2,000+ extradition requests with Israel as of May 2022, amid pattern of Jewish American pedophiles hiding in Israel

Find the spreadsheet here.

Mr. Alexandrovich, 38, executive director of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, was one of eight “child sex predators” named in a Friday press release regarding an undercover operation conducted by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. The Israeli cyber official acknowledged during an interrogation having been in town for the 25th annual Black Hat cybersecurity conference, which took place from August 2 to 7, prior to its more community-oriented analogue, DEF CON 33.

A $10,000 bond was paid to the Henderson Detention Center southeast of Las Vegas for Mr. Alexandrovich’s case, according to reporting from Reuters, and paperwork indicated that he is due back in court on August 27.

Alexandrovich returned to Israel after being released by the Las Vegas police and was placed on leave from the National Cyber Directorate, according to reporting in The Jerusalem Post on Saturday. Two days later, the Israeli-born acting U.S. attorney for Nevada, Sigal Chattah, publicly criticized a “liberal district attorney and state court judge in Nevada” for “FAIL[ING] TO REQUIRE AN ALLEGED CHILD MOLESTER TO SURRENDER HIS PASSPORT, which allowed him to flee our country.” Chattah’s office announced the previous day that Alexandrovich’s case would be handled by the Clark County district attorney, with no reference to federal prosecution.

(Following scrutiny of her public claims that all Palestinians in Gaza are terrorists, Chattah subsequently deleted her personal account on the social media platform X.)

According to an August 7 arrest declaration from Henderson Police Department officer Mark Kohut – first reported by the American journalist Saagar Enjeti – Mr. Alexandrovich attempted to lure an undercover officer, whom he believed to be a 15-year-old girl, into taking an Uber to a sexual encounter at a Cirque du Soleil event. Alexandrovich was said to have admitted to using the pseudonym “Adam” as part of his solicitations the previous day on the Swiss anonymous dating application Pure and then through Meta’s messaging application WhatsApp.

Find the Declaration of the Henderson Police Department officer here.

According to Mr. Kohut’s summary of an interview conducted with Alexandrovich at 8 p.m. on August 6 by an FBI special agent, the Israeli cyberofficial was staying on floor 53 of Hilton’s Conrad Hotel while attending the Black Hat cybersecurity conference and had met with several officials from both the FBI – “one white guy who was tall and bald and one black guy” – and the National Security Agency.

The interview summary described Alexandrovich as being “in shock” and needing “to contact someone about his international flight back to Israel,” further stating that Alexandrovich “did not know the numbers for the Israeli government.”

The more than 2,000 hidden case overviews in the leaked spreadsheet further include a new detail regarding the extradition request timeline for the famed director and convicted pedophile Roman Polanski, as well as previously unreported information regarding the U.S. extradition request for the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Joseph Snowden. They also summarize four international legal requests relating to the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group and one involving the Mossad-affiliated private intelligence firm Black Cube.

Case number 15-13-11 assigned the U.S. Government’s “state security” extradition request for Snowden to Israeli Ministry of Justice lawyer Enumah Kelemen on July 11, 2013, during the former government contractor’s roughly 40-day confinement in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport.

A “sex with minors” entry in the spreadsheet provides background to Roman Polanski’s July 2007 visit to Israel, where he narrowly escaped extradition. As an apparent consequence of Mr. Polanski’s fleeing the United States after pleading guilty to sexual intercourse with a minor in 1978, the Israeli Ministry of Justice opened a case for the U.S. request for the filmmaker’s extradition on July 9, 2006.

The Israeli government requested additional information from the Los Angeles district attorney during Polanski’s 2007 visit to the country, and an official timeline provided by the district attorney noted that, “By the time the information arrived, Polanski had left Israel and was not arrested.”

(The Swiss government subsequently denied a U.S. extradition request for Polanski after his September 2009 arrest in the country.)

Two notable entries of the more than 2,000 in the leaked spreadsheet relate to an investigation published by CBS News in early 2020 regarding how the New York City-based organization Jewish Community Watch tracked down American pedophiles who had escaped to Israel.

After pleading guilty in 2002 to abusing three children from ages 8 to 10 and serving time in jail, the Los Angeles-based Rabbi Mordechai Yomtov violated his probation by fleeing to Israel by way of Mexico, where he acquired a fake passport. A December cache of Jewish Community Watch’s website reported that Yomtov was still at large, with his last known address being in Israel.

The American citizen Jimmy Julias Karow similarly fled the United States after being accused of sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl in Oregon in 2000 and was sentenced to 13 years in jail by an Israeli court in early 2021 regarding a separate case involving dozens of rapes of two girls, ages three and seven, between December 1999 and October 2001.

According to the leaked overview of active international legal requests, the Israeli Ministry of Justice opened cases regarding U.S. Government extradition requests for Karow and Yomtov – both categorized under “sex with minors” – on November 30, 2017, and September 13, 2021, with case numbers 41-17-11 and 32-21-11, respectively.

Other U.S. child abuse extradition requests focused on the former Yeshiva principal Gershon Kranczer and his son, Asher, as well as the Israeli “sextortion” practitioner Elad Gaber.

While the “Anonymous for Justice” leaks have led to numerous published investigations and have been prominently mirrored by the U.S.-based transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets, the detailed contents of an attachment within a May 22, 2022, email had gone unnoticed. The bulk of the information was apparently accidentally included as part of a request from the legal assistant Shahar Barak for a review of 79 active cases assigned to Chana Leib within the international affairs department of the State Attorney’s Office.

The United States requested the extradition of Yeshiva Rabbi Gershon Kranczer in December 2011, one year after he fled the United States to Israel to escape charges of sexually assaulting children. Kranczer was ultimately extradited back to the United States nearly a decade later, in March 2021, where he was sentenced to 9 years in prison after pleading guilty to sexual conduct against a child.

Israel has not chosen to act on the closely related 2012 U.S. extradition request for Rabbi Kranczer’s son and co-abuser, Asher Kranczer, who fled with his father to Israel in 2010.

A similar case was opened by the Israeli justice ministry in July 2011, after the U.S. requested the extradition of Israeli citizen Elad Gaber for “computer sex with minors.” According to federal prosecutors, “since at least 2010, Gaber executed a systematic ‘sextortion’ scheme on dozens of victims, beginning with obtaining compromising videos of the girls.” Israel extradited Gaber back to the United States to stand trial nine years after opening a formal case for the request.

Technology and private-intelligence legal requests

At least four of the international legal requests in the leaked May 2022 spreadsheet relate to the Israeli developer of the infamous Pegasus cellphone spyware, NSO Group. In addition to Panama requesting help from the Israeli government regarding alleged fraud and deception relating to NSO in April 2015, Mexico requested help regarding “NSO Pegasus” in December 2017. Israel likewise requested “state security” help from the Singaporean government regarding NSO in June 2018 and then from the U.S. in December 2019.

Beyond NSO Group, case 11-16-21 documents Romania requesting help from the Israeli government regarding “fraud and deceit” related to the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube in April 2016. According to a 2020 report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, the late former honorary president of Black Cube, had suggested that the company work as “an arm of” the Romanian Intelligence Service prior to two of its employees being arrested in Bucharest for their alleged hacking campaign against former state prosecutor Laura Kovesi.

Other cases of interest include a February 26, 2018, request from the Israeli government to Meta’s social media platform Instagram for information regarding Yarden Bidani (ירדן בידני), and a subsequent September 9, 2021, case regarding “threats on Instagram.” The Bidani request appears to refer to an Israeli with the online pseudonym AppleJ4ck who was arrested in 2016 at the age of 18 by Israeli police after an FBI tip regarding his for-profit distributed denial of service (DDOS) tool, said to be named vDOS.

Another case documents an Israeli government request to the Phoenix-based domain name provider Namecheap, which was opened on March 20, 2022, presumably for information regarding who registered a particular domain.

Given the 2,152 legal requests in the spreadsheet, a more comprehensive investigation into the accounting of Israel’s international legal requests would be guaranteed to turn up further cases of interest.

Harrison Berger is an independent journalist.

How Jewish American pedophiles hide from justice in Israel

Reposted from CBS News, February 19, 2020

It’s a tense stakeout, waiting for Jimmy Julius Karow to appear. He is a wanted man and is considered dangerous. Accused of sexually assaulting a 9-year-old girl in Oregon in 2000, he fled to Israel before authorities in the U.S. could apprehend him or figure out where he went. Karow has been running from U.S. law enforcement ever since. Currently, INTERPOL, an intergovernmental policing organization that works with 194 countries, has a Red Notice to alert police worldwide that he’s a fugitive.

Two years after he fled the U.S., Karow was convicted by an Israeli court of child molestation in a separate case. He served time and was released. Now another alleged Israeli victim has come forward, saying he began abusing her when she was 5 years old, and continued for years.

Karow has successfully evaded authorities by moving between communities in Israel for almost two decades, and he is not alone. 

A widespread problem

A CBS News investigation has found that many accused American pedophiles flee to Israel, and bringing them to justice can be difficult. 

Jewish Community Watch (JCW), an American organization that tracks accused pedophiles, has been trying for years to find Karow and help bring him to justice. 

JCW says Karow and others wanted men and women to have been able to exploit a right known as the Law of Return, whereby any Jewish person can move to Israel and automatically gain citizenship.

Since the small organization started tracking accused pedophiles in 2014, it says more than 60 have fled from the U.S. to Israel. Given its limited resources to identify these individuals, JCW says the actual number is likely much larger.

“The same thing that is going on in the Catholic Church right now around the world, the exact same thing is happening in our community,” JCW’s founder, Meyer Seewald, told CBS News. “The cover-ups are the same, the stigma, the shame.”

Seewald says tightly-knit Jewish communities across the U.S. will sometimes meet accusations against a member with incredulity, and that can have a chilling effect. 

“Everyone goes and surrounds this individual and supports him because they can’t believe a person can commit such a crime. They take the abuser’s side and the abuse continues,” Seewald says. “They put him in another community. A few years later, he’s done the same thing, and we hear more allegations that the person is abusing children. Victims don’t want to come forward when they see that.”

JCW says the majority of its cases originate from modern Orthodox to Ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclaves in the U.S., but that it happens across the wider Jewish community. Because perpetrators can’t be held accountable unless victims come forward, many cases are believed to go unreported. To try to get them out into the light, JCW holds awareness events across the U.S. and offers victims of sexual abuse advice and emotional support.  

Mendy Hauck decided to come forward after receiving support from JCW. The father of two says he was just 8 years old when he was molested by a teacher at his Orthodox Jewish School in Los Angeles. Hauck says the abuse started one day when a friend brought in cookies for his birthday. 

“I actually went ahead and reached for the biggest cookie, and he said, ‘Put it back and you could come back by recess and get your cookie,'” Hauck said. “So after he handed out the rest of the cookies to the other classmates, I had to stay behind if I wanted my cookie, and I did. He called me up to his desk… and that’s when he started… rubbing me.”

His alleged abuser is Mordechai Yomtov, a then-35-year-old Hebrew teacher. 

“I jumped backwards like a step or two, and he grabbed my hair and said, ‘It’s fine, you can come close. I won’t hurt you. There is nothing wrong,’ and he did it again,” Hauck recalls.

Hauck says the abuse continued over the course of the year. He says he felt trapped, with nowhere to turn.  

When the year finished, Hauck moved on to the next grade. That’s when Yomtov’s crimes caught up to him. In 2001, police arrested and charged him with committing lewd acts with three of his other students, ranging in age from 8 to 10. But Hauck never told anyone about his ordeal until years later.

Yomtov eventually pled guilty, served time in jail, and was released on probation. But once free, he violated his probation by fleeing to Israel via Mexico.

JCW tracked him down and confronted him in Jerusalem with a hidden camera. Yomtov admitted that he violated his probation and illegally fled the United States with help. He also said that in Mexico, he obtained a fake passport in order to travel to Israel, where he lives illegally. 

Yomtov denied abusing Hauck, but offered a general apology to his victims, saying: “I’m very, very sorry. I hope that God will help every single person who has gone through this. Please forgive me.”

It wasn’t until 2016, when another alleged victim of Yomtov and a friend of Hauck’s came forward, that Hauck felt compelled to tell his story. He filed a police report, hoping to get justice, but says the process has been slow. For him, justice is twofold.

“I want the (LA County District Attorney) to step up their game — you know, actually fight to get him back here and give him what he deserves,” he says. “And also, I want the communities to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

The district attorney’s office told CBS News there has been no request to extradite Yomtov back to the United States, and declined any further comment. 

Red flags, more victims

Help from the community is a recurring theme. Rabbi Yehuda Oppenheimer knows firsthand how a pedophile is able to flee to Israel. In 2000, he unwittingly helped Karow escape.

The two met when Karow expressed interest in converting to Judaism. One day, Karow suddenly said he wanted to move to Israel. 

When asked whether there was nothing at all that raised red flags up to the point when Karow said he wanted to move to Israel, Rabbi Oppenheimer responded: “I wish I could say that [it didn’t raise any red flags], but unfortunately, I can’t… He [Karow] said, ‘I plan to go to Israel, I need to go much more quickly than I thought I needed to go.”

“He said that there was something in the past that happened when he was young, but nothing had ever happened since. I felt that I could trust him. So I wrote him a letter, he bought a ticket, and he left.”

Oppenheimer gave Karow the contact information of family and friends in Israel to help him settle. Then one day, a close friend called the rabbi. 

“I’ll never know exactly what happened, but something severely sexual… something happened with their daughter, and [Karow] was arrested.” Oppenheimer says it felt like “a punch to the gut. It was very painful.”

He says he carries that guilt to this day, and that’s why he came forward with his story. He has a message for other rabbis and community leaders:

“When somebody has offended in this way, the odds are that they will do so again, no matter how kind and pious and wise and nice and charismatic they are,” Oppenheimer says. “You simply can’t trust them. You have to take steps to prevent; you cannot have them around youngsters, you cannot have them in your home.”

One of the girls Karow allegedly abused in Israel is “Amoona.” She asked us not to use her real name, to protect her family. 

“I was 5, 4, or 5 years old. My mother was on bed rest. My father is a rabbi, so he wasn’t home. (Karow) used to come to our house. We used to play games, and then it became sexual.” 

The alleged abuse took place over the course of more than two years.  A July 2019 Israeli indictment against him details allegations of severe sexual abuse, including rape and sodomy.  She says he would threaten and manipulate her to keep her quiet. 

“‘I’m going to give you a cookie because you do it so nicely.’ It’s all about the cookie, it’s all about lying, and it’s all about being so evil to a little child,” Amoona recalls him telling her. “He also threatened to kill my parents. He would choke me. He would hold me.”

Inaction, even protection? 

Amoona is angry that Karow was allowed to enter Israel in the first place, but JCW’s chief operating officer, Shana Aaronson, says the failure begins in the United States. She says there are elements of the Jewish community in the U.S. that are willing to help pedophiles escape.

“Oftentimes there’s some sort of community incentive, either somebody owes them a favor or someone in the community, let’s say an institution, has covered up for them in the past, and they know that if this goes to court there’s a lot of civil liability coming down the line,” she says.

While Aaronson puts the blame on Jewish communities in the U.S. and the U.S. government for not aggressively pursuing extraditions, she says Israeli authorities have also failed to prioritize the hunt for suspects. 

She tells CBS News it would be easier for the police to locate and arrest Karow, for instance, but it has fallen instead on the JCW to track him down. 

Israel is known as a nation on the cutting edge of technology, but Shana says that doesn’t trickle down to local law enforcement. Shana says police don’t request background checks of perpetrators arrested in Israel who have recently moved there from other countries. They don’t even do a Google search, she says.

“The general standards and protocols for investigations by local police are poor,” she says. 

JCW says the problem reaches into the upper echelons of Israeli politics as well. They note that Yaakov Litzman, leader of an ultra-orthodox alliance in Israel’s legislature and the current minister of health, has been accused of preventing the deportation of a Malka Leifer, a former head teacher at a Jewish school in Australia, where she is wanted on multiple charges of child sexual abuse.

CBS News obtained an Israeli police recommendation that says there is enough evidence against Litzman to recommend he be charged himself with fraud and breach of trust for protecting Leifer. Litzman’s office told CBS News there was no wrongdoing. It’s now up to Israel’s attorney general to decide whether to indict the lawmaker.

“It’s a good example of the lengths the community will go,” JCW’s Aaronson says. “It’s really disappointing and disgusting.” 

Israeli police wouldn’t comment on specific cases but insist they take the cases seriously, and that they coordinate “closely with the Ministry of Justice and worldwide police organizations in order to find suspects overseas.”

The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment on specific cases, too, but praised their relationship with Israel’s law enforcement, adding that sex offenders have been successfully extradited in the past. 

The stakeout

On the day of the stakeout, JCW received its best tip in months — that Karow was going to be at a clinic in Tel Aviv. They know he is 6’2″ and over 200 pounds, but he could have changed his appearance, and previous attempts to capture him have failed. 

“Obviously, the fear is that he’ll figure out that someone is looking for him and he’ll bolt,” Aaronson says, clutching an old photo of JCW’s target. 

An ambulance pulls up, and a man steps out with a bandaged right arm. He fits the description of Karow. Aaronson’s team confirms his identity and calls the police. 

Within five minutes, a police officer on a motorcycle arrives, and they move in to make the arrest. 

Karow is brought out by two officers. He doesn’t look surprised to be in custody. We ask him if he assaulted a girl in the United States. 

“No,” he replies. He denies fleeing to Israel but doesn’t answer when asked if he assaulted girls in that country. He says he knows he’s wanted under an international arrest warrant. 

Karow now faces charges in both Israel and the U.S. 

The District Attorney’s office in Clackamas County, Oregon, told CBS News it was “working with federal authorities to secure his extradition.”

Outside the clinic, Aaronson calls Amoona to share the news of Karow’s capture. In Israel, victims are allowed to confront alleged offenders before trial. Amoona brought a box of the same cookies Karow used to manipulate her, to throw back at him.  

“It was good to confront him,” she says. “To have that closure in my life.”

Meanwhile, Mordechai Yomtov remains at large. 

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