After he applied to be an army chaplain in January 2009, the military initially accepted him, but soon rescinded the offer because of its rule prohibiting beards. Stern later filed a lawsuit, and on Nov. 22 reached a settlement that allowed him to keep his beard while serving as a chaplain.

Read more here.

Rabbis and Jewish community leaders posted letters to freeyitzi.org excoriating attempts to bring Yitzhak Shuchat back from Israel to face charges that he allegedly assaulted the son of a black policeman in April 2008. The assault was deemed a hate crime by prosecutors.

Read more at NYDailyNews.com.

“They rearranged his face, beating him beyond recognition,” said Isaac Abraham, a Jewish community leader, to the NY Daily News.

Jenny and Ifthikar smile before their huppah ceremony. Jenny is from Florida and Ifthikar is from Pakistan. (Photo courtesy of Storybook Simchas Photography)

By Michael Keller

At her wedding table, Jenny turns to her new husband Ifthikar and says to him, “I don’t know how I lived for 43 years without you.” Jenny looks through the veil of a traditional Jewish bride. Ifthikar smiles and says something too softly to hear in his Pakistani accent. They were married in their friend’s living room in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony.

On the fireplace, portraits of famous rabbis in beards and black hats are arranged like family photos. In preparation for the event, women have placed chocolates in the shape of swans on the table. An older woman asks the singer of the band if he too would be interested in meeting a nice Jewish girl to marry. She may happen to know someone.

Jenny and Ifthikar did not simply meet at an Orthodox wedding, however. “When I first met him,” Jenny told me a few weeks ago, “I set his ring tone to this shrill noise so I wouldn’t answer because I was dating a rabbi. He would call every night, though. I called him ‘Itchy’ because he got under my skin.” “I knew he was the one for me,” she says.

Jenny moved to Brooklyn a little under a year ago from Florida after slowly becoming more religious over the past ten years. Ifthikar, or Yitzi as Jenny refers to him as, was born in Pakistan to a Syrian Jewish mother and first moved to America 33 years ago. They share a storefront on the section of Coney Island Ave. known as Little Pakistan out of which Jenny publishes a weekly newsmagazine for Orthodox women and Ifthikar runs a car service. And oh right, they are also both attorneys. They met when Jenny was selling ad space for her magazine.

Their businesses serve both the Jewish and the Pakistani residents of Midwood. To hear Jenny explain it, the arrangement sounds natural. “Muslims pray roughly the same number of times a day as we do,” she says. “They don’t eat pork. Women cover their hair. They wear a different scarf but it’s the same idea.”

If you ask shopkeepers along Coney Island Avenue how business is doing they will say that since 9/11 and since the arrest of the man who tried to bomb Times Square, business is not so good. Ask Jenny about the Orthodox and she will tell you about the two times this month that she has been verbally assaulted about her faith. But if she tells you this story she will laugh at the end and proudly say how Ifthikar chased one of the men out of the store.

“We need to defend each other,” she says, “and forget about this little scrap of land on the other side of the world.”

During the wedding ceremony I and three other men hold up the corners of the huppah, a prayer shawl that is held above the couple. Underneath the huppah are the bride, groom, rabbi, two witnesses, and several women. No one in the room is sitting. They crowd behind and to the sides of the rabbi as close as they can get.

A wedding is beautiful, the rabbi says, because the space below the huppah is filled by the divine presence at the moment of union. And if you combine and rearrange the letters in Jenny’s and Ifthikar’s Hebrew names, he says, you get the Hebrew word for “whole.”

After the ceremony the men dance in one room and the women in the next. Orthodox men take Ifthikar by the arm and by the hand and they dance around him in concentric circles. They grab his arms and form chains. They pile their yarmulkes on his head like school boys teasing a friend.

It is a mitzvah, a good deed, to make the bride and groom smile on his wedding day. They sit Ifthikar and Jenny down in a chair and pretend to polish their shoes with their ties, bringing them water to rehydrate, trying to make them smile.

But before the men and women are led off to separate rooms they are together under the huppah crowded with their guests. Behind the folds of her dress, Jenny and Ifthikar are holding hands.

Jews are already celebrating Passover, the holiday that commemorated the Jews’ flight from Egypt.

The preparations of this holiday are all about bread. Even the last crumb has to go. Jews aren’t allowed to own and eat bread on Passover. This is a reminder of their ancestors. They had to leave Egypt in a hurry and bread had no time to rise. Just as thousands of years ago, Jews today eat Matzo on this holiday.

It is the first Passover for Maurice Appelbaum as a rabbi. He became head of the Shul Ahavas Israel in Greenpoint last September at age 27.

Danielle Bengsch follows him and his family during the Passover preparations.

Benjy Unger remembers sitting cross-legged on his therapist’s floor, waiting to be tapped on the head. Dressed in traditional Orthodox Jewish regalia, “the whole garb,” the 25 year-old was playing duck, duck, goose.

The children’s game is one of several tactics used by Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality, or JONAH, to turn gay Jews straight. The idea is to return men to a childlike state, in order to rewire their sexuality. The organization, based in Jersey City, attracts men like Unger, who is from Borough Park, with the goal of treating homosexuality as a kind of disease, in order that they might have a heterosexual marriage.  In the Orthodox communities of Brooklyn, many gay Jews feel pressured to change, and they provide a substantial chunk of business for these types of programs. JONAH is one of many, though it claims to be the only organization specifically tailored to this gay Jewish audience.

Photo courtesy of the AP

According to the American Psychological Association, there is no evidence that reparative therapy, as this type of conversion technique is known, is successful. Last fall, Dr. Judith Glassgold chaired an investigation on its behalf into reparative therapy and concluded that, “there is insufficient evidence to support the use of psychological interventions to change sexual orientation.” Yet JONAH remains an attractive option for many young Jewish men in Brooklyn. The organization declined to comment.

“If you are Orthodox you have a choice: you are either Orthodox or gay. You have to choose, you can’t be both” Unger said. “You grow up hearing it’s a sickness, and one day you realize, ‘Oh my God, I have this’,” he explained.

Though there are those who accept his sexuality, his community as a whole holds a negative perception of homosexuality. At one extreme, the lack of acceptance of homosexuality within ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities is clear in the statements made by Rabbi Yehuda Levin, a Flatbush rabbi and a spokesman for the Rabbinical Alliance of America. In a Youtube video he blames the earthquake in Haiti on homosexuality.

Unger was raised in a highly Orthodox family, and attended conservative yeshivas as he was growing up. He was eventually expelled from a Brooklyn yeshiva when his sexuality became known. Even his friends were unsure how to react. “People went crazy when I said I was gay. I was getting calls about it, nobody believed me,” he said. “It’s a really misunderstood issue in Brooklyn.”

He came out to his family last year and, while they were supportive, they paid for him to attend therapy sessions at JONAH. The therapy, he says, was his own idea. Twice a week for the next year, Unger traveled to Jersey City, paying a weekly total of $160 for one private and one group session with around 10 to 12 other men. “After a year, we’re talking thousands of dollars,” he said. And, he says, he did not reap any benefits, instead finding the experience damaging. “I’m in therapy because of it now,” Unger said. “I’m actually in reparative therapy for my reparative therapy.”

“When I heard of JONAH, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’ They have many members because we are desperate to change, because we have no option. But it can be very destructive,” he continued.

Unger’s friends were predominantly supportive throughout this period, he says, though he remains the only gay person they know. “There’s so little education about this in the Orthodox community that some people actually did not believe it was physically possible to be Orthodox and gay. It’s impossible to be accepted into the community and be gay. Impossible. It doesn’t exist.” According to Unger, JONAH has one member who has been attending therapy for 15 years.

Much of his therapy at JONAH focused on the idea of masculinity, Unger said. He was told the reason he was gay was that he was too close to his mother, and that his relationship with his father was not strong enough. As a result he distanced himself from his mother, a course of action he regrets.

JONAH claims many success stories and its website is filled with testimonials from men for whom their therapy has apparently worked, but Unger believes this success is defined predominantly through abstinence, rather than a holistic change. The organization has created its own lingo for discussing what in religious Judaism is frequently considered unspeakable: homosexuality is “same sex attraction,” or SSA. The website offers the knowledge of how to “journey out of homosexuality.” Gay men are repackaged as those who “are involved in homosexuality” or “embrace the false identities of homosexuality.”

Shloimy, 22, who requested his last name be removed from this story after he received threats, attended JONAH for 8 months before leaving the organization in January.  Originally from the West Coast, where he was raised Orthodox, the family relocated to Crown Heights a year ago. He came out to most of his family—several of his siblings still do not know he is gay, but he is planning to come out to them at the upcoming Passover festival—when he was 20. “They basically pushed me back in the closet,” he said. “The closet was named JONAH.”

“JONAH has done a lot of good, because it’s therapy and it can be helpful, but it’s done a lot of bad too,” he said, adding that he found several of the therapy sessions he attended useful in a general sense.

In the Torah, the holy book on which these beliefs are predicated, certain homosexual acts such as anal sex are categorized as sins, but homosexuality itself is not explicitly condemned in halacha, Jewish law. According to its website, JONAH bases its therapy on the idea that homosexuality is a type of conduct rather than an identity, another belief at odds with the American Psychological Association.

Like Unger, Shloimy experienced the same focus on masculinity at JONAH. This bothered him. “I’m masculine, I’m a guy. I like sports,” he said. “I was on the basketball team, I played soccer.” He recalls an experience he had at work recently, when his shoe squeaked on a plastic floor. The sound took him back to a weekend retreat he had participated in with an organization similar to JONAH, People Can Change.

“We were all blindfolded and the therapists bounced basketballs and yelled ‘pussy’ and ‘faggot’ at us, trying to bring us back to being the loser in gym, and the experiences we had. I never had that. I was always one of the guys,” he said.

He remembers a therapy session at JONAH where he was asked to strip in his therapist’s office, and then given a massage. “I’m lying down with a blanket covering my bottom, getting a massage, and he asked me to put my hand on the masseuse’s thigh,” he said. At other times, he was asked to hug other men for long periods of time, allegedly to accustom him to feeling like a heterosexual man would in that situation. These therapies are based on the research of psychologist Dr. Elan Karten, who argues that sexuality is changeable. Shloimy no longer thinks so.

“Occasionally I’d feel attracted to a girl and I’d be like, ‘Oh my God, it’s changing!’ But, fundamentally, you can’t change who you are,” he said. “Sexuality is a piece of the pizza pie but its one of a lot of things.”

Chaim, who did not want his last name used in this article, is a 21 year-old Crown Heights-based Lubavitch Jew who was also sent to the same organization by his parents. He was told that if he could not change it was for want of effort on his part. He left a yeshiva when it was discovered that was gay, but no other yeshiva he applied to would accept him. “They’d heard about me,” he said. He is now enrolled on a nursing course at Kingsborough College.

“My friends took a little time to come around and it wasn’t easy for my family- my mother still thinks I’m going to wake up one day and be over this,” he said. “We’re given a dream, it’s sort of like a manual: get married and have children. To let go of that is very scary.”

Chaim stresses that he can’t make a judgment about JONAH except to explain how it affected him. But he describes finding changing his sexuality to be impossible. He dated women but found that it “didn’t work.” Chaim has spoken with some rabbis who have been sympathetic, but they seem to have no solution mapped out for him, no template for how someone in his position is supposed to live their life.

“They tell me what I am doing is ‘wrong,’ but they don’t know how it can be made ‘right’ without leading a life of celibacy,” he said.

For Chaim, the Jewish gay community is a separate, although small, family within his religious world. Having been involved with organizations for frum or formerly frum Jewish youth, like himself, he also believes that acceptance is starting to grow, and that the community as a whole is starting to open up.  In particular his involvement with JQ Youth, which was founded by two Flatbush Jews, offers him a place where he is completely accepted. The group exists publicly only on the Internet, and allows its members to remain anonymous, although it holds monthly meetings in the New York area. In spite of this, “many of our members are somewhat in the closet,” its website states.

In December, the Yeshiva University Tolerance Club held a panel called Being Gay in the Orthodox World, which was moderated by Rabbi Yosef Blau, which gave him further hope. “That was a big deal,” he explained excitedly, “but it didn’t register everywhere. People in my community ignored it.”

“Attitudes still need to change,” he said. “An acquaintance of mine from JONAH recently got married. A lot of rabbis believe if you get married, you will get better. It’s not true. Marriage is not a hospital.”

By Christopher Alessi and Nathania Zevi

Rabbi Avrohom Mondrowitz, shown above, was arrested on charges of child molestation in November 2007 by Israeli police. He currently awaits extradition to the U.S. Photo courtesy of The Awareness Center, Inc.

In Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, the rabbinical leadership’s muted response to a wave of sexual abuse allegations has come under increasing scrutiny.

The problem of sexual abuse by rabbis and yeshiva teachers against children has garnered much media attention in the last year. Twenty-six alleged molesters were arrested–8 of them convicted–throughout orthodox Brooklyn in the last year. Hundreds more children have been molested, mainly in Borough Park, according to reports in The New York Times, The Jewish Star, and The Jewish Week.

But many of the parents of those children–fearful of offending the powers that be and the possibility of being ostracized from a notoriously insular community–are not reporting these crimes to the police. They are keeping quiet because a Jewish law, Mesirah, states that a Jew cannot report a fellow Jew to the secular authorities. This law has been cited repeatedly by ultra-orthodox rabbis who do not want victims to report instances of sexual abuse to the police, but rather only to the rabbinical courts, called the Beth Din.

“It is the mentality of a community that is at stake,” said Rabbi Yosef Blau, the Mashglach Ruchani, or spiritual supervisor, at Yeshiva University. Blau has spoken out against what he sees as an improper interpretation of Jewish law, but noted, “The community is not going to shift on a dime.”

The ultra-orthodox world is facing a powerful and authoritative silence, and it remains unclear when–and exactly how–the pendulum will swing.

The 26 arrests in the past year stand in dramatic contrast to earlier years when the average was a mere two per year. The recent culmination of several decades-old child molestation cases helped to pave the way for this shift. In November 2007, Rabbi Avrohom Mondrowitz of Chicago was arrested in Israel pending extradition orders to the U.S., 24 years after having fled the U.S. in order to evade charges of child molestation in Borough Park. Mondrowitz, who was indicted on four counts of sodomy and eight counts of sexual abuse in the first-degree, still awaits extradition and has not been tried.

Mondrowitz moved to Borough Park in the late 1970s, where he worked as a rabbi and child psychologist, in addition to working as a consultant for the influential Jewish non-profit, Ohel Children’s Home & Family Services. Up until 1984, when he fled to Israel, Mondrowitz allegedly molested dozens of young boys in the neighborhood, according to the indictment handed down by a Brooklyn grand jury. As a footnote, Blau notes that Mondrowitz “pretended to have many degrees” in psychology but was not formally trained. In all the time he was living in Brooklyn “nobody checked to see if his degrees were real,” Blau said.

Another landmark case that came to a head recently was that of Rabbi Yehuda Kolko, a teacher at the prestigious Yeshiva-Mesivta Torah Temimah in Brooklyn, who was arrested in December 2006 on charges of child sexual abuse. David Framowitz attended the school in the early 1970s, when it was called Torah Vodaath. He came forward in 2003, claiming to have been one of Kolko’s first victims. Framowitz filed a civil suit against the school, ultimately forcing Kolko to resign his post at the yeshiva. A wave of additional accusations followed, leading to Kolko’s arrest.

In 2008, The Jewish Week reported that prosecutors at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office allegedly “talked the families of the victims into not pursuing further action after a plea bargain was negotiated.” Kolko, who made no admission of sexual abuse, pleaded guilty to two lesser counts of child endangerment. He was sentenced to three years’ probation, with no jail time. The DA’s office declined to comment for this article.

Some victims, meanwhile, say they are thwarted in their quest for justice. Mark Weiss, 43, currently lives in an orthodox Jewish neighborhood in New Jersey. He grew up in Chicago where he first met Rabbi Mondrowitz, who was a family friend. In 1980, his father, a respected yeshiva teacher, sent Weiss, then 13, to Borough Park to spend a week with Mondrowitz in order to refocus the boy on Judaism. Weiss found Mondrowitz to be “very charming,” though he explains that it became “complicated at night when it was time to go to bed.” While Weiss says it is now clear to him that Mondrowitz sexually molested him, he had not fully understood what was happening at the time. Then, when he was 18, he had an encounter with Mondrowitz in a Chicago synagogue. “It hit me like a ton of bricks, what had happened,” Weiss said of the sighting. After this revelation, he told his parents about the abuse.

But, despite his parents’ disappointment, he says, they were reluctant to accuse such a respected member of the community. This was the case with many of Mondrowtiz’s victims in the Jewish community who were loath to challenge the rabbinical establishment, Blau explained. But, as a self-declared psychologist in Borough Park, Mondrowitz had also interacted with other children in the neighborhood, including the sizable population of Italian-Americans that used to reside there. “The Italian kids would go to the police [if molested],” Blau said, “the Jewish kids would not.”

Guided by a fundamental interpretation of the law of Mesirah, orthodox Jews fear the consequences of speaking out. “Many feel that if anyone knows their kids were abused, then they won’t be accepted to good yeshivas and won’t obtain a good marriage partner,” said Vicki Polin, executive director of The Awareness Center, Inc., an advocacy group for victims of sexual abuse in Baltimore. “People have, in the past, been chased out of the community,” she said.

Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg is one example of a person who was ostracized for speaking out, in orthodox Williamsburg. In 2007, he set up a phone hot-line for abuse victims so that they could call in for counseling and support. When he tried to educate other rabbis in the neighborhood about sexual abuse, he says, he was essentially ex-communicated. That same year, many prominent rabbis throughout Brooklyn signed a rabbinical decree urging the members of the orthodox community not to associate with Rosenberg, according to Der Blatt, a Yiddish-language weekly newspaper based in Williamsburg. Rosenberg has said that he received death threats, and was allegedly wounded in the forehead by what may have been either a rock or a bullet.

“I am paying a high price for speaking out,” Rosenberg said. “But, I was able to do it because I was working in a different industry and I had no political pressure” from the rabbinical establishment. He also works as an accountant in Manhattan.

Sympathy for Rosenberg within Brooklyn’s orthodox community has been limited. Rabbi Aharon Fried, a professor at Stern College and resident of Borough Park, said of Rosenberg, “a person who calls himself a victim becomes a hero,” adding that in his view, the child molestation issue “has been over-reported.” In attempting to explain this mentality, Blau notes that, “Rosenberg is a traitor to the community in their eyes, while the guy who abused people was just a bad guy.”

As a result, it takes years–even decades–for some people to be able to come forward and share their stories of abuse. Pinny Taub says he was molested in 1990.  He only shared his story over a year ago, to advocates for abuse prevention, as increasing numbers of victims began going public. He grew up in Williamsburg and attended a yeshiva in Borough Park. When Taub was 15, he says, a teacher at his yeshiva befriended him and took the teenager under his wing.  “He was a dream rebbe teacher, he was my buddy,” Taub said. The teacher would take Taub to his house during school hours and let him smoke cigarettes, play on the computer, and talk about sex. It was during one of these midday outings that Taub says he first heard the phrase, “Just give me two minutes,” as his teacher attempted to grab Taub’s crotch.

He would hear this phrase repeatedly over the next year, he said. During these incidents, the teacher would become physically violent as he tried to pin Taub down. The first time this occurred the teenage boy’s pants were ripped apart and he was left with choke marks around his neck. He was furious. Yet, despite his anger he continued to return, again and again, to his mentor and friend. “After a day, I would go back to him because I was lost,” Taub recalled.

Today Taub, who has a wife and three children, is an outspoken advocate for sexually abused children. His former teacher, he says, still lives in Borough Park. While Taub and the teacher have not spoken in almost two decades, the sight of his old mentor continues to invoke a deep and unresolved anger. In August, Taub ran into him at a wedding.  Before the teacher could even enter the wedding venue, Taub dragged him outside and began to beat him. Taub knocked him to the ground, kicking and cursing at the elderly man, he says, while other bystanders looked on. “People said that he deserved it, that he should be kicked out” of the community, Taub said.  But he remains frustrated because, he says, the community has done nothing to remove the former teacher and many others like him.

Nonetheless, advocates like Taub and Weiss continue to push back, encouraging victims of sexual abuse to go to the police.  Bloggers, including the “Unorthodox Jew” (UOJ) and “Failed Messiah,” have been instrumental on this front. Paul Mendolwitz, the UOJ blogger who has tried to protect himself by keeping his identity secret on his blog, was the first to break the Kolko case. Since then, he has remained a constant critic of those in the community unwilling to speak out against abuse. “The blogs were very, very helpful,” said Rabbi Mark Dratch, the founder of an advocacy group called J-Safe, who believes that the community is being forced to “open up.”

In 2006, Mendolwitz also broke Rabbi Asher Lipner’s story on his blog. Lipner, a Flatbush-based mental health professional and advocate for sexually abused children, says he was molested as a teenager by a rabbi at the Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore. Lipner had kept his story a secret for two decades. “I was afraid of being shamed, shaming my family, being disbelieved and having no support,” he said.  Even at the time that Lipner’s story was revealed, he says, he was still nervous about backlash from within the orthodox world.  Today, he says, he fights to erase the stigma of speaking out about issues of sexual abuse in the orthodox community, noting, “the potential damage is not nearly as bad as people think because of the taboo.”

Lipner is also among those who are critical of Ohel, the Borough Park-based Jewish children’s welfare organization, where he worked as a psychologist in the adolescent department and then in the outpatient clinic until last year. Advocates have accused Ohel of failing to encourage victims of abuse to report their cases to the secular authorities. For some, Ohel has remained too loyal to the rabbinical establishment.  The blogger, Mendolwitz, says that Mondrowtiz – the rabbi being held in an Israeli prison–worked intimately with Ohel.  Blau corroborates this claim, noting that Mondrowitz “served as a consultant” for Ohel for many years.

“Ohel knew he was a sex offender,” Mendolwitz argued further. “They can’t claim they didn’t know.”  Additionally, Weiss, the victim from Chicago, claimed that the ultra-orthodox rabbinical leadership refers a lot of child patients to Ohel and as a result, “Ohel looks at the larger institutional structures before the victim.”

Ohel is also a partner in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office’s new sexual awareness program, Kol Tzedek, an arrangement that concerns some advocates despite the number of recent prosecutions. Jonah Bruno, a spokesman for the DA’s office, could not be reached for comment.

Ohel’s communications director, Derek Saker, who declined to speak in person, requested an e-mailed list of detailed questions from the Ink. This list included questions that asked Ohel to respond to accusations that the organization does not actively encourage victims of abuse to report these crimes to the police; how the organization teaches children to interpret the law of Mesirah; to address the organization’s relationship with the rabbinical leadership of Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox community; and to respond to accusations that claim the organization was aware Mondrowitz was a sexual offender while he was working in conjunction with Ohel. Saker– who sent back what he termed an “advertorial” citing Ohel’s commitment to fighting sexual abuse in the orthodox community–responded directly to only one question. “To the best of our knowledge, Avrohom Mondrowitz was never employed by Ohel,” he wrote.

Dratch, meanwhile, is critical of Borough Park’s assemblyman, Dov Hikind.  Hikind has been an outspoken critic of sexual abuse in the neighborhood, and has been instrumental in providing support for victims in the community that want to share their stories. Yet, critics, like Dratch, believe he has not been forceful enough in encouraging these victims to report the crimes to the police. “By making it a public issue he has done a good job,” Dratch said. Yet, he continued, “Hikind has also perpetrated the cover-up, which is very harmful.”

Hikind counters that he tells victims they have “an option” to go to the police, but he emphasizes that it is a “personal choice” to do so, rather than an obligation.  He also has deep reservations about providing the names of victims to the DA’s office because he is afraid of alienating others who might come forward, who would not want their stories to be made public. (In a later interview, Hikind retracted these comments, insisting, “We encourage people to go the police, but most have already made up their minds.”) Others assert that he does not provide the names to the DA’s office so as not to undermine the rabbinical establishment, about which he is notably uncritical.

“I want to believe the rabbinical authorities just didn’t know and understand this problem,” Hikind said.

Yuri Foreman, from Brooklyn, right, throws a right at the head of Daniel Santos, from Puerto Rico, during their WBA super welterweight boxing title fight Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy Jae C. Hong/AP

Yuri Foreman, an Orthodox Jewish boxer raised in Brooklyn, became the first Jewish World Champion since 1932. On Saturday night in Las Vegas he defeated champion Daniel Santos to win the WBA Super Welterweight title. Foreman is studying to be a rabbi.

A prayer in the Court of Justice during a break of the trial against six members of the Jewish Patrol Shomrim. Photo: Pirolo/BrooklynInk

Six members of the Orthodox Jewish patrol Shomrim were back in the Brooklyn Supreme Court yesterday, on trial for allegedly attacking yeshiva students in Crown Heights two years ago.

But among the spectators were those from the ultra-Orthodox community who believed that it was one of their victims who instead should have been on trial – for making his accusation public.

Joshua Gur, known as Shuki, had a long black beard that made him look like older than his 23 years. He wore a skullcap emblazoned, in Hebrew, with the words — “Long life to Rebbe Messiah, he never left the world.” Gur is among those Lubavitcher Hasidim – which is based in Crown Heights – who believe that their late Rebbe, or spiritual leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Scheneerson, who died in 1994, was, in fact, the Messiah. Believers keep an eternal vigil at his grave.

It was the question of the Rebbe’s sacred place that apparently led to a December 2007 fight in a yeshiva dormitory at 749 Eastern Parkway. The Shomrim were summoned to break up the melee. But, argued assistant district attorney David Weiss, they only worsened the violence, beating the students “indiscriminately.” Several Meshichists were taken to the hospital. One suffered a broken eye socket, another a broken finger.

During yesterday’s testimony, one of the defense attorneys, Israel Fried, asked Gur to watch a video shot during the alleged attack. One of the Shomim could be heard saying, “I’m trying to mediate with you.”

“So Shomrim came to calm things down?” Fried asked.

“I don’t think so,” Gur replied.

Among the spectators was Yosef Lifshitz, father of the defendant Benjamin Lifshitz. “He is lying, he is lying,” he said. The seats, in fact, appeared filled with friends and supporters of the defendants; a handful of Gur’s supporters sat together, off to the side, a small pocket of support in a room filled primarily with those who saw his testimony as a betrayal.

“We are not allowed to bring a dispute in a secular court,” said Lifshitz. The matter, argue the defendants’ supporters, should have been taken to a religious court, a Bet Din. In fact, he argued, in ancient times a Jew who testified publicly against a fellow Jew did so at the risk of his own life. “It’s even allowed to kill him,” Lifshitz said. “But we live in this world and of course we don’t do it.”

He was not alone in his disapproval of Gur’s testimony.

“This guy is not even part of the community, they come form the outside,” said Mayer Hershkop, whose three sons are among the defendants.

The risk of being exiled from the community has apparently given several other potential witnesses pause. On Sunday the yeshiva students came before rabbinical authorities in Crown Heights and agreed to not testify. Last Monday, at the opening of the trial, the prosecution asked to the judge to warn the defendants against tampering with the witnesses.

Meanwhile, Hershkop, mixing Yiddish and English words, said that he wished that the case could have been heard by a Bet Din.

But in criminal court, the defendants, if convicted, face up to15 years in prison.

In Crown Heights, the punishment for the witness could be banishment.

Photo from the Russian American Jewish Experience Program

The sons and daughters of Russian Jewish immigrants converse over frothy beers at the Jewish Center in Brighton Beach. They are here, ostensibly, to study the books of Jewish law, something their parents could not do when they lived in the Soviet Union. The children of these immigrants, now mostly in their 20’s, are also here for something more: they are here to find themselves.

Biana Lupa, 25, came from Ukraine when she was three years old. She comes to this Brighton Beach synagogue’s program to learn Judaism. She says her parents were forced to live secular lives under the Soviet regime. Now, she wants to reclaim her Jewish tradition.

“I grew up in the States,” says Lupa, “I’m not Russian, but I don’t feel only American. Plus, I’m Jewish and my parents don’t observe Jewish traditions. I wanted to know who I was and I wanted to find a community of people like me to share with them my struggles.”

Lupa’s struggles come at a particularly emotional time. Although, Lupa questions her faith and her relationship with God at times, she finds comfort in a program in her synagogue called Russian American Jewish Experience or RAJE. It is a program that promotes Jewish values and traditions among young Russian Americans in the south of Brooklyn.

Rabbi Dovid Goldshteyn, one of the teachers of the Talmud in this synagogue, explains that, back in the Soviet Union, it was very hard to for Russian Jews to profess their faith in a secular society because the regime prohibited them from doing so. Hence, most of these immigrants had lost their religious tradition long before coming to America. “A hundred years ago all of our ancestors were Jewish Orthodox, living in terrible poverty conditions,” says Goldshteyn, adding that Judaism “was stolen from us by the soviet regime.”

RAJE is not the only organized group with the goal of connecting children of Jewish immigrants with their roots. The worldwide organization Ezra USA also has a center in Brighton Beach. But RAJE targets young adults and their outreach programs get very creative.

Every Tuesday evening, students congregate at this Jewish center to attend Rabbi Goldshteyn’s lectures about the Talmud and to drink beer. Rabbis and students sometimes cook a potlock. At other times, they order kosher food, but there are always kegs of beer around. Tuesday are known as Happy Tuesday.

Alexander Schiller, 23, comes to Happy Tuesday religiously. He says that drinking alcohol is part of being Russian and part of being Jewish. “Our parents made vodka in their bath tub,” says Schiller.

His view is echoed by another Russian American, Igor Komissarenko, who said that to him a big part of being Jewish means enjoying yourself. However, for Komissarenko, the search for a Jewish identity was unsuccessful. “I was curious for a while,” he says, “and then I lost interest.”

Komissarenko does not go to Happy Tuesdays, nor does he observe Jewish traditions. He was born in Ukraine and moved to America with his family when he was 8 years old. Today, he is 24 and he remains secular, like his parents.

When Komissarenko was 18 years old, he says, he worked at a kosher bakery in Avenue U. Rabbis constantly invited him for dinner or to observe Jewish holidays. But it did not take long before he realized the religious path was not for him. He said that after attending synagogue a few times he felt a bit of pressure by his peers to become observant.

“I wanted to be free, to be the way I want to be,” says Komissarenko.

For Erika Michelle Koltun, a life-death experience put an end to her quest of searching for an identity. Koltun’s best friend died in a car accident three years ago, exactly three weeks after she first started attending this Russian American Jewish Experience program. It was her best friend’s birthday and Koltun was invited to go out with her and some friends to celebrate on a Friday night. She debated between going to her party of observing the Sabbath.

“I decided to go to Sabbath instead,” says Koltun. “It was crazy! I was supposed to be with her. I was supposed to be in that car,” Koltun says.

When she looks back to the accident, however, Koltun admits that she had been “hanging out with the wrong people” at that time. She says she knows now for sure she was in the wrong path. Koltun wishes her friend was alive and what happened to her still hurts.

At the time of the accident the rabbis of her synagogue were teaching her that “if you keep Sabbath, Sabbath will keep you,” Koltun says. “When I was at the hospital I was so sad and angry I wanted to rip my star off my neck and my mother stopped me,” she said. “God protected me, my mom told me. God saved me from being dead.”

Koltun is now studying at the Yeshiva University, in Manhattan, and she is Orthodox. She said she still has a long way to go in her knowledge and her faith.

While Koltun has embraced her faith, not all Russian Americans do so. Many who come to this synagogue’s program are merely seeking to make sense of who they are. They search for answers in Judaism despite of what their parents think of this search.

Because they are secular, the parents of these young people are not always at ease with the possibility that their kids end up being Orthodox. Koltun’s parents are more supportive. “My mother started lighting candles on Friday night,” Koltun says, “Actually, it was my father who pushed to light the candles.”

Koltun hopes her parents follow her steps one day. But the small signs that they are showing lately are enough to make her happy.”

“Sometimes they go to a kosher restaurant and they would call me saying ‘Hey, we’re eating kosher.’ It’s really cute. Maybe one day,” says Koltun.

Alexander Schiller is dedicated to his Talmud studies, though his parents are not as thrilled as Koltun’s. Schiller’s mother was a teacher in Ukraine. His mother told him she was denied a job promotion back in Ukraine for being Jewish. Schiller says his parent’s faith has brought to them nothing but trouble. He says that here in the States his mother tells him sometimes to take his yarmulke off his head to show respect for others because they live in a Catholic neighborhood.

His father is still suspicious of his devoted attendance to synagogue. His father, he says, would tell him: “What do you do there, what do you do? Do you drink alcohol? Do you drink with the rabbi? You do marihuana? Why are you so happy?”

Schiller replies to his father that he is searching for what the Soviets took away form him.