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  Rabbi in Sex Suit
Ex-Students Seek $20m

By Austin Fenner
New York Daily News
May 6, 2006

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/415306p-350953c.html

A Brooklyn rabbi and his yeshiva were hit with a $20 million civil lawsuit yesterday, accusing him of molesting two students more than 25 years ago.

One of the alleged victims said Rabbi Yehuda Kolko, 60, sexually assaulted him when he was a seventh-grade student attending Yeshiva-Mesivta Torah Temimah, an Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn, religious school.

"It happened in his car on the way to school and at recess during summer camp," the 48-year-old man said at a press conference.

The plaintiff, identified by his Miami lawyer, Jeffrey Herman, only as John Doe No. 1, was allegedly molested during the early 1970s over a two-year period, Herman said.

The alleged victim charges that Kolko had instructed him to sit on his lap and hold the steering wheel while they were in Kolko's car on the way to school as the rabbi molested him.

Herman, who claims there are at least 15 victims, charges that school officials waged a campaign of intimidation and concealment against victims and their families to bury the accusations against the rabbi.

School officials could not be reached for comment.

Kolko, who lives in Midwood in a red-brick house on E. 22nd St., could not be reached for comment.

The other plaintiff, who was not present, was identified as a 38-year-old man who was allegedly sexually abused when he was also a seventh-grader in the 1980s.

The alleged offenses exceed New York's three-year statute of limitations.

 
 

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