A similar arrangement may be in place for Twersky’s Cadillac. According to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, the car has an official type of license plate reserved for the vehicles of government entities and officials, and is registered not to Twersky but to the village government of New Square. Yet in response to a Freedom of Information Law request filed by the Forward asking for information about the car carrying the license plate, the Village of New Square responded that it had “no record of the information you have requested.”

Meanwhile, many of Twersky’s followers in New Square are living a very different lifestyle. Almost two-thirds of the village’s residents live below the U.S. federal poverty line, and the median household income, according to the 2012 Census, is $24,075 while the median family size is 5.5.

According to Deen, “Even people who don’t necessarily love him believe he has the power to control.” This is reflected, he said, in the takkanas, the unwritten, yet well-known religious by-laws of the village. “For example,” he said, “you can’t have a minyan” — a public prayer service — “on Shabbos outside of the Rebbe’s minyan.”

The requirement that New Square residents pray only in the Rebbe’s minyan — extreme even by the standards of other Hasidic sects — was central to the fate that befell Aron Rottenberg, a New Square resident who chose to pray regularly at a nearby nursing home where a close friend of his was being cared for.

Rottenberg’s decision to pray with his friend led to a ruling by the New Square rabbinic court finding him in serious violation of the community’s rules. Soon after, groups outside Rottenberg’s house smashed windows and dumped his daughter’s school desk and books on the front porch, as recounted in local police reports. And on May 22, 2011, an early-morning attack left Rottenberg with third-degree burns over more than half of his body.

The attack came from Shaul Spitzer, then 18 and one of a group of acolytes who lived with the Rebbe and served his daily needs. Spitzer tried to set fire to Rottenberg’s home while the family slept inside. When Rottenberg’s son saw Spitzer on a surveillance camera the family had recently installed, Rottenberg ran out in the night at 4 a.m. to confront the teen outside his house, and the two struggled. During their fight, Rottenberg burst into flames from the gasoline-soaked rags Spitzer was trying to throw onto the property.

After four days of silence, Twersky told his followers in an address in Yiddish at the New Square yeshiva that such behavior was imprudent. “Because this terrible thing happened, maybe it’s good to say it again and let everyone know that, God forbid, do not fight with force,” Twersky said. “It makes troubles. It’s against our way, the way of Skver.” The speech, which was recorded, was later posted as an audio file on the website Failed Messiah.

In February 2012, Spitzer was sentenced to seven years in prison for first-degree assault. His attorney, Paul Shechtman, told the court, “He loved his rebbe too much. He thought he was enforcing the rabbi’s rules.” At his sentencing hearing, according to The Journal News, a local Rockland County daily, Spitzer was quoted in his pre-sentencing report as having said that he acted with others. But his lawyers emphasized at the hearing that the teenager was never ordered to go after anyone by Twersky or by Twersky’s advisers. Twersky’s attorney, Frank Snitow, also denied his client said or did anything to incite Spitzer’s attack.

In April 2012, someone paid Rottenberg $2.3 million to settle a suit the burn victim had filed against Twersky and Spitzer alleging that they had violated his civil rights. Snitow, Twersky’s attorney, told me, “I believe Rabbi Twersky did not pay that himself.” Twersky had earlier denied the charges in the complaint. Snitow declined to offer further information on the settlement. After consulting her father, Rottenberg’s daughter, Malka Elbaum, told me that Twersky had not signed the settlement; Spitzer signed it on behalf of both himself and Twersky. Under the settlement’s terms, she said, part of the sum was used to buy Rottenberg’s New Square home, as he and his family sought to leave the community. Rottenberg did not know who the purchaser was, according to his daughter; the money was deposited in an escrow account. The settlement itself is sealed.

Former Skverer hasidim say they are not surprised that Twersky did not sign the settlement. Twersky, they say, generally deals with his community at a remove via intermediaries who are close to him. He rarely speaks publicly to his followers.

In 2008, a committee of six prominent members of the New Square community was established to handle sex abuse cases from within. Known as the Vaad, the committee was formed with help from the Orthodox children and family services agency, Ohel. The committee cites three foundations for its mission: education, prevention, and taking care of the abusers and their victims. But in a 2010 interview with the Jewish Star, an Orthodox publication, its chairman, New Square businessman Isaac Breuer, did not respond directly when asked if his committee would report child sex crimes to law enforcement authorities.

Seeking the authorities’ help when there is no other way of getting abusers off the street was “definitely an avenue,” he said, “but I’m not sure this is the most effective [way].” Instead, said Breuer, citing a “leading gedolai HaTorah” — Torah sage — “It is our job to put the hammer on him.”

Breuer did not return repeated phone calls and emails from the Forward requesting an interview. But last year, News 12, a local news station covering Rockland County, found at least one case in which “the hammer” seemed absent. According to News 12, unnamed New Square religious leaders instead helped a sexual abuser flee to Israel.

“Yossi,” a New Square youth who went on camera but was identified by only his first name, told News 12 that Herschel Taubenfeld — a brother of Laiby Stern’s alleged abuser, Moshe Menachem Taubenfeld — had molested him three times a week for four months when he was supposed to be counseling him. But when he went to the Vaad with this information, Yossi told me, the only action they took was to send Taubenfeld to Hillel Sternstein, a licensed New York social worker who worked at the time with Ohel on sex abuse issues. Sternstein declined to comment on the case.

Unsatisfied and still afraid, the 16-year-old youth took an unprecedented step: He reported his abuse to the police and actively assisted their subsequent investigation. Among other things, he taped a conversation with Taubenfeld in which the man tearfully pleaded forgiveness for having molested the teen. But before law enforcement authorities could arrest him, New Square’s religious leaders sent Taubenfeld to Israel to teach at a yeshiva. Yossi told me that Taubenfeld approached several of his family members and offered to pay $100,000 to drop his allegations.

Kenneth Gribetz, Taubenfeld’s attorney, denied this allegation.

Later, Taubenfeld returned and turned himself in to face 30 misdemeanor charges of forcible touching, third degree sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child. Rockland District Attorney Thomas Zugibe reached a plea deal with Taubenfeld. In exchange for pleading guilty, he got six years probation and was required to register as a sex offender. Nevertheless, News 12 found him continuing to teach young children at the New Square Yeshiva in August 2013.

“It was like a slap in the face,” said Yossi, who was meanwhile ostracized by the community. “Everything I’d worked for for months was in vain.”

Zugibe termed the prosecution “trailblazing” and said the plea deal was “appropriate based on the facts.”

Rockland County Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Parietti told me that the local magistrate who originally heard Taubenfeld’s plea tried to convince her office to drop any reference to sexual abuse in the charges altogether. That would have spared Taubenfeld from having to register as a sex offender.

The local magistrate, Manhattan-based attorney Stuart Salles, holds court in a small room inside New Square’s only boys’ yeshiva. The longest-serving judge in Rockland County, Salles has been New Square’s magistrate for 40 years thanks to the bloc vote the New Square community gives him in local judicial elections, in which he runs unopposed. He serves in the office pro bono.

“I grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and struggled to support myself before I became a lawyer,” Salles told the Forward when asked why he serves in the post. “I felt it was an honor to give back to people and say thank you to God for my good fortune. I am very religious. We all are.”

Asked in a follow-up call about his role setting charges in the Herschel Taubenfeld case, Salles said, “I’m not answering any questions about that,” and hung up the phone.

The New Square Vaad’s decision to merely refer Taubenfeld to a therapist was reportedly not the only such case; the Jewish Star article spoke of at least one other.

When told that the Vaad, in at least some cases, did not report abuse to law enforcement authorities, Zugibe, who came under heavy fire from critics over his plea deal in the Herschel Taubenfeld case, was outraged. “I’m unfamiliar with this,” he said. “But that is downright offensive, and all it does is create a next generation of sex offenders, by not prosecuting these people and moving them along. This is disgraceful. One thing the evidence shows is therapy doesn’t work. You have to supervise them and punish them.”

In principle, even an alleged sex abuser who is referred to a therapist could end up subject to prosecution if the therapist reported him. But under New York State law, therapists (along with teachers, doctors and camp counselors, among others) are only legally obligated to report suspected cases of child abuse when the suspect in question is a parent, legal guardian or primary caretaker of the child. And at New Square’s Refuah Health Center, Sam Rosenberg, the therapist who treated Laiby Stern, made it clear he did not make it his practice to report all such cases that come before him.

“[We report] if the victim is in a situation in which he’s in danger,” said Rosenberg. “But if the victim no longer lives in the house, we’re no longer mandated to report.”

Rosenberg, a licensed social worker, told me he has dealt “with both victims and perpetrators” at Refuah but claimed to never have been involved with the Vaad, or to have been contacted by the committee for matters concerning sex abuse victims, perpetrators or their treatment.

“I would rather not talk about it at this point, since Refuah is part of New Square,” he said.

Yeshiva University law professor Marci Hamilton, a leading scholar of sex abuse law, and author of “Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children,” lamented the discretion that New York’s mandated reporting law allows therapists.

“Refuah is responsible for how its employees handle such issues, and the harm that accrues to these children if their employees take an overly narrow interpretation of the law so that a child is abused again,” she said.

Refuah’s general counsel and spokesperson, Alexandra Khorover, told me, “Our policy is that our providers comply with the applicable law regarding reporting child abuse.”

Asked for the number of reports of abuse filed in the last five years by Refuah providers, Khorover said she could not obtain that information and declined to comment any further.

Zugibe, the DA, is aware that the ultra-Orthodox community tends to distrust outside authorities. Building a relationship of trust is an uphill battle, he said.

“The problem is twofold: You have those people who really believe that they can’t trust the system. That [alleged perpetrators] are not going to be prosecuted… Then you have the real ugly side of it, and that’s leaders who have taken it on their own to basically intimidate witnesses and [are] trying to prevent them from coming forward. That’s what concerns us,” Zugibe said.

Pressed on who he believes is intimidating victims in New Square, Zugibe said, “We don’t know who the person is who intimidates… We’ve had situations where victims came from the community and said they were subjected to intimidation.” These victims did not say the intimidation came from Twersky, said Zugibe, but he added, “They’re telling us they were under a lot of pressure to not report.”

Zugibe cited his establishment of a special victims unit heavily focused on sex crimes as evidence of his long-term commitment to addressing the issue. He said his office has also been meeting with leaders of the ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic communities to attempt to instill trust that if a case is reported, there will be justice.

“Our laws are fair and we prosecute evenly. That’s the message we’re trying to put out there,” he said.

In the past year, since Yossi came forward, things seem to have shifted, if ever so slightly. The precedent he created seems to have planted seeds of change in residents’ minds. Despite their absolute faith in the system and in the Rebbe’s ways, the younger generation of parents, who are now raising school-aged children, is showing a receptiveness to change.

Rabbi Yakov Horowitz, dean of Yeshiva Darchei Noam in Monsey, New York, director of the Center for Jewish Family Life and Project YES, and a longtime advocate for child safety, said that ultra-Orthodox millennial parents are less reluctant to go to the authorities.

“The very painful headlines of these past few years have progressively gotten more parents and community leaders to understand it’s a human problem, not a Jewish one, and that we’re not immune from issues of child abuse,” Horowitz said.

Twersky even approved allowing Horowitz himself to hold a child safety workshop in the village last spring. The workshop, which attracted a sizable group of New Square fathers, included distribution of a Yiddish version of Horowitz’s children’s book, which talks to young readers about their bodies and the previously taboo subject of sexual molestation. Horowitz plans to hold a second workshop in December.

But asked if he had urged the New Square fathers who attended his workshop to consult with law enforcement authorities if they suspect their child had been abused, Horowitz declined to comment.

Horowitz’s stress is on sex abuse awareness and prevention rather than prosecution. And that may be the best way to breach the community’s high walls. But it does not solve the problem of perpetrators roaming free and the failure of New Square leaders to report them to law enforcement authorities or support their victims in doing so.

“There are a lot of nice people living in New Square,” Laiby said, indicating that he does not want to cast blame on the community as a whole. “But the people who run the show… need to be held accountable for their actions… I’m not looking for revenge; I’m looking for justice.”