By World Israel News staff
The former rabbi of Poway’s Chabad Synagogue, who lost a finger in the infamous 2019 antisemitic shooting, was sentenced to 14 months for his role in multi-million-dollar fraud schemes.
Yisroel Goldstein, 60, pleaded guilty to tax fraud in 2020. He and his co-conspirators must also pay $2.8 million in restitution, and he has until February 23rd to self surrender.
In a unusual event, both prosecutors and defense attorneys recommended home confinement rather than time in prison, citing the trauma Goldstein suffered during the attack and the leadership role he took on following the aftermath of the event.
But the judge rejected the punishment, stating that it wasn’t enough considering the severity of the crimes.
“You not only committed this offense yourself, but you took a lot of people with you,” US District Court Judge Cynthia Bashant told Goldstein, the San Diego Times-Union reported.
“I think it’s important to send a message to the community, and I think it’s important to send a message to you,” she said.
However, the judge did agree to recommended that Goldstein be jailed in a medium-security federal prison, which is known to accommodate observant Jews.
Last summer, Goldstein pleaded guilty to 14 charges of federal wire fraud and conspiracy charges, including a yearslong multi-million-dollar series of schemes that included tax evasion, ripping off government emergency relief programs and defrauding grant programs.
Goldstein found out about the investigation in 2018, but the news wasn’t made public until last summer when he pleaded guilty.
The investigation states that some of Goldstein’s schemes began in the early 1980s, but the rabbi himself dated it back to around 2010 in a self-documentary video prepared for his defense in court.
Goldstein said that at the time, many of the synagogue’s philanthropists died or moved away, according to the San Diego Union Tribune, and the rabbi felt the weight of the fiscal responsibility, only strengthened by the memories of his poverty-stricken childhood in Brooklyn.
He said that the schemes started small to assuage growing anxiety he was battling to support his large family.
The rabbi’s brother, Mendel pleaded guilty in September 2020 to evading taxes by hiding around $700,000 in a bank account controlled by Chabad. Both men were involved in the crime, and concealed the income, avoiding paying close to $156,000 in taxes.
Last week, John T. Earnest , the man who killed a woman and wounded three others in the 2019 shooting attack, was sentenced to a second life sentence in federal court.
Image: Sarah Biggart from San Marcos (San Diego), USA, CC BY 2.0 <;, via Wikimedia Commons
