1 Accused Rabbi Will Stay Jailed for Weekend : Courts: Judge terms him ‘a danger’ pending bail hearing. He and a colleague, who has returned to New York, are accused of molesting girl on airliner.

With questions still hovering around the prior arrest of one of two New York rabbis charged in a sexual molestation case, Yehudah Friedlander will remain in jail this weekend.

Rejecting a request to release Friedlander for a Jewish holiday, a federal magistrate ordered Friday that he be held pending a bail hearing Tuesday.

“I believe your client is a danger to the community,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Carolyn Turchin told attorney Mitchell W. Egers, who had argued that Friedlander was neither a danger nor a flight risk and therefore should be let out of jail to observe the Sabbath and Shavuot, a holiday that begins this evening.

In a case that has stunned the Orthodox Jewish community, Rabbi Israel Grunwald, a leader of a New-York based Hasidic sect, and Friedlander, his assistant, are accused of molesting a 15-year-old girl on a flight from Australia to Los Angeles this week.

Grunwald, charged with abusive sexual contact, was released on $10,000 bail Thursday night and returned to New York. The bail hearing for Friedlander, charged with sexual abuse of a minor, has twice been continued to give authorities time to determine the final outcome of his 1991 arrest in Monticello Township, N.Y.

According to Assistant U.S. Atty. Joel Thvedt, Friedlander was charged four years ago with having sexual contact with someone without consent. He apparently was given a conditional disposition: If he successfully completed probation, the case would not be prosecuted.

The court records were sealed, however, delaying the files’ release to federal prosecutors in Los Angeles.

Thvedt said that his office received the records Friday afternoon but that the contents would be open only to court officials. The matter will be taken up again Tuesday morning, when Turchin is expected to set bail for Friedlander, 44.

Judging from the magistrate’s comments Friday, the figure will be considerably higher than it was for Grunwald, who is charged with a less serious offense. Turchin said that on Tuesday, Friedlander should be prepared to say if he has property to post a “significant” bond. She also indicated that she may require him to wear an electronic monitoring device to track his whereabouts.

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In an affidavit accompanying a federal complaint filed in Los Angeles, authorities allege that Grunwald, 44, fondled the teen-ager’s breast and that Friedlander fondled and molested her while she tried to sleep under a blanket during the transpacific flight.

The teen-ager told authorities that she persistently attempted to fend off the advances but did so quietly because she was embarrassed by the situation and did not want to attract attention.

The complaint states that another passenger, a woman from Michigan, told the FBI that she saw one of the men groping the girl under the blanket. After talking to the girl later, the woman alerted the flight crew, which contacted authorities, and the men were arrested as they got off the plane Wednesday.

The affidavit further quotes Friedlander, in an interview with the FBI, as admitting sexual contact with the girl. But he says that she initiated it. Egers, maintaining his clients’ innocence, said the affidavit is inaccurate.

The allegations have ricocheted through the Orthodox community, which did not seem aware of Friedlander’s previous arrest and now finds it impossible to believe that two well-respected figures in an ultra-orthodox Hasidic sect could do what they are accused of.

“Hasidic leaders are charismatic persons who are role models of an extraordinary nature,” said Rabbi Eli Schochet of Shomrei Torah Synagogue in West Hills. That, he said, “makes accusations of this sort striking--almost blasphemous--particularly when they believe that a man is prohibited from being in the same room with a woman to whom he is not married or related.”

“No physical contact whatsoever would be permitted,” according to Jewish law, said Schochet, a rabbi in the Conservative branch of Judaism.

In New York, “This news is being greeted with a combination of shock, horror and a very healthy dosage of skepticism,” said Rabbi Yehuda Levin, host of a weekly radio show for the Hasidic community in Rockland County, outside New York City.

When he was shopping in preparation for the Sabbath Friday, Levin said, the talk on the streets was all about the arrests.

“People are saying they feel this girl saw these two Orthodox rabbis and didn’t like the way they were either segregating themselves from her or treating her, so she decided they had done something to her,” he said. “There’s a very strong feeling that this is absolutely fictitious--that it is a canard.”

At the same time, Levin said, people are seeing it as a message that “Americana, as it is, has crept into even the most Hasidic of households. . . . This is telling us to be on our guard.”

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, a spokesman for the Rabbinical Council of California, an Orthodox group, described the Pupa Hasidic sect, which Grunwald leads with his brother, as “small but certainly not insignificant.”

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Named after a Hungarian town, the sect was brought to America by Grunwald’s father, a survivor of the Holocaust, who built up the Pupa community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

Adlerstein, who is Orthodox but not Hasidic, said the Pupa sect served as an alternative to the larger Satmar sect for people who thought parts of Satmar were “strong or overstated.”

“They [the Pupa] were sort of a mild-mannered group of Hasidim,” he said.

The Grunwald family, he added, is a “respected and known name in Hasidim.” After the death of Rebbe Grunwald, the community broke up and Israel Grunwald and his brother each “carved out a different piece of the turf,” Adlerstein said.

While he said he found the charges ludicrous, Rabbi Abraham Hecht of New York added that if they turn out to be true, Grunwald will get no sympathy.

“Rabbis will bring the wrath of heaven down on him,” he said.

Times staff writers John Dart, Bob Pool and Larry B. Stammer contributed to this story.