There’s no understating the importance of the 103-year prison sentence imposed this week on Nechemya Weberman. A respected member of the Satmar Hasidic community, Weberman will probably die in prison now that Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice John Ingram threw the book at him after his conviction for sexually abusing a child he was “counseling.”
His fate is richly deserved.
The conviction wouldn’t have come without the courage of the victim, now a teenager, who defied the politically connected Orthodox sect to testify.
It was also a big win for Brooklyn DA Joe Hynes, who finally brought a sex-abuse case against a member of the insular Satmar community. Of course, only the harsh glare of the press spotlight — shone by The Post, among others — got Hynes to act.
The DA says this case marks “a sea change.” We sure hope so.
And an excellent place to start would be with the attempts by some in the Satmar community to intimidate the victim of this crime into silence.