A New Jersey teenager was charged with multiple counts of bias intimidation after he allegedly tried to lure Orthodox women as part of a gang initiation. Police said Rafael Laurano-Flores, 18, of Lakewood had planned to touch and knock down an Orthodox Jewish woman in the southern New Jersey township, according to the Asbury Park…
What is it with the name confusion this week? Hot on the heels of John Travolta’s Oscars-night blunder, when he referred to Broadway star Idina Menzel as Adela Dazeem (next Disney princess, anyone?), we now have an Orthodox newspaper confusing actor Luis Guzman with Mexican cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. The Lakewood Shopper correctly…
Yosef Kolko, a former Jewish educator from New Jersey, was sentenced to 13 years in prison for aggravated sexual assault. Kolko, who was sentenced late Thursday in Ocean County Superior Court in New Jersey, pleaded guilty in May to multiple sexual crimes. A former counselor at an Orthodox summer camp, Kolko admitted to performing oral…
Two Orthodox rabbis and two others were arrested for allegedly kidnapping and beating men in order to force them to grant their wives religious Jewish divorces. The men were arrested Wednesday night in a monthlong sting operation in which a female FBI agent posed as an Orthodox woman trying to get a religious divorce, or…
A former counselor at a summer camp run by a yeshiva in Lakewood, N.J., wants to withdraw his guilty plea on charges of sexually abusing a male camper. Yosef Kolko, 39, pleaded guilty in May, on the third day of his trial, to aggravated sexual assault, attempted aggravated sexual assault, sexual assault and child endangerment…
A Federal Communications Commission commissioner has proposed sweeping reforms to the E-Rate program, a school and library technology subsidy that was the subject of two Forward exposes this year. The proposed changes to the program, announced by Republican FCC commissioner Ajit Pai at the American Enterprise Institute on July 16, would entirely reshape how the…
A former yeshiva teacher in the Orthodox town of Lakewood, N.J., Yeshiva teacher today admitted sexually abusing a boy after two more victims of his came forward to accuse him, authorities told the Asbury Park Press. Yosef Kolko pleaded guilty to aggravated sexual assault, attempted aggravated sexual assault, sexual assault and child endangerment, and was…
A federally backed program subsidizing Internet access for low-income students has committed more money to schools in the heavily Orthodox Jewish town of Lakewood, N.J. in recent years than to schools in any other municipality in the entire state. Yet after several years of participating in the E-Rate subsidy program, Lakewood’s schools report having far…
