UNITED STATES
JTA
By Uriel Heilman
May 18, 2015
(JTA) – Rabbi Barry Freundel was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison for installing hidden cameras in the mikvah shower room adjacent to his synagogue and surreptitiously recording naked women.
The sentence meted out last Friday in D.C. Superior Court represented 45 days each for the 52 counts of misdemeanor voyeurism to which Freundel, the longtime rabbi of the Orthodox Washington congregation Kesher Israel, pleaded guilty in February. The terms will be served successively.
How does the sentence stack up with other prison terms doled out to Jews in America for their high-profile crimes?
Here are some cases for comparison:
Perpetrator: Rabbi Baruch Lanner, principal of an Orthodox yeshiva high school in New Jersey and an official at the Orthodox Union’s National Conference of Synagogue Youth.
Arrest date: March 2001.
Crimes: Child endangerment, aggravated criminal sexual contact, sexual contact and harassment.
Plea: Not guilty.
Sentence: 7 years in prison. Lanner began serving his sentence in 2005 and was paroled in 2008.
Perpetrator: Nechemya Weberman, an unlicensed therapist in Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidic community.
Arrest date: Feb. 23, 2011.
Crimes: 59 counts of sexual abuse against a teenage girl.
Plea: Not guilty.
Sentence: 103 years in prison.
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