Tel Aviv – A lawyer for an Israeli celebrity rabbi with a following in the United States says his client has pleaded guilty to bribing a senior police official and could face a year in prison.
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Eyal Rozovsky tells Army Radio that Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto is “paying a price for something not easy that he did.”
He says Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has agreed to submit testimony on Pinto’s character to seek leniency in his sentencing.
Pinto pleaded guilty in an Israeli court Tuesday as part of a plea bargain he reached last year.
He admitted to offering bribes in 2012 to receive classified information on a police investigation into one of his charitable organizations.
The multimillionaire rabbi has a celebrity following in Israel, New York, and elsewhere.
Time to put him away. He’s lucky he’s only getting a year. Man up to it and stop causing such a chillul Hashem. I’m sick of this guy already.
So he pleaded from his hospital room? How interesting how his guily plea came the same day he was hospitalized. Of course it was all a coincidence.
Baruch Hashem he will have chance to recuperate and rest while in prison. It is ממש a case of השגחת פרטית that exactly at the moment he felt sooooo ill that he has been given the opportunity of a few years of quiet time.
Corrupt police officer should be in jail. NOT Rabbi Pinto!!!!
Also, I would appreciate an answer to my question: why charedim do not like sefardim?????
Agree to posters 1 through 6, with the exception of #4 . Sefardi or Ashkenazi, a crook is a crook. Pinto is a crook. Get over his ethnicity, it has nothing to do with his guilt.
Don’t worry, after taking a few years off to get his health back and sit and learn, Pinto can come back as Chief Rabbi. After all if the convicted convict Deri can become a minister of the State of Israel, Pinto can also be rehabilitated.
The giveaway word in this article is “celebrity”. This has become a serious problem in the frum community, where kavod for talmidei chachomim and emunas chachomim has been converted into a Torah-free dynamic of hero worship. WE observe this in the yeshiva velt, among chassidic groups, and in the sefardishe velt. This deification is abhorrent, and is inconsistent with basics of Torah. When one puts inordinate value in an individual, regardless of that person’e greatness, one is set up for the form of avodah zoroh that served as the beginnings of other religions. We might revere a Torah true Jew who possesses admirable levels of Torah expertise, midos tovos, and avodas Hashem. But we have become unduly enamored with their dress, their public performances, and the crowds of people that become their flocks.
A single cow in a herd follows because the rest are there, and none of them wants to stand out from the rest. Do we do that, or are we honestly looking to see if someone has the traits we need for our own personal individual leader?
Such a thuggish disregard for the true tzadikim and all that is holy!
All these comments are libelous and utterly violent, as maybe was all the investigations against him.
To put a man like that in prison, and for a year, is a greater damage to jews, than the biggest terror attack happening, chas v’sholom.