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Cleveland rabbi sentenced to prison for soliciting underage sex had a prominent Conservative rabbi as his character witness
(JTA) – A Cleveland-area rabbi was sentenced to six months in prison on Monday for soliciting underage sex, capping a sad and shocking saga for the area’s Jewish community.
Among those who testified on Stephen Weiss’ behalf in a bid for leniency was a prominent rabbi in the Conservative movement.
Weiss, formerly senior rabbi at B’nai Jeshurun Congregation in Pepper Pike, was sentenced for the crimes of attempted unlawful sexual conduct with a minor and possessing criminal tools. He had been arrested and charged after a sting operation last April and pleaded guilty to the two felony charges in January. Weiss, 61, will be required to register as a sex offender for 25 years.
Appearing as a character witness for Weiss at his sentencing hearing was Rabbi William Lebeau, a former dean of the rabbinical school and former vice chancellor at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Lebeau currently serves as a senior consultant for rabbinic and institutional leadership with the Rabbinical Assembly, the professional association for Conservative rabbis.
“I first met Rabbi Weiss when he was a rabbinical student and I’ve maintained a close relationship with him to this day. I’ve come from New York City this morning because I wanted to share with you in court my experiences with Rabbi Weiss over the more than three decades that I’ve known him,” Lebeau said as he opened a three-minute statement on Weiss’ behalf, according to a recording of the hearing.
In the rest of the statement, he described “the Rabbi Weiss that I know” as “beloved by his classmates and respected by his teachers,” “especially admired for his qualities of kindness and sensitivity,” “his inspirational teaching of children and adults” and his support for congregants experiencing trouble.
Lebeau noted that Weiss felt remorse and had sought professional help in the wake of his arrest.
“Significantly, over more than 30 years as a rabbi there was nothing close to a grievance about his rabbinic service or his personal conduct,” Lebeau said. “There was nothing that would have predicted this aberrant moment in his life. I respectfully ask you your honor to consider the case of Rabbi Weiss in the context of the life of devotion to his family and to his community that he lived prior to this tragic event.”
Weiss had already pleaded guilty to the crimes; Lebeau and Weiss’ daughter appeared as character witnesses as part of his attorney’s effort to secure a more lenient sentence. Weiss’ legal team had argued that his 2022 solicitation of an undercover police officer posing as an underaged boy was an aberration in Weiss’s three decades of rabbinical activities. His lawyer also cited a 2018 brain injury as a relevant factor in his behavior.
Some in the community questioned the decision of Lebeau, a widely admired mentor in the Conservative movement, to testify on Weiss’ behalf.
“I have a great deal of respect for Rabbi Lebeau. He’s a very important person in the movement,” Rabbi Noah Bickart, an endowed professor of Jewish studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Bickart had been a student at JTS when Lebeau was its dean.
But, Bickart said, “Choosing to support and defend Rabbi Weiss here, as opposed to the community that was victimized or potentially victimized, was the wrong decision to make.”
In an email to JTA, Lebeau said, “I chose to make a personal statement referring to the Stephen Weiss I have known for 35 years and the qualities that defined him, as I said in the courtroom, ‘prior to this tragic event.’”
The Rabbinical Assembly, with which Lebeau is currently associated, had harshly condemned Weiss’ alleged behavior upon his initial arrest in April 2022 and suspended his membership, making him ineligible to apply for jobs or participate in other activities.
“These deeply disturbing accusations betray the sacred trust our communities put in their clergy and must be fully and immediately investigated and dealt with appropriately,” the group said in a joint statement with the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism at the time.
The Rabbinical Assembly began publicizing a list of suspended and expelled rabbis in 2021, amid a widespread reckoning over whether Jewish organizations had inappropriately obscured misconduct by rabbis and other leaders.
“Rabbi Lebeau’s testimony was not on behalf of the Rabbinical Assembly,” a Rabbinical Assembly spokesperson said in a statement this week, which noted that the group is now in the process of expelling Weiss permanently. “And his testimony did not seek to justify nor excuse the behavior for which Steven Weiss was convicted.
Lebeau had previously defended a different rabbi accused of inappropriate behavior towards children. In 2014, according to the Forward, he had supported a rabbi in Savannah, Georgia, who had given a lesson to a class of 9-year-olds about child sex trafficking filled with explicit language, alarming many parents.
Back then, Lebeau told the Forward the accused rabbi was “one of the kindest, most sensitive, caring people among all the students I met,” and expressed particular concern about the damage the incident could do to the rabbi’s reputation, saying, “This is a man’s life and a man’s reputation.” No crime was ever alleged to have taken place with the rabbi in Savannah.
Bickart said he was unfamiliar with the Savannah case but had a theory about why Lebeau spoke on behalf of the rabbis in both cases.
“I think Rabbi Lebeau honestly just wants to defend rabbis,” he said. “My sense is that Rabbi Lebeau is probably the go-to person to be a character witness for anybody.”
Still, Bickart said, he found the choice to testify on Weiss’ behalf meaningful.
“As somebody who’s a parent of a boy precisely the same age as the fictitious victim in this case, it’s hard for me to see an important rabbinic mentor seemingly take more seriously the concerns of a convicted sex offender than of the community,” Bickart said.
Prosecutors for Ohio’s task force on internet crimes against children disputed the arguments of Lebeau and Weiss’ attorney that Weiss’ conduct was a brief irregularity, saying that he had shown evidence of premeditated action. Weiss had previously sent explicit messages to an undercover officer posing as an underaged boy in 2020, and waited for hours in order to separate his target from his parents in 2022, when he was arrested.
B’nai Jeshurun, where Weiss had served since 2001, suspended the rabbi immediately upon his arrest in 2022, and he resigned days later. The congregation had determined in its own investigation that Weiss had not engaged in any illegal or illicit activity at the congregation itself. After Weiss’ sentencing was announced, the congregation’s president and senior rabbi emailed congregants to offer counseling services.
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US Aircraft Carrier Enters Middle East Region, Officials Say
The USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego, California, US, Aug. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Blake
A US aircraft carrier and supporting warships have arrived in the Middle East, two US officials told Reuters on Monday, expanding President Donald Trump’s capabilities to defend US forces, or potentially take military action against Iran.
The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and several guided-missile destroyers have crossed into the Middle East region, which comes under the US military’s Central Command, the officials told Reuters.
Trump said on Thursday that the United States had an “armada” heading toward Iran, but hoped he would not have to use it.
The warships began deploying from the Asia-Pacific region earlier this month, as tensions between Iran and the United States escalated following a crackdown on protests across Iran.
Trump had repeatedly threatened to intervene if Iran continued to kill protesters, but the countrywide demonstrations have since abated. The president said he had been told that killings were subsiding and that he believes there is currently no plan for the executions of prisoners.
The US military has in the past surged forces into the Middle East at times of heightened tensions, moves that were often defensive.
However, the US military staged a major buildup last year ahead of its June strikes against Iran’s nuclear program.
In addition to the carrier and warships, the Pentagon is also moving fighter jets and air-defense systems to the Middle East.
Over the weekend, the US military announced that it would carry out an exercise in the region “to demonstrate the ability to deploy, disperse, and sustain combat airpower.”
A senior Iranian official said last week that Tehran would consider any attack as an “all-out-war against us.”
The United Arab Emirates said on Monday that it will not let its airspace, territory or territorial waters be used for any hostile military actions against Iran.
The US military’s Al Dhafra Air Base is located south of the UAE capital Abu Dhabi and has been a critical US Air Force hub in support of key missions against the Islamic State, as well as reconnaissance deployments across the region.
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Wikipedia, Qatar, and the Future of Knowledge
Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani speaks on the first day of the 23rd edition of the annual Doha Forum, in Doha, Qatar, Dec. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
Imagine a world in which facts can be erased from one of society’s key sources of information.
A world where foreign governments and terror-supporters have a say in whether you should know something or not.
A world where truth is malleable and facts are twisted to fit pre-determined narratives.
No, this isn’t an Orwellian dystopia. It’s Wikipedia as it currently operates: one of the world’s most influential websites and a primary source of information for millions.
Because of how it crowd-sources information, Wikipedia is one of the most extensive sources of knowledge on the Internet (and possibly in the entire world). However, this same strength is also Wikipedia’s biggest weakness, leaving it vulnerable to manipulation by autocracies, terror supporters, and other bad actors.
From recently-uncovered Qatari influence to a secret network of anti-Israel activists, we’ll take a look at how the truth is being manipulated on Wikipedia, and what this means for our understanding of the world.
Wikipedia was meant to democratize knowledge, but today it’s a hub for deliberate fake info and erasing documented history by rogue editors – what I call Knowledge Poisoning.
The list of victims is endless:
Iranian protestors in Iran, Iryna Zarutska, Women, Jews and more.The… pic.twitter.com/Ir7WzKfHGD
— Ella Kenan (@EllaTravelsLove) January 17, 2026
In Qatar’s case, the PR firm Portland Communications was hired after Qatar was selected to host the 2022 World Cup. Its job was to edit Wikipedia articles related to human rights, and to suppress other unflattering facts that threatened the state’s international image.
According to the report, between 2013 and 2024 Portland Communications directed a network of subcontractors to edit Wikipedia articles on human rights in Qatar, as well as entries on Qatari politicians and businessmen accused of corrupt or unethical conduct.
The edits were deliberately small and incremental, designed to evade detection and slip past the scrutiny of other Wikipedia editors.
In short, anyone researching Qatar on Wikipedia has not been presented with a full or nuanced picture of the Gulf state.
Instead, they encountered paid-for reputation management designed to polish its image and suppress unflattering facts. In the process, Wikipedia shifted from an information resource to a vehicle for indoctrination.
The @TBIJ just revealed a UK PR firm allegedly paid intermediaries to rewrite Wikipedia pages — burying criticism of Qatar and reshaping public perception.
Hidden edits like these launder reputations, making biased content appear neutral to millions. The Portland case is the… pic.twitter.com/EwZpwS2ODx
— Ashley Rindsberg (@AshleyRindsberg) January 17, 2026
Nor is Qatari influence confined to Wikipedia. Analyst Eitan Fischberger has noted that the Qatar Investment Authority has invested billions of dollars in Elon Musk’s xAI. This is a development that has potential implications for how Qatar is portrayed on Grokipedia, xAI’s alternative to Wikipedia.
If this pattern continues, the result is straightforward: future audiences may encounter a curated version of Qatar that downplays human rights abuses and other reputational liabilities. By strategically funding the platforms people rely on for information, a state need not censor facts outright, as it can simply ensure they are never meaningfully encountered.
I was about to tweet about how Grokipedia is already far better than Wikipedia.
And I was going to illustrate this by comparing their pages on Qatari foreign influence in American universities.
But it looks like Qatar noticed too. Hence the billions now being thrown at xAI, as… pic.twitter.com/0VcCrJlUpx
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) January 8, 2026
Wikipedia’s Untrustworthiness on Israel
For those who have followed developments around Wikipedia, the revelation that Qatar actively sought to edit articles in its favor came as little surprise. Abuse of the crowdsourced encyclopedia by bad-faith actors has been documented for years.
In 2024, investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg published an in-depth exposé about a group of 40 activists who had engaged in a coordinated campaign of anti-Israel disinformation since 2020.
According to Rindsberg, this group accounted for 90 percent of the content on dozens of Israel-related articles and made a combined total of more than two million edits on over 10,000 articles.
This coordinated effort has transformed Wikipedia’s Middle East narrative: Zionism is increasingly framed as inherently evil, Hamas’ violent Islamist ideology is softened or obscured, Iranian human rights abuses are minimized, and the Jewish historical connection to the Land of Israel is routinely challenged or erased.
Rindsberg has also identified another coordinated effort: a group known as Tech for Palestine (TFP), which formed during the recent Israel–Hamas war and edited thousands of Wikipedia articles related to Israel.
In its own welcome message on the platform Discord, the group explained its focus on Wikipedia by noting that the encyclopedia’s “content influences public perception.”
Most recently, independent investigative journalist David Collier conducted a deep dive into a Wikipedia claim that the Israeli town of Ofakim was built on a depopulated Bedouin village. He found that the cited books and maps did not support the claim at all, and that the evidence had been effectively fabricated through misrepresentation.
Yet the claim remains on Wikipedia, upheld by a decision from an anti-Israel activist editor, and it continues to feed into AI systems that treat Wikipedia as authoritative, compounding the misinformation.
Wikipedia’s Israel problem is no longer in dispute. As long as activist editors retain outsized control over key articles, the Internet’s largest encyclopedia remains an unreliable source for understanding Israel, the Palestinians, and the Middle East.
Exclusive: A detailed investigation exposes how false claims on @Wikipedia fabricate history – then get laundered into activist and media campaigns used to smear elected officials and demand resignations
Thread— David Collier (@mishtal) January 5, 2026
How Wikipedia Influences Your Life — Even Without Your Knowledge
According to Wikipedia’s own data, the site is viewed nearly 10,000 times per second, totaling close to 300 billion page views annually. In practice, this means a significant portion of the world’s population relies on Wikipedia for basic knowledge, often without realizing how susceptible it is to manipulation by bad-faith actors.
And opting out is not an escape. Even users who never consult Wikipedia themselves are still influenced by it, as many AI systems draw on Wikipedia as an authoritative source, recycling its distortions at scale. And to mark its 25th anniversary, Wikipedia has signed content partnerships with major AI companies, including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI.
This influence is already embedded in everyday technology. Google’s search results routinely draw on Wikipedia as a trusted reference, while voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri rely on it to answer basic factual queries.
In practice, Wikipedia now functions as a foundational layer of the modern information ecosystem.
At the center of everything is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia articles appear in 67%-84% of all search engine results & most info boxes
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) May 30, 2023
Whether you consult Wikipedia directly, ask an AI system for information, or turn to Siri with a question, you are being shaped by the thousands of editors whose collective work forms Wikipedia.
Most of those editors are diligent volunteers committed to accuracy and the pursuit of knowledge. Some, however, are not. They omit facts, introduce disinformation, and quietly reshape narratives to fit an ideological agenda.
The real danger is not Wikipedia’s scale, but the trust it enjoys. Too often, it is treated as neutral while users have no reliable way to distinguish between an article written to inform and one designed to manipulate.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Italy Pushes for EU Clampdown on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Over ‘Heinous Acts’
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani speaks during an interview with Reuters in Rome, Italy, April 15, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Guglielmo Mangiapane
Italy will ask European Union partners this week to place Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on the EU‘s terrorist register, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said on Monday, signaling a shift in Rome’s position.
Until now, Rome had been among the governments resisting efforts to brand the IRGC as a terrorist group, but Tajani said a bloody Iranian crackdown on street protests this month that reportedly killed thousands of people could not be ignored.
“The losses suffered by the civilian population during the protests require a clear response,” Tajani wrote on X, adding he would raise the issue on Thursday at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels.
“I will propose, coordinating with other partners, the inclusion of the Revolutionary Guards on the list of terrorist organizations, as well as individual sanctions against those responsible for these heinous acts.”
Being branded a terrorist group would trigger a set of legal, financial, and diplomatic measures that would significantly constrain the IRGC’s ability to operate in Europe.
Set up after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the IRGC holds great sway in the country, controlling swathes of the economy and armed forces, and is also in charge of Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs.
While some EU member states have previously pushed for the IRGC to be listed, others have been more cautious, fearing that it could lead to a complete break in ties with Iran, harming any chance of reviving nuclear talks and jeopardizing any hope of getting EU nationals released from Iranian jails.
However, Iran’s violent crackdown on protests has revived the debate and added momentum to discussions about adding the IRGC, which is already included in the bloc’s human rights sanctions regime, to the EU terrorist list.
Italian, French, and Spanish diplomats raised qualms during a meeting in Brussels earlier this month about adding the IRGC to the list, EU diplomats told Reuters at the time.
If France continues to object, then the move to sanction the IRGC will fail, diplomats have said.