Satmar Grand Rebbe visits convicted child sexual abuser in prison
One of the United States' top Charedi rabbis has met with paedophile Nechemya Weberman, who is serving a 103-year sentence.
One of the United States’ leading Charedi rabbis has visited convicted child sex abuser Nechemya Weberman in prison, according to a Yiddish-language newspaper serving the Satmar Chasidic community that has published a series of favourable articles about the former therapist who abused an adolescent girl from12 years of age.
The visit by the Satmar Grand Rebbe Zalman Teitelbaum has riled advocates for sexual abuse victims in the Chasidic community. They say the community’s leadership has a pattern of downplaying abuse charges and in this case convictions, further traumatising the victims.
A sexual abuse survivor who lives in Orange County, New York, seat of Zalman Teitelbaum’s Satmar faction, told the New York Jewish Week that abuse victims like her feel they are “being stabbed” when they see support for accused abusers in the Chasidic media and among their leaders.
“It’s retraumatising victims,” said the survivor, who asked not to be named for reasons of privacy and safety. “It’s being stabbed every week, again and again, and knowing that if you’re ever going to open your mouth you’re going to be kicked out.”
The woman said that other survivors within the community told her “that they are not going to come forward so quick again because they see this every week.”
“It’s the most horrific thing,” the source said. “I am reliving all the hell that I’ve gone through. They are taking a molester, who did the worst thing, and they are promoting him, and calling him holy.”
The newspaper serves the faction of the Satmar community that is loyal to Zalman Teitelbaum. It published an article about his visit.
A weekly series sympathetic to Weberman has been running since August. The articles are written accounts from organised visits to Weberman’s jail cell by members of the community, including prominent rabbis. They include letters from Weberman himself and letters from people in the community to him.
“They say he’s wrongfully accused,” Shulim Leifer, a member of the Hasidic community who has read the articles, told the New York Jewish Week. “It’s written in a sense that it’s a foregone conclusion, that it’s a lynching that he went through.”
According to the article about Teitelbaum’s visit, the rabbi spent over an hour with Weberman and “offered words of faith and belief in God” while the convicted sexual abuser was at Rikers Island for an appeal, the article said. Weberman is now at Shawangunk Prison in upstate New York. “Thanks to Hashem, after much advocacy, we did manage to prevail and we managed to get a visit from the [Grand Rebbe] who was able to come into the dark walls,” the article reported.
The United Jewish Organisations of Williamsburg and North Brooklyn, who are affiliated with the Grand Rebbe, and other representatives of Teitelbaum did not respond to a request for comment.
The articles are written by Rabbi Abraham Yehoshua Fraynd. Neither Fraynd or the newspaper responded to a request for comment.
Weberman, was an unlicensed therapist who served the fervently Orthodox Satmar community, was 54 when he was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing a young woman over the course of three years beginning in 2007. He was given a 103-year sentence in 2013, close to the maximum permitted by law.
The victim spent 15 hours on the witness stand recalling how she had been repeatedly raped and forced to perform oral sex in Weberman’s office, where she had been sent because of her alleged immodest dress and rebellious behaviour.
Many members of the Satmar community stood behind Weberman, who had served as the driver for the late Grand Rebbe Moses Teitelbaum, the father of Zalman Teitelbaum and his brother Aaron, who now lead rival factions of the Casidic movement.
Aaron Teitelbaum went so far as to suggest that Weberman’s accuser was “a zona,” which translates to “whore.” The victim claimed that after going to the district attorney, she received both bribes and threats in an attempt to convince her not to testify. The Hasidic community has long discouraged members from going to outside law enforcement, a practice long decried by advocates for victims of sexual abuse and other crimes.
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