Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Police Probe Video of Ultra-Orthodox Principal Kissing Boy in Kiryas Joel School: Report

Police are looking into a video circulating widely among Orthodox social media users that shows a teacher at an Orthodox school kissing a young male student, the Journal News reported.

The video, which emerged from Orthodox groups on the social networking service WhatsApp on Sunday before being posted by various advocates on Facebook, appears to be a surveillance video shot in an office at an Orthodox yeshiva.

According to the Journal News, the video shows an adult man holding and kissing a boy in what appears to be a school office over more than ten minutes. Neither the face of the man or the face of the boy were blurred in the version of the video distributed over social media.

The Journal News reported on May 3 that the commander of New York State Police Troop F confirmed that authorities had seen the video and were examining it.

“We have received the video. We have looked at it,” Major Joseph Tripodo told the paper.

A spokesperson for the Orange County District Attorney, chief assistant district attorney Christopher Borek, contacted May 2 by the Forward, declined to say whether or not his office was investigating the video.

“The Orange County District Attorney’s office treats all allegations of sexual abuse of children as extremely serious,” Borek told the Forward. “Ethical rules prohibit us from commenting on specific allegations until or unless charges are publicly filed in a court.”

A spokesperson for the government of the Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, where the video was purportedly captured, did not respond to a voicemail left at his office by the Forward.

Boorey Deutsch, an Orthodox advocate who posted the video on Facebook on Sunday, wrote late Monday on Facebook that his post had been removed by the social networking site after users apparently reported it as inappropriate.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

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.