A convicted level one sex offender was among the parents of public school children who tried to stop haredim from trespassing on school grounds last Tuesday.
Keith Meyers is a low-level sex offender who pleaded guilty in 1999 to a misdemeanor count of trying to posses a video of a child under 16-years-of age engaged in a sex act.
He's also a parent who has a child in East Ramapo's schools, specifically the school whose grounds were illegally used by haredim as a shortcut to and from synagogue on Sukkot.
The school's principal tried to keep the haredim off school grounds on the first day of Sukkot, but for the most part, haredim refused to listen to her and kept right on cutting through.
So on the second day of the holiday, a group of parents who have children in the school, including Meyers, came to help her.
A level one sex offender usually has no restrictions of movement and can go on school grounds as the administration allows.
Meyers told the Journal News in an interview for the article it published on the confrontations between the trespassing haredim on one hand and the parents and principal on the other that he was a level one registered sex offender. But the Journal News did not print that fact – until haredim who had recognized Meyers from a picture and video posted with that article made a stink.
But as usual, haredim used the discovery of Meyers' past for their own purposes – not to protect children. And that starts with how the haredi spinmeister behind the move represented himself to the Journal News for their article admitting their mistake in not properly identifying Meyers in its previous article:
…Joseph Gestetner, a Spring Valley man who writes in the local community and maintains a popular blog, questioned the motives of the parents who patrolled the school and confronted the men and women while they were observing the religious festival.“There’s a saying in the Talmud that somebody who has failure tends to project that failure on to other people,” said Gestetner, who has a child in an East Ramapo private school.
“Being that he was the guy over there rushing over to people on a Tuesday afternoon in the rain with nothing else on his mind other than wondering if there’s an Orthodox pedophile running around, you have to look at your own books. We did and this is what we found,” he said.
Joseph Gestetner is Yossi Gestetner, a haredi PR flack and political sleazeball who has made a career of defending sex offenders and lying about the nature of his employment.
Past that, Meyers was discovered because he was registered, and because the group of parents – including Meyers – told the JN that one of their fears was that a pedophile could walk through the school's grounds and prey on a child, claiming there were 20 registered pedophiles with two miles of the school. Readers looked to see if the number claimed was correct, and to see who they are. One of them was Meyers. Finding Meyers had nothing to do with following some religious principle.
The point of keeping trespassers off school grounds is to keep people who could harm children away from children.
Not every trespasser is a pedophile but if trespassing isn't stopped, many pedophiles will be trespassers.
Meyers – who was with a group of parents – shouldn't be allowed on school grounds, except perhaps under very controlled and limited circumstances.
Failure to control his presence is a failure of the school administration – including the school board, which should have had a policy in place to govern a situation like this.
But that failure in no way excuses what haredim did or the lies Yossi Gestetner tells.
Gestetner isn't bright enough to understand that. Neither are his rabbis.
And that's why police have to enforce the existing laws against trespassing on school grounds.
Of course, this is East Ramapo, and very little that goes on there isn't corrupted by the craven and corrupt haredi community that has bloc voted its way into destroying one of the prettiest places to live in New York State.