NEW YORK
New York Daily News
BY ALLISON YARROW / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2013
Last November, Nechemya Weberman, pillar of his community and unlicensed counselor of wayward children, swore to a standing-room-only Brooklyn courtroom that he had only been trying to save the life of the girl who’d once called him “Daddy,” who was now accusing him of raping her for years, beginning when she was 12 years old and in sixth grade.
Many observers thought he looked smug as he testified, and why wouldn’t he? With the vehement backing of most of the tightly knit, deeply insular Satmar Hasidic Jewish community in Williamsburg, the 54-year-old former driver for its spiritual leader, the Grand Rebbe Moses Teitelbaum, felt he could get away with anything.
After all, he always had.
Members of the Satmar collective, who consider themselves members of one of the world’s holiest communities, closed ranks to defend an accused child molester from the secular world — and cast out the girl who’d accused him.
She wasn’t their concern. She’d gone outside of the family.
Mirroring groups from the Catholic church to Penn staters, Satmars attacked the victim, more concerned with protecting itself from the outside world than with the evil within.
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