Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Conviction Jewish institutions and contexts Other Jewish institution or hearing Brooklyn, New York, USA · 2009

United States: bar-mitzvah tutor convicted of abusing two boys under his religious instruction

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

bar-mitzvah tutor and licensed social worker in the Flatbush Orthodox community

Organization

No organization assigned

Spiritual nexus

Bar-mitzvah tutoring is religious instruction: boys were alone with a man whose role in their religious coming-of-age gave him standing no ordinary tutor would have.

  • Guru or spiritual-teacher authority

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 2009-01-01 · conviction and sentence

    Kings County Supreme Court, New York, USA. Yona Weinberg, a Flatbush bar-mitzvah tutor and social worker, was convicted in 2009 on multiple counts of second-degree sexual abuse and child endangerment against two boys under fourteen whom he tutored, serving thirteen months and registering as a Level 3 offender. In 2014, when police came to arrest him on a new complaint involving an eleven-year-old at a Brooklyn synagogue, he had already fled to Israel; that later charge is unadjudicated and is not asserted here.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • one-on-one religious instruction of boys preparing for bar mitzvah
  • abuse in synagogue settings

Primary record

Sources

national newspaper court reporting conviction history report The Forward: 'What happens to sex offenders who run to Israel?'.

Documents the 2009 conviction, sentence, offender level and flight.

national news agency conviction history report JTA, 28 Mar. 2018.

Corroborates the conviction in later legal coverage.

Related record

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