Rabbi Avrohom Mondrowitz is a name with which so much evil is attached that it perhaps surprising that he hasn’t been the subject of an Amazon Prime or Netflix special limited series, because – as Oron Dan put it in the ‘New York Post’ in 2012 – he is the ‘Bin Laden of pedophiles’ (1) and is believed to have groomed and anally raped circa 300 boys in New York aging from ages 8 to 15 in the late 1970s to 1984 when he fled to Israel just before the police broke down his door.
Dan discloses what the NYPD discovered when did so:
‘They found a cache of kiddie porn and lists of hundreds of names of local boys, most referred to Mondrowitz by Jewish families and child-service agencies for counseling and his yeshiva-style program.’ (2)
Mondrowitz was – you see – a ‘self-proclaimed psychologist’ (3) and despite Dan’s claim that he was also a ‘bogus rabbi’; (4) I can find no references to any reason to doubt Mondrowitz’s rabbinical credentials – especially as you don’t actually need formal qualification to become a rabbi in Judaism although you do if you want to actually want to lead a formally constituted congregation directly affiliated with a jewish religious organization such as the Orthodox Union – as he was clearly viewed as such within Brooklyn’s jewish community and whether or not he had formal qualifications is functionally irrelevant.
What happened next is described well by Dov Ivry writing for the ‘Times of Israel’:
‘There are not a few reported monsters in the world: the Sasquatch in northwest North America and the Loch Ness in Scotland are two.
No one has ever laid a hand on them so no one can vouch that they really exist.
There is a monster in Jerusalem as well. No one has ever laid a hand on him either. But this one is definitely real. His name is Avroham Mondrowitz.
Mondowitz is a paedophile who molested up to 300 boys in Brooklyn in a mainly ultra-Orthodox section of the city — we’ll never know the real number of victims — and then skipped out to Israel in 1985 where he twice fended off efforts to send him back to face justice. Mondowitz, who presents himself as an ordained rabbi and Columbia-trained psychologist, and is neither, lives free as a bird in the neighborhood of Nachlaot in central Jerusalem.
The US twice sought his extradition from Israel, in 1986 and again in 2008. The first time the two states discovered incredibly that their extradition treaty covered only sexual abuse crimes against females and not males. The second time they worked with a revised treaty. A lower court ruled for the extradition. The Supreme Court nixed that saying that Israel had 20 years to get this guy hiding in plain sight and to come along after such an extraordinary period of time violates his civil rights. You can’t make this stuff up.
He may gone off the radar in Israel but they have not forgotten Mondrowitz in New York. Just last month the Post ran still another article on how the man they call “New York’s most notorious child molester … got away with it.”’ (5)
Basically, Mondrowitz raped circa 300 male children and early teenage boys – including producing child pornography of him doing so – in late 1970s and early 1980s in New York then fled to Israel in 1984 where the government and courts have protected him ever since so, he lives ‘free as a bird’ to this day as they say in Jerusalem.
Mondrowitz was – and probably still is in his own quiet way – a big cheese in the ultra-Orthodox having rubbed shoulders with numerous ultra-Orthodox jewish ‘celebrities’ and indeed the reason Mondrowitz got caught had absolutely nothing to do with the jewish community finally reporting what was going on to the police, but rather it was because he decided to begin raping local Italian-American boys as well as jewish ones.
As Ivry explains:
‘Mondrowitz who presented himself to the community as a rabbi and as a psychologist and no one in Brooklyn questioned his credentials received boys from ages 8 to 15 with psychological difficulties. Referrals came from all over the community and also from social services. He had a popular call-in radio program and even the “king of Jewish music” Mordechai Ben David appeared on it. Haredi music as it is known is the equivalent to gospel in the general culture. The tape still exists. That MBD would share a microphone with him gives you a measure of the prestige Mondrowitz enjoyed at that time.
He used the boys sent to him as sex toys, in ultra-Orthodox culture members of the flock are expected to choose a rabbi. When they need guidance in any matter not excluding their personal lives, they seek it from their rabbi. What he tells them is binding. From empirical evidence it appears that all the rabbis on the subject of paedophilia imposed “omerta,” an Italian word meaning a code of silence. No one reported Mondrowitz to the authorities. Then he got careless. He lived in a mixed neighborhood. Mondrowitz developed an appetite for boys of Italian extraction. Their folks were not bound to any omerta. Parents of four boys went to the police. Two cops came round to arrest Mondrowitz. They were too late. He was already en route to Canada and from there headed to the Promised Land.’ (6)
But how did Mondrowitz flee New York so quickly?
Well, the truth is simply that he had powerful help since as Ivry writes once again:
‘Mondrowitz got help along the way too up to and including illegal acts of obstruction of justice but we’ll never learn from whom.’ (7)
I disagree with Ivry here in that we might not know exactly who aided Mondrowitz’s escape from justice – he means the ultra-Orthodox jewish community in the same way that another ultra-Orthodox jewish community in Melbourne, Australia got another serial jewish child molester named Malka Leifer out of the country using its money and political contacts – (8) but we can say that:
‘The only reason Mondrowitz avoided facing justice all those years was because he was protected by the ultra-Orthodox community in both Israel and Brooklyn.’ (9)
We know this is true because once again the Brooklyn Distract Attorney at the time was Charles Hynes – who was later brought down due to his role in covering up and minimizing the sentences of jewish criminals in order to secure political funding and votes from Brooklyn’s powerful ultra-Orthodox community via doing the bidding of its leading rabbis – (10) who was key to the attempts to extradite Mondrowitz from Israel and he was deliberately doing as little as humanly possible to do so despite publicly claiming the opposite.
As Zoe Blackler wrote in ‘The Guardian’ in 2012:
‘At that time, Israel didn't recognise sodomy (since renamed criminal sexual act) as an extraditable offence and Mondrowitz was beyond reach. But in 1988, that law was changed, raising the possibility of bringing Mondrowitz back to Brooklyn. Not long after Hynes came into office in 1990, however, he abandoned the extradition effort. In January 2007, a new extradition treaty was drawn up that reflected the change in Israeli law, and that autumn Hynes did file a fresh request, but only after months of campaigning by advocates. When Israel's supreme court ultimately refused the request, it said America had left it too long.’ (11)
Indeed, as the ‘New York Times’ also observed in 2012; Hynes lied and covered for Mondrowitz at the behest of the powerful ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn who believed Mondrowitz had done absolutely nothing wrong. (12)
So then why didn’t Israel extradite Mondrowitz when requested in 1986 and 2008?
It wasn’t that it couldn’t as Ivry explains:
‘On the basis of the information in the public record, I think it is safe to say that Mondrowitz did not possess Israeli citizenship until 1996. The government can deport a non-citizen at any time for any reason as I understand it. It does this all the time.’ (13)
Nor that there wasn’t support for doing so in Israeli society as Yakov Horowitz opinion piece for the ‘Jerusalem Post’ in January 2009 makes clear. (14)
It was simply that the ultra-Orthodox Shas party has long been the kingmaker of Israeli politics (15) and they supported Mondrowitz so in order not to have their governing ruling coalition collapse the Israelis were unwilling to upset Shas by deporting Mondrowitz to the United States to face trial and punishment.
As Ivry explains:
‘The interior minister officially was the prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir had a razor-thin majority dependent on the votes of the ultra-Orthodox parties. Shamir was a very astute politician. Maybe he didn’t need a nudge from anyone when he heard the radio broadcast to call Milo and tell him to back off. Or maybe someone from the ultra-Orthodox community drew it to his attention that he would be better off without this issue. The upshot was that Milo was muzzled and he left that office after a few months. For the next five years the interior ministry was the property of the ultra-Orthodox Shas in the hands of the notorious Aryeh Deri, a demagogue and a crook who stayed until he was charged with corruption in 1993 on his way to prison. Deri played the heartstrings of his base to perfection; he would never touch this issue. Anything else, just leave cash; cheques and credit cards not accepted. Next up in the interior ministry was the prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in name only the same as Shamir. But those were the opening days of the Oslo peace push. The country was in an uproar the whole time and it culminated in Rabin’s assassination. I think when he delegated authority in the interior minister the understanding was not to make waves. The upshot is that Hynes could have walked back and forth in front of the interior ministry for six years with a sign on his back that said GIVE ME MONDROWITZ OR GIVE ME DEATH and it would haven’t made an iota of difference.’ (16)
Then in 2010 Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that Mondrowitz couldn’t be extradited to the United States to face trial because he was now an Israeli citizen, and it had ‘been too long since the crimes were committed’. (17)
Thus, ended pretty much all hope of Mondrowitz ever seeing the inside of a prison cell – despite desperate last-ditch lawsuit having been launched by some of Mondrowitz’s hundreds of victims in 2020 – (18) but what this case does prove once again is two things:
1) Jews are willing and able to cover for serial child molesters to a far greater degree than anyone else ever has or ever well including the Roman Catholic Church.
2) Israel is so powerful that it can refuse extradition requests from the United States for so serious a crime suggesting – as we all know – that Israel rules the United States not that the United States rules Israel.
In the coming new America, there will be no mercy and only swift justice for creatures like Rabbi Avrohom Mondrowitz.
References
(1) https://nypost.com/2012/06/03/brooklyn-child-molest-monster-got-away-with-it-after-fleeing-to-israel/
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid.
(5) https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/mondrowitz-three-ways-to-get-him/
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ibid.
(8) On this see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/malka-leifer-jewish-lesbian-and-serial
(9) https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/mondrowitz-three-ways-to-get-him/
(10) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/29/brooklyn-da-orthodox-jews-cover-up; https://www.thejc.com/news/world/brooklyn-prosecutor-under-fire-over-charedi-sex-abuse-ndlxtt4g; https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/opinion/who-speaks-for-the-children.html
(11) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/29/brooklyn-orthodox-jews-child-abuse-cover-up-feature
(12) https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/29/nyregion/hyness-claims-on-extradition-of-abuse-suspect-are-challenged.html
(13) https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/mondrowitz-three-ways-to-get-him/
(14) https://www.jpost.com/opinion/op-ed-contributors/why-avrohom-mondrowitz-must-be-extradited
(15) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/16/israeli-ultra-orthodox-party-quits-government-as-netanyahu-loses-majority; https://www.populismstudies.org/religious-populism-in-israel-the-case-of-shas/
(16) https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/mondrowitz-three-ways-to-get-him/
(17) https://forward.com/news/123907/mondrowitz-escapes-another-trial/
https://www.jta.org/2020/07/14/ny/lawsuit-revives-victims-hopes-that-alleged-abuser-will-face-justice