Another day, another jewish child molester to bring to light; in this instance we have Rabbi Moshe Keller of the Lubavitch Chabad in Brooklyn who was charged in June 2011 with sexually molesting an 11-year-old boy in his care (1) it turned out that Keller had been doing this for quite some time and to multiple (male) children.
As Linda Stasi put it in 2019 in ‘Harper’s Magazine’:
‘Seewald was motivated to create the organization after discovering that Rabbi Moshe Keller, the father of Seewald’s deceased best friend, was rumored to be a pedophile. “I got a call from a teenager who said he’d been molested by Keller,” said Seewald. “Even though he was like a father to me, I started investigating him.” After asking a number of his childhood friends about Keller, Seewald started hearing repeated stories about molestation. He eventually found out that Keller had been accused of sexually abusing children since his days in Israel, two decades earlier, though not a single Israeli rabbi had informed anyone in New York of the allegations when Keller relocated. In 2011, Keller was arrested in Brooklyn for sexually assaulting a teenage boy and was charged with “harassment,” “acting in a manner to injure a child under seventeen,” and “attempted sexual assault.” His ultimate sentence: three years of probation.’ (2)
Now quite clearly Keller has been attempting to rape pre-teen boys for many years and there appears to be strong anecdotal evidence – as there often is – of such abuse going back decades, but yet Keller only got… well… probation.
That’s pretty bad and interestingly the response of the local Beth Din/Kahal – jewish religious court/rabbinical governing board – the Vaad HaKohol of Crown Heights gave a clue as to what went on when we read that:
‘As Crown Heights reeled last summer over the accusations of molesting against Rabbi Moshe F. Keller, who had led a foundation for at-risk youth, one community organization issued a warning: The Jews of Crown Heights, the Vaad HaKohol warned, should not rush to judgment about the accused man and should show mercy on his family. Mr. Keller pleaded guilty in May to one count of endangering the welfare of a child and received three years' probation.’ (3)
Put another way: they required - not asked as that is not how Beth Dins/Kahals work - that the jews of Crown Heights ‘show mercy’ to Keller and ‘not rush to judgment’ then note that Keller was only convicted of ‘one count of endangering the welfare of a child’ because he pled guilty – basically he made a deal with the prosecutor’s office – and got simple probation.
Now since we’ve previously discussed – and indeed it is well-known and widely accepted – that the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office has given numerous sweetheart legal deals to ultra-Orthodox jews accused of such crimes – often with little to no prison time – (4) in exchange for their substantial political and financial support then it is reasonable to suppose that this has occurred again here but this time it isn’t the Satmar Hasidim doing it but rather the even more powerful and much better known Lubavitch Chabad.
So, what the Vaad HaKohol of Crown Heights is actually is saying: we got him out of the clutches of the non-jews, don’t worry about him he is a good devout jew and do not shun him because he is one of us.
Lovely: eh?
References
(1) https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/jewish-community-watch; https://failedmessiah.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b71f69e2015390331820970b-popup
(2) https://harpers.org/archive/2019/10/secrets-and-lies-sexual-abuse-orthodox-jews/
(3) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/355319-orthodox/
(4) See my articles: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/nechemya-weberman-jewish-child-molester ; https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/rabbi-israel-weingarten-jewish-child and https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/rabbi-yechiel-jerry-brauner-jewish