Nearly two years after his arrest in Beverly Hills on sexual abuse charges, Mendel Tevel was sentenced on June 8 in a Brooklyn court to one year in prison.
Mendel Tevel, who was arrested in Beverly Hills in Oct. 2013 and then extradited to Brooklyn on charges of sexual abuse stemming from an Apr. 2007 incident, pleaded guilty in a New York courtroom before Judge Elizabeth Foley on Apr. 24 to two counts of criminal sexual acts in the third degree. He faces up to four years in prison.
On Thursday afternoon, Oct. 31, Mendel Tevel appeared in a Los Angeles Superior Court for the first time since his arrest two days earlier by Beverly Hills police acting on a warrant issued by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office. Tevel, a rabbi and youth worker, is accused of 11 counts of alleged sexual abuse in New York.
Allegations of child sex abuse, rampant in Melbourne’s Jewish community, have spread to Sydney, with police mounting investigations into two individuals.
The launch of a commission to investigate child sex abuse was welcomed by the principal of an Australian Jewish school whose students allegedly were victimized. Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Monday that the royal commission — or public inquiry — would look into children under the care of religious organizations and focus on the response of the institutions to the alleged sex abuse cases. She called child sex abuse \”vile and evil.\”
Former Pennsylvania State University President Graham Spanier was charged with perjury and obstruction as part of a \”conspiracy of silence\” in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal, Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly said on Thursday.
The Orthodox Jewish school in Melbourne embroiled in a child sex abuse scandal apologized \”unreservedly\” to the victims.
Four haredi Orthodox men in Brooklyn were charged with attempting to intimidate and bribe an alleged sexual abuse victim and her boyfriend in a criminal case against a local counselor.
Producer Scott Rosenfelt, whose credits include “Home Alone” and ”Mystic Pizza,” is threatening a major Jewish film festival after its director raised concerns that Rosenfelt\’s documentary about sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community amounts to a “witch hunt.”
The Brooklyn District Attorney\’s Office says it has charged 89 men in the borough\’s haredi Orthodox communities with child sex abuse — a threefold increase over a two-year span.
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