Protecting the Child Molesters: Hasidic Edition

The New York Times ran a two-part story last week about how child molesters are protected by the Hasidic community, to the point that those Hasidim who go to the police to report child molesters are shunned and threatened. The second part of the series was about how the Brooklyn D.A. is on board with all of that.

An influential rabbi came last summer to the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, with a message: his ultra-Orthodox advocacy group was instructing adherent Jews that they could report allegations of child sexual abuse to district attorneys or the police only if a rabbi first determined that the suspicions were credible.

The pronouncement was a blunt challenge to Mr. Hynes’s authority. But the district attorney “expressed no opposition or objection,” the rabbi, Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, recalled.

Hynes went so far as to shield the names of Hasidic defendants who were prosecuted and convicted, a courtesy that is pretty much unheard of. Justice may not exactly be for sale in the Borough of Brooklyn (aka Kings County), but it certainly can be purchased with a decent voting bloc.

Bernie Law must be sick with jealousy.