ABC News reports:
Oct. 11 2006
Retired New York Police Department Det. Pat Kehoe still remembers a phone call she got more than 20 years ago, from a person making allegations that a rabbi was sexually abusing children in his neighborhood.
"I never received a call like that in my whole career in the New York City Police Department. Never," Kehoe told Cynthia McFadden in a recent interview.
"I'll never forget it because unfortunately it was my birthday, November 21 1984. I was working in the Brooklyn Sex Crimes squad and I received an anonymous call from a male who started to say that there was a rabbi and gave the name and he was abusing people on this block," she said.
Rabbi Avrohom Mondrowitz, as he called himself, lived on a tree-lined block in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. Kehoe and her partner, Sal Catafulmo, went out to the neighborhood where Italians and Hasidic Jews lived side-by-side.
At one of the first addresses they tried, she says a resident told her "Everyone knows Rabbi Mondrowitz. He's good to all our children. He buys them bicycles and takes them away on weekends and things."
That might sound like a recommendation, but not to Kehoe. "With that information I got very scared," she said. Kehoe's background in an NYPD pedophilia squad taught her to recognize the signs of pedophilia."Pedophiles have a pattern with children to get their confidence and send their so-called love, you might say, and buy them things," she said. What she heard from the children themselves only confirmed her gut feelings.
"We brought them in without their parents," Kehoe said. "They started to tell us, 'The rabbi is our friend. He takes us away,' and things like that. As the questions became more difficult for the children -- 'Did anything ever happen? Did anything sexual ever happen? Are you aware of it happening to anyone else while you were there?' -- they all broke down and cried, each one separately."[...]
UOJ blogger outs himself with goal in mind.
ReplyDeleteHamercaz.com reports that the reason the controversial UOJ blogger outed himself is to set the stage for the fight to extradite Mandrowitz.
Here is the full repeort:
"Anti-Abuse Blogger Reveals His Identity
Jan 08, 2009
Beverly Hills, CA -- The blogger known as the "Unorthodox Jew," who for some time has been involved in an anonymous crusade against the covering up of child abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community, has publicly "outed" himself on his blog.
For some time, many have suspected that the author of the Unorthodox Jew is California businessman Paul (Manilow) Mendlowitz, a grandson of Torah Vodaas founder R' Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz and senior vice president of DiamondCard Processing, the largest processor of credit card transactions in the United States. Now, Mr. Mendlowitz himself has ended the speculation, posting his photo on the blogger profile of the Unorthodox Jew blog.
The Unorthodox Jew blog gained fame - or as his detractors say, notoriety - for its frequent vitriolic attacks on various Rabbonim and Torah organizations. The blog has been unrelenting in spotlighting instances of sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community, and has posted alleged abusers' names and addresses.
It is for the most part undisputed that the Mr. Mendelowitz and his blog were instrumental in setting in motion a series of events that ultimately led a prominent Brooklyn Yeshiva to fire an accused sexual predator. The teacher in question pled guilty to two counts of endangering the welfare of a child in exchange for a plea bargain that included 3 years probation and mandatory counseling, but no jail time and no listing on sex offender registries.
Mendlowitz writes on his blogger profile that he does not mean to be "critical of Judaism." Rather, he seeks to "expose the practices and the conflicts that have so denigrated our religion; hopefully leading to a drastic change in the way we select our "leaders"."
When asked on the blog why he chose to reveal his identity, Mendlowitz responded, "It will become clear in the months ahead!"
Some have speculated that he intends to get involved in attempts to extradite an accused Orthodox Jewish child molestor who fled to Israel more than two decades ago [see story HERE: [Alleged Victims Of Accused Jewish Child Molestor Ready To Testify(Dec 30, 2008)]]."