counseled girls and women behind closed doors.

    A 14-year old girl complained that the rabbi liked to sit on her lap, touch her, tickle her and talk about sex. She said he licked her face.

    Various women complained to Chabad rabbi Avraham Altein, a supporter of rabbi Bryks's campaign's against Winnipeg's eruv and kashrut standards, that rabbi Bryks made unwanted sexual advances. Rabbi Altein told the women to not go to the police or social services. Instead, he urged them to go to their synagogue (Herzlia-Adas Yeshuran) board, which set up its own private inquiry..."

    TO BE CONTINUED

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