Rabbi Said To Drop Fight

An Orthodox rabbi has dropped his legal fight to identify anonymous bloggers who wrote on their Web sites about his alleged sexual harassment of female congregants.

Rabbi Mordecai Tendler, who was accused by at least nine women from his former congregation in New Hempstead, N.Y., of sexually propositioning them when they sought spiritual guidance, petitioned courts in Ohio and California to force Google to release the names of four bloggers. Google hosts the electronic message boards through its Blogspot division.

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Tendler, who fiercely denies the accusations, has dropped the fight, according to Public Citizen, a national public interest group that filed a motion on behalf of the bloggers.

Suicide in New York

A 25-year old Orthodox Jewish woman, Sarah Adelman, jumped to her death from her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side July 25, according to a report in the New York Post.

Adelman, a manager of a dental office in Rockefeller Center, reportedly phoned a former boyfriend, Stephen Green, before committing suicide. She had apparently broken up with her most recent boyfriend over the weekend.

“She’s been very depressed for a while, and I guess it just accumulated,” Green told the Post. The recent breakup, he said, was “the tipping point.”

Green also said that Adelman was penning her suicide noted as they spoke on the phone. He tried to convince her not to jump and phoned 911 immediately after their conversation. But Adelman, who hailed from St. Louis, had already jumped.

Australians Quit WJC

The executive council of Australian Jewry withdrew from the World Jewish Congress.

The council pulled out after the congress refused to withdraw its defamation suit against one of its former senior vice presidents, Jerusalem-based Australian Isi Leibler.

Leibler, who is being sued in a Tel Aviv court, was expelled from the congress’s steering committee in 2004 following a published report in which he alleged financial improprieties at the congress.

An investigation by the attorney general of New York State, where the congress is based, found financial impropriety but no criminal wrongdoing or loss of charitable funds.

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