Christopher Peak file photo
Rabbi Greer.
Incarcerated sex offender Rabbi Daniel Greer took the witness stand to testify about a strained relationship — not the sexual relationships previously described in court with his former student, but a business relationship with the family of one of those students.
Those were the topics discussed, and conspicuously not discussed, during an hour-long hearing held Friday in Room 5C in New Haven’s state courthouse at 235 Church St.
Greer is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence after a jury found him guilty in 2019 of four counts of risk of injury to a minor for sexually attacking a former student at his Elm Street yeshiva, Eliyahu Mirlis. (Greer is appealing that criminal conviction.)
Friday’s hearing before state Superior Court Judge Jon Blue marked the second in a separate but related case filed by Greer in November 2021 in which he is petitioning the court for a new trial based on what he and his attorney David Grudberg claim is “new evidence” provided by Aviad “Avi” Hack.
Hack — a former student and then a former employee at the yeshiva who has also described having had a sexual relationship with Greer — presented that “new evidence” to the court in July. At that hearing, Hack testified that he believed Greer did not have sex with Mirlis until Mirlis was 16 years old.
State statute defines a minor as being under 16.
All of which led to Greer’s traveling from prison to the Church Street courthouse Friday to serve as his own second and final witness in his bid for a new trial on the grounds that the jury’s 2019 conviction was based on an incorrect assessment of the victim’s age.
But during the roughly half hour that Greer testified on the witness stand under questioning by his attorney Grudberg and under cross-examination by Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Craig Nowak, not once did he say anything about having sex with Mirlis or about Mirlis’s age.
He did not admit that he had sex with Mirlis.
He did not deny it.
He was not asked anything about it by either attorney, even though the core of the “new evidence” on which Greer’s new-trial petition rests is Hack’s assertion that Mirlis was 16 years old when Greer started having sex with him.
Instead of broaching those subjects, Greer spent his time on the witness stand talking about his personal and professional relationship with the Hack family. He spoke about how that relationship fell apart in 2011 over disagreements about how to manage the finances of the yeshiva and its related housing nonprofits. He claimed Hack and his father tried to pressure him into handing over control of the yeshiva in 2015. He spoke of how Greer’s “strained” relationship with the Hacks led to Avi Hack refusing to appear and testify at his original 2017 civil and 2019 criminal trials.
Greer: As Nonprofits Grew, Relationships "Strained"
Wearing a black suit and brown shoes, and with metallic chain-link cuffs still around his ankles, Greer spent most of his time on the stand talking about his relationship with the Hack family — not just Avi, but Avi’s parents, Harold and Adelle.
The only other non-court personnel in the room Friday besides this reporter was Greer’s wife Sarah. When judicial marshals walked Greer — cuffed at the hands and ankles — into the room, Sarah greeted him with a smile, a wave, a blown kiss, and a whispered “Shana Tova!” (“Happy new year,” for Rosh Hashana) before leaving the room before the start of the hearing.
Up on the witness stand, his handcuffs temporarily removed from his wrists but remaining around his ankles, Greer reflected on how he and his wife Sarah first met Harold and Adelle Hack back in the fall of 1976, soon after Yale Law grad Greer had moved back to New Haven to create an Orthodox Jewish community.
He described the Hacks as two of the “principal founding parents” alongside the Greers of the Edgewood yeshiva, then called the Gan school, which opened up in the former Roger Sherman school building when Greer’s nonprofit purchased the derelict property from the city in 1982.
Greer said that he and Harold had similar educational backgrounds going to “quality Jewish parochial schools.” They founded the yeshiva with the hopes of providing high-quality general education and rigorous Hebrew-language Jewish studies to New Haven.
Did such a school exist in New Haven prior to the founding of the Gan school? Grudberg asked.
There was nominally such education available in the city at that time, Greer replied. But “it did not fulfill the standards we hoped to achieve” at the newly founded school.
Greer said that he was responsible for the organization’s fundraising. Harold Hack, who worked in the city’s budget office at the time, took the lead on grant applications for the school. Adelle Hack was the yeshiva’s treasurer and responsible for collecting tuition. Sarah was the lead educator.
Starting in the late 1980s, Greer continued, he started founding various housing nonprofits designed to buy and fix up dozens of multi-family houses surrounding the yeshiva that had fallen into disrepair when owned by “slumlords.” Greer said that Harold Hack also took the lead on grant applications for those housing nonprofits, while Adelle Hack served as treasurer and was responsible for such financial duties as keeping track of incoming rent money, and making sure utility bills and contractors were paid.
“The neighborhood flourished,” Greer said about the school’s and the housing nonprofits’ impact on Edgewood.
What exactly does any of this have to do with the claims made in the petition for a new trial? Blue asked.
Grudberg promised to get to that matter soon.
He asked Greer about how the school and the housing nonprofits grew over the years.
Greer said that the elementary school, which started out serving just a handful of children in the late 1970s, wound up serving as many as 50 students a year. He said the yeshiva founders also started a girls’ high school and a boy’s high school. All five of Greer’s children and all five of the Hacks’ children attended the yeshiva through their high school years.
By 2011, Greer said, the housing nonprofits had “some 50 properties with 110 units.” Also by that time, one of Greer’s children had married one of the Hacks’ daughters. “We shared grandchildren,” he said about how close the Greers and the Hacks were, not just professionally but also personally.
Then, Greer said, “things came to a head in 2011.”
He said that the housing nonprofits and the yeshiva had gotten so large that “keeping track of finances, the disbursement of funds [became] more and more complicated.”
He said the various nonprofits that ran the school and that owned the rental housing properties “didn’t have the type of accounting” system in place necessary to manage the finances of such relatively large organizations.
Greer said he believed that the companies need to modernize and standardize their financial accounting systems in a certain way. He said the Hacks — who had spent so many years playing such a key role in how the finances for these companies were handled — disagreed.
“In families, fights are very difficult and very painful,” Greer said. He described the Hacks as “wonderful people.” But, he claimed, the organizations’ finances “were out of control. … It couldn’t continue.”
In February 2012, Greer said, Harold and Adelle “basically resigned” from their roles at the housing nonprofits and the school. “They were very hurt.” Greer said it took a year for an outside accounting firm to “straighten out and put in place” the yeshiva’s and the housing nonprofits’ finances.
All the while, Greer said, Avi Hack was still an employee at the yeshiva, “running the boys’ high school.”
Greer said that, at the time that Hack’s parents resigned because of disagreement over finances, his own relationship with Avi Hack “became difficult” because of this larger strain between the Greers and the Hacks.
“It became difficult,” Greer said again and again.
Finally, in April 2015, Greer said, Avi Hack approached him and “presented papers asking” Greer to sign over control of the yeshiva to him. “He asked me and Sarah to resign from the Board of Directors and to sign over direct control to him and his father.”
Did you agree to resign from the yeshiva and hand over control to the Hacks? Grudberg asked.
“I did not agree,” Greer replied.
State's Attorney: What Here Is New?
After roughly 20 minutes of questioning by Grudberg, Nowak, the state’s attorney working this case, then got to cross-examine Greer.
Just like Grudberg, Nowak did not ask Greer any questions about whether or not he had sex with Mirlis or whether or not Mirlis was 16 at the time or whether or not anything Hack said during his testimony in July was true.
Instead, Nowak focused on how Greer had just testified that his relationship with Avi Hack has been “strained” for years — and yet he was relying on Hack’s testimony from July and in a related affidavit for his claim that there is enough “new evidence” available to warrant a new criminal trial.
“The reason you’re here [is because] you’re claiming Avi Hack’s testimony would somehow help you?” Nowak asked
“Yes,” Greer replied.
And yet your relationship with Hack was strained as early as 2011?
Yes, Greer said.
“Is this relationship still strained today?”
Yes, Greer said again. He then claimed that the reason Hack did not testify in person at Greer’s original 2017 civil and 2019 criminal cases trials was because of this strain.
Judge Blue then jumped in as Nowak raised his voice louder and louder to borderline shouting as he cross-examined Greer.
“Justice is blind,” Blue said. “It’s not necessarily deaf. You can speak at a normal” volume.
Greer told Nowak that his attorneys tried to get Hack to testify at the original civil and criminal trials, but he successfully avoided subpoenas.
Nowak pointed out multiple times during his cross-examination that the professional and personal strain between the Greers and the Hacks that he had testified about earlier dated back to 2011 — well before the original criminal trial in 2019.
With that, Nowak finished his cross-examination. And, after a brief recess, Judge Blue ordered the two parties to return to the courthouse on Nov. 9 for closing arguments in Greer’s petition for a new trial.