Arrogant Satmar Weberman blows his whole defense... in big trouble

Alleged monster Weberman

Article by Andrea Peyser of the New York Post, Friday edition

This is not kosher.

Nechemya Weberman lumbered into a Brooklyn courtroom yesterday as big as a rabid bear in an oversized black coat and matching yarmulke, side curls tucked behind his ears.

The slimy bastard, 54, is charged with repeatedly and monstrously sexually assaulting a young girl he controlled by counseling the child in the office of his Brooklyn home deep inside the Orthodox Satmar religion, a cult-like sect more secretive than Scientology.

It’s a place where laws governing girls’ dumpy dress code are enforced by the masked men of the “modesty police’’ — a terrorist group that might well be called the Jewish Taliban.

He played your jolly old Yiddish uncle on the witness stand. With an arrogant smile, he described running a kind of Hasidic shelter for wayward girls under his own roof, doling out beds to at least three young ladies — including his niece — who had refused to cover themselves like mummies, just like Mom.

All were welcome, the less clad the better.

Weberman was having a high time until prosecutor Kevin O’Donnell asked him flat-out, “You’re a well- respected man. In the Satmar community, [the accuser] is considered a piece of dirt?’’

With a smirk I’d like to rip off his fat face, Weberman demolished his alleged victim without as much as a forbidden kiss.

“There are people who are better than her, right,’’ he said.

Later, he explained that this child was “fresh’’ and “immodest’’ unlike other girls. “That’s why these were girls who were better than her.’’

What would Moses think?

The accuser, who turned 18 yesterday, had the grave misfortune of loving and revering this human piece of filth.

And her parents paid for it.

Weberman agreed on cross-examination that he took his accuser to upstate Monsey, charging $150 an hour. It was a 14-hour trip but he charged only $1,500. What a guy!

When they got home at midnight, the girl’s mother freaked out, yelling that they’d violated the rules of yichud that prohibit men and women from being together alone in the same room, or even a car.

Weberman was sore at the mom’s tantrum, and threatened to stop counseling the daughter.

The mother should have said fine. Instead, she wrote Weberman an apology note. His power over these people was frighteningly vast.

I’m ashamed to be of the same faith as this evil, malicious creep. But then, it seems that fanatics have taken full control of the Satmars, making all of them look to outsiders like incurable freaks.

It also didn’t help that in the morning court session, two Hasidic hotties came out to praise Weberman as the greatest thing since matzoh brei.

One of them, Baila Gluck, 23, took the witness stand — in Weberman’s defense! — and told about the three years she spent as a teen living in a fold-up bed in Weberman’s home office.

“He was Hasidic, but he was different,’’ she said approvingly.

Before she was a live-in, Gluck got a visit from Vaad Ha’Tznius, the Gestapo-like fashion police, rifling through her clothes and warning her to keep in line, or else. They took her cellphone.

After that, the girl ran away, couch-surfing and sleeping in cars, until Weberman took her in.

Weberman, who is not licensed as a therapist, for years took in counseling clients recommended by Vaad Ha’Tznius idiots. He took on all the girls.

Another man took the boys, the prosecutor suggested.

But the Satmars continue to love him. As a freelance charlatan, Weberman is not bound by confidentiality rules, and can tell anyone anything that happened in a therapy session without fear of legal recourse, it came out in court.

He also is not obliged to tell authorities about sexual abuse within the community, which is why the police-averse Satmars use him to keep kids in line.

UPDATED THURSDAY 10:31PM

He left himself wide open.

A Hasdic leader, on trial for allegedly molesting a 12-year-old girl, took the stand in his own defense yesterday — and ended up admitting that he raided his community nonprofit to pay for everything from his kid’s tuition to frilly lingerie.

Leaving himself vulnerable to a barrels-loaded cross-examination by Brooklyn prosecutors, accused child molester Nechemya Weberman denied sexually abusing a Williamsburg girl who had been sent to him for counseling sessions from the age of 12 to 15.

Defense attorney Michael Farkas asked him: “Mr. Weberman, have you ever inappropriately touched [the alleged victim]?”

To which Weberman answered, “Never ever.”

But once prosecutors got a crack at him, rather than hammer away at the sex-abuse allegations, they got the Satmar counselor to admit to a host of financial misdeeds.

“You used this not-for-profit for your own personal gain?” Assistant District Attorney Kevin O’Donnell asked.

“Yes, I did,” Weberman said.

The 54-year-old Weberman, a well-respected member of the Satmar sect, also copped to using money from his nonprofit organization, B’lev V’Nefesh, to pay for his own child’s tuition at the United Talmudical Academy, the very yeshiva that threatened to expel his accuser if she stopped seeing Weberman for counseling.

“So you’re getting a salary and paying your children’s tuition?” asked O’Donnell.

“I did if I needed to,” Weberman replied.

The most salacious details Weberman revealed about the nonprofit, which he claims to use to pay for housing and sabbath dinners for the poor, was that one of the nonprofit’s credit cards was used to buy lingerie.

“Doesn’t the organization buy lingerie?” asked O’Donnell, naming BMG Corset and Lingerie Shop in South Williamsburg, as well as other “unmentionables” stores.

“Maybe some other people in the organization did,” Weberman said.

The trial has provided a rare glimpse into the normally closed-off world of the Brooklyn ultra-Orthodox — and into the sometimes-squabbling sects within.

Besides using the nonprofit as his personal piggy bank, Weberman also used Vaad Ha’Tznius, the so-called modesty committee that enforces the strict dress codes of the Hasidic community, as his referral agency in the past.

“The Vaad Ha’Tznius would have people see you for counseling so you could make money?” O’Donnell asked.

“Yes,” said Weberman, who has 10 children and 18 grandchildren.

When asked if any of his children were no longer Satmar, he said, “No, thank God.”

His other lawyer, George Farkas, called prosecutors’ focus on the nonprofit an attempt “to paint this man as a dirty, money-grubbing Jew.”

Weberman also described his first counseling session with the victim — who turned 18 yesterday.

“She said, ‘Why should I trust you? Why should I talk to you? You look like a Hasidic f--k. You look like my father,’ ” Weberman testified.

The teen said Weberman was the first one who listened to her and she wanted to continue seeing him, he testified.

Earlier in the day, the defense called a woman who lived in Weberman’s office for two years.

Baila Gluck, 23, a pretty brunette who was raised Satmar, testified that she and several other young woman stayed in Weberman’s office at various times.

“Do you recall an occasion when [another girl] walked into the room and you were sitting on his lap and the defendant had an erection?” O’Donnell asked.

“No. That never happened,” Gluck answered.

Weberman was the defense’s last witness. Both sides will sum up today.

Satmar Rebbe Zalman Leib Ignores the pain of Sexual Victims and Visits Nechemya Weberman their Convicted Rapist in Prison

 

We reported this nauseating story back in 2012 when the Sex fiend was first tried in court

https://dusiznies.blogspot.com/search?q=Weberman

The Satmar “Grand Rebbe” Zalman Teitelbaum paid a visit to convicted sexual abuser Nechemya Weberman in prison last month, according to a Yiddish-language newspaper serving the Satmar Hasidic community that has published a series of favorable articles about the former fake therapist accused of sexually abusing an adolescent girl starting from when the victim was 12 years old.

The visit, and the weekly series of articles in Kiryas Joel Vochenshrift, have riled advocates for sexual abuse victims in the Hasidic community. They say the community’s leadership has a pattern of downplaying abuse charges and in this case convictions, further traumatizing the victims. 

A sexual abuse survivor who lives in Kiryas Joel, the Orange County, New York seat of Zalman Teitelbaum’s Satmar faction, told the New York Jewish Week that abuse victims like her feel they are “being stabbed” when they see support for accused abusers in the Hasidic media and among their leaders. 

“It’s retraumatizing victims,” said the survivor, who asked not to be named for reasons of privacy and safety. “It’s being stabbed every week, again and again, and knowing that if you’re ever going to open your mouth you’re going to be kicked out.” 

The woman said that other survivors within the community told her “that they are not going to come forward so quick again because they see this every week.”

“It’s the most horrific thing,” the source said. “I am reliving all the hell that I’ve gone through. They are taking a molester, who did the worst thing, and they are promoting him, and calling him holy.”    

Weberman takes stand to defend himself

With a costumed crowd pressing against velvet ropes begging to be let in, the Brooklyn criminal courtroom resembled a nightclub Wednesday.

The iconoclastic garb of the Satmar Hasidic Jewish sect was unmistakable as members showed up to support Nechemya Weberman when he took the stand to defend himself against charges that he sexually molested a beautiful Satmar teenager while he was supposed to be her therapist. Lubavitcher and Modern Orthodox Jews showed up to support the woman, sequestered in another room, quietly celebrating, if you could call it that, her 18th birthday.

Ladies in wigs and hats, with long skirts and arms and legs covered, sat apart from the men in dark suits, wearing yarmulkes, their hair in forelocks, as the jury as diverse as Brooklyn itself stared out over the insular community and got a lesson in Hasidism 101 from the testimony.

Like the fact that what you wear is no joke, as the alleged victim found out when she began to break the dress code with short skirts and sheer tights, and when she began to share pop songs like “Love Can Kill You” and sneak off to Hollywood movies.

The recalcitrant teen had come to the attention of an internal committee of men called the Va’ad Hatznius, which helps enforce modesty rules — among 613 commandments Satmar members believe must be followed.

According to the testimony of another young woman who'd taken the stand Wednesday morning, you don't want to mess with Va’ad Hatznius.

“Isn't it true that masked individuals came into your bedroom in the middle of the night and seized your cell phone?” no-nonsense prosecutor Kevin O'Donnell asked Baila Gluck. “And that this is the type of action Va’ad Hatznius takes when Satmar don't follow the rules? And wasn't it traumatic for you?” Yes. Yes. And yes.

But it was nothing like the trauma Weberman's accuser said she suffered as he allegedly forced her to perform oral sex and recreate scenes from porn movies. She had been ordered by her religious school's principal, Weberman's cousin, to go to Weberman for therapy, which he had no license to provide. And her parents were forced to pay for it.

If she didn't get therapy, she would be thrown out of the school, Weberman admitted. Though Weberman adamantly denied ever molesting her, the girl says the abuse went on for three years.

A young Satmar woman dressed modestly but wearing green nail polish against her husband's wishes told the Daily News, “I don't have time to come here, but I'm compelled to listen for myself. I need to know the truth.”

The victim of molestation for five years as a child, Debbie Teller set up the website adkanenough.com — Enough is Enough — to post names of sex offenders in the Orthodox community worldwide. Since the Weberman trial began, her site’s visitors have spiked by the thousands.

Sex abuse isn't greater within the Hasidic community than outside, said social worker Carole Sher, who helps run the SOURI Hotline, Support Orthodox Victims of Rape and Incest.

But there's been a lot of covering up in the past. But now with more receptive rabbis and greater communication, that's changing.”

The Brooklyn jury learned that if a Jewish person reported another Jewish person to the police, they would be labeled a “moser” — informer — and ostracized as strongly as a Mob rat.

With the Internet, the thin black line of silence in the religious community has been erased, agreed Joey DiAngello, perhaps one of the most colorful people attending the trial.

Born Yoel Deutsch into the Satmar sect 32 years ago, DiAngello, a heavy-metal drummer with Slayer and Iron Maiden tatoos on his arms, told The News he was raped at the age of seven in a mikvah, or public bath. He's set up the Facebook pages War on Vaad Hatznius and Survivors for Justice.

“I've gotten tweets from people calling me a self-hating Jew, but I really want to help Jewish kids in the same situation I was in,” he says. “It's like metal. I have something to say, and if you don't like it, I'll turn it up even louder.”

WEBERMAN TESTIFIES:

A prominent Hasidic counselor said he “never ever” sexually assaulted a beautiful Brooklyn girl, and testified he didn’t know anything about lingerie bought by a charity he founded.

Nechemya Weberman, taking the stand in a child-sex-abuse case, acknowledged Wednesday that he founded a charity and used it to pay for his salary and his kids’ education.

Weberman stands accused of forcing a Brooklyn teen to perform oral sex, as well as watch and reenact porn, over a three-year period, beginning when she was 12. 

The 54-year-old defendant testified he did not inappropriately touch the alleged victim, who turned 18 Wednesday.

Prosecutors also raised the specter that Weberman may have sexually abused other teens — allegations that were also denied in court.

Presenting himself as a “rabbinical counselor,” Weberman, said he started a not-for-profit organization called B’lev V’nefesh, Hebrew for “in heart and soul,” around 2000. He said it was used to raise money for those who can’t afford his services.

He was then confronted with financial records showing that the charity’s credit cards were used at BMG Corset & Lingerie, The Lingerie Shop and other undergarment stores.

“Me, myself, I’m not aware of this,” Weberman said. “This is the first time I heard about it.”

The charity — whose only principals are the defendant and his wife, Chaya Golda — was also used to pay tuition for the private Satmar yeshiva their kids attended and for Weberman’s salary. In one month, expenses came close to $12,000, a prosecutor said.

“Did you use this not-for-profit for your own personal gain?” Assistant District Attorney Kevin O’Donnell asked him.

“Yes, I did,” Weberman replied.

Also Wednesday, a woman named Baila Gluck, 23, testified about residing at Weberman’s home office for a couple of years as a teen. She stayed in the same apartment as the alleged victim in the case being tried had claimed she was forced to perform oral sex and reenact porn starting in 2007.

Gluck said after she had no place to stay following troubles at home, “He offered (for me) to come live at his house.” She added that during her time there, two other girls occasionally stayed in the flat.

One of those girls has told authorities she caught Weberman and Gluck in a compromising position. That person refused to testify for fear of retribution, a source said.

But Gluck, asked if one of the girls ever walked in and saw her sitting on Weberman’s lap while he had an erection, replied “No.”

She also denied being taken by Weberman to buy lingerie and bras and also a claim that she told the other housemate, when discussing the counselor, “I had to do what I had to do to get by.”

Weberman, a father of 10, spent about four hours on the stand and was the final witness in the high-profile trial.

The defendant, a well-regarded member of the Satmar sect, was once the driver of Grand Rebbe Moses Teitelbaum, he testified.

The insular group split into two after its leader’s death in 2006 and the counselor agreed he’s one of only a handful of people who are respected by both warring factions.

Children who had issues following the sect’s strict rules would be referred to him by schools or rabbis, he said, and he would then charge their parents about $150 an hour to counsel them.

In her testimony last week, the alleged victim testified she objected to the sect’s stringent dress code, which required thicker tights than she cared to wear.

When he first counseled the teen who brought the charges against him, “She was very quiet, looking down, closed in,” Weberman said. She slowly opened up, he added, discussing religious questions and problems she had at school and her home.

“At the beginning, we spoke a lot and I spent a lot of time with her to understand what bothers her,” he said. Weberman acknowledged the sessions cost her parents tens of thousands of dollars.

He was asked by his lawyer about the aim of the counseling sessions.

“To save her life,” Weberman replied.

Satmar Mobilizes other Chassidic Rabbanim to release the Monster Sexual Preditor Weberman!

UPDATE: Rav Schechter withdrew his signature and support to have Weberman released!

I reported on this trial way back in 2012, and when I say "reported" I mean I attended this trial everyday! I went with an open mind to give Weberman the benefit of the doubt! 

But about three days into the trial as I was sitting out in the lobby because the Judge called for a recess, a married Chassidishe lady with a hat on top of her wig went over to Mrs Weberman lifted her sweater and showed all those in the lobby that were supporting this monster, cigarette burn scars all over her stomach, she screamed at his wife in Yiddish and said that there are at least another 20 victims like her, and she will come every day to see justice being served! 

It must have taken her such courage to abandon tznees to prove that this was a monster that needs to be locked up! I need to add that Weberman could have walked with no jail time, all the victims wanted was an apology but they wanted a detailed apology that would prove that these girls, now married women were telling the truth! But because he was the arrogant monster that he is he couldn't bring himself to humiliate himself! 

רשעים אפילו על פתחו של גיהנם אינם חוזרין בתשובה

Satmar ASS"kanim  in New York appealed to the governor for the release of a Hasidic community counselor imprisoned for sexual abuse, arguing that his sentence was disproportionate, according to court documents that surfaced this month.

Nechemya Weberman, 67, an unlicensed religious "counselor" in the Satmar Hasidic movement, was sentenced to 103 years in prison in 2013, in a major case for the New York Jewish community.

He was convicted of 59 counts, including sustained sexual abuse of a child, endangering the welfare of a child and sexual abuse.

NEW YORK — Jewish leaders in New York appealed to the governor for the release of a Hasidic community counselor imprisoned for sexual abuse, arguing that his sentence was disproportionate, according to court documents that surfaced this month.

Nechemya Weberman, 67, an unlicensed religious counselor in the Satmar Hasidic movement, was sentenced to 103 years in prison in 2013, in a major case for the New York Jewish community.

He was convicted of 59 counts, including sustained sexual abuse of a child, endangering the welfare of a child and sexual abuse.

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Weberman’s sentence was reduced to 50 years later in 2013. He is incarcerated in the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in upstate New York.

The case resurfaced this month when Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez backed a move to issue a new sentence for Weberman. Weberman is scheduled to appear in court next month.

As the case reemerged, court filings obtained by The Times of Israel showed that last December, an array of Jewish leaders signed a letter to New York Governor Kathy Hochul seeking a commutation for Weberman’s immediate release. The previously unreported letter was submitted to the court as a reference for resentencing in June, along with other letters of support from Weberman’s family and supporters.

The letter called Weberman’s sentence “absorbently excessive,” saying he had not incurred any infractions during his 12 years in prison and that his sentence was “much greater by comparison to others held guilty of a similar crime.”

“While we strongly condemn the nature of this crime, we do believe Mr. Weberman’s excessive sentence was placed upon him to set an example to the Orthodox Jewish community,” the letter said. “Using him because he is an Orthodox Jew as a scapegoat is unjust.”

The letter was signed by 13 prominent rabbis representing an array of Hasidic groups in New York City and a representative of Yeshiva University. The university did not reply to a request for comment.

The letter said that, due to Weberman’s health problems, his imprisonment amounts to a life sentence. A doctor also submitted a letter attesting to Weberman’s “deteriorating health.”

The New York State constitution grants the governor the ability to commute prison sentences.

Gonzalez also asked then-governor Andrew Cuomo to consider a commutation of Weberman’s sentence in 2021, saying Weberman had been “singled out for an unusually harsh punishment,” according to court filings.

Cuomo and Hochul did not publicly respond to the requests.

The Brooklyn district attorney’s office said on Tuesday, “This was a horrific case, but fairness compels us to look critically at sentences like this one that fall wildly outside the range for other defendants convicted of the same crimes.”

“Our office stands by this conviction and strongly believes that a long prison term was appropriate, but this sentence — four times longer than anyone convicted of the same crime — intended to make an example of the defendant in a politically charged moment,” a spokesperson said, confirming that the office had consented to the resentencing proceeding.

Weberman was imprisoned for repeatedly abusing an adolescent girl who was sent to him for counseling for several years.

The victim’s husband told The City this week that he and the victim had been blindsided by Gonzalez’s support for the resentencing, opposed the move, and planned to speak to the judge because they believe Weberman is still dangerous.