NEW JERSEY
Asbury Park Press

Written by
Kathleen Hopkins
@KHopkinsAPP

TOMS RIVER — The boy at the center of a sexual abuse case within Lakewood’s Orthodox Jewish community had no friends in fifth and sixth grade and none in the summer camp he attended those years, he shyly testified on Wednesday.

So when camp counselor Yosef Kolko let the boy sing solos with the camp choir and gave him the lead role in the play the summer after fifth grade, in 2007, that made the boy feel “awesome,” he told a jury of nine men and seven women.

“I respected him,” the boy, now 16, said of Kolko. “He was one of the cool counselors.”

The following August, the boy returned to Yachad, the summer camp that is run by the Yeshiva Bais Hatorah School on Swarthmore Avenue in Lakewood. He and some other boys in his…