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Rabbis ‘beat me, stun-gunned my genitals’

The rabbis accused of pocketing piles of cash to kidnap and torture Orthodox husbands on behalf of divorce-seeking wives targeted a Brooklyn man in 1996, he claimed in a lawsuit.

Abraham Rubin said that Rabbi Mendel Epstein and Rabbi Martin Wolmark had him forced him into a van outside his synagogue before beating him and stun-gunning his genitals.

He was left bloody and half-naked on the side of the road — all to force him to agree to a religious divorce, or “get,” from his wife, he claimed in the suit.

Rubin’s 1997 lawsuit was dropped by both parties in 2000, and a Brooklyn DA probe was halted because “the victim could not identify any of his assailants,” said a spokeswoman for DA Charles Hynes.

FBI agents remove evidence from the Brooklyn residence of Rabbi Mendel Epstein.AP

“We were so upset that we couldn’t prosecute,” said one law enforcement source. “They did it in a place that was very dark and they were all wearing masks,” the source said.

“We wanted Epstein, but we just couldn’t prove it,” the source said. “It was all in a world we couldn’t get deep inside.”

Rubin’s allegations put Epstein and Wolmark on investigators’ radar, and on Friday he applauded the arrests.

“We are very, very grateful to the Creator that finally this happened,” Rubin said in a statement given to The Post.

“These imposters, these so-called rabbis, are a disgrace to our community,” Rubin said. “The masks have finally been taken off their faces.”

The two rabbis remain locked up in New Jersey after a federal sting caught them agreeing to take $50,000 from an agent posing as a “get”-seeking Orthodox wife.

In exchange, the rabbis promised to lure the agent’s “husband” into a warehouse and torture him into agreeing to the split, the feds said.

“We take an electric cattle prod… You put it in certain parts of his body,” Epstein was secretly recorded promising, the feds’ complaint alleged.

Borough Park-based social worker Elya Amsel, 60 — who still remembers visiting the battered Rubin at Maimonedes Hospital — said the arrests, “will raise the eyebrows of the whole gentile world.

“The Italians are nothing compared to what went on here with the Jews.”