Lawsuit accuses rabbi of sexually assaulting teen

By Daniel Tepfer
CT Post
May 3, 2016

http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Lawsuit-accuses-rabbi-of-sexually-assaulting-teen-7390082.php

In this June 11, 2007 photo, Rabbi Daniel Greer speaks at the Yeshiva of New Haven in New Haven, Conn. According to a lawsuit filed Tuesday, May 3, 2016 in federal court, Greer is accused of raping and molesting a teenage boy hundreds of times when the boy was a student at a Jewish boarding school in New Haven from 2001 to 2005. Photo by Mara Lavitt

BRIDGEPORT — A New Haven rabbi is accused of sexually assaulting a teenage student in the school he runs, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court.

The lawsuit claims Rabbi Daniel Greer, a former New Haven city police commissioner, sexually assaulted the teen over a three-year period beginning in the fall of 2002.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, also names The Yeshiva of New Haven, Inc. and The Gan School, Inc. as defendants.

“Dozens and dozens of times for a period of years, Greer sexually assaulted and abused a young boy in his care,” said the plaintiff’s lawyer, Antonio Ponvert III of the Bridgeport-based firm Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder.

Greer has not been criminally charged. His lawyer, William Ward, denied the allegations levied against his client.

“It only takes a moment to make allegations with despicable indifference to the consequences of the damage they could cause to my client, his family and a reputation he spent his life building,” Ward said.

The plaintiff, Eliyahu Mirlis, attended the Yeshiva and school where Greer was the rabbi and school principal, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit states that during the teen’s sophomore, junior and senior high school years, “Rabbi Greer repeatedly and continuously sexually abused, exploited, and assaulted him.”

It continues that Greer frequently gave the youth alcohol and showed him pornographic films at the time of the assaults. The assaults occurred on school property, at Greer’s private residence, at motels in the New Haven area and Pennsylvania, and at various rental properties owned by the schools, the lawsuit states.

“During the entire period of Rabbi Greer’s molestation . . . senior administrators and officials of the school, including the school’s assistant principal, actually knew and/or should have known that the Rabbi was raping, sodomizing and sexually assaulting, abusing and molesting the minor boy; and they did nothing to stop it,” the lawsuit states.