NEW YORK
JTA
By Uriel Heilman
May 17, 2016
NEW YORK (JTA) – Even before FBI investigators descended last week on the Satmar Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, there was a growing sense in this insular community that it and its unique way of life were under attack.
Two months earlier, the FBI had been in the village investigating alleged fraud of a government program, and community leaders also have been facing a mounting campaign by dissidents to increase state oversight of yeshiva curricula.
“We need to know what kind of danger we’re in,” the Satmar rebbe in Kiryas Joel, Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, said in a widely publicized May 4 speech about the threat of closer state supervision of yeshiva curricula. “These are bad times for us Jews, terrible. We need to pray to God that they should not interfere with the upbringing of our children.”
In last week’s FBI raid, investigators confiscated computer equipment and boxes of documents from the village’s Department of Public Safety and its main yeshiva, United Talmudical Academy. An unnamed law enforcement source interviewed by a local newspaper, the Journal News, said the raid was related to the publication on social media two weeks ago of a leaked hidden-camera video that appeared to show a principal of the yeshiva kissing and grasping young boys in his office. Some 6,000 students are enrolled in the school.
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