MANAGEMENT OF CONGREGATION KESHER ISRAEL in Washington are trying to take their recently removed rabbi to court to evict him from a congregation-owned property.
According to Wikipedia, the rabbi, Barry Freundel, was also until recently a member of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) and was vice president of the Vaad of Greater Washington. R. Freundel also was one of the few U.S. rabbis acceptable to the Israeli rabbinute.
RCA suspended Freundel in October, 2014.
The congregation and the rabbi - who to date has neither been tried nor found guilty of the voyeurism misdemeanor crime with which he has been charged by Washington's Metropolitan Police - have an agreement that any disputes between the congregation and the rabbi would be settled by the Beth Din of America.
Will the judges be fair?
According to Times of Israel. the Beth Din of America is a function of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), an organization to which the rabbi was a long-time member.
In a related action "Freundel-related lawsuit adds RCA as defendant," the JTA reports that A lawsuit arising out of allegations of voyeurism at a Washington D.C. ritual bath added the Rabbinical Council of America as a defendant.
The lawsuit, filed earlier this month by a third-year student at Georgetown University’s law school, initially named as defendants Rabbi Barry Freundel’s Washington synagogue, Kesher Israel, the adjacent mikvah and her own law school for allowing Freundel’s alleged misdeeds to go unchecked.
At a press conference on Thursday, the law firm representing her — Silverman, Thompson, Slutkin and White — added the RCA as a defendant and added two additional plaintiffs in a class action, WJLA, the local ABC affiliate, reported.
One of the new plaintiffs approached Freundel in order to convert and who has written about her experiences with Freundel and the ostracism she has suffered since speaking out, according to the JTA article.
The JTA failed to specify if the additional actions were filed before the RCA's Beth Din of America or in a civil court.
R. Freundel is charged with voyeurism, a misdemeanor for allegedly filming women while they were undressing before immersing themselves in the National Capital Mikvah, an independent facility that Freundel was instrumental in founding in 2005.
