NEW YORK
Huffington Post
Rabbi Asher Lipner, Ph.D
The special treatment given by prosecutors to Orthodox Jewish sex offenders, reported on extensively over the past six years in The Jewish Week and on the blog Failed Messiah, was first documented in a Newsday series in 2003 regarding the failed police investigation in Brooklyn of infamous alleged serial child molester Avraham Mondrowitz, revealing how he was allowed to flee to Israel and avoid extradition due to political pressure from his community. A retired Police Detective expressed the frustration of the “handcuffed” police department who had repeatedly discovered that there were “two justice systems in Brooklyn; one for Orthodox Jews and the other for everyone else.”
While Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes boasts that he stemmed the tide of child molestation in Brooklyn’s Catholic community by insisting that the Bishops sign a “memo of agreement” to turn over all allegations directly to his office, this is a far cry from his agreement with the Agudah rabbis allowing them to decide which alleged molesters are reported to the police, as was exposed by Failed Messiah and repeated last week in a New York Times article. Regardless of Mr. Hynes’ claims that he “expects” that these allegations will “also be reported to his office,” he has never criticized the rabbis for not reporting them despite the fact that there exists not a single documented case in which a leading rabbi in Brooklyn has reported a molester to the police.
An account detailed in “Tempest and the Temple: Jewish Communities and Child Sex Scandals” (Brandeis University Press, 2009), citing research published in 2008 in the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, documents that in at least one case Mr. Hynes allowed a Beit Din (rabbinical court) lead by Rabbi Dovid Feinstein to decide the outcome of a grand jury investigation. Following the Beit Din ruling in March of 2000, the D.A. dropped charges against Rabbi Shlomo Hafner of molesting a 10-year-old hearing-impaired boy, with one of the rabbis bragging that “We educated the D.A. on how to properly conduct a sex abuse trial.”
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