NY Rabbi Who Avoided Jail For Child Sex Abuse Dies Of COVID-19

BACK in 2012, Rabbi Joel Kolko, above, avoided a jail sentence after pleading guilty to charges of child endangerment – but two years later the religious college at which he worked, Yeshiva Torah Temimah, paid out $2.1 million two of Kolko’s victims following a civil claim for damages.

At the time The New York Post reported that both boys were students aged just six at the yeshiva which retained Kolko as a rabbi despite receiving “multiple credible allegations of pedophilia” over a period of 25 years.

The lawsuit also alleged that while Torah Temimah knew that Kolko was molesting children, it gave him unsupervised access to children, covered up allegations of sexual abuse and threatened families who complained about Kolko.

Yeshiva Torah Temimah announced in May 2006 that it had put Kolko on “administrative leave.” But an April 2008 article in the New York Jewish Week later revealed that the school had continued to pay Kolko for many months afterward, in amounts of up to $6,000 per month, as the criminal and civil cases proceeded.

Three other lawsuits, filed by men who claim the rabbi molested them as kids, are pending, but Kolko will never know the outcome: he died in Israel of COVID-19. according to The New York Post.

But Niall MacGiollabhui, a Manhattan lawyer who represents plaintiff David Framowitz, said:

It won’t affect the case. At the end of the day, there’s little denying Kolko did what he did. My client will testify. I’m sure some people think he [Kolko] has evaded a full measure of justice, but I can tell you this: his epitaph has not been written, and it’s going to be written by his victims. How he will be remembered is going to be determined by his victims.

The other alleged victims include Baruch Sandhaus and an anonymous “John Doe.”

Said Avi Moskowitz, a lawyer reprersenting Yeshiva Torah Temimah:

I heard that he was sick. He was on a ventilator.

Kolko’s death complicates the cases, Moskowitz said:

You have grown men who claim that 40 or 50 years ago something happened, and now the person alleged to have done it is not available.

Former Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes cut a deal with Kolko in 2012 requiring him to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of child endangerment while sparing him both jail time and having to register as a sex offender.

Ben Hirsch, co-founder of the group Survivors for Justice, was critical of Hynes for cutting a deal with Kolko.

It’s tragic that Charles Hynes chose not to prosecute this case in 2008, when he would have achieved an almost-guaranteed guilty verdict.

The 2014 settlement had the yeshiva admitting no guilt but paying one student $900,000 and the other $1.35 million. The settlements in the Kolko case were the first ever paid by a yeshiva to students who were sexually abused by a staff member.

Well-known victims’ advocate Rabbi Yosef Blau of Yeshiva University said at the time:

This is unheard of. I am not aware of any other settlements.

Rabbi Blau said that he is hopeful that the settlement will prompt yeshivas to takes allegations of sexual abuse against students more seriously.

Bizarrely, Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, above, used the settlement to accuse both the Daily News and The New York Times of “anti-Catholic bias” for failing to report on the pay-out.

Donohue claimed that both papers were quick to pounce on any stories of sexual abuse by priests and wondered why a multi-million dollar settlement in the Kolko case wasn’t considered newsworthy.

And they expect us to believe that there is no anti-Catholic animus at the Daily News and the New York Times! They prove us right all the time.

The Daily News responded a day later with an editorial acknowledging that not covering the Kolko settlement was a major error in judgment, but adamantly rejecting the notion of any anti-Catholic bias at the paper.

Like any media organization, The News sometimes misses stories. This was one of them – and it was especially significant for a publication that has campaigned for reform of New York State statutes of limitation on criminal and civil cases against those who sexually abuse minors.

Pointing to its broad coverage of child sexual abuse in all religious and demographic groups and the significant space devoted by the Daily News to Catholic causes and issues, the editorial concludes by branding Donohue’s allegation as “simply false.”

In addition to accusing the newspaper of being prejudiced against Catholics, Donohue observed that the deliberate omission of the Kolko story was yet another example of The New York Times’ policy of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse committed by rabbis.

Quite frankly, the Times has a history of omitting stories on rabbis who molest youngsters, something one of its previous public editors even admitted to me. Yet little has changed.

This is simply untrue. Over the years the Times has covered the Weberman trial, the Kolko case and allegations of abuse at Yeshiva University.

Nechemya Weberman, above, was a member of the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg. An unlicensed therapist and “respected” member of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, he was sentenced in 2013 to 103 years in prison for repeatedly sexually abusing a young woman, beginning the attacks when she was 12.

A lengthy 2012 Times article detailed the consequences Chasidic Jews can face when reporting incidents of sexual abuse while a 2013 article addressed the arrest of a rabbi who abused three of his teenage students.