NETHERLANDS
JTA
May 8, 2018
AMSTERDAM (JTA) – Following an investigation, the umbrella group of Dutch Jewish communities dismissed accusations that a local rabbi molested children in the United States.
The Organization of Jewish Communities in the Netherlands, or NIK, last week announced the findings of its four-month probe of Rabbi Mendel Levine of Brooklyn, New York, who began serving the community of the eastern city of Nijmegen in 2009.
The probe followed an article in De Telegraaf daily in January reporting on accusations against Levine from 2011.
That year, Meir Seewald, a Crown Heights activist against accused child molesters in religious Jewish communities, published an online account of the alleged abuse he says he suffered in 2000 as a boy attending a summer camp belonging to the Chabad-run Gan Israel Camping Network, where Levine had worked as a counselor.
But a special commission set up by the NIK could not verify the account in dozens of conversations, the organization said.
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