Our next case of jews engaging in pretty horrific child molestation as well as the wider jewish community – secular and religious – protecting its own from long arm of the law and especially any kind of punishment is that of Rabbi Baruch Lebovits whose encounter with the justice system is quite the story.
To aid the reader in getting a concise summary of the facts I quote Philissa Cramer’s summary from her July 2022 article on Lebovits after his death:
‘A cantor from a prominent Hasidic family whose child abuse conviction shook up both his community and Brooklyn politics has died.
Baruch Lebovits died Saturday at 71, 12 years after he was first convicted of repeatedly sexually abusing a 16-year-old boy. He was buried in Jerusalem on Monday at a funeral attended by hundreds after a separate large gathering in Borough Park, Brooklyn, on Sunday.
The sendoff offered no indication that Lebovits stood at the center of a saga that had bitterly divided his community and traumatized many within it.
Lebovits was sentenced to 10 to 32 years in prison after being convicted of eight sex abuse counts during a 2010 trial, at a time when Brooklyn prosecutors were seeking to shed the image of being soft on alleged offenders from Orthodox communities. He was released after his conviction was overturned on a technicality in 2012, then sent back to prison in 2014 after pleading guilty to felony sex offenses with a minor when the case was prosecuted again. He was released after 82 days and settled back into his life in Brooklyn.
By that point, the case had gained widespread attention because of Lebovits’ representation by celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz, advocacy on his behalf by top Satmar rabbis and intimidation and retribution against his accusers.
A lengthy New Yorker article in November 2014 detailed the saga. Titled “The Outcast,” the article stitched together and expanded reporting from local and Jewish press, including the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and New York Jewish Week, to show how the father of a boy who said Lebovits had molested him broke communal norms by involving the police, then paid dearly for his transgression. Lebovits’s abuse was widely known within the Hasidic community, the article concludes, but the father — Sam Kellner — was punished more harshly, including by being framed as trying to extort the Lebovits family in exchange for dropping the case.
The case had implications across the local community and beyond. An Orthodox man who died by suicide shortly after his wedding in 2010 was reported to have suffered alleged abuse by Lebovits, and another man in the community who was tried for sex abuse said he had been abused by Lebovits himself.
Meanwhile, the handling of the case became a prominent issue in the 2013 Brooklyn district attorney election in which Charles Hynes, the D.A. who prosecuted both Lebovits and, seemingly more doggedly, Kellner, was ultimately trounced.
Both Lebovits and Kellner are household names, according to a source in the Hasidic community in Brooklyn — Lebovits as a serial sex offender, and Kellner as an example of what can happen to those who go outside the community’s legal system to civil authorities.’ (1)
So in summary what occurred is that Lebovits was convicted in 2010 of eight counts of raping underage boys – Cramer doesn’t directly specify but Lebovits raped boys not girls – and was sent to prison for up to 32 years then in 2012 had his conviction overturned on a legal technicality and then in 2014 was re-tried, pled guilty and sent to prison again for only 2 years.
Then Alan Dershowitz – who remember is a secular liberal jew not an ultra-Orthodox fruit loop – helps Lebovits get released on parole after serving less then three months of his sentence in incredibly generous plea deal (2) with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office – which has a long history of agreeing to incredibly generous plea deals with jewish criminals in return for political and monetary support from Brooklyn’s powerful rabbis – (3) with additional evidence of there being all kinds of witness tampering by the Satmar Hasidim using the Mesirah principle in Judaism as their basis and labelling those who had testified against Lebovits as ‘Mosers’ (= ‘Informers’) (4) and thus subject to the most extreme sanction they can possibly impose without being prosecuted themselves (complete social exclusion although historically this included murdering the accused ‘Informers’). (4)
With Lebovits dying in effect a free man in July 2022 having only served roughly 2 years and 3 months out of his original 32-year sentence.
This quite frankly a sordid tale, but also one that beautifully demonstrates the scale of jewish power and privilege as well as how meaningless the jewish principle of ‘Dina d'Malkhuta Dina’ (the ‘Law of the Land is the Law’) precisely because the concept of Mesirah immediately supersedes it.
References
(1) https://www.jta.org/2022/07/06/obituaries/baruch-lebovits-convicted-child-abuser-whose-case-shed-light-on-hasidic-justice-system-dies-at-71
(2) https://forward.com/fast-forward/201896/baruch-lebovits-brooklyn-rabbi-charged-with-sex-ab/; https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/brooklyn-cantor-leaves-rikers-early; https://www.timesofisrael.com/brooklyn-rabbi-charged-with-sex-abuse-gets-plea-deal/
(3) https://6abc.com/archive/9332226/; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/29/brooklyn-da-orthodox-jews-cover-up
(4) https://forward.com/news/144982/crackdown-on-child-sex-abuse-unravels/
(5) Myer Lew, 1944, ‘The Jews of Poland: Their Political, Economic, Social and Communal Life in the Sixteenth Century as reflected in the Works of Rabbi Moses Isserls’, 1st Edition, Edward Goldston: London, pp. 128-129