Conviction Jewish institutions and contexts Hasidic and Haredi communities Lackawaxen Township, Pike County, Pennsylvania, USA · 2015

United States: Chabad rabbi Aryeh Goodman sentenced for indecently assaulting a 12-year-old boy at a Chabad summer camp

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Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

Chabad rabbi serving as a counselor at Camp Menachem

Organization

Camp Menachem, Lackawaxen Township, Pennsylvania (Chabad-Lubavitch)

Archive classification

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

The victim was a child at a Chabad-run religious summer camp; the defendant's authority as the camp's rabbi and counselor was what put him in unsupervised charge of the boy.

Pastoral or clerical authority
Institutional obedience or isolation

Scope decision

Goodman was separately charged in 2018 in New Jersey with federal child-sex-trafficking offenses arising from a different, later period as executive director of a Chabad center in East Brunswick, NJ; that matter is a distinct proceeding and is not the basis of this record, which rests solely on the Pennsylvania conviction for the 2001 camp abuse. Appellate position not yet established. This record documents a 2015 guilty plea in the Court of Common Pleas, Pike County, Pennsylvania. A separate federal prosecution of the same person exists in the District of New Jersey (No. 3:19-cr-00265, terminated 28 August 2019), and a subsequent habeas petition under 28 U.S.C. §2241, Goodman v. Ortiz (D.N.J. No. 1:20-cv-07582); neither is an appeal against the Pennsylvania conviction recorded here, and neither is treated as its appellate history. The Pennsylvania appellate record has not been searched.

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2015-10-01 · guilty plea and sentence

Court of Common Pleas, Pike County, Pennsylvania, USA. Rabbi Aryeh Goodman pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent assault of a person under 13 years of age, arising from incidents during the summer of 2001 when he was a counselor at Camp Menachem, a Chabad facility, and the victim was a 12-year-old boy. He was extradited from New Jersey in January 2013 to face the Pennsylvania charges. In October 2015 he was sentenced in Pike County to 11 to 23 months in prison, required to complete sex-offender counseling, and barred from contact with the victim or his family.

Documented coercion mechanisms

rabbinic and counselor authority over a child at a religious summer camp

Cited record

Sources

jewish wire service court reporting background and sentencing report 'N.J. Rabbi Again Faces Sex Charges', Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2018.: JTA report recapping Goodman's 2013 extradition to Pennsylvania, his guilty plea to indecent assault of a child under 13, and his October 2015 sentence of 11 to 23 months, in the course of reporting his later 2018 New Jersey charges.

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://www.jta.org/2018/02/20/ny/n-j-rabbi-again-faces-sex-charges Corpus classification: jewish-wire-service-court-reporting; evidentiary role: background-and-sentencing-report. SHA-256 a8c1dad8d3290cccf265d7aec2c17ca8a344f29305c17a11204bfddee1462456
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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