This week, a Brooklyn yeshiva leader was arrested and accused of sexually abusing at least three teenage boys. Rabbi Yoel Malik, 33, a former teacher and part owner of the now-closed Ohr Hameir school in Borough Park that the victims attended, is alleged to have sexually assaulted most of the boys at different times at a Brooklyn motel. But Malik told investigators that the teens, all between 13-16, tried to seduce him: one police source told the News his comments “were self-serving. In other words, they were coming on to him.”
Prosecutors said that in addition to rubbing each teen's genitalia, Malik forced two victims to perform oral sex on him at the motel, and forced the third one to do so in a car. Police added that no charges have been filed concerning a fourth victim, who he also allegedly raped in the motel, and who is currently in Israel. Prosecutors said all four incidents occurred within the last year. Sources told NBC that "Malik admitted to detectives that he had encounters with the boys, but denied having sex with them or giving them alcohol and cigarettes."
He has been charged with 12 counts of sexual abuse, four counts of criminal sexual act, 11 counts of endangering the welfare of a child and one count of forcible touching. Many family and friends in the community have come to his support: his wife Rachel told the News: “This is vicious gossip...He’s a good man. I don’t know what to say. I hope it’s not true.”
“This is a frame-up,” said his 64-year-old mother, Miriam Malik. “This is an extortion plot. My son has a heart of gold. He’s a wonderful father.” Misri Toba, one of his Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbors, said her husband was friendly with Malik: “He’s a fine man,” said Toba. “I don’t believe it’s true.”
Yoel Indig, 22, who said he had been a student of Rabbi Malik’s at the school, told the Times that he believed the whole thing was an extortion plot: “Whoever knows this guy knows it doesn’t make sense for him to do this,” Indig said. “He helped lot of people... There was a guy that tried to take money from Mr. Malik. He tried to threaten him with an arrest: ‘If you are not going to give me $25,000, I will make a case and get you arrested.’ ”
Before it shuttered, Ohr Hameir was known as a school for troubled Hasidic teens who have been kicked out of mainstream religious schools. Another former teacher at Ohr Hameir, Moshe Pinter, was arrested and charged with trying to molest a 13-year old boy in 2007. Pinter started working there AFTER he had been arrested, chaperoning Hasidic teens on weekend getaways while parents had no idea of his criminal past.
This case comes less than a month after ultra-Orthodox leader Nechemya Weberman was sentenced to 103 years in jail after being convicted by a Brooklyn jury of 59 counts of sexually abusing a teenage girl.
