The trial of a rabbi and three other members of an ultra-Orthodox collective village on charges of complicity in the abduction and hiding of 10-year-old Yoselle Shumacher was resumed today. The boy was taken from his parents in 1959 by Orthodox relatives who feared he would not receive a sufficiently Orthodox education from his Russian-born parents. Despite a search on three continents, the boy has not been seen since.
The defendants in the trial, one of two in the case, are Rabbi Binyamin Mendelsohn and three other Poale Agudat Israel members. A related case opened last week against a Kom-memiut couple named Kutt, also accused of complicity in the boy’s abduction. That case was recessed until June 21.
(In New York, more than 3, 500 Orthodox Jews attended a meeting last night, called by the Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada, to protest “a bitter hatred campaign against religious Jews” by the State of Israel allegedly developing from the Yos-selle Shumacher case. The delegates adopted a resolution protesting the arrest in Israel of six persons charged with complicity in the case.)
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