Rav Chaim Halperin reportedly arrested for sexual assault

BHOL    It has been reported that Rav Chaim Halpern was arrested this morning after his house was searched by police - along with his brother Rav Dovid Halpern and two others who were suspected of interfering with the investigation by paying for the silence of witnesses against Rav Chaim Halpern.

Times of Israel   A man believed to be Chaim Halpern, a London rabbi, was arrested Wednesday morning in connection with investigations into sexual assault and perverting the course of justice.

The London Metropolitan Police will not name him, but the man appears to be Halpern, a former religious judge for the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, who has been at the center of a sexual abuse scandal that has roiled London’s Haredi community since October.

Three more men were also arrested Wednesday morning on suspicion of perverting the course of justice in the case. They are all in custody at a north London police station and may be held for up to 48 hours without charge.

One is believed to be a brother of Halpern.

According to the London Metropolitan Police, all the arrests were made at addresses in the borough of Barnet, which includes the Orthodox suburb of Golders Green, where Halpern is a resident. The main suspect is 54; the others are 64, 62 and 25.

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Drug dealing in Beitar: 5 arrested including a sofer & principal

BHOL

 פרשת סחר בסמים מרעידה את ביתר עלית, עיר התורה והחסידות בהרי יהודה: ביום שני בשבוע שעבר נעצרו חמישה חשודים בסחר בסמים, בהם שני אחים, תושבי העיר החרדית.

לאחר מעצר החשודים בסחר, עוכבו 15 'קליינטים', שעל פי החשד רכשו את הסמים מחמשת העצורים. בחקירתם קשרו את עצמם הצרכנים לחשדות, והודו בביצוע מספר קניות מהסוחרים העצורים.

Stop bullies - by force - not by being nice!

Tablet Mag   These are tough times for the American bully.

Last week, after a young man opened fire in his Ohio high school, killing three classmates and wounding two, renowned scholars of adolescent psychology such as Charlie Rose and Marlo Thomas were quick to prognosticate and assert that the alleged shooter, the gawky T.J. Lane, was just a bullied kid taking bloody revenge on his tormenters. That the theory turned out to be utterly false did little to satisfy the national hunger for bully-flavored sanctimony. [...]

 The problem is not what to do to defang the bully, but what to do to galvanize his victims. The answer is simple, stark, unfashionable: Teach victims to hit back and hit hard. [...]

And yet, when we talk about bullying, we reserve most of our vim and vitriol for the perpetrators, motivated by the belief that these cruel ogres can somehow be reformed. They cannot. The desire to torment the other, to harass those different than us, to lord it over the weak is all too human. It’s worth remembering here that Joseph’s brothers are the men from whose loins sprang the tribes of Israel—which is to say, to an extent they are the progenitors of most of the people who are likely reading this article. Like them, we too have it in us to be terrible meanies. Suppress that urge, and you deny us our natural birthright.

Which, of course, isn’t to advocate brutalities. Limits must be observed. But attempting to make children preternaturally nice to one another is very much like trying to convince puppies to chew with their mouths closed—we may succeed, but we would have ruined what makes them such jolly beasts, and we would certainly impede their growth. Children grow in part by testing the boundaries of their own abilities, and such testing is always applied vis-à-vis others. They tease and hit and threaten, some more maliciously than others, just to see what happens. If balance is kept, if the victim swings back, peace is restored. If not, a message is sent, clearer than the admonitions of a thousand teachers, that bullying is tremendously effective.

Rather than see bullies as abhorrent and in need of mending, let us realize, per our tradition, that they are us. And rather than forbid malice, let us instead teach our kids to strike back. They’ll be much happier if the biblical justice was allowed to prevail, unimpeded, in the schoolyard. After all, they were born this way.

Beitar teacher arrested for allegedly molesting 10 yr old boys

 YNet    26-year-old resident of Beitar Illit was arrested Tuesday on suspicion he molested children multiple times. The suspect, an educator employed at one of the town's institutions, confessed to some of the allegations and has been remanded in custody.

Last week, one of his victims filed a complaint which was supported by a tape in which the suspect is allegedly heard admitting he committed the acts. 

 A police investigation suggests that over the past few years the suspect would molest children he knew as well as children he met in random. 

Galei Tzahal

בהקלטות שהגיעו לידי גלי צה"ל, מתאר מורה רב מלמד בבית ספר לילדים בבית"ר עילית איך הוא מבצע מעשים מיניים חמורים בילדים בני 10 ו-12. בשבוע שעבר הגיש המדובב תלונה למשטרה נגד הרב המלמד, ואמש הוא נעצר והובא לחקירה במחוז ש"י

הם קבוצת צעירים, שנפגעו מינית כשהיו ילדים ונערים בידי אברכים, ומלמדים בקהילתם. כשסיפרו להורים, הם קיבלו הוראה לשתוק.עכשיו הם רוצים לעשות מעשה, ולהציל ילדים אחרים שנפגעים. בהקלטות שהגיעו לידי גלי צה"ל, מתאר מורה רב מלמד בבית ספר לילדים בבית"ר עילית איך הוא מבצע מעשים מיניים חמורים בילדים בני 10 ו-12. למדובב מעבר לקו, בהקלטות הסתר שביצענו, הוא מספר שיצרו לא עומד בפני הילדים הרכים והקטנים שסובבים אותו כמורה.

התפארותו של המלמד נמשכת לאורך דקות ארוכות. כולל וידוי שלו כי שילם 60 אלף שקלים, כופר לאב שגילה כי הוא פגע מינית בבנו בן ה-10, וכך הושתק העיניין. את הכסף חשף, הוא לקח מהמשכנתה שקיבל על מנת לרכוש דירה לו ולרעיתו.

בשבוע שעבר הגיש המדובב תלונה למשטרה נגד הרב המלמד, והעביר לידי החוקרים את ההקלטה המרשיעה. החוקרים נדהמו מהחומר שהועבר לידיהם, והוא הועבר לצוות החקירה המיוחד שהוקם במחוז שי לחקור את החשדות לפגיעות מיניות בילדים שהוסתרו, לא רק במודיעין עילית. אמש נעצר המורה, כשהוא כבול באזיקים הוא הובא לחקירה במשרדי היחידה במחוז ש"י.

Channel 4 video erred: Hardliners not majority

The Telegraph   When Dispatches: Britain’s Hidden Child Abuse aired at the end of last month on Channel 4, I watched it with interest. The programme had been widely advertised. Its central revelation was to be that British orthodox rabbis were forbidding their followers to report child abuse to the police. As a member of the orthodox community who suffered abuse as a child, I knew how important this was. [...]

When my sister and I were growing up in the Haredi community, we were abused by a rabbi. Between the ages of six and 11, this man — a member of our close family — physically abused me, and sexually abused my younger sister. The matter eventually came into the open, and it caused a split in the community. Many people made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that the authorities should not be involved. But there was another group that supported our right to report our abuser to the police. We did so, and the man went to prison for a number of years.  [....]

This period of our lives was the most stressful our family had ever experienced. While the court case was going on, my mother was targeted by a group of ultra-orthodox hardliners who despised us for having talked to the police. Somehow, she protected my sister and I from it at the time, and told me the details only recently. It was a campaign of intimidation. Her car was vandalised. Rubbish, including soiled nappies, was pushed through our letterbox. She was spat at in the street, and cursed for generations. Many kosher shops refused her service. She received threatening letters; even our solicitor – a Haredi man – was sent a note saying that if he continued to represent us, his house would be burned down and his children killed.

And most humiliating of all, letters appeared under the windscreen wipers of all the cars in the synagogue car park, stating my mother was mad and we were under her influence. The same letters were sent to our teachers, and to my mother’s employer. Reading this, you are probably wondering why I criticise the Channel 4 programme. The reason is simple. The intimidation was carried out only by a hardcore element of the Haredi community. Many others stood up to them, including my headmaster and our solicitor, both high-ranking rabbis and ordinary people. These people gave us emotional, practical and even financial support, and refused to be intimidated.

A group of senior rabbis even held meetings with those who attacked us, and argued with them, citing Talmudic sources, to suggest that going to the police was the right thing to do. I will always be grateful to these people for their courage and compassion. It was wrong of Dispatches to ignore them, and irresponsible to allow the hardline sects to characterise the entire Haredi community.

The orthodox Jewish community is not a monolithic entity. There are countless sects and sub-sects, and each has a slightly different set of values. Nobody can know the numbers for certain. Perhaps there are more hardliners than moderates; personally, I suspect it is vice versa. [...]

Suspected Modesty Squad members arrested in Beitar

YNET    Two ultra-Orthodox men were arrested Monday for allegedly heading a "modesty squad" that terrorized the female residents of Beitar Illit over what they deemed their "immodest behavior."

The two, both in their 30s, are believed to be responsible for what the police called "a reign or terror."

The two are suspected of a line of violent acts including threats, beatings, kidnappings and more, against what they perceive are indecent women, and at times – men.

The suspects allegedly followed the conduct of the city's residents and decided to "educate" those who did not live up to their standards of modesty.

 According to the case file, the two would watch people's conduct in the streets, the way they dressed, the manner in which they sat on public transportation, their use of language and more.


update YNET Mayor of Beitar alleged to have known about modesty squad and protected it

Office Shooting Video: Run - Hide - Fight!

R. Leib Tropper - educator at RJJ elementary school

Update: Text on Tropper's blog now says "educated at the Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yaakov Yosef Elementary School" instead of "educator".

Update in light of some comments in the comments section

Daas Torah February 25, 2013 at 11:29 AM

Yisroel's comments concerning this shows that he is a shoteh. However Monseylite raises some of the same concerns I mentioned in the post itself. The issue is whether there is any benefit of mentioning the terrible chillul hashem that an individual once did. Monseylite says "its over" " I don't think it's fair to bring him up again and open up another chance for people to shoot arrows at him."
I disagree. Tropper's crime was not a momentary loss of control where he might have taken money that wasn't his. It wasn't an aberration of the situational temptation of eating treif food or selling it. His crime involved the systematic and intentional corruption of Orthodox Judaism and some of the most well know and important gedolim within that system primarily with money but also with kavod and power over others concerning conversion.
For these types of crimes not only is his repentance dependent on the facts of his crime being well known- but something more important. When I traveled to America after the Tropper affair I was confronted with an amazing reality - almost no one I met had heard of the disaster. I am not talking about tzadikim and masmidim who are detached from awareness of scandal. The people ignorant of this historic event were people who pride themselves with knowing what goes on in the frum world. As one American godol who was intimately involved in the events put it, it was event that involved too many big people and involved too much of the system to be publicized. In the vernacular -Eternal Jewish Family and Tropper were too big to fail. But he did. And it caused one of the most negative lowering of rabbinic status, respect and authority of anything else in the last 50 years- if not more.
Furthermore the response of gedolim - not only those in involved - was a concerted effort to silence comment and coverup the crimes that were done. There was not a single comment of apology from a single gadol who was involved in the fiasco except to say what happened wasn't really such a big deal.

So for all of these reasons and more I respectfully disagree with monseylite and his "let's be adult in our midos" approach.
If he has any actual sources that say that this event should be erased from our collective memory, that it serves no purpose to remind the public periodically what happened and that it is wrong to Tropper (who to the best of my knowledge is not a baal teshuva in this matter) to remind him of his past when warning others of what can happened when the rabbinic system loses its transparency and is concerned primarily with power, influence and money - please educate us.

Those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it.

The Torah prescribes punishment for crimes that serve as a warning and consciousness raising exercise so that the crimes are not done again.

As Rav Moshe Feinstein put it - "even if a murderer did genuine teshuva - he is still executed." It is still publicized that he was a murderer or any other type of criminal - even though this has disastrous consequences on his family.

Update: Rabbi Micha Berger wrote:  Dr Marvin Schick's email address is on his blog, so it took no work to contact him and ask. Here was his reply:

Leib Tropper does not teach at the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School on Staten Island and to my knowledge has never taught there. Nor does he hold any other position at the school. I hope that this makes the matter clear.
 ===========================
 I was recently given a shock when someone sent me a page from Rabbi Tropper's Blog where he proclaims in the upper right hand corner that he is currently an "Educator at the Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yaakov Yosef Elementary School". That is where his father taught first grade for 30 years.  He also notes that "He is involved in the Character First project, which promotes good character in young people

At the time that the tapes of R' Tropper were circulating the internet and it was clear that he was involved in behavior incompatible with being a spiritual leader  - someone approached a gadol who was associated with Eternal Jewish Family and asked him what he was doing to remove him from leadership of the group.  The gadol unsurprisingly wasn't convinced that he was guilty but said that even if he were guilty - so what? A shikse is not an issur doreissa. He was then asked - well how could he be a rosh yeshiva? The gadol incredibly answerered  that even if he was guilty as charged but since he was not teaching his students immoral behavior or encouraging them to do so - there was no need to remove him!

Basically I am asking this as a question - not claiming that this as the halacha for him. The facts of what has happened are public knowledge for most of my readers and Rav Sternbuch had told me to publicize the facts of his misdeeds

Has the scandal been so successfully covered up that in fact there is no problem with him having an official position of a Torah teacher to children?  Would you want him to teach Torah to your children or be the rav of your shul? Or alternatively even if it is assumed that he has done teshuva [which isn't certain since he has not publicly confessed to his misdeeds] does that erase all that has happened?

When it comes to picking a shliach tzibor there are those who prohibit picking one who had sinned intentional - even if he did teshuva because of the reputation 

Shulchan Aruch (O.C. 53:5):  ... Rema: ... One who has sinned unwittingly for example he accidentally killed someone and repented - it is permitted for him to be shliach tzibor. However if he did it on purpose he can not be the shliach tzibor despite the teshuva because he has already acquired a bad name prior to doing teshuva.

The example of Rabbi Meir and his rebbe who sinned is also not clearly related to the present case since Acher never did teshuva - or at least not until the end of his life.

Bottom line. Can a person who has been involved in a major scandal involving major sins and chilul hashem - ever be given a job as a teacher or spiritual leader?

Child behaves better with less violent & more good TV

NY Times   Experts have long known that children imitate many of the deeds — good and bad — that they see on television. But it has rarely been shown that changing a young child’s viewing habits at home can lead to improved behavior.

In a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, researchers reported the results of a program designed to limit the exposure of preschool children to violence-laden videos and television shows and increase their time with educational programming that encourages empathy. They found that the experiment reduced the children’s aggression toward others, compared with a group of children who were allowed to watch whatever they wanted.

“Here we have an experiment that proposes a potential solution,” said Dr. Thomas N. Robinson, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford, who was not involved in the study. “Giving this intervention — exposing kids to less adult television, less aggression on television and more prosocial television — will have an effect on behavior.” [...]

The new study was a randomized trial, rare in research. The researchers, at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and the University of Washington, divided 565 parents of children ages 3 to 5 into two groups. Both were told to track their children’s media consumption in a diary that the researchers assessed for violent, didactic and prosocial content, which they defined as showing empathy, helping others and resolving disputes without violence.

Arrest for allegedly ordering woman to back of bus

Times of Israel  Police on Sunday arrested a man suspected of ordering a woman to the back of a bus, on Friday. The woman was reportedly harassed by other passengers on the bus when she refused to move.

The incident took place when two ultra-Orthodox men ordered 22-year-old Noa Kentman to move to the back of a public bus — which was traveling from Safed to Ashdod — because of her gender. The woman filed a report with the police, resulting in the arrest of the suspect. [...]

Kentman sat at the front of the intercity coach when a couple of ultra-Orthodox men demanded that she immediately remove herself to the rear of the vehicle.

When she refused, the men shouted she was “impure,” and began reciting prayers and screaming at her.

One of the ultra-Orthodox men then sat on the front steps of the bus near the driver to deliberately sit in front of her. The woman’s younger sister called the police, who sent squad cars to intercept the bus at the entrance of the destination city.
 
See Rav Moshe Feinstein's teshuva regarding a man sitting next to a woman on a bus

Police close Modin Illit rape case

YNET   Two weeks after the Judea and Samaria District Police launched an investigation into a suspected rape of a five-year-old girl in the haredi settlement of Modiin Illit, the case has been closed.

Police decided to end the investigation after it was discovered that the woman who had made the original complaint had fabricated the story. She may face charges for her conduct.

However, the inquiry has opened the door to other suspicions. Police said that during the probe investigators had uncovered a number of cases of molestation involving children in the settlement. Police are now looking into these cases.

Rabbi Herbert Bomzer passes away - RaP

Rabbi Herbert Bomzer Passes Away 

Major Torah scholar arrested in sex sting operation

NYTimes    A rabbi has been arrested after sending sexually explicit messages online to a person he thought was a 14-year-old girl and arranging to meet her in Queens for sex, the district attorney’s office said on Thursday. Instead, a New York police detective had impersonated the girl, the authorities said.

The rabbi,  Nosson Dovid Rabinowich [Wikipedia], 59, of Brooklyn, was arrested Wednesday. He was charged with four sexual offenses, including attempted rape, the Queens district attorney’s office said in a statement. [...]

Rabbi Rabinowich runs a tour company and a synagogue from his home in the Midwood section, according to the statement. He exchanged online messages, some sexually graphic, with the detective in December and this month, the statement said.

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click here for Dr. Marc Shapiro's article regarding plagarism

Electronic retinal implant gives sight to the blind

NY Times    The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the first treatment to give limited vision to people who are blind, involving a technology called the “artificial retina.” 

With it, people with certain types of blindness can detect crosswalks on the street, burners on a stove, the presence of people or cars, and sometimes even oversized numbers or letters. 

The artificial retina is a sheet of electrodes surgically implanted in the eye. The patient is also outfitted with a pair of glasses with an attached camera and a portable video processor. These elements together allow visual signals to bypass the damaged portion of the retina and be transmitted to the brain. The F.D.A. approval covers this integrated system, which the manufacturer calls Argus II. 

The approval marks the first milestone in a new frontier in vision research, a field in which scientists are making strides with gene therapy, optogenetics, stem cells and other strategies.[...]

With the artificial retina or retinal prosthesis, a blind person cannot see in the conventional sense, but can identify outlines and boundaries of objects, especially when there is contrast between light and dark — fireworks against a night sky or black socks mixed with white ones in the laundry. 

“Without the system, I wouldn’t be able to see anything at all, and if you were in front of me and you moved left and right, I’m not going to realize any of this,” said Elias Konstantopolous, 74, a retired electrician in Baltimore, one of about 50 Americans and Europeans who have been using the device in clinical trials for several years. He said it helps him differentiate curbs from asphalt roads, and detect contours, but not details, of cars, trees and people. “When you don’t have nothing, this is something. It’s a lot.”[...]

Developed over 20 years by Dr. Mark S. Humayun, an ophthalmologist and biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California’s Doheny Retinal Institute, the artificial retina was inspired by cochlear implants for the deaf. Some financing came from a cochlear implant maker and other private sources, but about $100 million was provided by the National Eye Institute, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, all federal agencies.