Back in March 2010 Rabbi Bryan Bramly of Temple Beth Sholom of the East Valley in the city of Chandler, Arizona was arrested in the parking lot of his synagogue by police after he had been accused of raping a seventeen-year-old girl a decade earlier when she was seven years old while he was a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
As Josh Nathan-Kazas explained in the ‘Jewish Daily Forward’ at the time:
‘A rabbi at a Conservative congregation in Arizona has been extradited to New York City on charges that he raped a 7-year-old girl while he was a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, a rabbinical school of the Conservative movement.
The rabbi, Bryan Bramly, was arrested by U.S. marshals and New York detectives in Arizona on March 23. He was charged with two counts of rape in an incident that allegedly occurred a decade ago. He pleaded not guilty and was released on $10,000 bail on March 26.
“It never happened,” said Alan Lewis, Bramly’s attorney, of the alleged rape.
The alleged victim, now 17, filed a report with police in August of last year. The complaint against Bramly alleges that he hit the victim and then had intercourse with her. Lewis said that Bramly passed a polygraph test that clears him of the charges. The rabbi, who is due in court on June 22, has relinquished his passport.
Bramly, 35, has been the rabbi of Temple Beth Sholom of the East Valley in Chandler, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix, since 2006. The alleged incident occurred in March 2000, when he was a first-year rabbinical student at JTS, in an apartment leased by the seminary for married students. Bramly lived there at the time with his wife and two children, a daughter and a son.
According to Lewis, the alleged victim and Bramly’s daughter had been friendly since preschool, and the two families were close and saw each other often.
Lewis said that the alleged victim and her mother visited the Bramly home in Arizona last June, one of many visits the families have made over the years. Bryan Bramly was away, Lewis said, but the alleged victim and her mother told Bramly’s wife and daughter about her memory of the rape.
Lewis said that Bramly had not been contacted by authorities investigating the incident.’ (1)
In mid-September 2010 police and the New York County District Attorney’s Office dropped the charges against Bramly and stating this was because of ‘certain inconsistencies in the evidence’ not that Bramly wasn’t guilty in their opinion, but because they were ‘no longer confident in taking the case to court’. (2)
Put another way; the witness was flaky which might be because they were lying or misrepresenting what happened, but it also could be because the events were traumatic to recall and/or their recall wasn’t the best.
Thus, I am listing Bramly as a potential jewish child molester here more for the latter possibilities and the record not because he has been tried and convicted as such.
References
(1) https://forward.com/news/127126/conservative-rabbi-accused-of-rape/
(2) https://forward.com/news/131513/rape-case-dropped-rabbi-still-feels-tainted/
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