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April 27, 2001/Iyar 4, 5761, Vol. 53, No.30
London Jews embarrassed by Orthodox vote fraud
RICHARD ALLEN GREENE
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
LONDON - Two observant Jews who served as local elected officials in London have been sentenced to jail for vote fraud.
Isaac Leibowitz of the Conservative Party was given a six-month jail sentence; Zev Lieberman, a Liberal Democrat, was sentenced to four months.
The two fervently Orthodox defendants were convicted in March of fraudulently adding names to London electoral rolls. The investigating officer called the case "the largest attempt to subvert the democratic process that I am aware of."
The case has embarrassed Britain's Jewish community.
"Wider society tends to look at us as a homogenous group," said a representative of one community organization.
Leibowitz, 36, and Lieberman, 29, manufactured phantom voters and tricked legitimate voters into signing away their proxy ballots, resulting in a 2,000 percent increase in the number of absentee ballots in their ward in a May 1998 local election.
About 75 percent of the 241 absentee votes went to the Liberal Democrats, Lieberman's party.
The prosecution argued that the fraud had affected the overall composition of the local council in the northeast London borough of Hackney.
In handing down the relatively mild sentences last Friday - the men could have been jailed for up to 10 years each - Judge Jeremy Connor described the defendants as men of "good character" who had committed their crimes out of "enthusiasm for public office in order to do good things."
The Jewish community representative said the kind of vote fraud the men had committed could happen in any tightly-knit ethnic community.
But Samuel Heilman, author of "Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry," said the lifestyle of fervently Orthodox communities makes it particularly important for them to have political influence.
"They have huge financial needs," said Heilman, a professor at Queens College, which is part of the City University of New York.
Fervently Orthodox communities often do not have a "large number of people who are gainfully employed," he said. "There is a growing tendency to study Torah as a full-time profession. Yeshivas have to provide stipends not only for students, but for their families."
Government becomes the major source of funds for these communities, Heilman said.
"There is less and less sympathy within the wider Jewish community to Orthodoxy, and therefore they are not willing to shell out money to support these folks," he said. "The public sector is the last source of support."
As a result, if these communities show that they can deliver votes, "political officials will give them what they want - subsidized housing, food stamps, education," Heilman said.
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