Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Beverly Hills Rabbi Busted on Child Sex Charge

A rabbi was arrested at the Jewish youth center where he works in Beverly Hills, Calif., on child sex abuse charges from New York.

Menachem Tewel, known also as Mendel Tevel, was arrested Tuesday at the JEM Center, the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles reported.

A spokesman for the Beverly Hills Police Department told the Jewish Journal that Tewel would be extradited to New York under an outstanding warrant for his arrest charging criminal sexual acts there. The charges date back as far as the mid-1990s and as recently as 2004.

Tewel is married to the daughter of Rabbi Hertzel Illulian, director and founder of the JEM Center.

“God will help that it will show that it’s all false and will clear up, and people will see while we will still continue our good job for the community,” Illulian told KABC TV.

Searches of civil and criminal public records as of August did not show any convictions, or any closed or pending charges against Tewel in either New York or California, according to the Jewish Journal.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version