Conviction Jewish institutions and contexts Other Jewish institution or hearing Brooklyn, New York, USA · 2012

United States: yeshiva rebbe's misdemeanor plea — and the $2.1 million settlement his yeshiva paid

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Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

longtime elementary rebbe at Yeshiva Torah Temimah

Organization

Yeshiva Torah Temimah, Kensington, Brooklyn

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

Six-year-olds under their rebbe. The record's weight sits in the gap it documents: a core-nexus case reduced to misdemeanors by communal pressure, with the institution's own seven-figure settlement standing as the fuller account.

Guru or spiritual-teacher authority
Institutional obedience or isolation

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2012-01-01 · misdemeanor guilty plea; civil settlement by the yeshiva

Kings County, New York, USA. Joel (Yehuda) Kolko, a rebbe at Yeshiva Torah Temimah for decades, pleaded guilty in 2012 to two misdemeanor counts of child endangerment — no jail, three years' probation, no sex-offender registration — after felony sexual-abuse charges collapsed amid documented community pressure on the victims' families. In 2014 the yeshiva agreed to pay $2.1 million to two former students abused at age six, a settlement that surfaced when the school failed to pay and was sued.

Documented coercion mechanisms

rebbe's authority over six-year-old students
documented communal pressure on victims' families that collapsed the felony case

Cited record

Sources

national newspaper court reporting civil settlement report The Forward: 'In a first, a Brooklyn yeshiva agrees to $2.1 million child sex abuse settlement'.: Documents the settlement and the criminal disposition.
national news agency case history report JTA: 'No sex charge for Kolko boy's parents — foiled by DA'.: Documents the pressure dynamics around the prosecution.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://forward.com/fast-forward/352583/in-a-first-a-brooklyn-yeshiva-agrees-to-21-million-child-sex-abuse-settleme/ Corpus classification: national-newspaper-court-reporting; evidentiary role: civil-settlement-report. SHA-256 84e8719bbb2293ddbe01e6294c3e677da86be01e32bc38cf8ab8c2411627f40b
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
Source and tier basis: https://www.jta.org/2008/04/18/ny/no-sex-charge-for-kolko-boys-parents-foiled-by-da-2 Corpus classification: national-news-agency; evidentiary role: case-history-report. SHA-256 45ee3a54d7265f3c806dc51f12c752ee95c11ddcc3819799d5a2be1c8d5e4c60
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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