David Kramer, a convicted pedophile who was extradited from the US to Australia last year to face charges of sexually abusing children at Chabad's Yeshivah College in Melbourne, has allegedly been offered a bribe by prominent Chabad members. They want Kramer to plead guilty so he isn't put on the witness stand and forced to tell an open court about Chabad's alleged role in helping him flee looming criminal charges in Australia.
David Kramer, mug shot 2012
A source in Melbourne tells me that two leading members of the Chabad Yeshivah Centre community there have been visiting pedophile David Kramer in prison. They allegedly promised Kramer significant financial inducements to plead guilty to charges against him in order to keep Kramer – and several Chabad leaders – off the witness stand at trial.
What Kramer, who was helped to flee Australia by Chabad’s now-late-Australian-leader Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner, allegedly has a lot of incriminating evidence against Groner and Chabad that would certainly come to light in a trial.
This type of witness tampering is not new for Chabad.
When Pinchos Lew, the son and nephew of prominent Chabad emissaries, was arrested along with a co-conspirator for armed robber and attempted murder after he and his friend went on a robbery spree after finishing work on a late Friday afternoon at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa.
The pair drove on Shabbat and committed robberies in nearby towns, and Lew’s partner shot a woman working in a convenience store as Lew waited in the getaway car outside.
Chabad emissaries Rabbi Moshe Feller (Lew’s uncle) and Rabbi Gershon Grossbaum were overheard by a prison guard as they spoke Yiddish to promised Lew’s partner, promising him money, a job, a guaranteed place to live and new motorcycle if he would testify that Lew did not know the robberies were taking place and that Lew did not know about them or about the shooting until the pair were arrested. The guard spoke German and understood most of what was said, and told Stephen Bloom about it. Bloom reports it in his 2000 book Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America.
Bloom also reports a conversation he had with Lew’s partner, who admitted the crimes were Lew’s idea,and the guns were Lew’s guns. Lew’s partner says that Lew still had a chance to make something out of his life even though the partner’s life was ruined. So he decided not to tell the whole truth to police and prosecutors in order to save Lew, and in return he was being taken care of by unnamed people who promised to provide for him when he gets out of prison. He got a 50-year-sentence.
Lew got a slap on the wrist and served his sentence at Chabad’s Rabbinical College of America in Morristown, New Jersey in a program for criminal offenders that did not actually exist. It was invented by Chabad (apparently with the help of its prison missionary arm the Aleph Institute) in order to get Lew sentenced to into it.
Lew spent his time studying. He got married to a woman from a well-to-do Chabad family. And then he eventually served as a Chabad emissary in North Carolina until he was accused of sexual harassment and attempted sexual assault shortly after the local Jewish community accidentally found out about Lew’s recent criminal background and was outraged. Chabad stood by Lew then, but not after the attempted sexual assault, and he went on to live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn where his wife’s prominent Chabad family lived.
The woman Lew’s partner shot in the convenience store lives in near-constant pain. She has a bullet lodged against her spine that can’t be surgically removed.
Chabad did not pay her any friendly visits or do anything to help her before or after Lew’s trial.
When I spoke to this woman, a grandmother even at the time of the shooting, what bothered her most was that no one from Agriprocessors or Chabad ever apologized to her or showed any sympathy or empathy for her.
She was out of work for a long time after the shooting, and her family had trouble getting by financially because of it.
Did Agriprocessors or the Rubashkin family ever help you? Did they even give you a box of meat so you wouldn’t have to worry about going hungry?, I asked.
They had not – even though Agriprocessors had literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of frozen non-kosher meat in its freezers that it could not find buyers for, and it would have cost the Rubashkins nothing to do it.