Rabbi overseeing Jewish elementary school asked judge to go easy on man guilty of child porn

“Basically what did he do? Did he touch anybody or just watch a video?” Rabbi Moshe Yosef Unger said when asked why he sent a letter to a judge seeking leniency for former congregant Dovid Akiva Shenkman.

Unger wrote to the court: “I am confident that he poses no danger to anyone.”

No Mercy for Monsters: When Rabbis Plead for the Unforgivable

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It is an obscenity that in our time, when Jewish children are still healing from wounds inflicted in the dark corners of their own communities, we see rabbis—men who claim to bear the Torah’s moral authority—signing letters begging for leniency for sexual abusers and consumers of child pornography. What Torah are they reading? What G-d are they serving? Certainly not the G-d of justice, nor the Torah of truth.

Let’s be clear: these are not victimless crimes. Every image, every act, every predator represents a human soul shattered. A child’s trust stolen. A life derailed. When a rabbi asks a judge for compassion for such men, he is not showing mercy—he is trampling mercy underfoot. He is siding with the serpent against the child.

This sickness in parts of our rabbinic leadership—the reflex to “protect” the abuser because he once wore a yarmulke and learned in a yeshiva—is nothing less than moral collapse. It reeks of tribalism masquerading as piety. They fear chillul Hashem, a desecration of G-d’s name? The desecration is their letter. The scandal is their silence toward the victims, their eagerness to turn perpetrators into “nebbachs” who “need help,” as if therapy could wash away depravity.

Where is their outrage for the children who can’t sleep at night? For the victims who lost their faith in G-d because the men of G-d defended their tormentors? “Lo ta’amod al dam re’echa”—do not stand idly by your brother’s blood. Yet these rabbis do more than stand idly—they advocate for those who spilled that blood in the first place.

The Torah demands compassion, yes—but compassion for the innocent. The Rambam writes that pitying the cruel is cruelty to the kind. Every plea for a reduced sentence tells victims their suffering is negotiable, their dignity expendable, their pain a PR problem for the community to manage. And Midrash Tanchuma (Metzora 1) warns: “He who shows mercy to the cruel will ultimately be cruel to the merciful.”

This is not mercy. This is betrayal.

It is betrayal of Torah, of justice, and of every survivor still waiting for someone in authority to simply say: I believe you. And I will not protect the man who hurt you.

Until the rabbinate purges this moral rot from its ranks—until letters of “support” for abusers are replaced by public cries for the protection of children—the rabbis who sign them will bear the shame of standing on the wrong side of Heaven. Because Heaven weeps not for the predator, but for the child. The community must never forgive these twisted rabbis whose confused minds destroy everything that is our most sacred – our children!

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