NYPost
A New York rabbi was sentenced today to a maximum of 32 years in jail for the repeated sexual abuse of a 16-year-old boy, prosecutors said.
Baruch Lebovits, 59, was convicted last month on eight charges of abuse of the teenager between 2004 and 2005, and was given the maximum sentence on each count -- meaning he would serve between 10 years and eight months and 32 years behind bars.
The rabbi is also a prominent businessman in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, where the teenager also lived, said Kings County District Attorney Charles Hynes.
Two separate cases of Lebovits's alleged sexual assaults on minors are still pending.[...]
A New York rabbi was sentenced today to a maximum of 32 years in jail for the repeated sexual abuse of a 16-year-old boy, prosecutors said.
Baruch Lebovits, 59, was convicted last month on eight charges of abuse of the teenager between 2004 and 2005, and was given the maximum sentence on each count -- meaning he would serve between 10 years and eight months and 32 years behind bars.
The rabbi is also a prominent businessman in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, where the teenager also lived, said Kings County District Attorney Charles Hynes.
Two separate cases of Lebovits's alleged sexual assaults on minors are still pending.[...]
We can expect an organized effort to demand a pardon or sentence.
ReplyDeleteHe must be saved from the antisemites.
Priorities, you know?
In the statement by the victim father posted on UOJ , Yerachmiel Lopin’s frumfollies and others he gives credit to rabbi Sternbuch.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that there are only two Orthodox rabbis who are fearless and incorruptible the Zionist rabbi Yaakov Blau and the anti Zionist rabbi Moshe Sternbuch.
Maybe they can get together and clean the town from the likes of Tropper and Lebovits.
http://www.cross-currents.com/archives/2010/04/12/spring-cleaning/
ReplyDeleteOur community has numerous apologists who continue to portray our world as a bed of roses, reinforcing their views with statistically unproven assertions of how much better we are than “them.” According to this view, we have no real problems; simply a media that is biased against us and outsiders who, as a means of justifying their refusal to recognize and accept the truths of our lifestyle, resort to hatred and bashing. I hate to spoil the image, but the rose garden is full of thorns!
Has the time not arrived to climb down from our ivory towers of self-deception and take an honest look at what is transpiring? We live in a generation where we have created yeshivot that are in danger of becoming bastions of beinoniut because we compel every male interested in a decent shidduch to commit himself to a program that is clearly not responsive to his needs or interests. Our daughters are often instructed that aspirations of anything other than kollel life are illegitimate; other ideas are to be quashed as being indicative of CBW [chronic bitachon weakness]. We have a problem with sexual abuse that has been festering for years and which many of our leaders still refuse to face. We have a yeshiva system that is bleeding children who are leaving the derech; both from the MOs and the UOs! We have rabbinical leadership that is imprisoned by askanim who filter information and are suspect of being loyal to personal agendas of self-advancement.
Years ago a leading rosh yeshiva said publicly that he shudders to think that the major accomplishment of the American yeshivot might be the production of a generation of talmidim who are functionally illiterate in three languages. I would expand that and claim that today many yeshivot can take credit for hastening the ultimate redemption in fulfillment of the dictum that b’ikvasa demeshichah chutzpah yasgeh.
I contend to you that one child forced off the derech might well negate all of the accomplishments of the teshuvah movement; that’s not my analysis, it was said by the Steipler!
I am scared not of the media and not by the hostility of chilonim. I am frightened by unzere who are perverting Torah haskafah to create a box with dimensions that are continuously shrinking, wherein eilu v’eilu has become an obscene phrase, and where a reign of terror prevents leaders from speaking the truth. I say drop the yehora of deluded shalom yiyeh lebaisai and let’s start getting our house in order.
[Rabbi Dovid Landesman, a veteran mechanech, resides in Ramat Beit Shemesh and looks at the world outside his windows with increasing trepidation. He recently published There Are No Basketball Courts in Heaven.]