Beverly Hills Rabbi Busted on Child Sex Charge
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
A rabbi was arrested at the Jewish youth center where he works in Beverly Hills, Calif., on child sex abuse charges from New York.
Menachem Tewel, known also as Mendel Tevel, was arrested Tuesday at the JEM Center, the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles reported.
A spokesman for the Beverly Hills Police Department told the Jewish Journal that Tewel would be extradited to New York under an outstanding warrant for his arrest charging criminal sexual acts there. The charges date back as far as the mid-1990s and as recently as 2004.
Tewel is married to the daughter of Rabbi Hertzel Illulian, director and founder of the JEM Center.
“God will help that it will show that it’s all false and will clear up, and people will see while we will still continue our good job for the community,” Illulian told KABC TV.
Searches of civil and criminal public records as of August did not show any convictions, or any closed or pending charges against Tewel in either New York or California, according to the Jewish Journal.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
