An Alleged Survivor of Rabbi Aron Tendler Speaks Out - By Luke Ford

Rabbi Aron Tendler's Days Numbered As Pulpit Rabbi

The notorious womanizer is finally feeling some heat from his behavior. The board of his shul Shaarey Zedek is investigating him again. This time they may not conclude that the female accusers are crazy but rather that the rabbi is a sick man (as he's confessed to many of the women he's been intimate with).

A popular excuse for not disciplining the rabbi for his behavior has been that it would ruin the shidduchim (marriage) chances of his children and deny him parnassa (a living).

Rabbi Aron Tendler has lost weight recently and shows the strain of his double life.

Rabbi Aron Tendler has told people, including women he was intimate with, that he was molested as a boy.

Instead of calling him "Rav Aron," his students was at YULA, behind his back, called him "Rub Aron."

"We were at an all-girls school," says a former student. "Our hormones were going nuts. And Aron Tendler was there. He was flirty. He had two or three buttons of his shirt unbuttoned, walking up and down the hallway. He provoked it. Kids bored in school were flirting with him. I can't say he touched people unwillingly. I think they did it and then afterwards asked, ohmigod, what happened?

"He wasn't someone who was going to force himself him on you. Years later the girls woke up later and said, this was wrong.

"Before he'd have an affair, he'd discuss the halacha [Jewish law] about wasting sperm.

"Whenever it gets down to it, Aron gets afraid and removes himself. I heard he removed himself from the RCC. I'm surprised he isn't resigning from Sharei Tzedek. He has to be crazy to want this all to go public.

"He was very careful in the girls that he picked. He always picked girls who came from troubled homes, so that if we went public, he could say that we're crazy.

"I don't judge anyone, but when you stand on a podium and portray yourself as better than everyone else, and you say that we're crazy, that's the issue I have. He's living a double life. He's been cheating on his wife for 20 years.

"When you're in the Jewish world and you look at Aron Tendler, you might think he's sexy, but when you're in the outside secular world, and you look at him again, it's like night and day.

"Aron told one of the girls that he had had an affair while his wife (Name Removed) was pregnant and she miscarried, and he always felt it was punishment for cheating on her.

"He told me stories about a woman in Beverly Hills and when her husband was away, he would go over to her house and they would just lie in bed naked together. He was all into the halacha against spilling your seed.

"He shouldn't be running a shul. If two adults want to have an affair, then have an affair. It's morally incorrect but not worth tattling about.

"[For several years after highschool], I couldn't be at an event where he didn't approach me. There could be 500 people in the room. He would make it straight to me and ask me if I wanted to go outside and talk. I thought, aren't people wondering what we're talking about? I realized he was telling people I had problems and I needed to talk to him. But really, he was flirting with me.

"When he'd walk away, he'd be standing with some single guy and they'd be looking back at me and laughing. I remember saying to him once, 'Were you talking against me?' I was so naive. I thought, he's not going to talk lashon hara [evil speech]. He's a rabbi. I must be imagining it.

"Then [fellow student and friend] would tell me things he would tell her about me, and he would tell me things about her, so finally I realized he was talking against me. When I'd bring this up to him, he'd say, 'You know I love you.'

"SSS was much more damaged by him than me. She confronted him recently. He said to her, 'I'd talk to you about it but I'm still sick.' He admits it.

"If I was him, I'd say, 'I need help.' Play the victim. Just stop telling people that we're crazy and lying. That just forces people to tell their stories.

"The Sharei Tzedek board was told two years ago these stories and all they did was blame the women.

"A letter was written to his wife (Name Removed) two years ago with everybody's story in it. (Name Removed) got it and almost had a heart attack.

"The wife had to know that what was in the letter was true because it was filled with intimate details about their marriage that he had told all of us. Even a girl who stayed in their house and the situation she had with him."