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(JTA) – A Cleveland-area rabbi was sentenced to 6 months in jail on Monday for soliciting underage intercourse, capping a tragic and surprising saga for the realm’s Jewish neighborhood.
Amongst those that testified on Stephen Weiss’ behalf in a bid for leniency was a outstanding rabbi within the Conservative motion.
Weiss, previously senior rabbi at B’nai Jeshurun Congregation in Pepper Pike, was sentenced for the crimes of tried illegal sexual conduct with a minor and possessing felony instruments. He had been arrested and charged after a sting operation final April and pleaded responsible to the 2 felony costs in January. Weiss, 61, will probably be required to register as a intercourse offender for 25 years.
Showing as a personality witness for Weiss at his sentencing listening to was Rabbi William Lebeau, a former dean of the rabbinical faculty and former vice chancellor on the Jewish Theological Seminary. Lebeau presently serves as a senior marketing consultant for rabbinic and institutional management with the Rabbinical Meeting, the skilled affiliation for Conservative rabbis.
“I first met Rabbi Weiss when he was a rabbinical pupil and I’ve maintained a detailed relationship with him to today. I’ve come from New York Metropolis this morning as a result of I needed to share with you in court docket my experiences with Rabbi Weiss over the greater than three a long time that I’ve identified him,” Lebeau stated as he opened a three-minute assertion on Weiss’ behalf, in accordance with a recording of the listening to.
In the remainder of the assertion, he described “the Rabbi Weiss that I do know” as “beloved by his classmates and revered by his lecturers,” “particularly admired for his qualities of kindness and sensitivity,” “his inspirational educating of youngsters and adults” and his assist for congregants experiencing hassle.
Lebeau famous that Weiss felt regret and had sought skilled assist in the wake of his arrest.
“Considerably, over greater than 30 years as a rabbi there was nothing near a grievance about his rabbinic service or his private conduct,” Lebeau stated. “There was nothing that might have predicted this aberrant second in his life. I respectfully ask you your honor to contemplate the case of Rabbi Weiss within the context of the lifetime of devotion to his household and to his neighborhood that he lived previous to this tragic occasion.”
Weiss had already pleaded responsible to the crimes; Lebeau and Weiss’ daughter appeared as character witnesses as a part of his legal professional’s effort to safe a extra lenient sentence. Weiss’ authorized workforce had argued that his 2022 solicitation of an undercover police officer posing as an underaged boy was an aberration in Weiss’s three a long time of rabbinical actions. His lawyer additionally cited a 2018 mind damage as a related consider his habits.
Some in the neighborhood questioned the choice of Lebeau, a broadly admired mentor within the Conservative motion, to testify on Weiss’ behalf.
“I’ve an excessive amount of respect for Rabbi Lebeau. He’s a vital individual within the motion,” Rabbi Noah Bickart, an endowed professor of Jewish research at John Carroll College in Cleveland, advised the Jewish Telegraphic Company. Bickart had been a pupil at JTS when Lebeau was its dean.
However, Bickart stated, “Selecting to assist and defend Rabbi Weiss right here, versus the neighborhood that was victimized or probably victimized, was the improper resolution to make.”
In an e mail to JTA, Lebeau stated, “I selected to make a private assertion referring to the Stephen Weiss I’ve identified for 35 years and the qualities that outlined him, as I stated within the courtroom, ‘previous to this tragic occasion.’”
The Rabbinical Meeting, with which Lebeau is presently related, had harshly condemned Weiss’ alleged habits upon his preliminary arrest in April 2022 and suspended his membership, making him ineligible to use for jobs or take part in different actions.
“These deeply disturbing accusations betray the sacred belief our communities put of their clergy and have to be absolutely and instantly investigated and handled appropriately,” the group stated in a joint assertion with the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism on the time.
The Rabbinical Meeting started publicizing an inventory of suspended and expelled rabbis in 2021, amid a widespread reckoning over whether or not Jewish organizations had inappropriately obscured misconduct by rabbis and different leaders.
“Rabbi Lebeau’s testimony was not on behalf of the Rabbinical Meeting,” a Rabbinical Meeting spokesperson stated in an announcement this week, which famous that the group is now within the means of expelling Weiss completely. “And his testimony didn’t search to justify nor excuse the habits for which Steven Weiss was convicted.”
Lebeau had beforehand defended a special rabbi accused of inappropriate habits in the direction of kids. In 2014, in accordance with the Ahead, he had supported a rabbi in Savannah, Georgia, who had given a lesson to a category of 9-year-olds about youngster intercourse trafficking crammed with specific language, alarming many mother and father.
Again then, Lebeau advised the Ahead the accused rabbi was “one of many kindest, most delicate, caring folks amongst all the scholars I met,” and expressed specific concern in regards to the injury the incident might do to the rabbi’s popularity, saying, “It is a man’s life and a person’s popularity.” No crime was ever alleged to have taken place with the rabbi in Savannah.
Bickart stated he was unfamiliar with the Savannah case however had a idea about why Lebeau spoke on behalf of the rabbis in each instances.
“I feel Rabbi Lebeau actually simply desires to defend rabbis,” he stated. “My sense is that Rabbi Lebeau might be the go-to individual to be a personality witness for anyone.”
Nonetheless, Bickart stated, he discovered the selection to testify on Weiss’ behalf significant.
“As someone who’s a guardian of a boy exactly the identical age as the fictional sufferer on this case, it’s exhausting for me to see an necessary rabbinic mentor seemingly take extra significantly the issues of a convicted intercourse offender than of the neighborhood,” Bickart stated.
Prosecutors for Ohio’s process drive on web crimes towards kids disputed the arguments of Lebeau and Weiss’ legal professional that Weiss’ conduct was a quick irregularity, saying that he had proven proof of premeditated motion. Weiss had beforehand despatched specific messages to an undercover officer posing as an underaged boy in 2020, and waited for hours as a way to separate his goal from his mother and father in 2022, when he was arrested.
B’nai Jeshurun, the place Weiss had served since 2001, suspended the rabbi instantly upon his arrest in 2022, and he resigned days later. The congregation had decided in its personal investigation that Weiss had not engaged in any unlawful or illicit exercise on the congregation itself. After Weiss’ sentencing was introduced, the congregation’s president and senior rabbi emailed congregants to supply counseling companies.
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