Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Israeli Gets Prison for Organ Trafficking

An Israeli citizen living in New York was sentenced to prison for organ trafficking.

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, 61, of Brooklyn, was sentenced Wednesday to 2 1/2 years in prison. He had pleaded guilty last Oct. 27 to three counts of organ trafficking and one count of conspiracy in a New Jersey federal court.

Rosenbaum had faced up to 20 years in prison; he could be deported to Israel after finishing his prison term.

He was the first person to be convicted of illegal organ trafficking in the United States since a 1984 law banned the sale of human organs, according to reports.

Rosenbaum reportedly was paid $410,000 to arrange the sales of kidneys from healthy donors in Israel to three people in New Jersey. He was caught in a sting operation in July 2009 set up with government informant Solomon Dwek, a real estate speculator arrested for a $50 million bank fraud. Some 40 other people, mostly rabbis and politicians from New Jersey, were arrested in a sting assisted by Dwek.

Surgeries for the donors and recipients took place in American hospitals, which were not identified by prosecutors in the case. The kidney donors and recipients also were not identified or charged.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.