July 28, 2009

Attorneys for several rabbis facing money-laundering charges in the widespread New Jersey corruption case are insisting their clients are innocent victims of manipulation by Solomon Dwek, a real estate developer looking to minimize his own legal problems by assisting investigators.

Their comments pit prominent leaders of the Syrian-Jewish communities of Brooklyn and Deal against the son of another community leader in a case that has brought intense and unwanted scrutiny on a group that values its traditions and tight communal bonds.

Dwek, who was charged but never tried in 2006 with scheming to defraud PNC Bank of $50 million, is the son of Rabbi Isaac Dwek, who founded the Deal Yeshiva and heads the Synagogue of Deal.

Although federal officials have declined to identify the younger Dwek by name, he is widely believed to be the government’s “cooperating witness” in the crackdown on corruption and money laundering that netted prominent New Jersey mayors, state legislators and other politicos in addition to at least five rabbis and numerous associates.

Authorities said they uncovered a network that laundered “at least tens of millions of dollars through charitable, nonprofit entities” and operated between Brooklyn, Israel and the Syrian-Jewish enclaves.

Most of 44 individuals arrested in the July 23 roundup were public officials, including the mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus, and Ridgefield, state Assembly members, and City Council members from various parts of New Jersey.

They face corruption charges unrelated to the arrests in the Jewish communities—but in most cases linked by their alleged association with Dwek, who offered bribes and recorded damaging conversations in his role as government mole.

Acting U.S. Attorney Ralph Marra Jr. announced the arrests at a crowded news conference with more than 100 media outlets in attendance.

Among the rabbis placed in custody and now released on bail are Eliahu Ben Haim of Long Branch, the principal rabbi of Ohel Yaacob Synagogue in Deal; Saul Kassin of Congregation Zion synagogue in Brooklyn, who is considered the chief rabbi of the Syrian-Jewish community; Rabbi Edmund Nahum of Deal; and Mordechai Fish, a rabbi at Congregation Sheves Achim in Brooklyn.

Ben Haim, Kassin, Nahum and Fish each were charged with laundering proceeds derived from criminal activity, as was Fish’s brother, Rabbi Lavel Schwartz of Brooklyn.

According to the criminal complaints, the rabbis laundered approximately $3 million between June 2007 and this July on behalf of Dwek.

Marra called the corruption “widespread and pervasive.”

But in conversations with The New Jersey Jewish News after the rabbis were released on bond, several attorneys insisted their clients were not guilty.

“Rabbi Nahum was not involved in any illicit activity as described,” said his counsel, Justin Walder.

Walder is also representing the mayor of Hoboken, Peter Cammarano III, who is facing bribery charges unrelated to the money laundering.

The lawyer wasted no time in attacking Dwek’s motive of allegedly coercing federal investigation targets in the Syrian-Jewish community into wrongdoing.

“It is apparent from what we have seen that the rabbi was taken advantage of by a man he has known for a very long time,” Walder said. “We intend to establish [that] the basic decency and goodness of Rabbi Nahum was utilized by a person seeking to be absolved for his substantial wrongful conduct by implicating others.”

Michael Bachner, a Manhattan attorney representing Fish, took a similar stance in attacking Dwek’s actions.

“Rabbi Fish was duped and manipulated by Mr. Dwek into business transactions which Rabbi Fish believed were wholly legitimate,” Bachner said. “Dwek used the sterling reputation of his own family to assure Rabbi Fish that the transactions were legitimate.”

“Rabbi Kassin asserts his innocence,” said Kassin’s attorney, Robert Stahl, in an interview with Bloomberg.com.

The 87-year-old Kassin is accused of trafficking in counterfeit Prada and Gucci handbags as well as money laundering.

“It’s a shame that he’s caught up in some misunderstanding,” said Stahl. “Despite his difficult circumstances, he remains confident that the system of justice will prevail.”

Attorneys for other defendants could not be reached by press time.

Federal prosecutors are alleging that Ben Haim received checks that ranged in value “from tens of thousands dollars up to $160,000,” made payable to a charity associated with his synagogue in Deal.

The Monmouth County beachfront community is a summertime destination for many members of Brooklyn’s 75,000-strong Syrian-Jewish community who own homes there.

Marra said the cooperating witness “was able to pick up the cash and bring it back to Rabbi Ben Haim. Rabbi Ben Haim would give him back approximately 90 percent of the face value of the bank check.”

According to the complaint, the checks came to Ben Haim from an unnamed business associate in Israel, “who he had worked with for years.”

“The rings were international in scope, connected to Brooklyn, Deal, Israel and Switzerland,” said Marra. “They trafficked in cleaning dirty money from all over the world.”

The complaint said another Israeli who is under arrest, Levi Deutsch, “was a high-level source of cash from overseas.”

Other “similar circles of money launderers” operated separately in Brooklyn and Deal “but occasionally co-mingled activities and participants,” the prosecutor said.

“In most cases the rings were led by rabbis who used charitable, nonprofit entities connected to their synagogues to ‘wash’ money they understood came from illegal activities,” said a press release issued by Marra’s office.

According to Marra, prosecutors have airtight evidence, including audio and video recordings of their witness soliciting and receiving bribes.

Attorneys for the rabbis are already preparing strategies to discredit those recordings.

“Conversations in which one party knows he or she is recording another person can be very much the subject of interpretation,” said Walder. “People doing this to benefit themselves sometimes have an agenda and may be feeding and making statements to the individual that can be ambiguous and misinterpreted. There is a whole area of forensic analysis which well documents the ability of a person knowingly recording an unsuspecting person to manipulate the discussion.”

“All I can say is Rabbi Fish is grateful that the transactions are taped. This ensures accuracy and prevents Dwek from continuing to fabricate,” said Bachner. “We are confident that once the entire relationship is understood and the tapes are explained in context, a jury will conclude that Dwek manipulated a man who loved and trusted Dwek’s family.”

Law enforcement officials were careful to deflect charges of bias.

“The fact that we arrested a number of rabbis this morning does not make this a religiously motivated case. Nor does the fact that we arrested political officials make this a politically motivated case,” said Waysan Dun, the special agent in charge of Newark’s FBI office. “It is about a shocking betrayal of the public trust.”

“Of course it is not religious-related,” Marra said after the news conference. “It is a group of criminals hiding behind a facade of being religious leaders in order to commit crimes.”

In a separate complaint that grew out of the probe, federal officials are charging a Brooklyn man, Levy Itzak Rosenbaum, with trafficking in the sale of human kidneys.

“He would pay people desperate for money $10,000 to donate a kidney, then charge recipients $160,000 for the kidney,” Marra charged. The complaint said Rosenbaum has been brokering kidneys for the past 10 years.

An unwritten commandment permeates many parts of American-Jewish society: “It shouldn’t be a shande for the goyim.”

That fear—that the bad acts of a few Jews may bring great shame to their people’s reputation in the eyes of the broader gentile world—is embedded in fears and realities of persecution that have lingered for centuries.

Since the July 23 arrests of 14 Orthodox Jews on money-laundering charges, and a 15th accused of illegally buying and selling kidneys, the word shande—Yiddish for “shame”—has echoed in countless Jewish conversations.

So, too, have fears of anti-Semitism, calls for serious introspection, concerns about media coverage and even some suggestions that the insularity of the Syrian Jewish community may have contributed to the alleged lawbreaking.

“It looks terrible to the outside world, but I am more concerned with the Jewish world,” said Mark Charendoff, president of the Jewish Funders Network. “My late father used to say, ‘The anti-Semites don’t need our help to be anti-Semitic.’ ”

Shortly after news of the arrests broke, Charendoff wrote an op-ed for The New York Jewish Week urging community leaders to examine whether “something” in the Orthodox world creates “fertile ground” for corruption.

“For me, as an Orthodox Jew, Orthodoxy is supposed to stand for something—a system that creates higher levels of moral conduct and better communities,” Charendoff said. “Here we are not just seeing Orthodox Jews, but some Orthodox Jewish leaders. That is extraordinarily disturbing.

“Whenever someone dons the mantle of leadership, it comes with enormous responsibility and influence. One can use that influence for good or for ill.”

In the wake of the arrests, some commentators are suggesting the tight bonds of religious observance can sometimes lead to an us-and-them view of the outside world.

In an interview with Time magazine, the American-born Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi spoke this week of a “kind of borderless community that in its best expressions maintains international charity efforts that are second to none. But the dark side of this is a mentality that often too easily slides into rationalizations for acts that cannot be rationalized, with the idea that the end justifies the means.”

Azriel Fellner, a Conservative rabbi who was raised in a Modern Orthodox home and educated at an Orthodox yeshiva, blames the “insularity” of groups like the 75,000-strong Syrian-Jewish community.

Such insularity “is part of the fundamental reason they think they can do things like that,” said Fellner, the former religious leader at Temple Beth Shalom in Livingston, N.J.

“They don’t think they can be judged by anybody else,” he said. “They also feel self-righteous about everything they do—that somehow they’ve got the key to true Jewish belief and true Jewish law and anyone who deviates from that—even other Orthodox groups—do not match up to who they are. They feel not only insular but also protected against other people’s judgments, and that is dangerous stuff.”

A spokesman for the fervently Orthodox group Agudath Israel of America says such analyses ignore the positive sides of tightly knit Orthodox communities.

“One of the premises of the haredi community is that it can be stronger and more effective by being insular and protecting our families and children from the influences of the outside world,” Rabbi Avi Shafran, Agudah’s director of public affairs, said in an e-mail interview. “There is something to be said for that, but on the other hand, the result of that is you are not challenged by outside thinking and the norms of the broader community.”

In recent weeks, Shafran says he has been pained by reports of haredim rioting in Jerusalem in protest of various rulings by Israel’s secular authorities, and now by accusations of wrongdoing by American rabbis.

“There is no question that the recent reports create a sense of shame in us all. But at the same time, we are enjoined by Jewish tradition to not assume guilt on the basis of accusations,” said Shafran, referring to the corruption probe.

The accusations against fellow religious Jews “reflect negatively on us as divine signals that something is in fact amiss in our lives,” he said. “When we all are living as we should be, we believe, such things cannot happen.”

Adrienne Asch, director of the Center for Ethics at Yeshiva University, said Jewish communities must confront an ethos that seeks to protect wrongdoers from outside scrutiny.

“It is time for Jews to face the fact that there are criminals among them, just as there are criminals everywhere else,” she said. “We should not be protecting criminals for fear of persecution. We should be speaking out for what is fair and just.”

At the same time, Jews must be confident enough to treat wrongdoing as the issue, as opposed to what the “outside world” thinks.

“Jews are powerful people,” Asch said. “We have got to stop acting as if every terrible thing someone does is a public relations nightmare for Jews, as if we are all about to be persecuted if one person does a bad thing.”

But the potential for persecution is on the mind of Etzion Neuer, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s New Jersey region.

“It is predictable that anti-Semites will come out on the Internet. This case was no exception,” he said. “Unfortunately, issues such as this are fodder for professional anti-Semites.”

While the Jewish community is “not immune” from criminal behavior, Neuer said, he found especially troubling “the visual of a haredi man with long beard and a black yarmulke in handcuffs under arrest. It will be salacious for many anti-Semites, and we have to be vigilant about the way the media convey this message.”

Shafran viewed the media coverage through a different lens.

“The fact that among the arrested in such a major operation were not only visibly Jewish Jews but rabbis was not one any of us could reasonably expect the media to ignore,” he wrote in the e-mail. “It does us no benefit to blame the media here.”

Of special concern to Asch, a bioethicist, were the charges against Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who is accused of buying kidneys from poor people for $10,000 apiece, then reselling them to the desperately ill for as much as $160,000.

“What he is charged with is trying to buy and sell organs with desperate people,” Asch said. “The important word is ‘desperate.’ Why should people make money by losing parts of their bodies? They compromise their health.

“Why are people buying organs? Because there is not an adequate supply,” she said. “It is very disturbing.”