The accused molester, Chisdai Ben-Porat, is allegedly in federal custody. At a recent court hearing, sitting behind Ben-Porat and offering his support was Binyamin Daiches,
Camp Dora Golding's Assistant Director. Daiches did not say hello
to one of his campers who had allegedly seen the incident and had come
to the hearing and offered no support to the child's parents.
The Camp Dora Golding molestation case was in court yesterday. Chisdai Ben-Porat, the accused molester who was a counselor at the camp, waived his right to a preliminary hearing.
I'm told that sitting behind Ben-Porat and offering his support was Binyamin Daiches, Camp Dora Golding's Assistant Director. Daiches didn't even say hello to one of his campers who had allegedly seen the incident and had come to the hearing.
Ben-Porat tried to flee to his home country of Canada with the help of the camp, prompting a parent – not the camp – to report the molestation to state police, who detained Ben-Porat as he tried to flee. He was allegedly taken into federal custody not long after that.
The call by the parent to police took place at 4:38 PM the day after the incident took place. The camp had known about that incident since early that morning, but it had made no calls to police or child services.
After finding out that a parent had called police, the camp's owner and executive director, Alexander Gold, called child services at 4:54 pm – after child services was already closed – allegedly so he could tell police he was in compliance with the law to report these types of crimes without lying. Gold left a recorded message saying that an incident had happened at the camp. However, Gold – who later claimed to have investigated the incident for most of that day – allegedly gave child services no details.
When police came to the camp, Gold allegedly lied and told the police that a video of the incident had no usable details because the recording was allegedly too dark. (It isn't too dark.) He also refused to let the police visit the bunk where the abuse took place.
Days later, after local media reports of the the molestation had been picked up by FailedMessiah.com and expanded on, Gold wrote to parents touting his compliance with camp regulations that call for molestation to be reported to secular authorities – never telling parents that he had stalled making that report for many hours and had only made the report after a parent, disgusted by Gold's behavior, reported the molestation to police.
The young boys involved need extensive therapy. At least one is getting it – paid for by his parents, not by the camp or its insurance company.
Meanwhile, I'm told that a parent of one of those boys was called by a camp official who asked the parent to call Ben-Porat's lawyer, Kenneth Gribetz. Why? To work out a deal that would allow Ben-Porat to get out of prison before Yom Kippur. The rabbi allegedly offered the parent $25,000 to drop the charges against Ben-Porat – alleged witness tampering by the rabbi, apparently in coordination with the disgraced former prosecutor Gribetz, who now is a go-to lawyer for haredi pedophiles.
That same camp official told a parent that he wished he could "turn back the clock."
"I don't want a boy to be in jail and I don't want what happened to your son to have happened. I wish I could turn back the clock – I really do," the camp official said on a recording made available to FailedMessiah.com, equating the alleged pedophile's imprisonment to the little boy's sex abuse.
On top of that, prosecutors have had to issue subpoenas to get a list of names of the boys in the bunk where the abuse took place and the contact information and names of their parents because camp officials have been uncooperative.
A reporter asked me yesterday if things had gotten better recently in the haredi and Orthodox communities with regard to reporting child sex abuse and protecting victims rather than pedophiles.
I said no.
Sadly, Camp Dora Golding is only one of many reasons why.