Six more former students of Yeshiva University’s prestigious all-boys high school have stepped forward to allege that administrators there covered up decades of sexual and physical abuse.
Days after 19 other ex-students at Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy in Manhattan slapped the university with a scathing $380 million lawsuit alleging similar offenses, a lawyer for six more students said yesterday that his clients are poised to file a similar suit after failing to reach a settlement with Yeshiva officials.
“The reality is you have an institution like Yeshiva University with a culture that not only allowed sexual abuse to occur but to flourish,” said lawyer Michael Reck. He said he is in talks with other former students who are also considering coming forward.
Reck said five of his clients were allegedly abused by Rabbi George Finkelstein, a former principal at the high school, between 1969 and the early 1980s.
The other is a female who claims she was abused by Finkelstein in the late 1990s, when he was a dean at Samuel Scheck Hillel Community Day School in Florida. She blames Yeshiva for failing to warn the Florida school that Finkelstein posed a threat to kids.
Rabbi Norman Lamm, Yeshiva University’s former chancellor, who retired July 1, previously confessed in December to the Jewish newspaper The Forward that Finkelstein and Rabbi Macy Gordon, a former teacher, were allowed to leave quietly after students accused them of sex abuse.