Amsterdam – Dutch police say they have arrested an elderly man believed to be the leader of a Jewish Hasidic sect on the run since two years and wanted in Israel for alleged indecent assault of women and girls.
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The 77-year-old rabbi was arrested at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport on Thursday after he evaded authorities who tried to arrest him in South Africa, several Dutch newspapers reported.
Dutch prosecutors confirmed the arrest of a “77-year-old man on an international warrant with an extradition request made by Israel,” but they declined to name the suspect.
“The arrest was requested by the Israeli authorities who issued an international warrant and is now requesting his extradition,” Tine Zwiers of the Dutch public prosecutor’s office told AFP.
“It has to do with indecent assault charges,” she said.
Zwiers said the rabbi has been released but that his passport has been confiscated pending a decision on his extradition to Israel.
Make sure he’s handcuffed. He’s a threat to society.
Lock him up for life.
Firstly, this is a TERRIBLE ordeal for a 77 year old to go through.
But let’s say he is 100% innocent and that this will end in a huge kiddush hashem and hashem gives him the koiches to go through it all,
if so, well, the consensus of Hareidi opinion is that he is for SURE 100% innocent of those accusation that they are suspecting him of (and that he has been on the run because his followers did not trust the anti-religous/hareidi israeli authorities), he is after all a very holy person.
However, he WAS once a baal teshuva, and i don’t know from when these stories are, IF they ever happened, and the chillul hashem could be tremendous for all tzadikim if it turned out that such a tzadik might also not come out 100% clean.
Nothing could be worse, g-d forbid.
But if he comes out 100% clean, let’s hope it will be admitted by all the judges and courts and that it will be a big kiddush hashem to show that such people are INDEED as white as snow. Like they SHOULD be, but just to remind us all that they are.
Still, it is dangerous today! What would happen if a person was saved on camera being seen talking to a woman and smilling at her, and it looked a little bad in the photo/vid?
Eliezer Berland matches all of the characteristics listed for the detained man.