About 30 individuals suspected of pedophilia were arrested overnight Tuesday, the result of a police operation in which an undercover female officer assumed the identity of a 12-year-old-girl. During the operation, called “computerized interception,” a large police contingent stormed the houses of suspects all over the country, from Be’er Sheva in the south, to Kiryat…
Multiple charges against a former Chabad-Lubavitch youth leader in Melbourne have been dropped. Aron “Ezzy” Kestecher, 27, was charged last year with four counts of indecent acts on a child under 16. All four charges were withdrawn Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice confirmed. Kestecher revealed the news on Facebook, writing “All charges…
The two major branches of Chabad-Lubavitch in Australia are in the grip of separate crises that threaten to tar the movement’s reputation and undermine much of the work the Hasidic organization has invested in the six decades since it began operating here. In Melbourne, a judge last week set the date for the trial of…
Recent media accounts of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox community have highlighted the threat victims face from teachers, rabbis and yeshiva staff as perpetrators, and the special pressures — even intimidation — they face from community leaders not to report such cases to secular law enforcement. But a list of child sexual abuse cases…
All competent rabbinic authorities are in agreement that cases of sexual abuse should be reported to law enforcement. Agudath Israel of America nevertheless requires parents to obtain rabbinic permission before reporting abuse to authorities. Although in the overwhelming majority of cases, abuse allegations turn out to be accurate, there has been a minority of cases…
Heightened media exposure of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox communities may breathe new life into a stymied proposal to extend the statute of limitations for child sex abuse cases in New York State, the proposal’s proponents say. Sex abuse victims and their advocates hope that a flurry of high-profile news stories in The New…
On a recent Sunday morning, I glanced at my newspaper and had another “cringe” moment. The story on the front page of The New York Times, like the Sholom Rubashkin, Bernie Madoff and Baruch Goldstein stories before it, exposed an underworld of evil with Jews at the center. This time, the papers focused on child…
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes may be virtually alone in setting up a special program to prosecute child sex abusers in the Orthodox community — and then refusing to disclose their names. But a Forward survey of several other jurisdictions with large concentrations of Orthodox Jews suggests Hynes’s record of indictments and convictions of such…
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