After a long arduous trial in which he was found guilty of fraud, sentence was handed down on Thursday, 25 Menachem Av on former Rishon L’Tzion HaGaon HaRav Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron Shlita. It was decided that the rav will not be imprisoned but will pay a fine in the amount of 250,000 shekels as part of the plea bargain reached with the prosecution.
The judge of the Jerusalem District Court, Justice Tzvi Segal, accepted the plea bargain between Rav Bakshi-Doron and the State Attorney’s Office, and approved the financial punishment imposed on the rabbi and the penalty of imprisonment.
The law-breaking activities included in the conviction took place between 1999 to 2003, connected to Rabbi Yitzchak Ochana, who was in charge of the Chief Rabbinate testing unit. He sold Chief Rabbinate of Israel rabbinical ordination certificates to persons who used them to advance their careers and increase their salaries; including members of the Israel Police and Israel Prison Authority. Rav Doron turned a blind eye to the illegal operation and he did not profit at all.
The parties reached a plea bargain two weeks ago, in view of the rabbi’s health, when the State Attorney’s Office agreed to receive a suspended sentence of 12 months’ imprisonment and a fine of NIS 250,000, when the rabbi would no longer receive the pension benefits.
In the sentence, the judge wrote that in light of the plea bargain, the rabbi’s medical condition, advanced age, and the assumption that he did not show consent to the public’s safety and to change other offenses, I did not find that the defendant should be punished with imprisonment, By means of service work, and I therefore decided to respect the plea bargain, even though the agreed sentence far exceeds the level of punishment that is actually appropriate.”
Earlier, the judge reviewed the sentences of others convicted in the case, and wrote that. “I found that the defendant’s punishment range ranged from 20 months to five years in prison, along with a substantial fine and suspended imprisonment. If the rabbi’s difficult personal circumstances were not serious, he would be willing to impose a real prison term on him.”
In the vicinity of Rishon L’Tzion Rabbi Bakshi-Doron, they praised the decision and the end of the affair that haunted him during the difficult days he was undergoing, because of his illness, which requires daily treatment, and his associates made it clear that the entire case fell on the rabbi as a thunderstorm, and certainly he did not act deliberately, and certainly did not take a shekel to pocket as the judge wrote in the judgment.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
One Response
This article prompts me to ask a question having nothing to do with the rabbi who is the subject of this article.
My question is: does someone, or some rabbinical council, or some non-rabbinical organization, keep a record of rabbis who run afoul of civil law? And is there a centralized source for this information? I suspect the numbers are very small. This information would be helpful (1) to congregations looking for a rabbi, (2) the klal in evaluating the quality (which I believe is generally high) of our leadership, and (3) in spotting patterns of anti-Semitic prosecutions.