Brooklyn yeshiva agrees to pay $2.1M to victims of Rabbi Yehuda Kolko’s child sex abuse

NEW YORK
New York Daily News
NEW YORK
New York Daily News

BY MICHAEL O’KEEFFE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Thursday, October 27, 2016

A Brooklyn yeshiva quietly became the first Orthodox Jewish school to compensate students who claim they were molested by a teacher when it agreed to pay more than $2 million to two boys and their families in 2014 — and now it may be the first Orthodox school to default on a settlement with sex abuse victims.

Yeshiva-Mesitva Torah Temimah, a prominent Orthodox school on Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway, agreed to pay one former student $900,000 and the other $1.35 million in a settlement reached in October 2014.

The agreements were originally confidential, but they became public earlier this month after lawyers for the boys filed papers in Brooklyn Supreme Court that said the school failed to make payments due earlier this year.

“This is the first time the public has known about these payments,” said sex-abuse expert Marci Hamilton, a lawyer and a distinguished scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. “This is the first settlement with a yeshiva that has been publicly disclosed. I was surprised as anybody to see this. This is a sizeable settlement.”

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