Police Arrest Rabbi Greer

By Paul Bass & Christopher Peak
New Haven Independent
July 26, 2017

http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/rabbi_greer_arrested/

Daniel Greer leaves NHPD with attorney Grudberg and bondsman.

Prominent Edgewood rabbi Daniel Greer turned himself in to police Wednesday for arrest on sexual assault charges.

Police arrested Greer, who is 77 years old, on a warrant charging him with second-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a minor.

Police said the arrest stems from a complaint they received last August from a former student of Greer at the yeshiva he started in the Edgewood neighborhood. Police said the abuse occurred in the “early to middle 2000s.”

Greer in May lost a $20 million verdict in a federal civil lawsuit filed by former yeshiva student Eliyahu Mirlis, which included testimony about years-long abuse of at least one other victim at the school. Greer invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to decline responding to the allegations. The rabbi is seeking a new trial.

Greer showed up at 1 Union Ave. at 11 a.m. along with attorney David Grudberg (who was accompanying him while his lawyer in the criminal case is on vacation) to surrender Wednesday. Bond was set at $100,000. Greer posted bond. As he left the police station, he declined comment when asked by a reporter.

Detective Kris Cuddy of the police department’s Special Victims Unit conducted the investigation. Superior Court Judge Patrick Clifford signed the warrant on Tuesday.

Greer denies the charges against him and plans to enter a plea of not guilty, his lawyer in the criminal case, Willie Dow, of Jacobs & Dow, said by phone. “Rabbi Greer has a long history of positive contributions to the New Haven community,” Dow said. “These charges are unfounded. He looks forward to addressing this case in court.

Mirlis’s attorney, Atnonio Ponvert III of Bridgeport’s Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, confirmed Wednesday that Mirlis also made the complaint to the New Haven police on which the investigation was based.

“Mirlis is relieved and gratified that the New Haven Police pursued this matter, and that Greer has been arrested and will now face criminal penalties for his sexual abuse of children. One of my client’s goals in bringing Greer’s abuse to light was to get this pedophile off the streets and far away from other people’s children,” Ponvert wrote in an email Wednesday. “Sexual predators — especially this so-called ‘rabbi’ and others who twist spiritual beliefs for their own sick pleasure — deserve to suffer all available civil and criminal penalties.”

Ponvert added that the arrest sends an important message about childhood sexual abuse. “My client and I hope that the $20 million judgment in the civil case and now this arrest will send a loud message to other victims that they can safely come forward and will be believed and a louder message to would-be child molestors that, if they touch a child, they will be pursued relentlessly, will be publicly humiliated, will lose everything they have, and will spend many years with their fellow rapists behind bars in a maximum-security prison,” he said.

In seeking to begin collecting on the $20 million federal civil verdict, Ponvert has obtained judgment liens on the yeshiva’s Elm Street building, property it owns in Bethany, and Greer’s personal residence in the Edgewood neighborhood.

The Greer case has destroyed a close-knit religious community that centered around the yeshiva. However, even though the school lost all its students, it has been reconstituted, and attracted new attention from state authorities.

The Yeshiva of New Haven remains open, under new management, despite lacking the proper licenses to operate a boarding school. The Department of Children and Families and the State Department of Education are still scheduling a meeting with the school administration, a DCF spokesperson said last week.

Beginning in the 1980s, Rabbi Greer oversaw the revival of the neighborhood around his yeshiva at the corner of Norton and Elm streets, renovating neglected historic homes.

Over the years, Greer has also crusaded against gay rights in Connecticut, at times played an active role in politics and government, and advocated for keeping nuisance businesses out of the Whalley Avenue commercial corridor. He and his family earned national attention for exposing johns who patronized street prostitutes in the neighborhood, for filing suit against Yale University over a requirement that students live in coed dorms, and then in 2007 for launching an armed neighborhood “defense” patrol and then calling in the Guardian Angels for assistance to combat crime. In the 1970s, Greer also led a successful campaign to force the United States to pressure the Soviet Union into allowing Jewish “refuseniks” to emigrate here and start new, freer lives.