Joe.My.God. LGBT News
On Sunday night thousands of members of Brooklyn’s Hasidic community lined the streets to see off their leader as he headed to Israel. Failed Messiah reports:
Last night, the Williamsburg Satmar Rebbe Zalman Leib Teitelbaum left on a trip to Israel, his first since becoming rebbe several years ago. Teitelbaum’s stated aim for the trip – besides attending a granddaughter’s wedding – is to disrupt Israel’s national elections scheduled for Tuesday [today] and to encourage haredim to resist the military draft. He got a massive sendoff in Brooklyn last night and a large police escort that appeared to be supplemented with several private SUVs with (illegally) blaring sirens.
Commenters on the above-linked article are questioning why the NYPD provided Teitelbaum with a lights-and-sirens escort typically only granted to some visiting heads of state.
RELATED: This weekend the Daily News reported that Hasidic leader Nechemya Weberman, who was convicted on 59 felony counts of child molestation last month, has many more victims who have not yet pressed charges.
The self-proclaimed religious adviser even invoked Kabbalah — a form of Jewish mysticism — to convince his victims that having sex with him was kosher. “He’s a monster,” said a man whose daughter was repeatedly brutalized by Weberman a couple of years before the victim at trial came forward. Other women who were sexually abused by Weberman refused to speak publicly for fear of retribution. But those close to them described a pattern of nurturing and grooming where he would shower outcast teens with attention, take them on road trips — and even buy them lingerie. He told one young victim, “That ‘I learned Kabbalah and we were a couple in another incarnation,’ ” said a friend of the woman. Rabbi Yakov Horowitz, who runs a Jewish youth program, said he was told by victims Weberman used the Kabbalah line on them too. “The intimate acts he was performing were intended as a form of repentance for sins committed in their previous lifetimes,” said Horowitz.
Weberman is due to be sentenced today.