A Jewish Yeshiva leader was fined $150,000, sentenced to two years in prison, and the school he worked has was forced to repay over three million dollars in funds that he stole by defrauding government programs meant to feed poor, hungry children, which he spend on lavish parties for himself and his friends according to a report.
A former Yeshiva leader was sentenced to two years in prison Friday in Brooklyn federal court for swiping $3.2 million in government funds that were supposed to provide dinners to needy kids.
Elozer Porges, 46, pleaded guilty to wire fraud for submitting phony documents to the feds from 2013 to 2016 stating that the school was feeding the dinners to at-risk kids at his Central United Talmudic Academy, according to court records.
But prosecutors said the funds were actually being used to throw social events for adults, as well as bat mitzvahs and bar mitzvahs, in a banquet hall at 762 Wythe St. The expenditures included $800,000 on chicken.
“That’s a lot of chicken, your honor,” Assistant US Attorney Erik Paulsen told Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis at the sentencing hearing.
Since his ouster from the academy, it has continued to pay Porges $100,000 annually but he does no work on the academy’s behalf.
Porges’ attorneys argued that the convicted leader should just get community service and no prison time because he has 11 children and a wife to care for.
But Paulsen said Porges had actually separated from his wife prior to the scam, leaving her to take care of the couple’s kids with a meager $250-per-week allowance, and that the wife applied for food stamps.
The academy is paying back the $3.2 million in restitution to the US Department of Agriculture, and Porges was fined $150,000.
“He looks forward to redeeming himself and he respects the judge’s decision,” said Henry Mazurek. He declined to comment on Garaufis’ comments about letters in support of Porges. (source)
It is good that he went to prison for two years. However, one must also ask the question, what would have happened if this was a man of a different background or extraction, as say he was a Euro-American man, or especially and Afro-American man. Would they have received two years in prison and a fine, or would the sentence have been a lot harder?
The very fact that the lawyer of this disgusting criminal, whose crime of “oppressing the widow and the orphan” by his actions is a sin that “cries out to Heaven for vengeance” and sits alongside the sins of the willful murder of the innocent, sodomy, and the deprivation of the working man of his justly earned wages, would attempt to say this man just should receive “community service” for his actions is more than as the Jews like to say, chutzpah, but is outrageous to the point of spitting in the face of his victims.
A great number of Jews in modern times do not seem to stop asking the question of “Why do “they” hate us?”, and by “they” the term is implied that it means most people who are not Jewish, and “hate” is used to equivocate objective, real and immoral hatred that exists with the dislike of the history of scamming, dishonestly, and financial fraud that run consistently among Jews even since the days of the Old Testament and is observable to all who carefully juxtapose their actions with their behaviors. Then, there is the legitimate criticism that non-Jews and fellow Jews will say about their fellow co-religionists or co-tribalists- for to be a Jew can be a chosen association with a religion or philosophy, a link by means of blood, or both -many immediately ignore the matter at hand and respond with “You are a Jew-hater” or, if it is a Jew, “You are a self-hating Jew”.
The concept of “Jew hatred”, while it certainly exists as people have always hated each other for various reasons, seems to be far less common that what it is marketed to be, and what often times is called hatred is, as noted above, the legitimate criticism of criminal behavior that applies to all races and peoples without exception. Stealing the food money from widows and orphans is as much a sin that “cries to Heaven for vengeance” as it is for any man of any race in any place at any time, for as Jesus made very clear, God did not come to bring “salvation” to just the Jews, or to elevate the Jews as a race over the other races of men, but to perfect the idea of the “chosen people” as being one that transcends race a place and is for those who love God and want to obey Him has He commands to be obeyed. The Catholic Faith is the true Judaism, and those who claim to be Jews but who elevate tribe and nation to the detriment of one’s fellow man are, as the Bible directly calls out, the synagogue of satan who called out, when their Messiah was presented to them by Pilate, “Let His blood be on us and on our children”, “We have no king but Caesar,” and “Crucify Him”.
One evil is not justified by another. However, having said this, actions such as this are the cause of many of the anger and hatreds that lead to violence. It is not a response to just one group, but to any, for there is only so much that a man can tolerate before he acts out or starts to develop serious negative feelings, as while there are people who do clamor for vengeance, many times it is an attempt to reach out for justice when it is not being served.