Unmolested

A principal of a small yeshiva in New York who asked not to be named found out that three of his students said they’d been molested by Mondrowitz, but the principal said the students did not want to press charges. He said he then called a meeting with the leaders of Agudath Israel, the leading ultra-Orthodox organization in America. The meeting took place at the house of one of the leaders of the organization, Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, who leads the Novominsker Hasidic movement. The principal said that the Agudath representatives were horrified by the finding, but they did not go to the police. A ruling circulated in 1986—by which time Mondrowitz had fled to Israel—signed by Perlow and Rabbi Elya Svei stated that Mondrowitz had been “abusing and damaging children and adolescents.”

“Great Rabbis and Roshei Yeshivah have heard first-hand testimony from his victims, and were horrified to hear of these terrible crimes which cause one’s hair to stand on end,” the letter said. “Anyone who helps or defends him will be liable for his actions, and will be considered responsible and as an accomplice to his crimes. And for this the punishment is severe.”

Yet the yeshiva principal also believes that someone—if not many people—knew about Mondrowitz’s alleged actions before the meeting but kept silent. “I cannot believe that anyone didn’t know about it before,” he said. “The man was so proficient he had to be doing it before. If I were a betting man, I would bet 100 percent that there were people who knew about it.”

Rabbi Yosef Blau, a spiritual adviser at New York’s Yeshiva University and an activist against sexual abuse in the Jewish community, had an even less charitable view of the community’s response. “This is whitewashing,” he told me. “Yes, they didn’t want him abusing kids, but did they really do anything? They said get away from kids, but did they tell people to cooperate? How come not a single Jewish kid cooperated with the police? Yes, there was a meeting, they were shocked, and then what?”

Blau pointed to several other notorious but also unsettled alleged sexual abusers in the ultra-Orthodox community who he says also fled to Israel. “When it came down to crunch time they were afraid,” he said. “They didn’t tell anyone to go to the police, and they thought it”—having Mondrowitz go to Israel—“would be good enough.”

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In 1985, Mondrowitz was indicted on eight counts of child abuse and five counts of sodomy, but 12 hours before detectives arrived at his house, he fled, first to Chicago, then to Canada, and finally to Israel. Activists believe he was tipped off. Coincidentally, Weiss, then 18, was one of the last people to see him in Chicago. “It was Sukkot and I saw him in shul and I hadn’t seen him in all this time,” Weiss recalled. “I said ‘Hey, let me go say hello to him,’ and mid-walk the whole situation flooded back into my head. I froze in my tracks and I spun back and went home crying.”

In 1985, then-Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman began extradition proceedings against Mondrowitz in Israel. But there was a problem. Rape in Israel was defined as sex between a man and a woman, and Mondrowitz’s case, homosexual rape, was not an extraditable offense. The extradition request was denied. When Israeli law was amended in 1988 to broaden the definition of rape, some legal experts assumed that extradition would be possible retroactively. But the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, then under Hynes, does not appear to have filed a claim. (In fact, the district attorney’s office says it wasn’t possible to file a claim.) Lesher believes that Hynes, newly elected, failed to pursue the case because of pressure from the ultra-Orthodox constituents. A 1993 cable from the State Department that Lesher obtained through an earlier Freedom of Information request states that U.S. officials in Israel were waiting for the D.A. to make a move and believed that Mondrowitz could be legally extradited. Lesher’s argument is that a fledgling district attorney was happy to avoid a trial that would alienate a strong and vocal portion of his constituency, which tends to vote as a bloc. When I asked Brooklyn D.A. representative Schmetterer about that, he replied flatly, “Well, that’s not the case.”

Lesher believes that a network of interests has kept the D.A. from pursuing extradition. “You’re talking about the leading gedolim”—or revered rabbis—“of the generation and the institutions they support that gave a blank check to Mondrowitz,” Lesher said. “That may be too much for the community to tolerate.” Lesher said he obtained documents from the Justice Department that report that a member of Hynes’ staff requested the Mondrowitz case be closed in 1993. Meanwhile, Mondrowitz lived freely in Israel, and, in 1996, he was naturalized as an Israeli citizen.

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In 2007, the extradition treaty between the United States and Israel was further amended and Mondrowitz was arrested in Israel in November of that year. An Israeli district court in Jeruslaem ruled in favor of extradition, but Mondrowitz’s lawyer successfully challenged that verdict. The case went before the Israeli Supreme Court, which in 2010 ruled against extradition, stating that it would be impossible for Mondrowitz to have a fair trial after so much time had passed. Not surprisingly, activists believe that decision was also politically motivated.

“Why did the Israeli government protect a pedophile?” asked Shmarya Rosenberg, of the blog FailedMessiah, which has chronicled the case extensively. “The answer is you have to look at Israeli politics. There was a political party called Agudath Israel that was controlled by the Ger Rebbe. It became the major part of the United Torah Judaism party,” an ultra-Orthodox, or haredi, Israeli political party. “Each successive government needs these haredi politicians to be in or to vote with their coalition.” Just as Mondrowitz’s alleged victims had been denied justice in the United States, they would also be denied justice in Israel—and for the same reason, the intersection of politics with the judicial system.

The Brooklyn D.A.’s long years of inaction were cited as the chief reason why the extradition from Israel to Brooklyn failed, according to Mondrowitz’s lawyer, Eitan Maoz. “In 1988 the law was amended in a way that the route to extradition was open and the district attorney was notified,” he told me at the time of the Israeli Supreme Court’s ruling against extradition in 2010. “But they did not do anything until 2007, when they decided to apply.” Even Lesher thought that defense, which entirely blames the Brooklyn D.A., to be ridiculous. “It’s preposterous to blame the D.A. for the fact that Israel and America simply did not negotiate a new extradition treaty fast enough,” he told me. “I don’t say that as a defender of Hynes—he did plenty to bury the case—but it isn’t his fault that the extradition treaty didn’t change sooner.”

When I spoke to Weiss about the verdict, he answered succinctly: “I think humanity has dropped the ball.”

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Paradoxically, Mondrowitz’s most lasting legacy may be an increase in sexual abuse awareness inside the Orthodox community. Here was a man whose alleged crimes were so horrid that he forced the issue to the forefront. “It took over 30 years to be more responsive to the problems, not only to recognize it, but to get help for victims and abusers, some of whom were then brought to justice,” said Susan Schulman, a pediatrician in the Borough Park area. When Yehuda Kolko, a rabbi who taught at the Brooklyn yeshiva Torah Temimah, was accused of sexual molestation, many observers thought that the prosecution was a direct result of the attention given to Mondrowitz. “The only reason the Torah Temimah story came out was because of Mondrowitz,” Dienstag told me.” He’s the guy who broke the ice. That’s an awful way of saying it.”

Others are less sanguine. “My greatest concern is how little the community has subsequently learned,” Blau said. “The community should do whatever possible to ensure it does not happen again. That means cooperating with the police.” And while there still is a long-simmering conflict between the Brooklyn District Attorney and sexual abuse activists inside the ultra-Orthodox communities, a series of high-profile victories against abusers has largely quieted the animosity. The community itself has become more aware of sexual abuse, though many leaders of the community still insist on referring sexual abusers to rabbis instead of to the authorities. Most recently, Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetzky, one of the members of the Mo’etzet Gedolah HaTorah, the self-appointed counsel of sages that decide Agudath Israel’s policy, publicly stated that sexual abuse victims should speak to their rabbis before reporting to the police.

Mondrowitz lives in a fashionable Jerusalem neighborhood. He turns 64 in November, and his once energetic walk has probably slowed down. In all likelihood, he’ll spend the rest of his life there as a free man, unmolested. After the Israeli Supreme Court ruling, the only open route to extradition would have been an appeal, possible in the Israeli system, which was not made. The New York Court of Appeals case is merely about access to the Brooklyn D.A.’s records, and even if Lesher discovers that Hynes shelved the case, the repercussions are likely to be minimal.

I asked Lesher what he hoped to accomplish from the disclosures. “I’m not sure there is a simple answer to that question,” he said. “What I wanted from the beginning is to finish the story.”

Michael Orbach is the former editor of The Jewish Star, a weekly newspaper covering Orthodox communities in the New York area.