The Nov. 16 arrest of a man in Israel on molestation charges was welcomed by New Jersey Jewish activists and by a Highland Park man who was one of his alleged victims.

Avrohom Mondrowitz, a member of the Gur hasidic movement who faces several counts of child sex abuse in the United States, was arrested in Jerusalem and awaits extradition to Brooklyn.

His extradition had been requested earlier this year by the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes, according to a spokesperson.

Mondrowitz, who has described himself as a rabbi and a psychologist, was a youth counselor in Brooklyn's fervently Orthodox community in the 1980s.

He has been in Israel since New York police issued a warrant for his arrest in 1984 on charges of abusing underage boys, including acts of forced sodomy.

Just hours after his arrest, four activists in the fight against child abuse in the Jewish community met reporters in the Manhattan office of Michael Wildes, an attorney who also serves as mayor of Englewood.

“I don't see this as a moment for celebration,” said Michael Lesher, a Passaic attorney who said he represents some of the alleged victims. “There is so much more to be done to ensure that Mondrowitz is in fact brought back and that justice is in fact served. But it is a moment for gratitude for victims who had the courage to come forward and expose their pain, despite the fact that many rabbis from our community who should have been there to support them did not.”

According to Lesher, who said he confirmed the arrest with a spokesperson for Israel's Ministry of Justice, Mondrowitz was scheduled to have a hearing on the afternoon of Nov. 18.

Amy Neustein, a sociologist who has been outspoken on the issue of child sex abuse in the Jewish community, said, “Pedophilia has not been redressed by law enforcement and the systems we have in place to do it. Instead, rabbis were discouraging victims from coming forward. Today is a day of sunshine. With Mondrowitz coming back, it is my hope and my surmise that he is going to point a finger at others.”

Rabbi Mark Dratch, a former vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America and chairman of its Task Force on Rabbinic Improprieties, said there had been a “cover-up” of child abuse in some parts of the Orthodox Jewish community.

Dratch is founder and director of JSafe, the Jewish Institute Supporting an Abuse-Free Environment.

Speaking of the principle of lashon hora, which he defined as “derogatory or slanderous speech,” Dratch said, “Sometimes it is a tool to silence victims. Victims come forward with complaints and they are told, ‘Don't speak lashon hora.' This kind of approach is inappropriate.”

Mark Weiss, 40, said he is still haunted by the week he spent at the Brooklyn home of Mondrowitz a few months after becoming bar mitzva in 1980.

Weiss, who now lives in Highland Park with his wife and two sons, told NJ Jewish News that as a boy he “didn't fit the mold” and “had trouble fitting in” with the religious life in his North Side neighborhood in Chicago, where his father was “a rebbe in a very, very black-hat shul.”

Meeting with a reporter at a kosher restaurant on Manhattan's Upper West Side last week, Weiss spoke softly of being placed by his parents in a series of yeshivas in the United States and Israel before being sent to live with Mondrowitz, a rabbi “with a reputation for helping out kids who are having trouble fitting in.”

“He picked me up at the airport, and he wined and dined me. He took me to an amusement park. It was awesome, like this total attachment. He knew exactly how to push the right buttons, and I was this naive little kid. I wouldn't know a predator if he hit me over the head. I was just soaking up all the love.”

When they returned to the Mondrowitz home in Brooklyn, Weiss said, he discovered the rabbi's family was vacationing in the Catskills.

The man and boy were alone. Weiss said the rabbi proceeded to molest him and continued to engage him in sex acts during the week they stayed together.

“That happened every night,” said Weiss. “I remember thinking that once he started making moves on me that maybe this was a little strange, or maybe he was just being a little friendly and making me feel comfortable and affectionate. I didn't think twice about it. It's like when you have an animal that is out in the wild and has no natural predators, it will walk right over to something that wants to kill it and not know any different. You point a gun at a dog and the dog doesn't run away. It doesn't know any better.

“That was what I experienced, this nightly routine, and it never registered on the radar that this was a problem. It sounds unbelievable now.”

Weiss said he only revealed the events a few years later, when as an 18-year-old he discussed them with his parents and the head of the yeshiva he was attending. Weiss said nothing came of his allegations.

Weiss had not been aware of the original investigation that led authorities to indict Mondrowitz in 1984 on four counts of sodomy and eight counts of sexual abuse. Weiss came forward in 2006 to press the case for Mondrowitz's extradition.

Weiss said he is “not a vindictive person, but I do have a sense of justice. I'd like to see him go to prison and get a taste of his own medicine, but I'm sure if he were to go to prison he would not be alive for long.

“But the bigger thing is this sends a message that the sins of the past cannot be buried by the people in the community who are all the enablers. They make the system wrong.”