BK Yeshiva Director Who Ran $3M Lunch Scheme Gets 2 Years: Feds

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN — A former Brooklyn yeshiva director who helped run a million-dollar school lunch scheme will spend two years in prison and need to pay back more than $3.2 million for the money he defrauded, prosecutors announced.

Elozer Porges, 46, was sentenced Friday to two years in jail and 1,000 hours of community service for leading the scheme along with his assistant director at the Central United Talmudic Academy, Joel Lowry, who is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty.

Porges and Lowry defrauded a federal aid program that provides meals to needy children out of millions of dollars by submitting false forms to the state's health department, prosecutors said in a release.

The state ended up sending the school more than $3 million for meals that were never served to the students. Instead, the school leaders used most of the money on evening events for adults at one of the school's locations on Wythe Street, prosecutors said.

“School children throughout New York City rely on funding from government programs for their meals every day,” said Margaret Garnett, commissioner for the New York City Department of Investigation. “This defendant aimed to defraud those vital programs, inflating the number of meals he claimed to need for low-income students, and receiving millions of dollars in subsidies to which Central UTA was not entitled."

Porges and Lowy sent in false and misleading forms to the New York State Department of Health every month for more than two years between 2013 and 2015, prosecutors said.

The forms asked for reimbursement from the federal government for thousands of meals they said they served to students at three of Central UTA's locations, but never did, prosecutors said.

Porges was ordered Friday to pay back more than $3.2 million in restitution to the United State Department of Agriculture, which handles the federal aid program, and will need to pay a $150,000 fine, the judge decided.

Lowy pleaded guilty in March 2018 and is awaiting sentencing.

A Central United Talmudic Academy representative did not immediately return a call requesting comment about the two former employees.

This isn't the first scandal for the Williamsburg school.

Earlier this year, one of the yeshiva's locations on Ross Street was one of several schools the city shut down for flouting vaccination rules during the measles outbreak, which spread throughout Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish community.

In 2015, the Daily News released footage of a teacher giving five-year-old students answers to an official English assessment test at one of the Central UTA schools and Gothamist reported in 2016 that the academy's head of governmental relations was arrested for fraudulently collecting $30,500 in food stamps benefits.