“I was so, so disappointed.”
That was the reaction on Sept. 26 from the complainant, after a Montreal judge acquitted an Orthodox Jewish spiritual leader and teacher, Rabbi Shlomo Leib (Leon) Mund, of two sex crimes dating back to the late 1990s.
Rabbi Mund, now 82, was a principal at Montreal’s Yeshiva Gedola, a private elementary school on Deacon Road. He also ran his own small synagogue in his Montreal home, and served as an unlicensed marriage counsellor to the Orthodox Jewish community.
Rabbi Mund and his wife moved to Israel after the city’s rabbinical court ordered him to step down from his congregation following a disciplinary hearing over his inappropriate conduct with one of his female patients, although the rabbi testified his leaving Canada had nothing to do with it. His wife Aidel was killed in a car accident in Israel in 2015.
The complainant in this court case is not the same person who was the subject of the earlier religious court hearing. This complainant can’t be named due to a court-ordered ban on publishing their identity.
They went to police to press charges in 2021, more than two decades after the alleged incident. They told police they had been sexually assaulted by Rabbi Mund in 1997 in his car when they were a child.
On Wednesday, Sept. 25, the judge, Patricia Compagnone of the Court of Quebec, read aloud the key final paragraphs of the 29-page verdict:
“The Court finds the accused’s denial of the charges to be likely and that Crown did not adduce evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, that [Mund] committed the charges laid against him,” she told the court.
Rabbi Mund left the courthouse Wednesday without speaking to reporters. He was accompanied by a daughter and grandchildren, and even a great-grandchild in a stroller. Rabbi Mund did not respond to an email from The CJN asking for comment.
Rabbi Mund’s defence lawyer Jesse Héroux also asked the judge to arrange to have the rabbi’s passport restored. His client has been under house arrest in Canada since police picked him up in Toronto in April 2022. Rabbi Mund had returned from his home in Ramat Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem, to visit family for Passover. He was initially charged with three outstanding sex crime charges. One charge was later dropped.
“Mr. Mund claimed his innocence on Day One. He’s been acquitted today. He’s happy and now he wants to go back home,” Héroux told The CJN outside the courtroom.
While the judge made sure to point out that the complainant “genuinely believes” they were sexually assaulted by Rabbi Mund and that they were “straightforward” when answering questions during the five-day trial held in June, there were issues with the reliability and credibility of their testimony.
“Of course I don’t remember a lot, but what I did remember, I said,” the alleged victim told The CJN in an interview from their home the day after Rabbi Mund’s acquittal.
Although the alleged victim was in court in person during the preliminary hearings in 2023 and for the trial this summer, they did not attend on the final day. The Crown prosecutor emailed them the verdict.
What the complainant told the court
They testified that the alleged attack happened when they were seven or eight years old. The court heard that they had been told never to be alone with Rabbi Mund.
However, while they were walking along Barclay Avenue after visiting an aunt, they testified Rabbi Mund drove by in a gold-coloured car, rolled down his window, and the next thing they knew, he was on top of them in the back seat.
The court heard them describe him kissing their right cheek and rubbing his penis on their left thigh, although the alleged victim admitted they didn’t know then what a penis was, and only realized it after they grew up. There was a sharp smell, which they also only realized later is what sperm smelled like, the court heard.
Rabbi Mund’s defence lawyer suggested the alleged victim was fabricating the story.
For one thing, Rabbi Mund and his children testified he had never owned a gold-coloured car, only dark blue cars. Secondly, the defence implied the complainant pressed charges as a way to get justice for their mother and other women in the Montreal Jewish community who the court was told Rabbi Mund had also assaulted. None of these women have ever come forward or approached government authorities.
The judge didn’t think the colour of the car was fabrication, but she wasn’t impressed by evidence that the complainant had arranged for one or more of their sisters to impersonate them in phone calls made to several rabbis in Montreal to help research their case. In her written verdict, the judge pointed out the alleged victim didn’t disclose this fact to the police detective until well into the legal process.
While the judge wrote that none of this proves the complainant made up the story, she agreed it did taint their credibility and reliability.
The defence also attacked their credibility during the court case by pointing out that they were selling merchandise on behalf of sexual assault victims.
In her written judgement, the judge felt the merchandise was being only for a short period of time mostly to support victims of sexual assault.
The alleged victim told The CJN that the website selling hoodies, T-shirts and tote bags is still operating. Proceeds will help sexual abuse survivors defray the costs of going to therapy. The website Swag for Survivors.com states that 20 percent of the revenue will go to organizations helping sexual abuse survivors.
Mund’s lawyer was critical that the complainant went to media outlets to tell their story, including The CJN and CBC in 2022. During the legal process, Rabbi Mund’s team even had the court request all The CJN’s notes, recordings, texts and emails between the reporter and the victim. The judge denied the defence’s application, on the grounds it would violate the freedom of the press.
As for media coverage of the case, the judge came down squarely on the side of survivors of sexual abuse. Her ruling called spreading awareness through the media a “legitimate purpose”, because the complainant was hoping to encourage other victims to come forward.
“These are crimes that are mostly committed in secrecy, towards vulnerable persons who generally fear denouncing their abuser, dreading the consequences they may have to bear if they do so,” the judge wrote. “This certainly seems to be the case in the particular Jewish Community (sic) in which the complainant grew up.”
Lack of reporting of abuse
The Mund trial focused a spotlight on the controversial problem of sexual abuse in the closed world of Jewish Orthodox communities in Montreal and elsewhere.
In 2023, a court in Australia sentenced former girls school principal Malka Leifer to 15 years in prison for sexually abusing her students while she ran the Adass Israel School in Melbourne between 2004 and 2007. Three students who are also sisters had come forward with complaints about Leifer, although the court convicted the principal in only two of the cases.
The trial hasn’t ended the scandal, though. An investigation is underway into why the private Orthodox school staff helped Leifer flee Australia to avoid prosecution, even buying airline tickets for her and some of her children to fly to Israel.
It took 12 years for extradition proceedings with Israel until Leifer was brought back to Australia to face justice. Leifer claimed she was ill. An Israeli politician with ties to the religious community even intervened to help her, but was caught and fined.
In late 2021, the Orthodox Jewish world was shocked when a high-profile Israeli children’s author and therapist, Chaim Walder, took his own life. Walder’s December suicide followed his conviction by a rabbinic court in Safed, which found him guilty of sex crimes against 22 children, including molestation and rape. The court heard from both boys and girls who he had treated as a therapist.
In 2019, a former Toronto day school teacher, Steven Schacter, was sentenced to five years in prison after being convicted of sex crimes against pre-teen and bar mitzvah-age boys at Jewish private schools, including Yeshiva Yesodei Hatorah and Eitz Chaim. Toronto police said teachers and others who were responsible for hiring him did not report allegations against Schacter to authorities, nor did they alert other schools after they fired him.
The complainant in the Mund trial maintains there were many people in the Jewish community who knew what was happening, but didn’t report him to authorities. They particularly singled out the therapists, social workers and other “mandated professionals” who are legally obliged to report sexual abuse to the police, as part of their practice.
“We have a huge problem both with the Orthodox system and the judicial system,” the complainant told The CJN in the interview after the verdict.
The judge wrote that during the trial, the complainant was cross-examined about their efforts to gather evidence by contacting two Montreal rabbis with knowledge of the situation, plus Abe Worenklein, a Montreal clinical psychologist.
A spokesman for the Jewish Community Council of Montreal confirmed that in the early 2000s, its rabbis did deal with complaints of a sexual nature involving Rabbi Mund and female members of the community.
According to Rabbi Saul Emanuel, the current executive director of the JCC, hearings were held at the time, although Rabbi Mund himself declined to participate.
“I do remember when the original claims came up that were verified and we had a whole gamut of rabbis across Montreal that were involved in the situation,” Rabbi Emanuel said in an interview with The CJN Daily in May 2022, adding the issue was dealt with “immediately and promptly.”
“The rabbis of the Jewish Community Council were fully engaged in the issue to ensure that he was removed quickly and not continue to be involved in any congregation.”
Although no one went to police then, Rabbi Emanuel underlined it is now policy to encourage rabbis, community members and social service professionals to do so.
New survivor comes forward about Rabbi Mund
Just hours after Rabbi Mund was acquitted, another Canadian woman, who was one of his students and patients, came forward with her own story of abuse at the hand of the former high-profile teacher and spiritual leader.
Ruth Pinsky Krevsky had been closely following the Montreal court proceedings.
The Ottawa-based special education teacher told The CJN in an exclusive interview on Sept. 25 that when she learned about Rabbi Mund’s arrest in 2022, she telephoned the Montreal police.
She shared her own decades-old experience with Rabbi Mund’s inappropriate behaviour when she met with the detective investigating the complainant’s case.
She had hoped it would bolster the Crown’s arguments against Rabbi Mund.
“She said ‘If I need your testimony I’ll call you, but I don’t think it’s going to help’,” pinsky Krevsky recalled, referring to her dealings with Det. Julie Harvey, in the sex crimes unit of the SVPM, the Montreal police force.
The Crown did not call Pinsky Krevsky to testify in the Mund case. However, she was one of several Jewish women who turned up at the Montreal courthouse several times to listen to testimony at the trial.
Pinsky Krevsky, now 59, recounted her relationship with Rabbi Mund dated back to 1986 or 1987 when she was a young teacher living and working in Montreal. At the time, Pinsky Krevsky said, she had recently been divorced after a brief marriage, where she had also experienced sexual abuse. She confided in Rabbi Mund that she was having problems getting to her job on time.
Rabbi Mund was 23 years older than her. He had been one of Pinsky Krevsky’s teachers at a girls seminary in Montreal.
Rabbi Mund was a child survivor of the Holocaust, whose family had escaped France to Switzerland in 1944. He settled in Montreal and was married and a father. At the time, Pinsky Krevsky recalls of their encounters, Rabbi Mund would have been in his early 40s. He ran a small Orthodox synagogue known as Zichron Moshe (Sambor) at 6323 De Vimy Ave.
“He was a very warm, friendly kind of teacher, and he took a personal interest in me as a student,” she told The CJN. “He said, ‘I will help you. I will take care of you.’ And he used to call me every night, and call me every morning and come to my house and spend an inappropriate amount of time with me.”
He would lend her his personal car, too, she said, which she recalls was a dark blue vehicle.
“I started feeling very uncomfortable with our interactions.”
During their phone calls, Pinsky Krevsky said she was encouraged to recount in detail the sexual abuse she had experienced, at which time she remembered hearing noises coming from the other end of the receiver.
“He was masturbating on the phone. He was breathing heavily. He was making strange sounds and I didn’t understand what was happening, and I said to him, ‘Are you okay? Is something wrong?’”, Pinsky Krevsky recalled.
According to Pinsky Krevsky, Orthodox Jewish girls like her were very sheltered when it came to sex education, despite her having been briefly married. During Rabbi Mund’s trial, one of his sons, Moses Mund, testified that sexuality and consent aren’t really discussed by members of their community.
Pinsky Krevsky told The CJN she didn’t realize what Rabbi Mund was doing, until a psychologist later explained it to her.
Pinsky Krevsky said she was given some advice on how to break away from Rabbi Mund, and she succeeded. She never told her parents about what had happened. She also didn’t bring her concerns about Rabbi Mund to the authorities.
However, she is still furious with Orthodox school administrators and community leaders and even social services professionals, including her own psychologist at the time, who she declined to name, because they knew about Rabbi Mund’s reputation but did not report him to the police.
“He was a mandated reporter, and he didn’t do anything about it,” Pinsky Krevsky said, referring to her therapist. “He knew that the accused was working with children. He knew that there had been rumours about the accused. When people saw me hanging around with [Rabbi Mund] they said, ‘You know you better stay away from him.’”
For the past eight years at least, Pinsky Krevsky has been an outspoken advocate warning against sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community. During a lecture at an event sponsored by Jewish Community Watch (JCW) in 2016, she shared how rabbis in another community wanted to put her and her students through the wringer when she brought an abuse case to their attention.
The JCW group collects data on child abusers in the Orthodox community and publishes a gallery of their photos on a website, as a service to the community. (The video of her speech is on YouTube.)
“He was this holy rabbi. Have you seen him? Would you ever in a million years think that this guy was masturbating while you were talking to him?” she said of Rabbi Mund.
Despite acquittal, victim was ‘brave’
The U.S.-based ZA’AKA organization supports survivors of child sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community, and was providing emotional support to the complainant in the Mund case.
When Asher Lovy, ZA’AKA’s director, heard the verdict was an acquittal on both counts, he was “heartbroken for the survivor who came forward”, he told The CJN.
Lovy extended his kudos to the complainant, and described them as “brave”.
“It’s important to note that just because there’s an acquittal in a case does not mean that the alleged incidents didn’t happen, it simply means that the incredibly high burden of proof couldn’t be met,” Lovy said.
A decision to proceed with a sexual assault charge is always difficult for the victim, ZA’AKA officials acknowledge, but doubly so in the Orthodox Jewish community—where family and friends and spiritual leaders often close ranks to protect the suspect—rather than support the survivor.
“I think about the harassment [the alleged victim] faced, from community members, from other people, for coming forward,” said Ariella Kay, an advisor with ZA’AKA.
During the week-long Montreal trial in June, some of Rabbi Mund’s children and other relatives testified on his behalf. He and they told the court the alleged victim’s accusations caused a “rift” in the family.
The complainant told The CJN in 2022 that they had to move to another country, and have very limited contact with the family or the Orthodox Jewish community now.
Ruth Pinsky Krevsky also distanced herself from that segment of the Jewish community. The mother of five said doing so has been personally distressing, but necessary.
“I can no longer align myself with these people. It’s just completely unethical, immoral, and goes against anything and everything that, to me, Judaism stands for.”
The Crown prosecutor, François Giasson, also was aware of the stigma the complainant faced for bringing the charges against Rabbi Mund, and the disapproval from family members and others.
“I can only raise my hat and tell [them] that what [they]did was really courageous and it was worth it, even though the conclusion resulted in an acquittal,” Giasson told The CJN.
“As the judge put it, she’s not saying that it did not happen. It’s only that within the criminal system, she held that there was still a reasonable doubt,” and he said Rabbi Mund benefitted from that.
While Giasson said it was too early to know whether there could be an appeal of the acquittal, he doubts it will happen.
Advocates for survivors point out that some victims of crime do go on to sue their accused in civil court to obtain financial damages. One example were the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, who sued former U.S. professional football star and actor O.J. Simpson after their murders. A civil jury awarded the families $33.5-million in damages.
“In this scenario, I don’t know if anyone has any assets to go after,” said ZA’AKA’s Ariella Kay.
As Rabbi Mund was set free, there was no opportunity for the complainant to read a victim impact statement to the court, even though they had prepared one.
After spending nearly four years with the legal case being at the forefront of their life, they admit it has been “really, really draining.”
However, they remain convinced it was worthwhile.
“I stood up for myself, and I’m glad I did it.”