Luke Ford

New York Post story.

In 2026 Miryam Malachi, an Israeli-born mother of two, sued Appel in Ocean County (docket number OCN-L-000016-26, filed around January 5, 2026). The complaint (copy here additional documents here) alleges that she came to him during acute financial distress over daycare bills, on a teacher’s suggestion, and that he presented himself as a rabbi, mentor, and friend she could trust.

What the packet gives you is Miryam Malachi’s side, the support for her bid for temporary restraints and an injunction. Calcagni & Kanefsky filed it. Three certifications hold it up. Yehonatan Richenberg, who calls Malachi his wife under Jewish law, describes going to Avraham Appel’s kollel in November 2025 to confront him, getting turned away by security, and receiving a no-trespass letter from Appel’s lawyer Ian Goldman dated November 16. Binyamin Doyev and Tehila Recht certify that a section of the website headed “Hachnasat Kallah Scam,” written about them, is false. Rabbi Joseph Rabinowicz says Malachi brought him evidence of Appel’s conduct in July 2024, that he summoned other rabbis, that the panel met Appel, that Appel admitted he had done terrible things with her and had a problem, and that they told him to step down as rabbi and from every position of trust.
That admission is the spine of her case, and it is thin on the page. It comes secondhand, as one rabbi’s paraphrase, with no quoted words from Appel, no signed statement, and a blank date line on the certification I saw. If a panel of rabbis got an admission and ordered a removal, that is strong. As written, it rests on Rabinowicz’s summary alone. A careful reader marks that.
Defense attorney Ian Goldman says her claims are fabricated, the screenshots are fabricated, and the whole thing is an extortion and smear campaign aimed at his client. The website tells a counter-story: a woman who wanted marriage, got refused, and turned vindictive, with attacks on her sexual history and her sanity. I will not relay those lines, since the website is the very thing she calls defamation, and repeating its contents does the harm again. Note its character and move on. The structural point holds either way: the same web pages serve as the defense’s narrative and as her Exhibit A. That doubling sits at the center.
The money is in the packet and I cannot tell you what it proves. Bank records show BFF Funding LLC, approved by one Eliyahu Haltovsky, paying $94,300 to Kramer Holdings on December 17, 2025, and $109,269 to an “American Friends of Oh…” entity on December 23.
Appel is no minor figure. He led a chaburah at Beth Medrash Govoha and one at the Mir in Jerusalem, ran charities, counseled women in distress, and built a development of fifty-six subsidized homes and a daycare for kollel families near West Gate. Malachi came to him as an immigrant single mother sent by a teacher when she could not pay for childcare. The access ran through charity and counsel. Then the complaint travels a familiar road. It goes first to rabbinic authority, the quiet panel and the order to step down. That sanction has no teeth, so Appel allegedly resumes teaching under a new rabbi’s permission. Then it spills into secular court and onto a public website. The trip from a private beis din to Ocean County Superior Court to malachichavala.com is the thing.
Two forks to resolve before you commit to any version. First, the marriage tangle. The filing calls Malachi the wife of Richenberg under Jewish law, while the website’s narrator speaks as a man who dated her, refused to marry her, and did real estate deals with her. Whether that narrator is Richenberg, Appel, or a third man changes the story. Do not guess. Second, the gap between the rabbinic finding and the legal one. A panel telling a man to step down is not a court finding that he assaulted anyone, and the suit is a set of allegations, not a verdict.

Kollel Cheshek Shlomo sits at the center of the litigation between Miryam Malachi and Rabbi Avraham Appel. The seminary was both a religious institution and the base of Appel’s authority in the Orthodox community of Lakewood, New Jersey. The court filings return to it again and again. The public controversy centers on allegations against Appel, but the dispute keeps circling back to the kollel, because that is where the allegations met the realities of power, governance, and communal self-preservation.

The filings describe Kollel Cheshek Shlomo as a religious private school and advanced Torah study institution that Appel owns and operates. A kollel is more than a classroom. It teaches, but it also confers religious authority, anchors a community, raises money, and grants prestige. The man who leads one teaches, counsels, mentors, fundraises, and rules on communal questions all at once. So a challenge to the leader rarely stays contained to the leader. It reaches the institution through which he works.

The ownership claim carries weight. The filings do not present the kollel as an independent body weighing Appel from a distance. They present it as his. That shapes the whole question of accountability. Any restriction placed on Appel touched the future of the school. Decisions about whether he could teach, counsel, or hold authority reached the identity of the organization he controlled.

The physical record reinforces the point. The no-trespass letter of November 16, 2025, issued by attorney Ian Goldman, names 502 and 506 New Egypt Road in Lakewood among the places Yehonatan Richenberg was told to stay away from. Those addresses tie the controversy to parcels of real estate. They show that the parties treated the kollel as a physical asset to be protected, not as an abstract enterprise. The fight to draw enforceable lines around the buildings turned the conflict into a question of access, property, and control.

The school grew in importance after the alleged rabbinic intervention of 2024. The plaintiff’s filings say Rabbi Yosef Rabinowicz and other rabbis confronted Appel over allegations concerning Malachi and won an agreement that he would step back from positions of trust and authority. Whether the allegations and admissions hold up remains for the courts and the witnesses. What the litigation makes clear is that the question of whether those restrictions still bound Appel could not be separated from the future of the kollel.

The conflict broke into public view in November 2025. In his sworn certification, Richenberg says he learned Appel had resumed teaching and went to the kollel for answers. That certification has become a main source for this stage of the dispute. Richenberg says administrators told him Appel had returned to teaching under the guidance of Rabbi Henoch Perl. The answer did not satisfy him, and he came back over several days.

Those visits turned the school from a backdrop into an actor in the story. The filings describe a response that hardened with each encounter. Administrators defended the choice to let Appel return. Security stood by. Warnings followed. Someone raised the prospect of calling the police. An internal question about rabbinic discipline became a fight over who held the power to decide the institution’s future.

The presence of security tells much of the story. Schools and houses of study exist to teach, mentor, and gather a community. By late 2025 the kollel had become a watched and guarded perimeter. Goldman’s letter states that Appel’s side held video documenting Richenberg’s visits on several dates. The detail introduces a symmetry. The plaintiff’s case leans on digital evidence: texts, photographs, financial records, recordings, screenshots. Now the school produced its own digital evidence for the defense, surveillance footage and visitor logs that might surface in court later.

The kollel had become an evidentiary site. The same building that held Torah study and instruction also generated surveillance footage, security protocols, and legal documentation drawn up in anticipation of litigation. The controversy made the school an organization working inside two frameworks at once, the religious and the legal.

Its ties to Appel’s other entities complicate the picture further. The plaintiff’s filings link the kollel to a wider network of charitable operations, fundraising, and community programs. The plaintiff argues that Appel’s standing as educator, communal leader, and charitable figure built the trust that opened his relationship with Malachi, and that the prestige of his work lent legitimacy to financial help that later turned into the heart of the dispute. The defense rejects these claims. Even so, they show how hard it is to pull the institution apart from the world of influence around its founder.

The school also turned into a symbol once the public fight began. The filings suggest Appel’s supporters read the continued operation of the kollel as proof the institution held firm against the allegations. The plaintiff reads the school’s willingness to take Appel back as proof that the earlier accountability had failed. Each side measured its own narrative against the fate of the school.

Across the controversy the kollel moved through three roles. It began as a source of authority, giving Appel students, donors, prestige, and a platform for communal influence. It became a contested institution, as questions rose over whether the old restrictions still held, who could change them, and whether the school’s interest lay with accountability or with rehabilitation. Then it became a defended perimeter, ringed by security, surveillance, police warnings, legal notices, and formal boundaries, a protected space operating under the threat of litigation.

That arc explains why the institution holds such a place in the record. The kollel was not only where events occurred. It was the body through which authority was exercised, challenged, defended, and litigated. The struggle over Appel could not be separated from the struggle over the school.

The school works as a small model of the larger conflict. Rabbi Rabinowicz stands for the attempt at communal accountability. Rabbi Perl stands for rehabilitation and reintegration. Chaya Rosenzweig stands for commercial rivalry and economic interest. Robert Keleti stands for public mobilization. Ian Goldman stands for legal containment and procedural control. Kollel Cheshek Shlomo stands at the meeting point of all these forces.

Read as a religious school defending its mission through a hard season, or read as a power center wrestling with accountability and governance, the kollel remains central to the case. The filings return to it because it gathered everything: allegations, authority, property, surveillance, legal strategy, and reputation. Few institutions show better how a private dispute can grow into a struggle over power, legitimacy, and control inside a closely tied religious community.

New York Post story.

In 2026 Miryam Malachi, an Israeli-born mother of two, sued Appel in Ocean County (docket number OCN-L-000016-26, filed around January 5, 2026). The complaint (copy here additional documents here) alleges that she came to him during acute financial distress over daycare bills, on a teacher’s suggestion, and that he presented himself as a rabbi, mentor, and friend she could trust.

Yehonatan “Yoni” Richenberg ranks among the consequential non-party figures in the litigation between Miryam Malachi and Rabbi Avraham Appel. He files no claim in the underlying lawsuit. Yet his actions, his certifications, and his public role put him at the center of the dispute’s main developments. As Malachi’s husband under Jewish law, Richenberg moves from supportive family member to principal witness, advocate, and participant. His conduct pushes matters that communal and rabbinic channels had handled in private into open view. A controversy that starts as an allegation of personal misconduct grows into a wider conflict over religious authority, communal accountability, reputation, and civil litigation.

Unlike the other major figures in the case, Richenberg holds no obvious role. He is no rabbi, attorney, business rival, or institutional leader. His part comes from his marriage to Malachi and from his resolve to challenge what he saw as a failure by community institutions to address the allegations against Appel. The filings present him as an invested participant who speeds the dispute from private conversation toward public confrontation.

Richenberg enters the chronology early, around settlement talks that predate the formal lawsuit. The plaintiff’s certifications say he attended a meeting with Ian Goldman, counsel for Appel, where a proposal offered about $50,000 for future therapy and related costs in return for a release of claims and a confidentiality agreement. The plaintiff’s side reads the proposal as an attempt to buy silence about the allegations. The defense might call the same talks routine settlement of a dispute carrying serious allegations and legal exposure. Either way, the filings show Richenberg refusing the deal and seeking other routes to accountability.

His role grows in late 2025, after he learns that Appel has resumed teaching despite an earlier rabbinic intervention. His sworn certification says reports of Appel back in a position of authority over students troubled him, and he sought answers from those who made the decision. The concern drove a series of visits to institutions tied to Appel, above all Kollel Cheshek Shlomo. Those visits mark a turning point.

His certification stands as a principal source for this phase. The sworn statement supplies much of the public record on Appel’s return to teaching, the responses of school administrators, the part Rabbi Henoch Perl allegedly played, and the tense confrontations that followed. Richenberg is more than a participant here. He is a chronicler of the events that carried the controversy from an internal communal matter into a public legal fight.

His certification compresses the escalation into November 2025. He first goes to the school for answers about Appel’s return and hears that Appel works under the guidance of Rabbi Henoch Perl. The answer does not satisfy him, and he comes back. The filings say the institutional response hardened with each visit. Guards stood by. Warnings followed. Someone raised the prospect of calling police. A search for answers turned into a standoff between an aggrieved husband and institutions set on order and on control of who entered their buildings.

The visits drew a legal response. On November 16, 2025, Goldman sent Richenberg a written no-contact and no-trespass letter. It told him to stay away from places tied to Appel and warned that further encounters might bring legal consequences. The letter marks a shift. Conversations, rabbis, and communal ties no longer ran the dispute. It had moved into documented legal positioning and the threat of a civil suit.

Richenberg sits at the center of a consequential factual dispute. The website built to attack Malachi’s credibility claims he tried to extort about $48,000 from Appel by text message. The site’s account has him demanding money and threatening exposure if Appel did not pay. The website reportedly posted screenshots it offered as evidence of those messages.

Richenberg denies the allegation. In a sworn certification under penalty of perjury, he says he never sent the messages credited to him and never made any demand like the one the website shows. He does more than deny bad intent. He says the messages are fabricated. So the dispute turns on a prior question: did the message ever exist in authentic form? The fight is no longer about what a real message meant.

The alleged extortion messages form a clear factual fault line. If they are authentic, they support the defense account that money drove part of the controversy. If they are fabricated, they support the plaintiff’s claim of a coordinated campaign to discredit Malachi and those around her. The question rests on a screenshot, a single communication, and a sworn denial, so it invites forensic examination.

The fight reached Richenberg’s home. The plaintiff’s filings say the release of personal information and the campaign against the family raised security fears. The family bought surveillance gear and took other protective steps once their address became known. Read as a reasonable response to threats or as an overreaction to criticism, the claim shows a dispute that ran past the filings and into the family’s daily life.

Among the cast around the litigation, Richenberg holds an odd place. Rabbi Yosef Rabinowicz stands for communal accountability. Rabbi Henoch Perl stands for rehabilitation and reintegration. Rabbi Yaakov Forchheimer carries contested legitimacy. Chaya Rosenzweig draws the charge of commercial rivalry. Robert Keleti brings public mobilization. Ian Goldman brings legal containment and procedural strategy. Richenberg fills a different role: the family advocate whose persistence forces private controversy into open view.

Call his conduct accountability-seeking, combative, protective, or provocative. It shaped the chronology either way. His refusal of the settlement offer, his challenge to Appel’s return, his clashes with institutional authority, the legal warning he drew, and his sworn denial of the extortion claim each turned the case.

The allegations around him stay contested. The defense paints him as a partner in an extortion scheme and a man who crossed proper lines. The plaintiff paints him as a husband seeking accountability for his wife and safety for his family. No court has settled the two accounts.

His weight in the case is clear. He stands as more than a figure beside the plaintiff. He drives much of the 2025 chronology, his credibility ties to some of the central factual questions, and his actions helped carry an internal communal controversy into the public record and before a court.