A Monsey area school recently accused its own former deputy dean of stealing money from the school, according to legal documents filed in a Manhattan court. The case has since been discontinued, but the stories the two parties told in the filings suggest financial mismanagement and a power struggle involving family members and multiple nonprofit entities.

The dean, Rabbi Don Blumberg, accused his former coworker Rabbi Matisyahu Rokach — who is also his nephew — of stealing money from his yeshiva  partly to install himself as the head of a new school in the same building, while Blumberg’s school was shuttered for lack of funds.

Around 50 men in their 20s and 30s studied at Yeshiva Ohel Yaakov in Chestnut Ridge in Rockland County before the school closed in April, according to a court filing submitted on behalf of Blumberg, the dean or rosh yeshiva of the school and the head of the congregation affiliated with the school. The school was quickly replaced by a new one that served many of the same students.

According to Blumberg, Rokach took over fundraising for the school last year after Blumberg’s son Shmuel Blumberg was discharged from the same job. In a fundraiser this past February, which went through charidy.com, a popular Haredi crowdfunding platform, Rokach used the school’s name and Blumberg’s image and raised nearly $700,000. But he diverted those funds to a bank account associated with an organization called Givos Olam to which Blumberg had no access.

Rokach, in his legal filings, denied the allegations and claimed that the campaign only raised about $344,000, but didn’t explain the discrepancy between the number on his invoice and the number Blumberg saw on charidy.com. Rokach insisted that all the funds from the campaign went to the school, not his own pocket. Rokach also claimed that months before the fundraiser, Blumberg cut off his salary. He further said that Blumberg had agreed that Givos Olam would control the funds, a claim that Blumberg denied.

Blumberg claimed that at one point, he confronted Rokach and demanded he return the funds. “But Rokach refused—instead demanding, in exchange for a return of any of the funds, that he be made Rosh Yeshiva,” Blumberg said.

According to Blumberg, the school closed on April 30, two months after the fundraiser. It also failed to pay its approximately $20,000-per-month rent for March and April. “Rokach’s theft has left the Congregation liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars of unpaid debts,” Blumberg said, “much of which is owed to local businesses that provided goods or performed services for the Congregation and trusted it, under my leadership, to make good on its bills.”

But a new yeshiva quickly began operating in the same building, with many of the same teachers and students, and with Rokach as the head. “Ironically,” Blumberg said, “Rokach got everything he want from the start—both the Congregation’s money and the title of Rosh Yeshiva.”

Rokach offered an alternate version of events that led the money to end up in his account. In his version, he and Blumberg had an arrangement in which Blumberg and Rokach would each be responsible for raising funds for a set of expenses associated with the school: Blumberg would handle rent and debt, and Rokach would handle all other expenses. They would put the money into different bank accounts in order to know what purpose it was designed for.

Nine days after litigation began, two other rabbis, Yitzchak Rothstein and Chayim Fischer, both teachers, submitted accounts that seemed to support Rokach’s version of events. Rothstein appeared to affirm that he participated in meetings in which Blumberg agreed that Rokach would use a separate bank account for fundraising and control the money. Later, though, Rothstein submitted another statement saying that his first one was “not entirely accurate.”

“When I said in my May 22 affidavit that Rabbis Blumberg and Rokach reached agreement on these points, what I meant, and should have said, was that the two men merely had discussions about these points,” Rothstein said. Rothstein attributed this error to a “miscommunication” between him and Rokach’s attorney.

Blumberg denied that he and Rokach ever agreed to divide fundraising responsibilities this way; if they had, Blumberg claimed, he and his son Shmuel wouldn’t have each organized a “team” that donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Charidy campaign. 

Rokach didn’t just deny Blumberg’s allegations against him; he also brought up new claims, attaching images of checks the yeshiva made to Blumberg’s wife and Shmuel, payments Rokach said are inappropriate . “Apparently, Blumberg is unfamiliar with the well-known saying, ‘people in glass houses should not throw stones,’” Rokach said.

Rokach also argued that the case shouldn’t have been brought to secular court in the first place, and that according to an agreement he signed with Blumberg when the two formed the yeshiva, all disputes should go before Rabbi Eliyahu Ber Wachtfogel. Blumberg, however, insisted that a rabbinic court gave him permission to seek justice in the secular system. 

Last Tuesday, both parties agreed to “discontinue” the lawsuit with no explanation. Attorneys for Blumberg, Joshua Wurtzel and Samuel Butt, did not immediately respond to Shtetl’s requests for comment, and Rokach’s attorney, Jeremy Rosenberg, declined to answer Shtetl’s questions.