30-year-old Menachem Tevel, a rabbi and youth worker at the JEM Center, a Jewish Community Center in Beverly Hills, was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of child sex abuse stemming from a previous New York City warrant, The Los Angeles Times reported. Tevel was arrested at the JEM Center where his father-in-law serves as its director. news reports said.
"Mendel Tevel has been accused by many people of being a child molester," Jewish Community Watch's Ilanit Gluckosky told Los Angeles' ABC7 news. Jewish Community Watch is an organization that focuses on child abuse prevention.
Beverly Hills police Sgt. Max Subin said that Tevel will be extradited to New York to face multiple accusations of sex abuse, as reported by The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.
Four victims claimed that Tevel "performed acts that included spanking on bare skin, to sexually suggestive rubbing. The instances described by those who spoke with The Journal took place as early as around 1995 and as recently as around 2004. Searches of both civil and criminal public records at the time [in August] did not reveal any convictions... against Tevel in either New York or California," Jewish Journal also reported.
The arrest warrant was issued for Tevel by Brooklyn authorities, and signed with an order for extradition by a Kings County judge, news reports said.
