On December 10, Nechemya Weberman, an unlicensed youth and marriage counselor in the Satmar community of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, was convicted of 59 counts of sexual misconduct against a minor. As in any trial, the judge reminded the jurors that the defendant’s guilt must be proved “beyond reasonable doubt.” But with Weberman now facing a possible…
A Brooklyn fishmonger was arrested for throwing a cup of bleach in the face of a Chasidic rabbi who advocates for victims of sexual abuse in the haredi Orthodox community. Meilech Schnitzler, 36, of Williamsburg, turned himself in to police on Wednesday afternoon, the New York Times reported. He was charged with felony assault, misdemeanor…
Some news, apparently, is fit to print, but not too boldly. Take, for example, the demure self-censorship on display Saturday in the New York Times’ eye-opening report, headlined “On Island, Largely Blue, an Exception: Trump Tower,” on the handful of New York City neighborhoods that voted for Mitt Romney over President Obama. Overall, the city…
The heavily Hasidic Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn escaped major damage from Sandy, suffering only minor flooding and downed trees from the superstorm that caused devastation elsewhere. Ultra-Orthodox schools opened as usual Tuesday and a few cafes and shops had their doors open as the neighborhood struggled to return to normalcy after the massive storm hit…
When Gitty Katz learned she was pregnant with twins earlier this winter, she was overcome with despair. The Williamsburg housewife, a devout Satmar, began to fantasize that that the babies would never be born. So, when Mrs. Katz miscarried, it was less a sense of grief than a strange and awful relief. Mrs. Katz already…
Joseph Oppenheim’s iShop, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, looks more or less like any other computer store. Oppenheim sells laptops and iPads, and charges for Internet access at a few Web kiosks in the back. That Internet access, however, is heavily filtered. The porn site Playboy.com is blocked, but so is Yahoo! News. That’s…
Two ultra-Orthodox Jews were reportedly arrested after a confrontation between supporters of a Brooklyn rabbi accused of sex abuse and protesters. The Daily News reported that scores of demonstrators faced off against a much larger crowd of supporters of Rabbi Nechemya Weberman, who is accused of abusing a teenage girl, in Williamsburg. Police were called…
Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots By Deborah Feldman Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $23 Deborah Feldman’s memoir, “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,” begins with Feldman describing her father, a mentally disabled Hasid employed by pitying community members to preform simple tasks, like picking up people from the airport. Sometimes…
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