A once-prominent Orthodox rabbi has been jailed for secretly videotaping scores of women undressing and using a changing room at a Washington Jewish ritual bath.
Prosecutors in the United States had asked that a judge sentence Bernard Freundel to approximately 17 years in prison, but on Friday he was jailed for six-and-a-half years.
Freundel, 63, led the Kesher Israel synagogue in Washington for 25 years before he was arrested in October after one of his recording devices was discovered.
Freundel acknowledged as part of a plea agreement in February that he secretly recorded more than 150 women over several years.
A statute of limitations would have barred prosecutors from charging Freundel for every recording, however, and he pleaded guilty to 52 counts of voyeurism, each count punishable by up to a year in jail.
As part of his plea agreement, he acknowledged that starting in 2009 he set up hidden recording devices in a changing and showering area of The National Capital Mikvah, a ritual cleansing bath he worked to have built.
His recordings captured women undressing, using the toilet and entering and exiting a shower, prosecutors said.
Freundel acknowledged that he also used recording devices hidden in a fan and tissue box holder and in some instances used up to three recording devices to capture women from different angles.
Some of the women Freundel videotaped were women whose conversion to Judaism he was supervising.
He also invited female students from classes he taught at Towson University in Maryland and Georgetown University's law school to visit and use the mikvah for the sole purpose of recording them, prosecutors said.
Freundel was fired from the synagogue about a month-and-a-half after his arrest.
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