UNITED STATES
Failed Messiah
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
The Chief Rabbi of the IDF, Rabbi Rafi Peretz, allegedly had a prominent guest over the Shavuot holiday – convicted child molester Rabbi Mordechai “Motti” Elon.
Elon, the former rosh yeshiva (dean) of the flagship Zionist Orthodox yeshiva, Yeshivat HaKotel in the Old City of Jerusalem, was treated as a guest of honor by Peretz, who is a state employee, even though Elon was convicted in August 2013 of molesting a minor teen boy, and even though Elon has been completely unrepentant.
Before that trial and Elon’s conviction, the Takana Forum, Zionist Orthodoxy’s and Modern Orthodoxy’s internal body that deals with clergy abuser and related problems, heard enough credible damning evidence to force Elon to resign from his Yeshivat HaKotel post, leave Jerusalem and promise to stop teaching public classes.
But within weeks of leaving Yeshivat HaKotel and the city in 2006, Elon – the scion of one of the most prominent Zionist Orthodox family in the country (his brother was a leading politician, his father was a Supreme Court judge and a published scholar of Jewish law, another brother is a district court judge and yet another is a biblical scholar) – resumed teaching. Not long after that, he began planning to return to Jerusalem in another public teaching role.
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