The Kremlin’s human rights council is reviewing a prison sentence meted out to Ilya Farber, a Jewish schoolteacher convicted of corruption.

The regional court of Ostashkov, north of Moscow, sentenced Farber last week to seven years in jail after convicting him of receiving $13,000 in bribes from a construction company. The company was seeking permission to renovate a culture club in a village where Farber settled in 2010 and began teaching art to children.

Many in Russia believe Farber did not receive a fair trial, partly because of his Jewish origins, according to Matvey Chlenov, the deputy executive director of the Russian Jewish Congress. Several people have testified that they heard the prosecutor in Farber’s first trial telling the jury: “Is it possible for a person with the last name Farber to help a village for free?” – a statement interpreted as referring to the fact that Farber is Jewish.

The Russian Jewish Congress has collected $30,000 in donations to help support Farber’s three young sons as he prepares to appeal the sentence, Chlenov said.

Alexander Brod, head of the Kremlin’s Human Rights Council, told the news site Utro.ru that he initiated a review of the case because he found the sentence to be “too harsh.”

Farber was arrested in 2011 and convicted. But a higher court scrapped the first conviction because of irregularities, including the judge’s instruction to the jury to “not to pay attention to the words of the defendant.” The conviction last week came in a retrial.

Farber was convicted of taking two bribes of $9,100 and $4,000 from the construction company Gosstroi-1 in exchange for permission to renovate a village club. Prosecutors said he signed off on the completed renovations when in fact none had been made.

Farber was a director at the club.

Chlenov said, “It is obvious Farber acted naively and some locals set him up and dropped their corruption on him.”

There has been a lot of discussion about the length of convicted pedophile Nechemya Weberman’s 103 year prison sentence. According to an article in the Forward comparisons are being made to the sentence given to Leiby Kletzky’s brutal murderer, Levi Aron, of 40 years in prison.

A lot of people are asking where is the justice in that?

I am not one of those people. In essence Weberman got a life sentence. At age 54, 40 years would have pretty much meant the same thing. I have also heard that the appeals court will often reduce the sentence by half.

It should also be noted that the deranged Levi Aron’s sentence was the result of a plea deal, that spared Leiby’s parents and relatives the ordeal of a trial where they would have had to relive every painful moment of that terrible tragedy. And a plea deal saved the state the expense of a trial.

Weberman, on the other hand continues to proclaim his innocence. Pedophiles are gifted liars that can convince their peers, friends and family of their complete innocence. Fortunately his lies did not convince the jury or the judge. But – his community still believes him.

His trial forced the victim to relive all the painful sexual abuse she endured for over four years at the hands of this monster. And the fact is that she too has a life sentence of untold pain from those memories.

So, no I am not particularly bothered by this harsh sentence. He can still say Tehilim in prison, just as he did during the trial. He will not be having nightmares. Unless they put him together with the general population of those prisons. Prisoners have standards too and they don’t take kindly to pedophiles. Weberman may get a taste of his own medicine there. He can still say Tehilim though.

For me – justice has been served for his victim and hopefully all future victims. Pedophiles ought to take a hard look at what happened here. And victims will now know that if they press charges – sometimes good things happen.

Unfortunately this is not the way certain segments of Orthodoxy will see this. This accomplished liar – with his ‘explanation’ of why his accuser brought these ‘false’ charges against him is still believed. He has convinced most of his peers including their leader that these charges are the result of a vendetta by the accuser who is herself immoral and “Off the Derech.” She should therefore not be believed.

They also fully believe that a Chasid cannot get a fair trial in America anymore. And they have some pretty prominent people saying that – pointing to the 27 year prison term Shalom Rubashkin received for a white collar crime they saw as undeserving of such a harsh sentence. A view corroborated by many distinguished Americans.

This is how they see what happened with Weberman. An innocent man has been convicted because of his beard and peyos. They will point to what they will say is an over the top sentence of 103 years to prove their point. Of course if the sentence were only 27 years (like Rubashkin’s sentence) he would still be in prison until he was in his eighties.

I can’t wait to see how Ami Magazine treats this verdict. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if they saw it in the way I just described.

The bottom line for me is that no one should see this sentence as excessively harsh. Instead they should see this as a victory for the abused.

Jonathan Pollard’s long incarceration has taken its toll and he is now seriously ill. While he is not the first inmate to suffer in this manner, most are given consideration for compassionate early release. It in no way diminishes the severity of his crimes to suggest he should be sent home. His sentence was Draconian, as attested to by a growing number of former senior federal officials, including several from Congress and the intelligence community.

In this connection, we were disappointed that retiring Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who in the past pointedly refused to get involved with the issue, still does not seem interested – this despite his call for Congress to have “mercy” on United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, who has been heavily criticized for her statements after the Benghazi attack. The circumstances are obviously very different but we were struck, nevertheless, by his compassion for Ms. Rice, which stands in such stark contrast to his disinterest in Mr. Pollard’s plight.

Several years ago his Senate colleague, New York’s Charles Schumer, said in an interview after being asked about his reported review of the classified Pollard case file:

Pollard should have been punished, he spied on the United States. But the sentence he received is disproportionate. When I got the top-secret briefing you alluded to, it didn’t teach me anything that I didn’t know from open sources.

Sen. Lieberman once told an interviewer that he had had “a classified briefing” in the matter and noted that “Pollard did some terrible things” – though he also acknowledged that “he’s been in a long time…but if you’re asking if I’m going to get involved, no.” When pressed further he said,

He’s been in a very long time. Our system of justice unfortunately sometimes produces results like this. Two people, even in the same state, can both be charged with murder and convicted of murder. One gets a life sentence for some reason and maybe that is commuted to 25 years; the other gets executed. I mean, that’s just the way it is.”

Mr. Lieberman’s words speak for themselves.

Ahmed Ferhani, one of two men arrested in an undercover sting in May 2011 and charged with attempting to blow up synagogues in New York City, has pled guilty, and now faces a sentence of 10 years in prison.

The 27 year old Algerian said in a prepared statement that “By targeting a synagogue … I intended to create chaos and send a message of intimidation and coercion to the Jewish population of New York City, warning them to stop mistreating Muslims.”

Justice Michael Obus is expected to sentence Ferhani to 10 years, significantly less than the 14 requested by the prosecution, and will likely be deported after serving his time in jail.

Mark C. Toner, Deputy Spokesperson for the US State Department, released the following statement on Monday:

Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni may be throwing their hats into the political arena once more, teaming up to attempt to defeat the nationalist camp headed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

The pair met on Wednesday for an hour and a half just a day after prosecutors announced their plan to appeal the verdict and sentence in a court case charging the former prime minister with tax evasion, fraud, and breach of trust.

Olmert was found guilty of breach of trust, fined less than $18,000 and given a one-year suspended jail sentence, considered by analysts to be a very light sentence.

If the pair do run, and add celebrity Yair Lapid, son of politician Tommy Lapid, they could receive more votes than the ruling Likud party, according to a poll published by Haaretz on Thursday.

There had been speculation that a new political party headed by Olmert and Livni could defeat Netanyahu’s Likud in the election, but polls released last week found that Olmert and Livni would likely only achieve ten seats.

The poll says 25 seats would go to the tripartite team, one more than Likud’s 24 seats.

Yet the poll also says nationalists would win the majority of votes, which means Netanyahu would probably continue as prime minister.

If Olmert, Livni, and Lapid do not join up, nationalists would likely win 65 seats, with 55 to the left wing.

Israel’s state prosecutor will appeal the acquittals of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in two of three cases decided earlier this year.

The prosecutor informed Olmert’s attorney on Tuesday that it will appeal the July acquittals on charges of fraud, breach of trust, tax evasion and falsifying corporate records in what became known as the Talansky and Rishon Tours affairs, according to the Justice Ministry.

His sentence in the Investment Center Affair, in which the Jerusalem District Court found Olmert guilty on the lesser charge of breach of trust, also will be appealed. Last month Olmert was sentenced to one to three years of probation and fined some $19,000 for granting personal favors to attorney Uri Messer when Olmert served as trade minister. The former prime minister could have faced up to three years in jail.

The announcement came a day after the 18th Knesset voted to dissolve itself and go to new elections in January, and as Olmert reportedly was deciding whether to attempt a political comeback in the elections.

Last week, Likud Party lawmaker Tzipi Hotovely petitioned Israel’s Central Elections Committee to prevent Olmert from running for office, citing the July conviction. The sentence in the Investment Center case did not include a ruling of moral turpitude, which would have prevented the 67-year-old from re-entering politics for seven years.

Olmert had agreed to forgo the perks awarded to a former head of state, including a secretary, an office and a car, in exchange for the finding.

Olmert is the first former Israeli prime minister ever to stand trial. He officially resigned as prime minister in September 2008 after police investigators recommended that he be indicted in the Talansky case.

We know we speak for many in our community when we express sadness at the news that the United States Supreme Court on Monday decided not to review the 27-year sentence meted out to former Agriprocessors chief executive Sholom Rubashkin.

At bottom we believe that nothing in the public record concerning Mr. Rubashkin’s crimes can justify a man in his early fifties being sent away to federal prison for more than a quarter of a century.

While we certainly believe that those convicted of crimes should pay a penalty, we believe that from the run up to his trial through this apparently final phase of the judicial process, his case fairly reeked of a sense of injustice: his prosecution was accompanied by an extraordinary level of negative publicity rarely seen in modern judicial proceedings; the list of charges lodged against him, though facially legitimate, was uncommonly inflated in number and degree and, in criminal law parlance, “piled on”; the presiding judge, by any measure, at least raised serious questions of impropriety with her highly unusual ongoing contact with the prosecution team; and the sentence of 27 years stood out among those imposed on others convicted of similar crimes.

In permitting such obvious issues to go unaddressed, the appellate courts failed not only Mr. Rubashkin but also others who may at one time or another find themselves enmeshed in the vagaries of our federal judicial system that do not always account for a possibly compromised trial judge and where formal review procedures are sometimes allowed to trump basic humanity.

We share the comments his lawyer, Nathan Lewin, one of the foremost criminal defense and appellate attorneys of our time, gave to The Jewish Press:

The Supreme Court’s refusal to consider the Rubashkin case – which is the greatest injustice that I have seen in more than 50 years of law practice – was very distressing. But the legal battle is not over. There are, in American legal history, a few famous cases “that will not die.” The Rubashkin case is in that league. The Torah teaches that tzedek does not come easily; it must be pursued. Even at this juncture, there are legal avenues for overturning a fundamentally unfair trial.