Federal authorities here will decide next week whether to seek indictments against a respected Chasidic rabbi and his assistant, both of whom have been charged with sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl during an overnight flight from Australia to Los Angeles.
The assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, Joel Thvedt, said he intended to present the case to a grand jury, which would decide whether to prosecute.
The accused are Rabbi Israel Grunwald of Brooklyn, a leader of the Hungarian Pupa Hasidim, and his assistant, Yehudah Friedlander, both 44 years old.
Their arrests have sparked outrage in the Chasidic and Orthodox communities of New York, while Los Angeles rabbis moved quickly to aid their colleagues.
Both of the accused have vehemently denied the charges, according to their attorney, Mitchell W. Egers.
After a June 2 hearing here, U.S. Magistrate Judge Carolyn Turchin released Grunwald on $10,000 bail. He immediately flew back to New York.
Grunwald, charged with sexually touching a minor, faces a maximum of two years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted.
Friedlander remained in detention over the Sabbath and the Shavuot holiday, despite Egers’ protests. He was being held pending clarification over the disposition of a 1991 arrest in New York state, in which he was charged with a sexual offense.
On Tuesday, Turchin denied a cash bail to Friedlander, calling him “a danger to society.”
The judge said Friedlander would only be released if someone put up his or her house with equity valued at least at $100,000.
If convicted, Friedlander who was charged with more extensive sexual abuse, faces up to 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Friedlander has been identified in the media as a rabbi or “assistant rabbi,” but according to Egers and New York sources,he is actually a non-rabbinical assistant to Grunwald.
A nine-page affidavit submitted to the court by an FBI agent, which cites statements by the young girl, a witness on the plane and Friedlander, alleges a number of occurrences during the United Airlines overnight flight.
The girl, an American traveling alone, accused Grunwald of leaning across an empty seat and, after some conversation, touching her necklace and fondling her breasts.
At some point, Friedlander allegedly exchanged seats with Grunwald, and while the cabin lights were dimmed, Friedlander allegedly groped and fondled the girl’s private parts and breast for some five to eight minutes, the complaint charged.
The teen-ager told authorities that she tried to fend off the advances but was too embarrassed to call for help. However, a woman passenger observed the alleged incident, talked to the girl and then notified the flight crew, which radioed a report to authorities.
When the plane landed in Los Angeles, FBI agents, who assumed jurisdiction under the laws governing American aircraft in flight, arrested the two men.
One agent quoted Friedlander as telling him that it was the girl who initiated the advances, adding that “I shouldn’t have done it, but it happened.”
Egers said Friedlander was “in a state of shock and deeply upset that the whole Jewish world” knows about the accusations.
Egers, a veteran trial lawyer with close ties to the Orthodox community, said in a phone interview that when he and his two clients appeared in court last week, he was “besieged by armies of reporters, with just about all the media from New York and Los Angeles on hand.”
For a day, “we were bigger than the O.J. Simpson case,” he added.
Reaction to the arrests was sharpest in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, where Grunwald serves as rabbi of Congregation Tuldos Yacov Yosef.
Rabbi Bernard Freilich, administrator of the Council of Jewish Organizations in Borough Park, told The New York Times that “people are outraged at these charges.”
“They are unbelievable, impossible nonsense,” he said.
“It is impossible that an Orthodox Chasidic person would even speak to a female, much less touch her,” Freilich said.
Rabbi Abner Weiss of the Orthodox Beth Jacob Congregation in Beverly Hills took a less categorical view. He was attending his installation as the new president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California when he received word of the arrests.
In his first act in office, Weiss conferred with Aaron Kriegel, a Conservative rabbi who serves as prison chaplain, to assure that the two Chasidim would receive kosher food. Weiss said he personally bought loaves of challah for Grunwald and Friedlander.
Without passing judgment, Weiss, a native of South Africa who holds a graduate degree in psychology, noted in general that “Jews are not immune to any kind of illness, physical or mental.”
Grunwald is the son of Josef Grunwald, the late grand rabbi of the Pupa Chasidim, who transplanted Holocaust survivors from Pupa, Hungary, to Brooklyn after World War II.
The title of grand rabbi has passed to the founder’s eldest son, Yakov Grunwald, who heads a congregation in the Williamburg section of Brooklyn, while his brother, Israel Grunwald, leads hundreds more in Borough Park.
There are more than 12,000 Pupa Chasidim in the world, concentrated in New York, Montreal, London and Jerusalem.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
